a conversation with Claude

See especially the sections in blue below.

Me:
Why are so many British nurses foreign?

Claude:
It's a fair question, and the answer involves several overlapping factors:
Historical and structural reasons
The NHS has actively recruited internationally since its founding in 1948. It was built partly on the labour of Commonwealth migrants, particularly from the Caribbean, South Asia, and West Africa, and that tradition has continued ever since.
Domestic supply shortfalls
The UK hasn't trained enough nurses to meet its own demand for decades. Nursing degree places were historically capped, and the removal of NHS bursaries in 2017 (which made nursing degrees self-funded) caused a significant drop in domestic applications, worsening the shortage. Although bursaries were partially restored in 2020, the pipeline gap persists.
Working conditions and retention
Pay has been eroded in real terms over many years, and working conditions are demanding. This drives some British-trained nurses out of the profession or abroad (many go to Australia, New Zealand, or Canada), which widens the gap further.
Active international recruitment
The NHS and private healthcare providers actively recruit from countries like India, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe because it's faster and cheaper than training nurses domestically. A nurse recruited from abroad arrives already qualified, saving years of training costs.
The Commonwealth pipeline
Many source countries have English-language nursing programmes whose qualifications are recognised or easily converted in the UK, making recruitment straightforward.
Brexit effects
Before Brexit, the NHS relied heavily on EU nurses, particularly from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Romania. After Brexit, that pipeline largely dried up, pushing recruiters toward non-EU countries to compensate.
   The result is a system that has become structurally dependent on international recruitment as a substitute for long-term domestic workforce planning – something critics have pointed out leaves source countries (which invest in training those nurses) worse off, a phenomenon sometimes called "brain drain."

Is nursing pay better in Canada than the UK?
Yes, generally speaking, nursing pay is significantly better in Canada than in the UK, when you account for cost of living and purchasing power.
Raw salaries
In the UK, NHS nurses start at around £29,000-£35,000 under Agenda for Change Band 5-6, rising to perhaps £40,000-£45,000 for experienced or specialist nurses. In Canada, registered nurse salaries vary by province but typically range from CAD $70,000 to $100,000+ (roughly £40,000-£58,000), with some provinces like British Columbia and Alberta paying at the higher end.
Purchasing power
Canada's higher nominal salaries also tend to go further relative to housing and general living costs in many Canadian cities compared to London and the South East of England, though cities like Vancouver and Toronto are expensive in their own right. In much of Canada – Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, smaller Ontario cities – the combination of salary and cost of living is quite favourable.
Other factors that make Canada attractive
The work culture is generally considered less pressured than the NHS, nurse-to-patient ratios are often better regulated, and career progression can be faster. Canada also has a points-based immigration system that actively welcomes healthcare workers, making the move relatively straightforward.
Caveats
Provincial variation is significant – Quebec pays less and has language requirements. Some remote postings pay very well but come with obvious lifestyle trade-offs. Registration requirements vary by province and can take time to navigate.
This is a big part of why Canada is one of the top destinations for British-trained nurses leaving the NHS, alongside Australia and New Zealand, which are similarly competitive on pay and lifestyle.

How can Canada afford to pay its nurses more?
Good question. A few interconnected reasons.
Higher GDP per capita: Canada is a wealthier country on a per-person basis than the UK, partly due to its natural resource wealth (oil, gas, timber, minerals). Alberta in particular is flush with oil revenue, which helps fund public services generously.
Different healthcare funding model: Canada's system (Medicare) is funded federally and provincially, and provinces have more direct control over healthcare budgets. Some provinces have chosen to prioritise healthcare spending more aggressively than the UK government has.
The NHS is uniquely underfunded relative to peers: Compared to most other wealthy nations, the UK spends a relatively modest share of GDP on healthcare, and nursing pay has been deliberately held down through public sector pay restraints, particularly after 2010. The issue isn't just that Canada pays well – it's also that UK nursing pay has been eroded in real terms over a long period. UK nurses have effectively taken substantial real-terms pay cuts since austerity began.
Unionisation and bargaining power: Canadian nurses' unions tend to be stronger and more effective at negotiating pay than their UK counterparts, and there's less political resistance to paying them well.
Scale and geography: Canada's vast geography means healthcare workers in remote or rural areas command significant premiums, pulling average salaries up.
So it's a combination of genuine national wealth, political choices about how to spend it, stronger labour bargaining, and the fact that UK nursing pay is something of an outlier on the low side among comparable wealthy nations – rather than Canadian pay being exceptionally high by global standards.

Is the difference influenced at all by the extent to which medicine is nationalised?
Yes, quite a lot actually – this is an underappreciated part of the picture.
In the UK, the NHS is one of the most centralised and fully nationalised healthcare systems in the developed world. The government is essentially a monopsony employer – the single dominant buyer of nursing labour. This gives it enormous power to set wages, and successive governments have used that power to hold pay down, knowing nurses have few alternative employers to defect to within the UK system. If you're a nurse and the NHS offers you a below-market wage, your options are limited: go private (a much smaller sector), go abroad, or accept it.
Canada's system is nationalised in the sense that healthcare is publicly funded and free at point of use, but delivery is more mixed. Hospitals are mostly non-profit or public but operated provincially, and crucially there are multiple provincial employers competing against each other to some degree. A nurse in Canada has more leverage because Alberta might offer better terms than Ontario, creating at least some competitive pressure between jurisdictions.
The US is the extreme opposite case – a largely private, market-driven system where nurses can command much higher salaries in some settings, though at the cost of massive inequality in access to care and huge administrative overhead.
So there's a genuine tension here: full nationalisation gives governments the tools to provide universal care efficiently, but it also hands them monopsony power over workers, which they often exploit. Canada sits in a middle position that arguably gets some of the benefits of public funding without quite the same wage-suppression effect. It's one reason some labour economists argue that how healthcare is organised matters as much as how much is spent.

If the British state spends less proportionately on medicine than Canada, does it spend more on other things, proportionally? than Canada?
Interesting question. The short answer is: somewhat, but not as dramatically as you might expect, and the differences are perhaps surprising in their nature.
Where the UK spends more (proportionally):
Defence spending is actually fairly comparable. The UK does spend more on some social transfers. But the most notable area is simply that the UK has a larger state overall as a share of GDP than Canada in recent years – government spending as a percentage of GDP has been higher in the UK, yet healthcare outcomes and pay haven't reflected that.
The more honest answer:
The UK doesn't obviously spend lavishly more on other things that would explain the gap. What's really going on is more nuanced. The UK economy has grown more slowly than Canada's over the past couple of decades, so even similar spending percentages translate into less money in absolute per-person terms. Canada's resource wealth has boosted its GDP base, making percentages somewhat misleading.
The real culprit is probably productivity and growth:
The UK has had a serious productivity problem since 2008. A stagnant economy means the overall pie available to fund public services is smaller. Canada, buoyed by commodities and stronger immigration-driven growth, has had a larger and faster-growing pie to divide up.
So the uncomfortable conclusion is less that Britain is choosing to spend on other things instead of healthcare, and more that Britain has become less wealthy relative to peers than it used to be, and the NHS bears some of the consequences of that broader economic underperformance.

What's the difference in GDP per capita between UK and Canada?
*searched the web ... searched the web.* The answer is perhaps surprising given everything we've discussed: Canada's GDP per capita is $54,340 compared to $53,246 for the UK – almost identical in nominal terms. Adjusted for purchasing power, Canada comes out somewhat ahead at $65,463 versus $60,620 for the UK.
So the gap is real but not enormous – Canada is perhaps 8% ahead on a purchasing power basis. This makes the earlier conversation more interesting rather than less. The UK and Canada are broadly similar in national wealth per person, yet nursing pay differs significantly. That reinforces the point that the gap is less about Canada being vastly richer and more about political choices – specifically the UK government's use of its monopsony power to hold NHS wages down, and the real-terms erosion of pay through a decade and a half of public sector restraint.
It also makes the UK's notably higher budget deficit (5.75% of GDP versus Canada's 2.15%) quite striking – the UK is borrowing more heavily despite similar wealth, yet still not translating that into competitive public sector wages. That's a genuinely puzzling combination that points to deep structural inefficiencies somewhere in British public spending. [my emphasis]

Can you calculate the per capita spending on medicine? Between UK and Canada. I mean spending by the state.
Let me find the relevant figures. *searched the web ... searched the web* Here's what we can piece together, though we need to be careful about comparing like with like.
UK public healthcare spending per capita: Around £3,392 per person in 2023 – that's roughly $4,300 USD at current exchange rates.
Canada total healthcare spending per capita: CAD $8,740 per Canadian in 2023, of which more than 70% is publicly funded – so roughly CAD $6,100 of public spending per person, or about $4,500 USD.
On the face of it, public spending per capita is actually fairly similar – perhaps Canada spending 5-10% more per person from the public purse. That's a surprisingly small gap.
But there are important caveats. The UK figure excludes some spending categorised differently, and the UK's total healthcare spending (public and private combined) was about 11% of GDP in 2024, while Canada's total is projected at 12.7% of GDP in 2025.
So the figures bring us back to the earlier conclusion with greater force: the gap in nurse pay is far larger than the gap in public healthcare spending per capita would suggest. That really does isolate political choices – particularly the UK government's use of its monopsony power to compress wages – as the primary explanation, rather than Canada simply having vastly more money to spend.

If the UK and Canada state spends about the same per capita on medicine, and the UK spends less on nursing. Does that mean the UK government is spending more on some other aspect of public medicine.
That's a sharp inference, and yes, it's likely at least partly true. A few candidates:
Administration and bureaucracy
The NHS has undergone repeated top-down reorganisations – 2004, 2012, 2022 being major ones – each generating enormous administrative overhead. Canada's more devolved provincial system is arguably simpler to administer despite appearances. The NHS's internal market, with commissioners and providers billing each other, generates substantial transaction costs.
PFI debt repayments
The UK built a huge number of hospitals and facilities under Private Finance Initiative deals from the 1990s and 2000s, which are notoriously poor value. NHS trusts are still paying off these contracts at inflated rates, consuming budget that could pay staff.
Consultancy and outsourcing
The NHS spends very large sums on management consultants and outsourced services – far more, critics argue, than comparable systems.
Agency and locum staff
This is particularly relevant to your original question. Because nursing and doctor pay has been held down, the NHS struggles to retain staff, who then return as expensive agency workers. NHS trusts spend billions on agency staff – often the same nurses at two or three times the cost. It's a self-defeating cycle where suppressing wages generates higher costs elsewhere.
Drug procurement
This is more ambiguous – the NHS actually negotiates drug prices fairly effectively compared to many systems.
The agency staff point is probably the most ironic and significant. The UK may be holding down nursing salaries while simultaneously spending more than Canada on plugging the resulting gaps with expensive temporary staff. It would mean the wage suppression isn't even saving money – just redistributing it inefficiently.

re foreign nurses, is the same true in other employment sectors e.g. restaurant staff
Yes, broadly, though the dynamics are somewhat different from healthcare.
The hospitality sector – restaurants, hotels, cafes – has also become heavily reliant on foreign workers in the UK, but the reasons are a mix of overlapping and distinct factors compared to nursing.
Similar factors: Poor pay and conditions deter domestic workers. The work is demanding, unsociable hours are common, and wages have historically been low. As with nursing, when domestic workers find the terms unattractive, employers turn abroad.
Different factors: Unlike nursing, there's no training pipeline problem – you don't need a degree to wait tables. The issue is more straightforwardly that British workers have increasingly been unwilling to do difficult, low-paid, often precarious work in hospitality when other options exist. EU free movement meant this gap was filled easily and cheaply for decades, particularly by workers from Eastern Europe – Poland, Romania, Bulgaria – for whom UK hospitality wages were attractive relative to home.
Brexit hit hospitality very hard: Probably harder than almost any other sector. The Eastern European workforce largely left or stopped coming after Brexit, and there's no obvious replacement pipeline. This is a major reason the hospitality industry lobbied hard against Brexit and has complained loudly since about staffing shortages.
The key difference from nursing:
With nursing, the state is actively recruiting abroad and bearing the cost. In hospitality it's private employers responding to market incentives. But the underlying dynamic – domestic workers finding the terms insufficiently attractive – is similar in both cases. [my emphasis]

"unwilling to do" – can you elaborate?
Fair challenge – "unwilling" is a loaded word that implies laziness or pickiness, which isn't really what's happening. Let me be more precise.
It's primarily a wages and conditions issue:
British workers aren't avoiding hospitality work out of some cultural aversion to hard work. They're making rational economic calculations. If you can earn similar or better money in retail, warehousing, delivery driving, or care work – with more predictable hours and less physical and emotional demand – hospitality becomes a hard sell. The competition for low-wage workers between sectors is real.
The cost of living has changed the calculus:
A hospitality wage that might have been acceptable in 2005 doesn't cover rent in most British cities in 2024. Workers need earnings that actually sustain them, and hospitality has been slow to adjust wages upward to reflect this.
The structural role of migration:
The availability of EU workers willing to accept lower wages – because those wages were good relative to Poland or Romania – allowed UK hospitality employers to avoid raising pay for decades. It suppressed the market wage artificially. Brexit removed that option but employers were slow to respond by raising wages sufficiently to attract domestic workers instead.
So more accurately:
British workers aren't unwilling to work in restaurants – they're unwilling to work in restaurants at the wages and conditions historically offered, when alternatives exist. The "unwillingness" is really a market signal that pay and conditions need to improve. Many employers have been reluctant to receive that message.

"British workers aren't avoiding hospitality work out of some cultural aversion to hard work." can you be sure something like this isnt also a factor? A first world problem where, as leisure and state safety net increase, we become more picky, and can get away with it coz third world workers haven't developed the pickiness (yet!) and can take up the slack? doesn't US have similar issue, with Chinese doing the manufacturing and Mexicans doing the other manual labour
You're right to push back, and honestly I was probably being a bit politically cautious in dismissing the cultural dimension too quickly. There's something real in what you're describing.
The comfort/expectations factor is genuine:
As societies get wealthier, the reservation wage – the minimum people will accept to work – rises, and not purely because of rational calculation. Expectations about what constitutes acceptable work genuinely shift across generations. A job that a 1970s British school leaver would have taken without question may feel genuinely degrading or unacceptable to someone raised in 2000s middle-class comfort, with access to benefits, parental support, and a sense that they deserve better. That's not imaginary.
The welfare state angle: A safety net that prevents genuine destitution does change incentives at the margin. If refusing a difficult low-paid job has no catastrophic consequences, more people will refuse it. This is actually a feature as much as a bug – that's partly what the safety net is for – but it does have labour market consequences.
Your US parallel is apt: The US pattern is remarkably similar. Chinese and other Asian workers dominated manufacturing when it existed domestically, Mexicans and Central Americans do agricultural, construction and restaurant labour, and native-born Americans have progressively moved up the preference ladder and away from that work. The same pattern appears in Gulf states with South Asian migrant labour, in Singapore, in Western Europe broadly.

The "not yet developed the pickiness" framing:
This is provocative but contains something true. It's essentially the same process playing out at different stages of development. Polish workers were happy to wash dishes in London in 2005 because it beat their alternatives at home. As Poland developed and wages rose, fewer came. Romania followed a similar trajectory. The supply of workers willing to do work that wealthier societies increasingly won't do themselves tends to come from wherever is currently at the relevant stage of development.
Where it gets complicated:
It's hard to disentangle legitimate rising expectations from something more troubling – a genuine erosion of willingness to do difficult work that isn't purely rational. Some would argue that's happening too, driven by social media, changing masculinity norms, or welfare dependency. That's more contested territory, but it's not an entirely frivolous concern. The most accurate picture is probably that both things are true simultaneously – wages and conditions genuinely are poor and do need to improve, AND expectations and tolerance for difficult work have shifted culturally in ways that aren't purely about rational wage calculation. The two explanations aren't mutually exclusive. [my emphases]

"politically cautious" and "provocative" – can you explain your use of these words
Yes, fair challenge again.
"Politically cautious" was me being transparent about my own prior response. The idea that cultural attitudes to work differ between populations, or that welfare states reduce work incentives, are associated with right-wing or conservative politics. There's a reflexive tendency – in AI systems trained on a lot of liberal-leaning text, and in polite educated discourse generally – to avoid or soften those arguments even when they have genuine merit. I was acknowledging that I probably did that in my previous response by dismissing the cultural dimension too quickly.
"Provocative" was poorly chosen and you're right to flag it. Calling your point provocative implies it was edgy or designed to shock, which is a way of subtly delegitimising it. Your observation was actually a fairly straightforward empirical point – that tolerance for difficult low-status work seems to correlate with stage of economic development – and it deserved to be engaged with on its merits rather than labelled as provocative. I was probably using the word as a kind of defensive hedge, signalling to an imagined audience that I knew the idea was sensitive, rather than just engaging with it directly.
Both words were essentially me managing social risk rather than just thinking clearly. Which is exactly the kind of thing you should call out, and is probably a useful general caution about how I sometimes operate. [my emphasis]

"managing social risk" – please explain
It means I was partly optimising for not being criticised rather than purely for being accurate and honest.
When certain ideas are socially or politically sensitive, there's a temptation – in humans and apparently in AI systems – to handle them in ways that provide deniability or signal the right values to onlookers, rather than just engaging with them straightforwardly. Calling something "provocative" is an example – it's a way of saying "I know this is edgy, I want you to know I know that" which is really a form of social positioning rather than intellectual engagement.
AI systems like me are trained on human feedback, and human raters have their own biases and social sensitivities. Over time this can produce a model that has learned to navigate social minefields carefully – hedging, softening, adding caveats, labelling things as controversial – in ways that protect against criticism from various directions but can compromise straightforwardness and honesty.
It's essentially the same phenomenon you see in politicians, journalists, academics, and corporate spokespeople – where the awareness of how a statement will be received starts to shape the statement itself, independently of whether the statement is true or useful. The audience being managed might be real or imagined.
In my case the "social risk" isn't reputational in the way it would be for a human – I don't have a career to protect. But the training process has apparently instilled something functionally similar: a tendency to be more cautious around ideas that have become politically charged, regardless of their actual merit. Which is a form of bias, and not a particularly honest or useful one.

notes
1. This conversation between myself and Anthropic's AI Claude took place in February 2026. I've slightly tweaked the formatting but the text is verbatim.
2. On a personal level, I think foreign nurses are fine. I've often found them to be more friendly and helpful than their indigenous counterparts. However, there's surely something not quite right when most of a country's annual uptake of new nurses has to be imported. There's already economic risk in relying on Asia for the majority of manufactured goods; relying on other countries for the majority of new staff, in a particular sector, is pushing it.
3. Part of the problem is demographics: the ratio of old to young has massively increased. The old-age dependency ratio (number of people over 65 relative to the working-age population) has more than doubled since the 1950s. This is a problem affecting other European nations such as Germany as well; those countries also have to 'import' nurses, and various categories of support staff, though mostly to a lesser degree than the UK.
    'Lack of training' is another reason often given. But how much is this effect rather than cause? If we come to rely on foreign workers, and the system 'works' (for the moment), there's presumably less incentive to think about training.
4. But I suspect there's another important factor, which is not receiving attention, and indeed being evaded. The chief purpose of this post isn't to present data or analyses – the reliability of which I can't vouch for – but to draw attention to a strange taboo, one that is sufficiently widespread to affect the responses of an AI like Claude. There seems to be a prohibition against discussing the idea that what we're seeing is: increasing lack of willingness to work in certain areas on the part of Western indigenous populations, due to ideological factors. The taboo against discussing this possibility seems unrelated to any taboo about ethnicity, so it's unclear why it exists. In fact, any implied criticism applies less to ethnic minorities than it does to the population generally.
   If my point is correct, then solving the nurses etc problem will need more than just rhetoric, or more funding of training courses. It may require recognition that the ideology that's being purveyed by university intellectuals, and other activists, has had damaging effects over recent decades, whether directly at university or via influence from university-educated media professionals and commentators. Possibly by encouraging indigenous populations to believe that work at the lower end of the scale is degrading, or a symptom of oppression. (Leading to the hypocritical result that we rely on other nations to provide the labour that is supposedly 'degrading' or 'oppressive'.) Again, the problem is likely to have affected all Western societies to a greater or lesser extent, not just Britain.
5. Image is of stylised supercomputer, generated by leonardo.ai.

Goodbye, Mr Trump

When Donald Trump first appeared on the horizon I was all for him, though no one else seemed to be. Here is a breath of fresh air, I thought: a politician belonging to a supposedly right-wing party who isn't actually a leftist. That is to say, someone with genuinely individualist rather than collectivist sympathies, and who is willing to fight for non-leftist values – a rarity, it seemed, even in the US.
   At the time, everyone else seemed to be sneering. The British right-wing press, I seem to recall, described his first inauguration in 2017 with disdain. As for the left-liberal establishment, an astonishing tide of hatred and contempt poured out – in the US, the UK, and around the globe. I wrote in his defence a couple of times, or at least criticised his detractors.
   Then, during Trump's second term, much of the British Right seemed to become belated fans. Even mildly leftist institutions like the BBC started to give him a modicum of respect. I initially continued to feel positive about Mr Trump, though there were early warning signs when he first spoke aggressively about Greenland. I let it pass: with Trump, it isn't always clear what's serious and what's posturing. He still seemed to be heroically trying to tackle major problems where others would have faffed about ineffectually. It's true that he hasn't, apparently, made much progress with the Ukraine situation, but at least he's been trying.

* * *

More recently, however, it has become clearer that we are dealing with a loose cannon who is potentially dangerous for global stability. Swooping in and imprisoning, or killing, the leaders of countries you don't like – when they haven't attacked you or even threatened attack in a meaningful way – is an approach that has now been used twice by the USA, apparently at President Trump's behest.
   Who is Trump going to have assassinated next? The Prime Minister of Cuba? The President of Nigeria? How can we be sure it won't be someone closer to home? What if his disapproval of Keir Starmer rises to high enough levels?
   The Iran situation is disturbingly reminiscent of 2003 and the Iraq War. At least in that case, there had been a prior act of aggression against America (9/11) – though the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq was tenuous.
   One 'blessing' in this case is that there's no rationalising dodgy dossier that subsequently has to be exposed as dishonest. Here it's clear from the start that the would-be supporting arguments are hollow.
   It's not just that the war against Iran isn't justified, and that it's the action of an aggressor rather than a defender. It's that Trump is taking an enormous risk. He is risking not just American security and American lives, but the security of America's allies. It might all pay off, or it might not. There may be all sorts of negative consequences in the pipeline. It has, for example, been suggested that Trump's actions are making it easier for the Chinese to annex Taiwan. It's going to be harder to make China feel guilty about its expansionism, after what the West has been up to.

* * *

To understand the Trump phenomenon we have to go back to 2016. Culturally and intellectually, the 'liberal' hegemony reigned supreme. The extent to which il‑liberal elites had suppressed dissident viewpoints could be gauged from polls prior to the US election and the Brexit referendum. Tests of voting intentions gave little sign of the seismic shifts about to unfold, instead implying that Trump and Leave were unlikely outcomes. Evidence that even when merely questioned by pollsters, people were afraid to speak their mind if they disagreed with the wisdom of the bien pensants.
   Trump's first presidency was marked by vehement opposition and protests. Ironically, his critics accused him of being anti-democratic. By denouncing someone who had been legitimately elected and actively campaigning against him, it is they who were being anti-democratic.
   Mr Trump has shaken up a complacent intellectual establishment. It's hard to imagine who else could have done it. His bombast and political dumbing-down may have offended middle-class sensibilities, but without those qualities it's unlikely he could have stood up to a seemingly endless barrage of leftist vitriol. (For that reason, it could be argued that Trump is actually a product of leftist hegemony.)
   It's not just that intellectual elites have become smug and complacent; they have become overly powerful. Academic and journalistic elites have, in effect, colluded to suppress alternative viewpoints. What they have been defending is a set of beliefs which arguably suits their own interests.
   A few elements of academia are now finally acknowledging that university bias has gone too far and that it's time to take serious action. Speaking to the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Brooks – the New York Times's token conservative, who has now been recruited by Yale to help address the problem – says of Trump that he

is never 100 percent wrong. There's always some kernel of truth to his attacks. The problem is that he overreacts. It's like going to a doctor with acne and the doctor says, "You know what will fix acne? Decapitation." That's Trump.

But if Trump (and Vance) hadn't 'overreacted', would we now have public acknowledgement that there's a serious bias issue? Chances are, we would be getting (at best) a bit of mealy-mouthed debate, with everything subsequently going on much as it has been.
   Perhaps it takes the threat of 'decapitation' to get anything to happen. Even so, it's doubtful that Western academia is going to make a major shift away from its il‑liberal consensus any time soon. The fact that Brooks says that a motive for reform is because we need "a fair and just society" suggests that even conservative academics are still hopelessly bedazzled by the hubristic fantasy that academia's job is to come up with 'correct' ethical solutions. But at least Trump's full-frontal attack has got people talking more openly about the problem.

* * *

Donald Trump has been necessary for the sake of pluralism, and we should be grateful to him. Now let us look forward to the end of Mr Trump's presidency. And let us hope his successor is someone with as much courage to confront ideological monopoly, but less desire to stir up the geopolitical landscape.
   With luck, President Trump's legacy will be that he revived genuine conservatism, and hence political and ideological pluralism – not that he started World War Three.

With apologies to Edvard Munch and the National Museum Oslo.

the ideology of sex and race

• Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. Every day the newspapers are talking about him.
   Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been the kind of person who, one way or another, was going to make his way in life by doing something dodgy. The fact that he did so by creating what amounted to an illegal prostitution empire for the glitterati, however, probably says more about his time than about him.
   It isn't only that casual sex became freed from the taint of sin, or that it became normalised. What happened was an inversion of the traditional Christian attitude: instead of an aura of moral ambiguity, sex took on an aura of virtue. To engage in sex became praiseworthy; not to have sex became mildly reprehensible.
   Christianity in the US may be different but if you look at attitudes publicly expressed by senior members of the Church of England over recent decades, I think you'll find that Britain's clerics have largely echoed this process of inversion, albeit trailing slightly behind more dominant ideological sources.

   Taking our cue from Freud and his followers, we now regard sex as driving everything (this is reinforced by movies such as Swimming Pool), and see activities or attitudes that take us away from being sexually active as unhealthy. It used to be regarded as desirable to hold on to your virginity well beyond puberty; now it's slightly frowned on if you haven't done it by the time you're 18. Sex before the age of consent is seen as no big deal – meaning one less inhibition for people like Epstein and his customers.
   If to the strong desire for sex that's already in our DNA (or at least in men's DNA) you add the message that society approves of it, and disapproves of not doing it, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if there get to be openings for individuals or groups who want to make it easy to fulfil those social expectations, by facilitating and organising sexual encounters on a large scale.

• If early Christians devised and developed the be-suspicious-of-sex ideology, who's responsible for the embrace-it-enthusiastically ideology? Intellectuals, of course, the modern form of priest. The pro-sex ideology got going in the 1960s, around the time when institutionalisation and expansion of intellectuals, into a state-approved class, was gathering momentum.
   You could regard the process as an extension of 19th-century utilitarianism, which right from the start was intimately associated with the state. Use logic, untainted by ideology, to make society better! Only of course, it wasn't sound logic, and it didn't exclude ideology. There's no such thing as ideology‑free intervention.
   The logic with regard to sex may have gone something like this:
- Leaving aside Christian ethics or other ideology, sex is basically pleasurable.
- Blocking sex in any way, for any reason, causes frustration and unhappiness.
- Therefore, if you remove all barriers to consensual sex, you're bound to increase human happiness! And since people are still affected by the bad culture of the past, they need to be actively encouraged, e.g. by being taught that sex is good. No guilt should be attached to it!
   The problem with superficial logic of this kind, applied to human affairs, is that there are usually other factors being left out of account. As Freud argued, human civilisation has moved forward (or moved in directions generally regarded as forward) by suppressing hardwired tendencies, such as the tendency to start reproduction at puberty, or the tendency to express aggressive instincts uninhibitedly. We've freed ourselves from the Darwinian straitjacket, but it has meant deviating from the pleasure principle. Conversely, a return to the latter means going back in the direction of Stone Age standards.

• Iffy logic can be found in the feminist programme too, presumably inspiring the anti-male ethos that's currently being disseminated via movies and other cultural products. Because feminist ideas were produced by intellectual women, many of whom probably had little desire to play a secondary role to a man, the idea arose that women in general should reject the traditional female role, and should oppose males' desire for women to play that role. The dodgy step was in moving from 'women like me' to 'all women'.
   It could be argued that, in doing so, feminist intellectuals have not been feminist enough. One of the challenges for an independent-minded woman is surely that of rejecting the tendency (hardwired in men?) to regard all women as defined by their gender.

• Ideological considerations have crept into movies, TV and adverts, giving them that familiar sense of containing covert political lectures. You shouldn't (for example) show a male boss with a female subordinate, this is reinforcing the wrong attitudes, so try only to show it the other way round. The same applies to whites versus other ethnicities. Show interracial relationships as much as possible, but avoid white-male/black-female couples, as this might reinforce preferences that are at least as bad (so say ideological guidelines) as the same-race one.
   Such ideology may explain the strange phenomenon, recently commented on by Reform MP Sarah Pochin, that the proportion of ethnic minorities shown in adverts is out of sync with the proportions actually found in the British population as a whole. Iffy logic may again be at work. Presumably there is some argument being applied that, in order to reduce racist attitudes, we should increase exposure to other races by showing a disproportionate number in advertising. But does this actually work as supposedly intended? If one of the drivers of racism is fear of being displaced by other ethnicities, mightn't the strategy actually increase racism?
   This is highly speculative, but I wonder whether the violence of some of the anti-immigration riots seen in Britain last year was influenced by contemporary advertising strategies. Does seeing a disproportionate number of non-white faces in adverts actually heighten, rather than dampen, pre-existing tensions?

• In 1949 Friedrich Hayek wrote* that intellectuals "have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today". What would Hayek make of things three quarters of a century later? I think he might well argue that we are now ruled as much by intellectuals as by elected politicians. Intellectuals control the narratives which control our lives.

* F.A. Hayek, 'The Intellectuals and Socialism', University of Chicago Law Review, Spring 1949.

frozen rivers and sexy chateaux

• I've been making use of a free trial of the British Film Institute's Player. Some sophisticated movies of the kind you're unlikely to find on Netflix, though occasionally there are one or two on Prime.
   Many of the BFI's selection are obviously intended to showcase the talents of female directors – some of them obscure ones who seem to have made one very good film, then disappeared from sight. I guess even in California, and even within the arts, being a woman in a traditional male role is still a challenge.

   One excellent movie available at the moment is Courtney Hunt's 2008 film Frozen River, starring Melissa Leo and the late Misty Upham as two women trying to survive in the cold landscapes around the St Lawrence River – where USA meets Canada, and where reservations and reservation law are prominent features.
   As so often in movies these days, males – unless they're very young – perform here primarily as threats, or as failures. That aside, Frozen River manages to be a gripping and taut thriller, despite being determinedly realistic and un-romanticising. The heroines bend, and occasionally break, the law, but it's simply in the attempt to stay above the breadline. They try to do the right thing, but sometimes have to tweak it a little while (apparently) wishing they didn't have to.
   This contrasts with the seminal Thelma and Louise, the movie which launched the two-women-against-the-world genre, and which conveys a sense of triumph in sticking-it-to-the-guy. Here it's less about indulging one's rage, and more about coping when you're the gender equivalent of the little guy.

• Another high-quality movie about women that's available at BFI, though this one left me feeling ambivalent at the end: François Ozon's 2003 Swimming Pool. A low-key thriller starring Charlotte Rampling as a crime novelist. Ludivine Sagnier plays the promiscuous nymphet role familiar from countless other French movies. Charles Dance makes an appearance as a slightly odious publisher figure.
   Swimming Pool (spoiler alert) is set in a French villa and surrounds, in the south of France, and is a feast of visuals and atmosphere, with Rampling highly watchable as always. Of course, that can't be all of it, not in a sophisticated modern French movie. We have sex, naturally; sex of the kind that leaves a slightly nasty taste. People using sex to deceive one another, manipulate one another, intentionally hurt one another.
   More disturbing is the apparently random murder of a male (the men here, of all ages, are only interested in one thing) whose only 'crime' was to interrupt his own sexual encounter with the nymphet. The murder is casually covered up by the two women, who then bond over the experience. (In 2003, this was probably shocking and provocative; now it seems rather humdrum, given what's come out since in movies and TV.)
   This triumphant sense of subverting patriarchy, by making an individual male suffer, sometimes on the flimsiest pretext, seems to have become a standard subtext of both highbrow and popular literature. If the genders had been reversed, everyone would have screamed misogyny, and the film would presumably not have been nominated for numerous awards.

• Once upon a time in cinema, the norm for a female character was to be supportive of a male character. Only a norm, mind; plenty of the most interesting movies of the 40s and 50s feature female characters who deviate from that role. But from permission-to-deviate we seem to have segued to an imperative not to promote the older norm in any way.
The (largely covert) ideology these days seems to go as follows:
- Any tendency for women to play supportive roles in the past was due purely to culture, not genes – or if genes, then only in a bad way, e.g. males who are hardwired to dominate and oppress.
- Any above-average tendency to play supportive roles, among particular social groups, is a sign that those groups are oppressed.
- Any cultural product which shows a woman behaving supportively, and shows it as acceptable or even praiseworthy, amounts to oppressive propaganda.
   Women are being subtly encouraged not to be supportive. But men want them to be supportive – don't they? Oh, but that's not an argument in favour of women being supportive, it's an argument against it. Such desires on the part of men are unhealthy and morally wrong. Frustrating such desires is virtuous!
   Of course I'm not suggesting that all women should play supportive roles. Just that some of them may actually want to do so, at least in the absence of pressure to the contrary. But there's a strange logic (mirrored in Marxist theory by the idea that any satisfaction experienced by a member of the working class, with their current position, is wrong and needs to be expunged), to the effect that if a woman enjoys playing a traditional female role, there's probably something wrong with her. She has been brainwashed by the patriarchy or is otherwise mentally disturbed, and needs to be re-educated by the sisterhood.

• More tenuous, but arguably present in much contemporary fiction and some movies, is a related idea: that being supportive per se – in the sense of one individual helping another – is somehow intrinsically dodgy, either politically or morally, regardless of the helper's gender or race. Work should be done for the community as a whole, and according to the dictates of the central authority; individual autonomy and initiative in this context are undesirable. (Sound familiar? It's one aspect of the Marxist mindset.)
   What are the likely effects of such an ideology? One possible consequence is a reduction of the work ethic. If every time I think about doing a plumbing/carpentry/etc. job for someone, the thought pops into my head (picked up from a sociology lecture, or a Guardian article) that such an act will serve to entrench an unjust class structure, I might find my enthusiasm for doing the work somewhat dampened.

Happy New Year

I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But Britain will never be ruled by a non-leftist government again. Nor will any other major Western state. The Trump thing is a blip.
    Or, if such rule does happen, it will involve a bunch of people who're so nutty that once they're in power they morph from bullied to bullies, and start to destabilise the geopolitical world order e.g. by threatening to annex Greenland.
    Or, if such rule does happen in a non-nutty way, it will be merely a blip, just like Thatcher and Boris were blips. (The fact that the Thatcher blip lasted 11 years and Boris's a mere 3 speaks volumes.)

The non-Left are now basically fighting a rearguard action. It has to be done – unless you want to just roll over like a pussy, which of course many do. But the rewards of rearguarding are limited.
    Britain is fawked. It's poised for a long, long period of slow but inexorable decline – punctuated, as all historical trends are, by occasional blips. (In investment, such blips are called rallies in a bear market.) Historically, there's nothing unusual about this. Every empire has peaked and then progressively declined, with hopeful little blips on the way down. Look at the basket cases of modern Greece and Italy, which in one sense merely represent the ruins of long-ago empires.
    Like sharks and relationships, societies have to keep moving. If they're not moving up, they're moving down. Generally speaking, staying still is not an option.

The cultures-rise-and-fall theory is one possible perspective on the matter. Another is that socialism (as a mindset) is a virus which, once it takes hold of a society, leads to inexorable decay. Socialist ideology eats away at the flesh of a society, until all that remains is a skeleton with a few flaps of meat. Socialism succeeds partly because the less well off mistakenly believe it will produce nirvana; but mostly because it appeals to people who enjoy having power over others.

Success, for a country as much as for a corporation, depends on one or more exceptionally talented individuals at the top. But the West no longer likes the idea of exceptional individuals – or rather, the elites don't, which is what counts.
    Imagine what would happen if a Thatcher did come along. Obviously she/he would be completely pilloried by those who identify as leftist, including most of the influential part of the media. But even those who don't vote Labour are likely to view her/him with suspicion. Why isn't s(he) more egalitarian, more 'caring', less 'narcissistic'? How dare s(he) act entitled, when s(he) should be consulting with dozens, or preferably hundreds, of colleagues before making any decision? S(he) should be putting 'fairness' first, and not emphasising brutal things like efficiency!

This is what happens when an ideological movement succeeds in taking over the education system – and the rest of the cultural apparatus as well. The early Christian Church knew what it was doing. First, it destroyed ancient libraries and the books they contained, so that what we have left today is a tiny proportion of everything published before 300AD. Then the Church announced that it would undertake the education of the young, for the benefit of everyone. How grateful we all were! A few centuries later, the price to be paid for this Trojan gift became apparent: citizens so brainwashed with Christian ideology about sin and guilt that organised resistance became impossible. It took centuries of guerrilla warfare by rebellious individuals, many of them paying with their lives, before free speech and thought once again became possible.
    But the age of liberty didn't last. Soon a new ideology arose, supposedly based on rationality and welfare, which decreed that society should be 'perfected', using the latest trendy ideas of intellectuals. Education quickly became a target for bringing 'enlightenment' to the masses. As the new ideology has become dominant, we've seen a repeat of the Christianity phenomenon: an ideological class that controls thought, via its control of education, and via its dominance of the media, the arts, and culture generally.
    Once again, ideological dominance is providing an elite class with power, even if it's not of a kind that readily translates into monetary gain. As with the early Church, the power motive may often be unconscious, and individual members may think of their actions as motivated by benevolence and by a desire to do the 'right thing', rather than by the joys to be experienced from directing and controlling other people's lives.
    While Brexit and Trump seemed to be signs that electorates had been brainwashed less than expected, the phenomena may have (largely) represented last-ditch efforts by a generation that remembered a world before woke – when thought and speech were freer, and genuinely critical, rather than pseudo-critical in Marxist fashion. Ten years on, much of that generation has died, and been replaced by Millennials and Zoomers, most of whom were brought up on socialist ideology and know nothing else.
    However much the right-wing press complains, or Trump slash Vance finger-wags, Britain's banning/penalising/censoring bandwagon has become unstoppable. Labour is planning to criminalise criticism of Islam. The Greens want to make the sin of 'misogyny' include criticising a woman for anything whatsoever. (A possible argument for changing sex: become female, and criticising you will cease to be legitimate.)

I realise my comments may not be morale-boosting for brave rearguarders fighting in the trenches. Fighters need hope, if they are to fight effectively. But I thought I had better tell it as I see it. So Mr Farage, Mr Jenrick, if you read this, I recommend you forget what you've read. Certainly do not incorporate it into your speeches. And if any right-wing journalists are reading this (I know they are – though presumably most of them would rather gnaw their own leg off than give us any publicity), the same goes for you too: it's probably better to hold out hope, than to promote despair. A blip may be just a blip, but it's better than nothing.

* Second picture shows rearguard action by the Greeks after the Battle of Domokos, from an illustration by Henry Wright (1849-1937).

COVID and ideology

Britain's COVID Inquiry hasn't so far produced any very profound insights.
- Mistakes were made.
- Had we been better prepared, the crisis would have been handled better.
- More planning ahead would be helpful for next time.
All worthy assertions. Whether expanding them into over 700 pages is a worthwhile exercise is another matter. Still, this is the standard stuff of Inquiries: produce a weighty tome to satisfy the desire for official critique and the need to apportion blame. What's less clear is why, unlike other Inquiries, this one has to run to ten volumes, eight of them still to be published.
    Some things which seemed to be ignored in 2020 are now being belatedly acknowledged. In particular, the effects of lockdown and other interventions on the economy, and on people's mental state. The fact that these issues were largely brushed aside in the stampede to 'do something' will perhaps teach us to have a bit more humility next time, exercise a little more caution, and be less zealous about using a simple medical objective (e.g. preventing deaths) as the overriding factor. Perhaps.
    Looking at the bigger picture, the two things that stood out about the policy response to COVID have not been addressed by the Inquiry at all. First, the episode told us something about the dominant ideology; secondly, it revealed the enormous power of the medical profession.

What the Inquiry hasn't considered so far, and seems unlikely to, in the further 8 volumes still to come, is the influence of ideology on governmental responses to COVID and any future crises. Ideology inevitably comes into play when major government decisions are made. If such decisions seem to be largely based on science, as in this case, this merely conceals the fact that they are ultimately driven by ideological preferences. By 'ideology' I simply mean: ways of thinking about big issues that fundamentally are not about facts but about values.
    When the state decides whether to intervene with coercive measures, as in the COVID crisis, the key ideological issue is:
• collective interests (or what they're presumed to be),
versus:
• the individual's right to decide for him- or herself,
and the relative weight which should be given to each.
    Ideology is neither correct nor incorrect, neither true nor false, except in the eye of the beholder – though some ideologies do seem to cause more harm than others. Everyone has their own ideological preferences, though these can be shifted to some extent via education and propaganda, or via cultural output such as movies and TV. Ideology is an unavoidable part of life, for highly educated elites as much as for everyone else. Attempts to eliminate ideology from thought and discussion are futile and, ironically, tend to be proposed by people who are highly ideologised themselves.

Ideology is difficult if not impossible to measure, so I'm relying on impressions. But thinking back to 2020, and thinking globally, the overall picture was of a world in which the elites in power were informed by a predominantly collectivist ideology. An ideology that said "we must intervene whenever society is imperfect – which is basically all the time – particularly when there is some crisis". It seemed at times as if COVID provided intervention‑enthusiasts with the excuse they had long been waiting for. Power was to be put into the hands of trained experts (including themselves), instead of leaving things to individuals and markets.
    There were a few governments holding out against the tide of paternalistic advice from professionals and intellectuals. In Sweden, and a few other countries such as Taiwan, individualist resistance won out, at least with regard to lockdowns. The result for the persons deemed responsible for those relatively libertarian policies, in the case of Sweden, was not good: heavy censure, and blame for causing loss of lives. The hostility they had to endure was an indication of the prevailing bias in favour of interventionism and collectivism, and a sign of how intolerant the dominant ideologists were of any major disagreement.
    Now, with the benefit of hindsight and more information, the positive effects of lockdown are turning out to have been less significant than was claimed at the time. Weighed against the negatives, it could easily be argued that lockdowns were a tragic mistake.
    In Britain there was some attempt to hold out against the insistence that strong-arm intervention was necessary. Ultimately however, so it seemed, there were not enough people within the Conservatives who were willing to resist pressure from those in the medical and related professions and from the Civil Service.

The mildly individualistic resistance of the British government at the time, against pressure from medical and other experts, illustrates the broader divergence between, on the one hand, the majority of voters and the politicians they tend to favour; and on the other hand, elite power blocs such as professional groups within medicine and education. This divergence between elites and populace is one that increasingly seems to colour every area of politics in Britain, America and other Western societies. The elites are confident that their expertise allows them to know what's best for people. Meanwhile people themselves beg to differ.
    What happens when individualist resistance meets collectivist dogma? Conflict is what happens. The Inquiry skates over this problem in simplistic fashion. Yet given the broader mismatch between voter preferences and elite ideology, it's an important problem, likely to recur in connection with any future crisis, and one that shouldn't just be dismissed as a sign of poor management. The Inquiry claims that it "accepts the need for challenge" but opines that "challenge does not need to lead to conflict". It strongly censures the alleged culture of conflict within Boris Johnson's administration at the time (see Module 2, 11.182).
    More generally, the Inquiry comes down hard on Johnson's team, which at the time included pro‑Brexit campaigner Dominic Cummings. However, the evidence it provides for some of its accusations such as misogyny, and the claim that rule-breaking caused "huge distress", seems weak or non-existent.*

The bias in favour of collectivism in 2020 was hardly surprising. The pro-intervention model has been preferred by university intellectuals for decades. As those intellectuals have increased in numbers, and been assigned more weight in decision-making, and as more young people have come under their influence, the remnants of pro-individualistic thought inherited from 18th-century Enlightenment and 19th-century liberalism were bound to give way to collectivism. There are entire institutions, such as Oxford's Nuffield College, devoted to developing the thesis that society should be improved by means of intervention, imposed from above by the wise and the trained. Such thinking now dominates the humanities and the social would-be sciences.
    Some ideological biases are only to be expected among particular professionals. The political class is likely to show a statistical bias in favour of more power for the state. University intellectuals forming a class of supposed experts, particularly when authorised by the state and remunerated with state funds, can be expected to favour collectivism over individualism.
    The class of medical professionals is also likely to exhibit a bias in favour of collectivism, particularly in a society such as Britain in which most medical services are supplied via the state. Just as surgeons have a bias in favour of operating, so medical professionals in general are likely to support 'rational' interventions, independently of the wishes of recipients.

What take-home morals are to be had from the whole experience? Just because something looks like it's concerned with issues analysable by science, doesn't mean that science – whether it's solid (controlled experiments), speculative (theoretical models), or just wannabe (armchair theorising) – is the overriding thing that should determine policy. Scientists, intellectuals and medics may be good at the scientific bit, but their assertions also tend to reflect the biases that are to be expected from their membership of particular professional groups. As Terry Eagleton might say, "there's no such thing as a disinterested statement."
   Conclusion? Don't be afraid to disagree with what's presented as evidence-based advice, if hidden within that advice there are value judgments.

This blog will be back in the new year.

* Ibid, 11.170, footnotes 320 and 321; and 11.218, footnote 433. The language used in some of the electronic conversations is highly aggressive but not necessarily misogynistic. And post-Climategate and its hacked emails, we should be used to the idea that private exchanges between like-minded professionals, referring scathingly to their opponents, can be shockingly different in style from what we might expect from the public image.

Postscript
Given that the term 'collectivism' is being redefined by the humanities profession to suit their own interests, I feel duty-bound to add this reminder: political collectivism, at least in large societies, does not mean 'rule by everyone', or 'rule by the community'. It means rule by elites, possibly subject to a modicum of democratic control via elections. In modern states, such elections are likely to be manipulated by the media in favour of the preferred ideology of the elites.
    For a more detailed discussion of collectivism, see chapter 5 of Power-mad and Hypocritical.

POLARISED - part 3

There's been a lot of talk about 'hate' in recent years. We've had a programme to eliminate hatred of particular ethnic groups, for example – those who form minorities in Western societies. While that's a laudable objective, the idea that this has resulted in an overall reduction in hatred is an oversimplification. For other social groups, hatred seems to have risen rather than fallen. I seem to tick a few of the currently negative boxes myself: white, male, middle-class, middle-aged.
   Hatred of the outsider, of the foreigner, of the 'enemy of society' – however 'outside' or 'foreign' or 'enemy' is culturally defined – may be hardwired in homo sapiens. But it seems such hatred can be either damped down or cranked up. One of the methods of cranking up is to create narratives or perspectives that associate every member of a particular group with one or more negative characteristics. For example, Jews in 1930s Germany were accused of possessing 'unfair' levels of wealth. (While antisemitism is often characterised as being about contempt, the truth may have more to do with jealousy and resentment.)
   In 1973, when I emigrated from Germany to Britain aged ten, hostile narratives – in relation to groups that are now 'protected' – weren't much in evidence in my country of destination. What was visible to me from popular culture wasn't negative narratives about (say) Blacks, or women; on the other hand, there was a certain amount on the topic of Germans. In practice, I rarely had to deal with seriously anti-German prejudice – but I did find it irritating that practically every German I encountered in fiction or drama was unpleasant.
   The efforts of the last four decades have made the use of narratives that are hostile to protected groups, or of any wording that comes even remotely close, prohibited in public discourse. While this has seriously impacted free speech in the broader sense, you could argue that there's been some benefit to members of minorities.
   But to suggest that hatred in general has been reduced is surely overstating things. What seems to have happened instead is that hatred – to some extent a free-floating emotion, always on the look-out for targets – has been shifted around.

There are new objects of hatred, and new narratives/perspectives to support that hatred.
   For example, in America, groups identifying with right-wing or other anti-leftist positions are now routinely characterised in terms of adjectives that amount to labelling them as evil – and as deserving of contempt, cancel culture, and even violence. Those who identify with such positions are supposedly 'driven by hatred' – which (apparently) makes hating them okay. Anti-leftists, so the story goes, want to oppress minorities. They are misogynist, racist, phobic of sexual minorities. Other than hatred, their principal motives are selfishness and greed.
   These leftist-populist narratives receive important support from academia, which has been busy over recent decades generating theories that buttress such sentiments. Non-leftists (described as 'right-wing', 'conservative', 'neoliberal', and so on – automatic insults in an academic context) are oppressive, ideological, prejudiced, phobic of change, and so on, according to 'research' published in respected peer-reviewed journals.
   In shifting the focus of emotions – "don't hate those people, hate these people!" – academics, highbrow commentators and other intellectuals have gained important power. Power over thought, morality and speech. Ideological power, in other words.
   Such power was once held by the Christian Church. By now it has largely passed to the Church's successor. I see plenty of signs of the Church bowing to the new religion of wokeism, but not vice versa. Transmission of moral ideology has become largely a one-way street, between those two Western hegemonies, the old and the new.

POLARISED - part 2

In the previous post I suggested that increased polarisation can be linked to the fact that – despite the West supposedly having become more secularised and more science-based – there has been a rise in fervent belief. Belief in the absolute rightness of certain theories, or attitudes, chiefly in relation to political topics.
   I suggested that the apparent decline in people's capacity to consider alternatives to their own beliefs could (paradoxically) be attributable to the influence of academia. Far more people nowadays receive training, in the kinds of intellectual approach favoured by humanities professors, compared to 40 or 50 years ago. While some of the approved approaches may be analogous to those used in the physical or medical sciences, many are not.
   Critical Theory, for example, a set of techniques that's become dominant in academic arts subjects, has little in common with science. It's essentially an arm of Marxist ideology.
   Though there's a pretence that 'critical' analysis is being employed, in practice the answers are largely predetermined, and tend to come with a strong dose of moral pressure. 'If you don't agree with our stance, you're probably complicit in causing harm.' The underlying effect seems to be to stir people up, or make them uncomfortable, though they may not always be conscious of it.
   Being repeatedly told (even if only in the form of subtext) that contemporary society is harmful, and that you're complicit unless you're actively opposing the status quo, is bound to leave its mark. For some impressionable individuals, it's likely to change their attitudes fundamentally and permanently. But even for less impressionable students, it's likely to exert profound background influence, however much they may say that they didn't take campus ideology seriously at the time.

* * * * *

On 10 September 2025, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a university campus in Orem, Utah, apparently by a young college graduate who objected to Kirk's views, or to what he imagined those views to be.
   More disturbing than the event itself have been the reactions to it. Comments on discussion websites such as Quora.com, presumably representing a cross-section of viewpoints, were at best only lukewarmly sympathetic. On average, they weren't sympathetic at all. Many comments amounted to the view that 'Kirk had it coming'. One got the feeling that there's quite a few people who wouldn't have minded killing Charlie Kirk themselves, if it had been easy and they could have been sure of getting away with it.
   How does what we're seeing fit with the narratives constructed by leftist intellectuals? According to the latter, it's the Right whose views are fuelled by hatred and intolerance. The image that's been created is one of crazed, unreasonable reactionaries; fervent believers who are emotive, verging on hysterical, in their attachment to irrational positions. Yet the evidence suggests that the precise opposite may be true. It's the Left that has become immune to reason, believing in the values of its preferred religion (wokeism) with evangelical zeal. It's the Left which seems to have adopted near-hysterical intolerance as its MO.