Yikeiatry

The nth greatest story ever told

Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment was so tantalisingly reviewed in the NS a couple of months ago that I immediately bought a copy. Granted, it doesn’t take much to tempt me into a reckless book purchase. But this one certainly didn’t disappoint. It tells the stories of places after humans have left – abandoned farmland, warzones, nuclear exclusion zones, polluted rivers, volcanic landscapes, and the like. It’s sparklingly written, elegantly structured, meticulously researched, and healthily balanced between arresting realism and genuine optimism. Flyn explores both the marvellous process of ecological ‘succession’, in which landscapes metamorphose gradually as different species flourish in a recently changed environment, and the drawn-out death throes of once vibrant ecosystems tainted by human activity, as well as plenty in between. She decides that what ‘should be a book of darkness, a litany of the worst places in the world’ is actually ‘a story of redemption’ (pp.10-11), as even the most blighted corners of the world have hope for an improved future.

What struck me almost from the beginning is its copious use of Christian¹ metaphor – redemption, eschaton, resurrection, atonement, desolation. Surely Flyn is right to reach for divine categories – climate change is a cosmic phenomenon virtually unmatched in its disturbing scope and severity, and how better to capture its urgency and magnitude than to sprinkle the prose with religious language? There was, however, something about the way these are used throughout that made me pause on this theme. To give you a flavour, here’s one such time:

‘… cloaked within the terror of the eschaton […] lie perverse desires: the thrill of danger, and the reassurance that disaster might be averted should certain strictures be followed; or that a selected few might hope to survive the onslaught to build a better, truer life on the other side.’ (p315)

H. Richard Niebuhr famously summarised liberal theology as describing how ‘a God without wrath brought men [sic] without sin into a kingdom without judgement by the ministration of a Christ without a cross.’ I have no interest in engaging in theological polemic here. I raise this rather because Flyn’s narrative arc is the other way around – she describes wrath without a God, judgement without a kingdom, and, most disturbingly, a cross without a Christ. This is certainly effective in capturing the (cosmic, totalising) stakes of the future of the earth, but there are very disturbing implications. On whom, for example, does a godless wrath fall in a Christ-less world?

The comforting humanist answer would be: on us all, collectively. And we’ll come out of the adversity stronger, as we always do, in the great human march towards Progress. The hard reality is surely different. This wrath is one that falls on the margins. The brunt of environmental costs will fall, in the medium term, on those areas affected by forest fires, desertification, rising sea levels, chemical spills, confluences of marine plastic waste. Those of us who can afford the luxury of living in temperate zones in the global north, far from smoke-belching factories and streams of effluent will, for now, be sheltered from this great desolation. The ‘elect’ identified by Flyn, who hope to survive this tribulation, will not be the upright or the blameless or the plaintive recipients of God’s mercy but the monied and the powerful, who can flee the rising tides and compete successfully for dwindling supplies of food and water.

There needn’t be an elect, of course. With no Sustainer and no Father, and no One whose words will never pass away, the sprung ecological booby-traps of the world – melting carbon-heavy permafrost, the fiery destruction of vital rainforest in increasing heat, the cessation of ocean current flow, the spiralling ‘greenhouse effect’ – could issue in so great a destruction as to obliterate the whole world: its forgotten corners and leafiest suburbs alike. A ‘resurrection’ (Flyn’s word) may follow, but who knows whether any of us will be there to see it? And who’s to stop the whole grim cycle from simply repeating? And what is there to blame but the greed, neglect, and ignorance of us and our ancestors? Can a leopard change its spots?

Admirably, this is a problem that Flyn confronts. Although, as she points out, ‘every major extinction event… has been succeeded by a burst of evolutionary creativity’, it is unavoidably true that ‘we – as individuals, certainly, but perhaps even as a species – may not be around to see it’ (p329). Her earlier confidence that the grand narrative is one of redemption seems in jeopardy, and yet she exhorts us to ‘find faith to fight’ (p330). There is a tension here honestly displayed, but not resolved. A path must be trodden between therapeutic nihilism and naive paternalistic overtreatment. Can redemption be successful? Will it be worthwhile? And can ‘faith’ (in what?) sustain the dizzying costs?

I think this tension arises partly from a mismatch of metaphors. Theological metaphors are, as I’ve said, surely appropriate to such a wide-angle issue. But do they make sense – do they compel – without connection to a real God with real power and purpose? Or is the ecological story Flyn tells with them doomed to frustrate and fall short?

‘Redemption’ is an appealing word to describe the emergence of a Good Thing out of a Bad Thing, but that’s not exhaustive of what it means in the Christian usage. There, it’s the payment of a price to set a captive free. Good and beautiful as it is when butterflies thrive on a slag heap, this is no fulsome and eternal liberation. No one has paid the price. Beauty has asserted its right to exist but the enemy – human greed – is not defeated. Flyn describes with unsettling matter-of-factness the inadequacy of good intention – even well-meant conservation can be cosmetic, unnatural, and ultimately self-serving. Or even in the worst-case scenario, where humanity collectively pays the highest price (of our own extinction), we surely cannot enact a moral transformation of the universe to ensure that greed will not triumph again in the next stage of evolution and extinction. No – full redemption needs a free and perfect and transformative liberator.

Or take ‘apocalypse’. In its Christian sense, this is prophecy ‘in which the secrets of the universe are revealed’ (Morna D. Hooker: The Gospel according to Saint Mark, p297). An unfurling environmental catastrophe, however frightening and existential, causes neither ‘all the starry host [to] fall like withered leaves from the vine’ nor the ‘son of man [to come] with the clouds of heaven’. It might impel a sense of moral urgency and even the thrill of the unknown, but the Bible’s view is bigger. The image is an appropriate one to imbue the issue with gravity – but there is mileage in the ‘apocalypse’ besides. The eschaton in biblical terms will mean the fabric of the world not just falling apart, but being torn like a curtain, revealing the God who lies behind all things, and who remains when they decay. And surely the hope of the gospel is not that an immunised elect can build a better life on the other side, but that the eternal God counts His people grafted to Himself. There’s a place to find faith to fight.

¹I use this term in the full awareness that other belief systems have some comparable concepts. I engage with the specifically Christian understandings of the terms both because of my familiarity with them and the fact that it seems to be primarily Christianity which is in view for Flyn. Christians have no monopoly on big worldviews!

Care, Ovaltine, and Multiplicity

Carl R. Trueman’s new book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, is a conservative thinker’s attempt to understand how western society’s attitudes towards sex have shifted so much, so quickly. Trueman is careful to avoid diatribe – this is not a book about how far ‘off-base’ modern society has drifted, or one prone to exaggerated lament at the state of what we’re teaching our children, or similar. He draws on an impressive and wide range of thinkers – from Rousseau and Marx to the modern New Left, to modern conservative philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Having read very few of the texts which Trueman draws on, I can’t really comment on how faithfully he represents them. Suffice it to say that he presents thought from a very long list of thinkers in a way that is not difficult to follow, and what might seem like a very disparate set of parts is actually drawn together into a coherent thread.

Trueman’s basic argument is that ideas from the somewhat insular worlds of academic philosophy and political activism have bled into the popular consciousness through art, protest, and media. Popular conception of welfare is now psychological, such that we incline to think of human flourishing in an individualistic, introspective, subjective way. In parallel, the modern conception of the psyche itself puts great emphasis on sexual expression and fulfillment, the right to which is now seen as an important item on the political agenda. It’s important to Trueman’s argument that, although these things are now instinctive, they are specific to modern culture, and have their roots in lofty philosophy and political radicalism. He doesn’t actually comment much on whether they’re good or bad (though it’s not hard to guess which way he leans), or even how one would go about trying to answer that. In its most basic form, the thesis of this book is that modern attitudes to selfhood place an especial emphasis on sex, personal expression, and subjective feelings of pleasure and fulfillment, compared with other dominant cultural attitudes in the history of the west.

I think it’s hard to argue with that. What’s a little more puzzling to me is the way that I’ve heard the book recommended, as though it’s dynamite – essential reading for ‘cultural engagement’, and a useful starting point for Christians to understand how their friends think about the world. Partly this is puzzling because it’s not really what Trueman says he’s trying to do. In the introduction, he explicitly says that the book ‘is not intended as an exhaustive account of how the present normative understanding of the self has emerged and come to dominate public discourse.’ Rather, he’s trying to show that specifically modern ideas have ‘deep historical roots and a coherent genealogy’ (p29). Partly, it’s an appeal to conservatives and liberals alike to engage in deeper conversation about the historical roots of a modern debate. As such, it might help conservative Christians to speak in more compassionate and understanding ways in the context of identity politics, or across whatever cultural divide exists between conservative Christianity and secular liberalism. But I don’t think it can or should be a ‘starting point’, or required reading ‘to understand the culture’, or similar. Recommending it like this risks fuelling the impression that modern liberalism is all about lawlessness, or despising authority, or destructive individualism, or sexual immorality. This is not actually what Trueman is arguing – but if you were to pick up the book under the impression that it’s a textbook for understanding modern culture, it might be possible to read it this way. And I don’t think that would be particularly helpful.

It’s worth drawing out some of the things which Rise and Triumph leaves unsaid about selfhood and modern culture. I should stress that much of what’s below isn’t really a critique of what Trueman actually writes, so much as gently suggesting why other books are necessary, and perhaps more urgent, for Christians to understand aspects of modern culture.

One obvious point to make is that there are other corners of the popular consciousness than sexual expression, or even personal expression broadly construed. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt argues that one of the fundamental moral dimensions in western liberalism is care/harm – good is that which promotes compassionate and helpful treatment of the vulnerable, and bad is that which exploits and hurts them. (This has an obvious correlate in Rise and Triumph – Trueman would say that liberalism isn’t unique in having this moral axis, but that its interpretation of what is caring/harmful is driven by a unique set of metaphysical assumptions). This is relevant to the above discussion because care/harm necessarily transcends individual fulfillment and aesthetics. If I’m really committed to caring for vulnerable people, and don’t consider myself to be essentially vulnerable, then it follows that, should they ever be in conflict, I should prioritise care of others over my own comfort. I should donate money to a charity promoting racial justice, even if I would rather spend it on a piece of clothing that expresses the ‘authentic me’. If I see my friends expressing ‘ignorant’ and ‘reactionary’ sentiments on social media which mitigate against helpful discourse and just changes, I should call them out even if it makes me nervous about falling out with them. 2020 furnished us with plenty of examples of liberals acting in these ways, or at least the widespread impression that they should. This suggests at the very least that there are important aspects to the popular consciousness in modern liberalism which we won’t understand better by reading about the moral genealogy of the sexual revolution. And I see no strong prior reason why understanding liberal sexual ethics is more urgent, or more fundamental, or more interesting, than understanding the codes of conduct for political engagement, charitable donation, and pursuit of justice and reconciliation.

Secondly, I think that there are other important aspects to the popular consciousness’ attitude towards sex. There are features of its portrayal in media that do not sit easily alongside Trueman’s account of the triumph of the therapeutic (of individual psychological fulfilment). One of the most powerful scenes in Normal People is when Connell’s mother Lorraine berates him for not treating Marianne with respect and generosity outside of their sex lives while they’re sleeping together. We may, as Trueman points out, be expected to laugh at 40-year old virgins, but we’re also invited to snicker at people who don’t satisfy their sexual partners with mutual pleasure, even if the sex they’re having serves a therapeutic purpose for them as an individual (this joke is made in House of Cards, at the expense even of a figure so widely revered by liberals as JFK). There’s also the trope that sex can be disappointing, banal, and not particularly desirable. This is why a character in a Victoria Wood song can raise laughs by responding to a proposition with ‘not me, not my scene: I prefer a game of rummy and an ovaltine’, or wryly remembering ‘I thought that love would be a big adventure; then I saw the spinach on your bottom denture’, or making increasingly improbable excuses (‘my mother sent a note to say “you must excuse me”’, ‘I’m boring! Let me read this catalogue on vinyl flooring’). This humour can be understood in a way that isn’t incompatible with Trueman’s therapeutic framework – if sex is good in general because it supports individual expression, then it can be undesirable in particular when it doesn’t. But I think all of these examples suggest that the modern attitude towards sex is more complex than one of pure liberation and self-expression. Rise and Triumph doesn’t even offer an exhaustive account of the modern attitude towards sex. How then can it be the textbook for engagement with the culture broadly construed?

I think it’s possible that Rise and Triumph overstates the proliferation of liberal assumptions in the therapeutic and sexual worlds. A liberal might read it and wish that they recognised more of the phenomena it describes in real life society! One example of this is the putative removal of stigma around abortion, which has apparently reduced the cost of casual sex. It’s convenient for conservatives to argue that this stigma has disappeared, but I’m not sure that’s consistent with the experience of real people considering or having abortions. More generally, there’s a basic assumption that there is a modern conception of selfhood and sexual freedom which is shared in modern culture in general. Trueman’s arguments are drawn almost entirely from European and American thinkers, and cultural phenomena in the industrialised and liberal west. There’s no sustained attempt to understand multiplicity in liberal understandings of selfhood, ethics, and sex – or even how the multicultural nature of modern America and Europe might require a more nuanced view of ideas ‘with cultural currency’ and how to engage with them. Neither does Trueman say to which subset of world cultures his argument applies. There are two basic mismatches here – the liberal political ideals haven’t transferred across either into the institutional fabric of liberal societies, and neither have they filtered into the ‘social imaginary’ of all groups of modern people. Acknowledging this requires a more nuanced view of modern culture in all of its multiplicity and diversity than is possible for a short book about a couple of ideas. So again this is not necessarily a weakness in Truman’s book as such. Rather, it’s another reason why Rise and Triumph should be read as a book about a few ideas, rather than a cheat code for understanding the 21st century or speaking into it.

A final thought is that Trueman’s approach to accusations of ‘-phobia’ may be useful for the intellectual purpose it serves in the book (tracing emotivism through modern institutions and discourses) but it was frustrating to me that he didn’t acknowledge the plain fact that sometimes the accusations are legitimate. In the darkness of human hearts, there are visceral attitudes which fuel evil prejudice and irrational animus. It’s not indulging in chronological snobbery or liberal hubris to point that out. The discussion of -phobias seemed like a missed opportunity at best – and a fundamental manual for Christians’ cultural engagement would surely have asked the hard questions about whether animus and prejudice have bled into our engagement in ‘culture wars’.

Exhaust fumes, earwax, and ecclesiology

Who are you? More precisely, what is it that constitutes you? This is the question that lies behind Daisy Hildyard’s elegant and probing The Second Body, published by the stylishly minimalist Fitzcarraldo Editions. We’re generally pretty confident to call our physical bodies part of ourselves even though they’re inhabited by a huge array of micro-organisms, and turn over actual material at an alarmingly fast rate. Hildyard’s alarming suggestion is that the various social, political, and physical changes our bodies exert on the universe are just as much part of ourselves. They are our second body.

You are wearing a pair of inexpensive gloves and a teenager in Calcutta is missing a thumb. The lungs of workers in Manila fill with toxic fumes emitted in the production of the materials for that phone in your hand. Species of Brazilian monkey are wiped out by deforestation to produce the palm oil that went into the chocolate you just ate. Those things – according to Hildyard – are part of you. They’re part of you in a different sense from the way your fingers, your earwax, and your pancreas are part of you. But they’re still part of you. Because when you zoom way out – she makes copious metaphorical allusions to Earthrise, a photo taken from the surface of the moon – what can be detected of you is less that space your first body literally occupies and more the worldwide, abstracted consequences of your being. It’s a powerful and very arresting image.

What’s less clear at first is why Hildyard reaches for the body as her guiding metaphor. A lot of her content was very new to me, not because it suggested that I’m responsible for the consequences of my consumption behaviour, but because it drew so direct a comparison between my (physical) body and those (equally physical) consequences. Christian theology gives us plenty of resources to suggest that I should notice and care about the things for which I am, however indirectly, responsible. (Michael Shluter and David Lee’s The R Factor provides a brilliant framework for thinking along this line). But I’m not sure I’ve ever heard somebody tell me that I have two bodies, in that sense.

This is how Hildyard justifies the comparison: “…the only way to truly experience the truth about your body is with pathological horror. The truth is that it does not have sealed boundaries and that objects pose a direct threat to your body – your car, for example, is invading your body. Your body is not inviolable. Your body is infecting the world – you leak. This is why I am speaking of a second body rather than of global connections or impacts.”

Truth be told, I found this very difficult to parse. When I drive a car (for me that still means L-plates and somebody who knows what they’re doing in the front seat), the way that I move my body moves also a gigantic frame of metal which poses an immediate lethal threat to pedestrians unfortunate enough to be nearby, and, via the smoky clouds it pumps out, a very long-term threat to all human existence. It’s not clear to me either that everything contained within the space my body occupies is me, or that the things which I do with a car are my body leaking, rather than some more disconnected causal chain like: I press down too hard on the accelerator; I have less time to react when a child appears from behind that Volvo; the car clips her left arm; she sprawls on the concrete. (This, be it understood, has never actually happened to me.) Hildyard’s lyrical, thread-weaving prose draws arguments from a disorienting array of disparate sources, and it’s possible that she has explained this but I lost it in the forest of her interviews with butchers and geneticists and her favourite Italian novels and her journeys to obscure German cities.

It has got me thinking, though, about the way in which the church is the body of Christ. (Apologies for what is perhaps a clunky but inevitable segue for one of these blogs). The Bible speaks often of how God’s people are His possession, His temple, His bride, and ultimately even His body (eg 1 Corinthians 12:12). I’ve been inclined to think of that as being strictly metaphorical and ideal, and so detached from the inscrutable complexities of Life In Practice. But it’s striking to me that Hildyard should alight on a very similar metaphor but with none of that detachedness – she speaks of a second body not just because it’s an arresting metaphor but because there isn’t a satisfying and comprehensive way of defining the first which doesn’t suggest the existence of a second.

Perhaps in some marvellous way beyond my comprehension, the ‘second body’ of Christ is the unity that his work establishes among his people. Good works done in his service and under his guidance are not isolated moral and physical realities, but wondrously somehow a part of his body. And just as the first of his bodies was raised to glorious life (physically at first, in an unmistakable statement of the goodness of matter), so the second – the church – will one day, in resplendent, material beauty, be presented to her glorious Husband, and united forever to him.

Angry Pragmatism

The Coronavirus crisis has elevated a range of things in the popular consciousness – that song from Tangled, professional football in Belarus (which was, for a while, the only live sport available), Rishi Sunak’s startling good looks, and, more seriously, social issues from unequal access to education to the disproportionate impact of the virus on BAME people and communities. Perhaps its least surprising effect in Britain has been the prominence of the NHS in people’s thoughts, concerns, slogans, and think-pieces. As such, it seemed a good time to read something about NHS history. An excellent New Statesman profile piece pointed me towards Nye – Nick Thomas-Symonds’ (NTS) biography of Aneurin Bevan.

Bevan is rather a difficult subject for a biographer. Falling as he does outside of Labour’s postwar orthodoxy, and even further outside during the war itself while he opposed the coalition government, his existing biographies (not that I’ve read any of them!) apparently fall into one of the two obvious partisan traps. NTS is therefore careful to avoid what has been wittily dubbed ‘Nyeolatry’, dealing carefully and rigorously with Bevan’s temper, his wilful individuality (which sometimes cost Labour at the ballot box), his indifference towards his ‘Bevanite’ group of supporters, and his more controversial policy positions (especially his rejection of unilateral disarmament at Conference in 1957). He also avoids the revisionism of biographers opposed to the Labour left – John Campbell’s biography of him is subtitled ‘The Mirage of British Socialism’. NTS highlights in particular that Bevan did indeed successfully hold out against opposition even within the cabinet to the ‘free-at-the-point-of-use’ principle, which remains one of the NHS’ most treasured aspects. Nye leaves readers with the firm impression firstly that the NHS owes much of its foundation to the work and vision of its founder, and secondly that its visionary founder suffered from deep flaws of character and judgement.

Bevan’s pragmatism is, perhaps surprisingly, emphasised throughout. Although he did resign from the Cabinet, and even had the whip removed briefly for leading a revolt against Labour policy on H-bomb testing, Bevan’s ability to negotiate effectively with the BMA on doctors’ pay without compromising the principles of the proposed NHS system is presented as one of his great successes. This was the culmination of a long willingness to accommodate on Bevan’s part – he began his Councillor career by acceding to a proposal to freeze council tax rates. In the same vein, NTS presents his meteoric rise from checkweighman at a coal pit to Cabinet Minister as a consistent and determined attempt to represent the working class’ interests, and decidedly not a careerist climb up the greasy pole. This desire to effect real and positive change seems to have informed Bevan’s flexibility on issues of secondary importance – he was more concerned with improving his constituents’ lives than being seen to defend a pure political philosophy. However, the firmness of his convictions meant that he was not always the most conciliatory of influences – NTS does not shy away from discussing his comment that Tories are ‘worse than vermin’ (leading apparently to the sarcastic foundation of Conservative ‘Vermin Clubs’), and neither from his chequered relationship with Labour colleagues. When a journalist suggested to Ernest Bevin that Nye was ‘his own worst enemy’, Bevin growled ‘not while I’m alive he ain’t’.

On the whole, Nye doesn’t read like any kind of polemic, or defence of a particular Labour faction. But it’s not entirely free of NTS’ own political persuasions and somewhat ulterior motives. He is at his lyrical best when defending Labour unity – the disaffiliation of the ILP in 1936 apparently “indicated that the group preferred the doctrinal purity of the wilderness to the grubby compromises of actual political power”. The characterisation of Attlee’s leadership style – apparently as a consensus-seeking facilitator rather than active helmsman – is also interesting in this light, although NTS doesn’t make an explicit judgement of the value of this style. This is not necessarily a weakness of the book. This promotion of unity is one of the lessons which NTS tacitly draws out of the period: he seems to suggest that Bevan damaged his own career prospects and Labour’s influence in the wartime government, and then the party’s electoral prospects after his resignation in 1951. Originally published in 2014, Nye is impressively prescient in drawing attention to this issue which is now central.

Overall, Nye deals even-handedly and consistently with the tensions in that period of Labour history – particularly in the unfolding conflict between Bevan’s class-centred philosophic vision of socialism and the more centre-left approach adopted by Tony Crosland and others. NTS also does well to avoid demonising any of the prominent figures in Labour at the time – although Attlee looks anaemic, Gaitskell conniving at times, and Morrison obstinate and inflexible, none of them are cast as enemies of Labour values, sell-outs, or other familiar cliches from more recent Labour history. Nye is a balanced, richly researched, and highly relevant work, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Optimising for Eternity

A typically eloquent and thoughtful follow-up from Daniel here.

Eternal Optimality

On dynamic optimization, both in this life and eternally.

So teach us to number our days, that we may get a heart of wisom.

Psalm 90:12 ESV

There is a short story by William Somerset Maugham titled The Lotus Eater. It describes a man who having fallen in love with the island of Capri, bought an annuity of 25 years such that he could live in Capri without working, and at the end of the 25 years, he would kill himself. He failed to die.

This story tells of how ease and indolence destroys meaning in life, and robs humans of the ability to thrive. But as an economist, the first thing that leapt to my mind was IF he had succeeded in killing himself, that was a perfect example of intertemporal choice (ok we are not called the ‘dismal science’ for no reason)…

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Beyond preference: a response to Daniel Ooi

Daniel’s excellent blog is full of absolutely delightful reads and I can’t recommend them enough. It’s very refreshing to read reflections on economics of religion written by a fellow Christian economist. Daniel and I are on very different pages as far as economics goes, though, and there are a few things in particular on which I want to challenge him.

His recent post ‘Spiritual Shopping’ (https://eternaloptimality.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/spiritual-shopping/) is characteristically provocative and well-written. It is, however, plagued by the same problems faced by all of modern economic utility theory. There is a thread running throughout the article that implies that preferences over churches are meaningful. That is, a person’s ‘choice’ of church betrays information about how they value different aspects of church experience, and how they are best satisfied by things that a church does. I might feel that the preaching at church A is excellent, but I felt so warmly welcome at church B that I was willing to accept its lower preaching quality for the sake of this social boon (or vice versa!). I’m not sure this is quite fair, or even empirically accurate. Why should every relevant dimension of church experience reduce to individual preference? Don’t Christians sometimes decide which church to go to because they want to be able to serve effectively, or partner with specific brothers and sisters? Of course, it is possible in principle to put numbers on these things and include them in a utility function. But it seems to me that they belong in a different category to simple want-satisfaction that Daniel seems to argue is experienced in the way Christians encounter doctrine, music, and church culture.

I am by no means the first economist to question whether these distinctions should not undermine the economic models used to describe and predict human behaviour. Amartya Sen’s fabulous ‘Rational Fools’ essay is the classic text: ‘if you are consistent, whether you are a single-minded egoist or a raving altruist or a class-conscious militant, you will appear to be maximising your own utility in this enchanted world of definitions.’ In the case of church choice, Daniel and all of his fellow mainstream economists of religion are forced to conclude that intrepid missionaries risking life and limb to reach every corner of the globe are just searching for their ideal combination of church and non-church life in the same way as someone who is only there for the music, or goes from time to time to chat up that attractive verger. It seems to me quite obvious that these people are behaving differently – and not just because their preferences are different. Sen’s concept of ‘commitment’ is useful here – he argues that individuals can knowingly sacrifice their welfare in the pursuit of a greater good. In saying this, he is not deviating much from neoclassical utility theorists. But here’s the twist: mainstream economists think that people would only do this in order to satisfy their preference for that greater good they are pursuing. Sen makes no such assumption: if you oppose torture because ‘it makes me sick’, then the economists have a point, but if you do it at great personal cost for no reason other than that is is wrong, and averting it exceeds my own ambitions in importance, then we need completely to reformulate how we understand individual behaviour. To return again to church choice, the economists may still be right if people’s apparently selfless choices over which church they attend, and how they serve it, are intended to make them feel morally superior. But if they are meaningfully selfless, or motivated by things that transcend individual wellbeing, then the economists (including Daniel) are wrong. At least, if they’re not wrong empirically, then they are at least making curious philosophical generalisations which will lead in Sen’s words to ‘a remarkably mute theory’ – mute because it does not distinguish between obviously different kinds of motivation.

No Such Thing as a Free Thinker

If Rory Stewart is remembered for one thing, it will be the effort he spent in disabusing people of the idea that a No Deal Brexit was a thing – an ‘Anglo-Saxon fact’. As an idea, he argued, it had gained a lot of traction as an ostensible solution to a keenly felt problem. But his critique of No Deal was not really at the practical level. Instead, Rory argued that the phrase was being used to conceal an irresponsible lack of detail – that, eventually, something positive had to be smuggled into the negative space that ‘No Deal’ implied.

Perhaps there is an analogy to be made with atheism. When you consider the vast range of meanings that could be attached to this term – no creating god, no higher plane of spiritual realities, no sacred/profane distinction, no meaning to the universe which each individual must seek, etc – the Anglo-Saxon fact embodied by ‘atheism’ dissolves into a heaving sea of possible meanings. This is one of the premises of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Allen Lane, 2018). Gray argues that many self-declared atheists throughout history, and especially in the contemporary world, have been averse to the prospect of genuine meaninglessness, so that they have clung to religious or quasi-religious beliefs not as an addition to their atheism but an essential part of it. 5 of his types he finds guilty of this smuggling, which he clearly finds contemptible. The final 2 buck this trend, and, although Gray is careful to avoid converting people to his mode of atheism, they are presented with much more approval than the previous 5.

All of the types are designed to find resonances in the present age, from the New Atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens to the God-hating of Sade, Empson, and Nietzsche. Perhaps the most insightful chapter is ‘Atheism, gnosticism, and modern political religion’. (By gnosticism, Gray means the ancient and pervasive belief that humanity enshrouded in darkness needs to free itself by finding the light of truth.)

“A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics.”

Beginning with Anabaptist theocracy in early modern Munster, Gray traces this thread through Jacobinism, Leninism, and Nazism, landing with triumphant finality even in modern liberalism. All of these political ideologies, from the French Revolution to contemporary interventionist foreign policy, are soaked in the idea that the purpose of politics is somehow to free people from an ignorant and miserable realm of darkness. One of the clear religious features to this political discourse, says Gray, is the way that substantial cost to human life is justified for the sake of bringing about the prescribed salvation:

“For Lenin the human cost of the Revolution was a passing incident on the way to a new world.”

“Since a new world could come into being only as a result of a catastrophe, destruction on a vast scale was an integral part of [the Nazis’] mission.”

The establishment of liberalism in the modern west has not required such bloodshed. But the gnostic element to this phenomenon is still clear in the way that, for example, British europhilic liberals explain their defeat in the Brexit referendum. If only, so goes the rhetoric, working class people hadn’t been duped by the eurosceptic forces of darkness (who want to impose the horrors of nativism on them), they might have voted in a more enlightened way. Gray concludes this chapter with a striking warning against the extension of the liberal world order:

“Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order by instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity.”

Frustratingly, Gray is silent on the religious elements of strongman right-wing populism. Orban, Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte – all have either co-opted religious language or ostensible religious purpose for their administrations, or else captured a traditional bloc of religious voters with a secular vision. Analogies are constantly made between flag-waving political rallies and crowds which greeted 18th and 19th century revivalists – even the Telegraph’s unflappable Christopher Hope couldn’t resist the comparison [https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1130913970863464448]. As well as the near-religious treatment of these talismanic figures, the deeper motivations of nationalism are imbued with religious sentiments. Erstwhile hopes of establishing explicitly religious nations have morphed into baffling assertions of a ‘national spirit’, publications with ludicrous titles like ‘Britannia Unchained’, and confected wars between native traditions and immigrant cultures. Granted, this may not be a ‘type of atheism’ as such, but it is no less a political religion than centrist liberalism, and Gray’s focus on gnostic elements to modern politics seems to obscure some of the most obviously religious features of secular politics from his otherwise far-reaching vision.

But this is not primarily a book about politics – it is about ideas. From attacking foundational myths of secular humanism – in particular the conception of a coherent and collective agent called ‘humanity’ – to questioning the need for the world to be explained as a harmonious and meaningful system, Gray covers an enormous range of thinkers from different corners of the world and periods in history. As a Christian reader I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the chapter on God-haters, in which Gray argues that God-hatred hides a substitution of deities. Sade “was mistaken when he imagined that he had left monotheism behind. Instead, he changed one unforgivable deity for another [Nature]”. More subtle is the substitution performed by Empson, who wrote that ‘The Christian God…is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man.” The treatment of cruelty as a self-evident metaphysical evil is a culturally specific object. (I am reminded here of Jonathan Haidt’s brilliant The Righteous Mind, which argues that different cultures have different moral systems comprising different prominent moral ‘modules’, of which the care/harm axis is one of the more prominent in western liberalism.) So what is Empson’s deity? Gray is not specific, though he maintains that Empson “remained wedded to a Christian worldview” even as he “ended up embracing something like Gnosticism.” So Empson deifies some system of metaphysics which owes something to Christianity and something to Gnosticism. This is deified in the sense that its meaning and significance is taken as read – it contains premises which even Empson’s rationalism will not question or challenge. The substitution is not, like Sade’s, a straightforward one of Nature for God, but a nuanced replacement of the eternal characteristics of God with self-evident truths written, as it were, into the fabric of the universe.

If there is a thread that runs through this book, it is that apparently free-thinking atheism is usually no such thing, and that genuine free-thinking requires the abandonment of convenient and attractive myths. What is difficult to detect is Gray’s purpose in writing it. He pointedly avoids trying to persuade people into his own way of thinking , even though his feeling towards each type is clear from the tone of each chapter. He is pessimistic in any case that contemporary atheists will give up their nurtured myths and inheritances from monotheism. Gray’s two preferred types of atheism, ‘Atheism without progress’ and ‘Atheism of silence’, sound more like absence than anything else. Nonetheless, he offers fresh, deep, and convincing insight into the tensions that atheism addresses, and provides food for thought for religious and atheist readers alike.

Male bias and female ‘otherness’ for (crash test) dummies

Who is the reigning Olympic 100m champion? I suspect that readers will know the answer immediately, even instinctively. There is, though, a second correct answer to this question – Elaine Thompson. This is more than just a snarky bit of pedantry. A question as simple as the one I posed above should obviously scream ‘two answers’ – we know, of course, that there is a separate women’s 100m event. But somehow, for whatever reason, it is even more obvious to our subconscious that the answer I was after is the male one.

This is a textbook, and trivial, case of ‘default male’. Anatomy textbooks, generic plural French nouns, pre-2011 NIV Bible translations, and a raft of other contexts inbuild the assumption that something of unspecified gender is male. Perhaps even the following list conjures up unwitting images of men in your mind as you read it: police officer, pianist, software engineer, headteacher, bartender…

Caroline Criado Perez is not, of course, the first to point out this phenomenon, in her book Invisible Women (Chatto and Windus, 2019) – it begins with a salute to the classic study of female ‘otherness’, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She may, however, be the first to present the thesis with such a wide and convincing array of data. In a diverse array of examples, she highlights the ‘gender data gap’ across phenomena from snow clearing to medical diagnosis to the contents of aid packages. Some of the cases she documents arise from the lack of female representation – lack of appropriate parking for pregnant women, forgetting to build kitchens in disaster relief housing (yes, really), designing transport systems for commuters rather than the diverse array of commuters, carers, and errand runners that they are supposed to serve – and some from decade-long convention that treats female bodies, lifestyles, consumption choices, and so on as ‘atypical’ compared with the corresponding male cases – heart attack diagnoses, poorly fitting PPE, cars designed to protect only men from crashes (of which more later). If this sounds like a loose stereotype, that’s not how Perez comes across: her analysis of the generally higher load of caring responsibilities on women, the consequences of lower average bone density and height, and all sorts of other generalised differences between men and women, painstakingly avoids the construction of ‘ideal’ subjects of each sex. This is not a book about how women are weak, or better at caring, or more inclined to domestic labour, or anything like that. It is, instead, an examination of the consequences of our world being designed with an ideal male subject in mind. As such, Perez doesn’t come across as consumed or distorted by any agenda other than tracing out the implications of the ‘gender data gap’ which is her central analytical unit, and then challenging the legitimacy of the gap.

Particularly striking is her analysis of car crash testing dummies (hence the brilliantly witty title of this post). EU regulations require 5 kinds of tests to be performed on cars to make them safe for passengers – all are carried out on dummies with ‘male’ characteristics (being of average male height, weight, bone density, etc). It does not take a genius to work out the practical implication of this. Cars are designed to protect their drivers and passengers in accidents – provided that their bodies conform to the pattern of the male-inspired dummy. Data suggests they do not. Having lent out my copy as soon as I finished it, I don’t have the numbers immediately to hand, but, unsurprisingly considering the above, serious injury and death rates in car accidents are much higher among female drivers. Perez speculates that this is not just due to the physical characteristics of the dummies, but also the ‘atypical’ driving position assumed by many women in order comfortably to reach the pedals and wheel.

The driving force of Invisible Women is its use of data. More than 300 pages of examples across countless fields can only leave readers with the impression that the book’s conclusions are inescapable. Perhaps this makes IW sound dry or inaccessible; on the contrary, statistics are woven into a pacy and readable prose with a lack of statistical hand-waving. But IW is not for the faint-hearted – readers will surely come away with a furious zeal. You will finish this book unable to leave your home without noticing default male everywhere.

The Making of the Western Minds

Readers unconnected to the Twittersphere may be unaware that, in a recent furore around eugenics, hardened New Atheist Richard Dawkins concluded “we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.” A quirk, perhaps, of language – Dawkins was hardly begging a God in whom he does not believe to intervene in the world. But it is also possible that Dawkins’ Christian upbringing, and immersion in Christian society, may have more to do with his objection to eugenics than just the language with which he deplores it.

Tom Holland’s latest book, Dominion, proceeds from a very similar premise. It is a book, for those who haven’t heard of it, all about how the history of the West is stamped with the unmistakable and distinctive mark of Christianity. Holland tours readers around an unlikely (and yet meticulously curated) succession of specimens, in an attempt to argue that the ethical and moral fabric of our society is much more deeply Christian than secularists and liberals would like to think.

Dominion is alive with the subversive delight of its author. Holland takes evident pleasure in reading Christian values into the Church’s most unlikely allies. He points out for example, that participants in the 2017 Women’s March, in spite of their apparent hostility to a Church perceived as patriarchal and repressive, ‘were summoning men to exercise control over their lusts, just as the Puritans had done’. The expression, indeed, of criticism for the Church’s patriarchal and repressive tendencies, is also apparently founded on Christian values. This is a typical example of Holland’s central point: modern secular liberals, who may see themselves as enemies of Christianity, unknowingly vindicate its values in the way they go about opposing it. America’s culture wars, over issues of foreign policy, transgender rights, abortion, and so on, are to Holland ‘less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.’

It is hugely tempting to read a book like Dominion as if it is a happy hunting ground for Christian apologetics. Christians in evangelistic settings have long enjoyed quoting CS Lewis and Solzhenitsyn to surprise listeners with the unexpected beauties of Christian doctrines, and the apparent compatibility of Christianity with people’s existing worldviews. Perhaps evangelists will add Holland to their burgeoning bibliographies.

There are, I think, problems with using Dominion like this. Although Holland establishes very clearly and thoroughly the essential parts to his thesis (the distinctive Christianity of values like charity and protection of the weak, and of the scandalous moral superiority of the oppressed over the oppressors), it is sometimes less than clear that the outcomes of value systems so constituted are in themselves Christian. Ben Sixsmith’s excellent review of Dominion (available at https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-origin-of-the-secular-species/) hits the nail when he writes that Holland ‘squints too hard’ in his attempt to find Christian motives everywhere. The good-humoured prose occasionally picks out parallels that are self-consciously facile:

‘Band Aid were hardly the first to ask whether Africans knew it was Christmas time. In the nineteenth century, the same anxiety had weighed heavily on evangelicals.’ (p482)

‘John Lennon… offered the watching world a prescription with which neither Aquinas, nor Augustine, nor Saint Paul would have disagreed: “all you need is love”.’ (p472)

Robespierre’s bloodthirsty ‘ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and absurdities, or purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII.’ (p387)

Of course, Holland’s argument does not rest on the strict accuracy of claims like these. His case is built on thousands of years of history, and I am not trying to reduce his thesis to these 3 examples. Nonetheless, his narrative method does use this technique often, with varying degrees of plausibility. Countless episodes are narrated to bring out parallels, usually with either the Cross, the Reformation, or both. Holland’s point is not necessarily that the characters in his book are Christians, or even that their actions serve to advance Christianity. Rather, subtract all Christian assumptions and metaphysics from them and they make little sense. Take the example of Robespierre. Moral fervour for the establishment of a just and even-handed social order is not in itself a Christian phenomenon. The universality of Jacobinism – the desire to purge society of the offending ideas and people, the conviction that such activity brings about an objective and undeniable improvement – is what marks it out as being heir to Christian assumptions. The many facile parallels in Dominion are not meant to stand as true in themselves. Holland instead invites readers first to scoff at them, and then to ponder how there is a truth buried in them that belies their ludicrous appearance. Over 525 pages, and 2,500 years, it’s very effective.

Nonetheless, I think an important question for readers of Dominion is ‘What is Christianity?’. Holland insists on reading Christian motivations into stridently atheist Enlightenment figures, contemporary social justice activists, even early persecutors of the Church. Readers will search in vain for a tight and explicit definition of Christianity in his pages. Instead, they are left, by the weight of numerous episodes, with the general impression that earnest search after transcendent truth, and bold defence of the weak against the strong, is Christianity, rather than being convinced that these things derive from something else which is the essence of Christianity.

John Gresham Machen lived and wrote in a time of great controversy on this very question. Expelled from Princeton Seminary and the Presbyterian Church, he founded Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. During a great conflict between the ‘liberals’ and the ‘fundamentalists’ in the American church, Machen refused to take an explicit side, highlighting multiple problems within the ‘fundamentalism’ of many of his friends and allies, including his mentor, Benjamin Warfield. His book Christianity and Liberalism was an attempt not to vindicate fundamentalism as constituting the true church, but to draw clear lines between the contents of the Christian gospel and the motifs of liberalism which often claimed Christian heritage for themselves. Although first published in 1923, Christianity and Liberalism reads at times as if it were written as a direct response to Dominion. The following quote exemplifies this perhaps most clearly:

“The great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology”. (p2)

What Holland presents as derivative of the Christian faith – especially implications of the spirit of reformatio and the moral superiority of the downtrodden, but more generally attitudes and events which are framed in Christian terms – Machen calls ‘destructive’ of it.

Consider, for example, the realm of things which might be called ‘supernatural’. First, here is Machen asserting the vital importance of something supernatural in the constitution of the Christian faith:

“No product of sinful humanity could have redeemed humanity… But a Saviour has come from God. There lies the very root of the Christian religion.” (p90)

To Machen, the supernatural occurs when God intervenes in the world with direct creative power – outside of normal means. Rejecting deistic and pantheistic ways of describing God, Machen attributes all natural laws to God’s power through means, and all miracles to His power expressed directly. The foremost miracle is the redemptive miracle of the Cross and Resurrection. Central, then, to Machen’s expression of what Christianity is (and this from a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant), is things from the realm of the supernatural. By way of contrast, here is Holland writing about the denial of Christ’s divinity and resurrection in Spinoza’s “Theological-Political Treatise”:

“Even the most scandalous of his claims…were merely Protestant assumptions pushed to a radical extreme… Spinoza was privately disdainful of any notion that Jesus might have risen from the dead.” (p363)

Holland designates this view of Christ as a ‘variant’ of Christianity because he draws a parallel between Spinoza’s unwillingness to affirm the supernatural with the Reformers’ disdain for extra-biblical practices in the Roman Catholic Church. To him, this is sufficient to qualify the Theological-Political Treatise as a ‘Christian’ work. But the stripping back of Jesus’ uniqueness and authority, by denying the central redemptive miracle of his work, totally disqualifies Spinoza from this epithet as far as Machen is concerned.

This example fits rather neatly into Machen’s wider point – that Christianity and Liberalism are different and ultimately irreconcilable systems of thought. This is how he defines liberalism:

“The many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism – that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God” (p2)

Remember also how he defined the ‘root’ of Christianity:

“No product of sinful humanity could have redeemed humanity… But a Saviour has come from God. There lies the very root of the Christian religion.” (p90)

Machen draws out the differences between Christianity and liberalism across a wider number of dimensions than is practicable to discuss here. But his central point – that Christianity rests on doctrine, and thereby on specific views of what God is like and what people are like – asks an interesting question of the thesis of Dominion: where should we draw the line between things which seem to proceed from Christianity, and things which are Christian?

Holland and Machen, of course, have entirely different purposes in their writing. In a sense, everything I have written above poses absolutely no problem to Holland. His thesis is about what modes of thought occur only in societies with a Christian heritage, and where those modes of thought come from. Machen sets out to do something so utterly different that it might seem strange that I’ve written about both in one post. His examination of Christianity is done with the express purpose of discovering what it is necessary to believe in order to be a Christian, and whether some popular strains of liberal thought are reconcilable with this basic gospel. But I think the contrast is useful, for the following reasons.

What Holland points to as the crisis of liberalism (its dearest preconceptions are derived from the Christian history of its society) can also be seen as a crisis for Christianity. He challenges those of us who subscribe to institutional Christianity to deal with the reality that many around us unknowingly subscribe to Christian doctrine. I say in response, after Machen, that Christianity from the start has not been an ethical movement, but a historically rooted relational teaching about Jesus Christ. That teaching is that he is Lord and Saviour. The problem faced continually by Christians is that we must hold to the fundamental tenets of Christainity’s historical and objective basis, while also working in society for the good that we believe God wants us to uphold. This reaches a crisis point when the society around us accepts much of what we believe to be good, but wants nothing to do with its foundation. Christianity in the West faces a crisis of relevance even as our society wakes up to its Christian heritage. Today, Christian ethical teachings are either taken as read or entirely repudiated. Meanwhile, the foundational claims of Christianity – that Jesus died for our sins and rose for our forgiveness, as the rather simplistic formula has it – remain as subversive and counter-cultural as ever. It would be a great shame, for both the West and for Christainity, if the truly foundational currents are left by the wayside.

While Holland drives repeatedly at things which Christian metaphysics require to be true, he is habitually loose with the label ‘Christian’. His case is therefore overstated. Christainity is often the soil in which his seeds germinate – it establishes a moral legitimacy to the social and political activities which he describes – but this does not mean that the seeds themselves are Christian. Modern secular liberalism is not a Christian phenomenon – even if a substantial part of its metaphysics and ethics looks Christain in origin. John Gray, reviewing Dominion in the New Statesman, salutes the book as a “devastating demolition job…on the sacred history of secular humanism.” He argues with glee that “social justice warriors…would not exist without the moral inheritance of Christianity.” I would gently question that, for the reasons I set out in the above section about Machen. The distinctive moral character of Christianity springs from the way that Christianity frames humans’ relationship with God – here is Machen again:

“If we would follow truly in Jesus’ steps, we must obey the first commandment as well as the second that is like unto it; we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength” (p80).

I conclude by urging anyone who has read this far to read Dominion. It is a wonderfully compelling book – for a weighty non-fiction title, it reads with the pace and excitement of a novel. It’s also hugely important for anyone taking an interest in contemporary western politics and culture because its reach is so wide. You may never come across a book which so adeptly moves from St Paul to Darwin to Angela Merkel. In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s “monstrously erudite, wickedly joyful and ahead of the established consensus, on average, by four years, three months and two days”. I couldn’t have put it better.

Trade, Union, and Compatibility: A response to Silenus

https://silenus.home.blog/2020/02/03/the-philosophical-case-against-the-eu/?fbclid=IwAR0KU1TBvM9puY8oJHR6lF0QX5H025kE7UV_pfcRD6z4kBMLQU2FoJocqOQ

In the article linked above, Jacob Anderson makes a fourfold philosophical case for leaving the EU. I respond here to each of his points in turn.

1. ‘I don’t want a united Europe’

Jacob’s argument here is very simple: the only thing that unites Europe is ‘the legacy of Christendom’. Other things divide it – and since the principles of ever-closer union (and the attendant focus on the common currency, the common justice system, etc) are not derived from this shared legacy, they are all ‘unappealing and illogical’.

The obvious rejoinder to this is that the UK, by and large, shares economically and politically liberal values with the EU. Take the harmonisation of trading standards as an example here. We share(d) the EU’s regulatory standards because of our (liberal) economic conviction that smooth international trade can enhance the productive potential of economies and benefit us all by expanding our wealth and facilitating mutually beneficial trades. Given this shared conviction, harmonisation of standards makes good sense: the way to facilitate frictionless trade across borders is to ensure that the trade takes place with the same rules on all sides. In some ways, it’s like a sport – under the same rulebook, the team that does the best wins. This breaks down once we abandon a common rulebook and, perhaps to extend the metaphor beyond its usefulness, once we are all playing different sports, the mutually beneficial trades are quite hard to spot. An example from the field of political economy is limits on state aid. For firms competing across borders, structurally unequal monetary support from states (like production subsidies sustained for a long time) advantages firms from historically richer countries over those in lower-income countries with a smaller tax base. Provided that we do share these values (up for discussion – but, in Jacob’s typology, perhaps this falls into practical rather than philosophical concerns), union in some different spheres makes good sense.

Maybe our shared liberalism is derived from the legacy of Christendom. But I don’t think this is Jacob’s philosophical point – it seems that he deliberately chooses something that is irrelevant to the modern economic and political realities, to underline the case for leaving it.

2. ‘Why shouldn’t we desire sovereignty?’

Jacob decries in this section the disproportionate influence of ‘committees, abstruse institutions, and unelected leaders’ (I have added the Oxford comma out of my detest for its omission). The case he makes relies on the fact that repatriating powers from these places is a (philosophical) good, because of the difference between between democratic accountability at the national and supra-national levels. I think he risks underestimating the extent of bureaucratic influence on national policy. Because parliament simply does not have the resources (or the patience) publicly and extensively to scrutinise every detail of government policy (such as the extensive rulebooks distributed to DWP frontline staff to determine exactly what benefit and how much can be given to each claimant), these decisions are all made in the bureaucratic sphere, and may be dragged into the public eye only in periods of controversy or comprehensive reform. This level of policy is scrutinised bureaucratically rather than democratically, even at the national level. Thus, the philosophical benefit of repatriating bureaucratic powers of abstruse policy is not as clear as he seems to suggest – there is no inherent reason why repatriation reduces bureaucracy. It is important here that the claim Jacob makes (like the claim made by so many advocates of Brexit before and during the campaign) is not that we would like faceless British bureaucrats to make these decisions rather than faceless ones in Brussels – it is that democratisation is the fundamental agent of progress in this area. I question whether British processes need be any less abstruse and removed from the public eye than European ones.

The other point he makes here is a critique of the argument that sovereignty is illusory anyway, because of the primacy of the corporation and the international economy. ‘It’s a very strange philosophy’, apparently, ‘which says that because some things are out of our control, we may as well cede what could be in our control as well’. This remark is self-evidently true, but it rather misses the mark. The force which Colin Hill called ‘hyperglobalisation’ works by forcing governments to adopt capitalist-friendly policies by effectively holding their employment laws and regulatory frameworks to ransom. (Hill, incidentally, presents this constraint as being largely confected – just a modern manifestation of the reified ‘limits’ that economics seems to exert on government policy.) Enforced deregulation set by the hyperglobalist pressures does not circumscribe a set of policy areas over which a government retains discretion – it entrenches a way of thinking in all realms of economic and political policy that says that all policy must bow the knee to the interest of corporations, in order to prevent a capitalist exodus. The argument is not ‘we’ve lost some decision power to corporations, let’s give the rest away to a federation’, but rather ‘collectively, European states are at risk of our economic policy being predetermined on our behalf, so let’s federalise in order to call the corporations’ bluff’. In an economic and political union, the adoption of a common rulebook could (philosophically) prevent deregulatory races to the bottom in order to reassert the state’s power to rule over the economic realm.

3. ‘The EU is a glorified trading bloc.’

I agree. Much of what I have written above is premised on the idea that the fundamental utility of the European project is in aligning our economic interests through trade. The idea of European identity is as puzzling to me as it is to Jacob. This, however, does not undermine the EU’s economic functions – indeed, much of the philosophical case for being part of it needs the trading bloc function in order for it to make sense.

4. ‘The EU is not the guarantor of peace.’

Again, I’m quite willing to concede this point. One guarantor of peace is the wider adoption of common liberal political and economic paradigms (Jacob even lists the ‘proliferation of democracies’ as one of the contributing causal factors to the modern era of peace). It is this, I have argued above, that makes economic and political union in Europe make good philosophical sense.