“A way of life, I would call it.” John Green is crouching among the colourful figures of a merry-go-round, polishing the seats and conducting his final checks. All around us, fairground lights flash silently in the February sun. Within the next hour, King’s Lynn’s annual Mart Fair will be under way, marking the start of the travelling showmen’s year. Green’s face is ruddy and weather-beaten but there is a boyish glint in his eye. He is explaining that, for the families who work on these fairgrounds, this is more than a career, a trade, or even a vocation. “I’m like the fourth generation now, the fifth on my mothers’ side. 62 years I’ve been doing it.” I ask his age. “62!” he responds with a great peal of laughter.

The next generations are here, too. Later I will meet Green’s son, Johnson, and his grandson, who at two months old has been judged too young to work. But first, the grand opening. The town’s mayor and accompanying dignitaries have turned up wearing gold-trimmed coats, bicorn hats and ceremonial maces. One carries a sword. Standing alongside a dodgem arena, they could be mistaken for entertainers at an amusement park, or perhaps time-travellers from the era when this square, known as the Tuesday Market, hosted public executions. I detect a hint of wistfulness in the 200 or so faces looking on, many doubtless recalling distant childhoods at this same fair. This part of Norfolk is one of the few places in Britain where you can ask an elderly couple whether much has changed in their lifetimes, and receive the answer “not at all”.

Now a vicar is reading some doggerel composed for the occasion, and the mayor pays tribute to a “remarkable and much-loved tradition”. There is a short, blaring rendition of “God Save the King”. Finally, the whole august party boards the dodgems, and a moment later, with club music pumping out, they’re racing around like a gang of sugar-crazed kids. The fairground kicks into action, a sickly blur of colour and noise, a world devoted to the garish kitsch of childhood. Everything is spinning: teacups, barrels, miniature cars and trains, carousels, Ferris wheels, little helicopters branded with Disney characters.

It may seem strange to dignify this spectacle with the seal of heritage, but such is the contradiction of the showmen’s culture. Theirs is an ephemeral existence, travelling constantly, appearing in a blaze of fun that lasts a week or two and then moving on. And yet, their own understanding of this life is one of continuity and loyalty. John Green’s pedigree of multiple generations is the norm among showmen (a word, incidentally, which is used for women as well as men). This industry has, essentially, consisted of the same group of families for the past 150 years. Today, it numbers around 20,000 people, counting the showmen, their families and other employees. Each family charts its own course among the 2,300 funfairs staged in Britain each year, following routes established by parents and grandparents, some cleaving to a particular region and others roaming across the country. At the King’s Lynn Mart, even the hotdog vans are a multi-generational, travelling family business.

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Such hereditary trades, once the default across much of the economy, are now curiosities in a fluid modernity where each individual is expected to plot a unique path through life. Fairgrounds are among the last remaining places where work is part of an identity that one is born into. “That position there was my great-granddad’s position”, Green says, pointing at a stall opposite his merry-go-round. He started contributing in earnest around the age of 10, when his parents announced, “right, double figures now, you’ll have to work”. He remembers helping his grandfather adjust to decimalisation in 1971, when the number of pennies in the pound went from 240 to 100. When I ask Green why this way of life manages to endure, he raises another paradox characteristic of showmen: the combination of solidarity and liberty. “You meet friends”, he says. “I’ve got loads of friends all over the country, and if I was in trouble now, they’d be there.” But there is also “the freedom of life”. As Green explains, “if you don’t wanna work, you don’t work. So then you starve.”

I hear another, simpler explanation from retired showman Perry Day. “We were born into it,” he says, “conditioned into it.” Day cuts a demure figure in a long dark-green coat and a shirtfront adorned with tiepins. One of these, a golden medallion bearing the image of a helter-skelter, marks him out as a former chairman of the Showmen’s Guild, the official body representing Britain’s fairground business. All showmen, as far as I can tell, are members of the Guild. Perry is 78 and says he would still be working had he not developed diabetes, preventing him from driving a heavy goods vehicle. He and his wife, Margherita, still come to the King’s Lynn Mart every year. “We used to travel, me and Perry, everywhere”, Margherita tells me. “King’s Lynn, London, North Wales, Jersey, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire… everywhere.” With the exception of two or three months in “winter quarters”, they were mobile all year long.

This arrangement remains typical. Many showmen also pause for a few months in the summer, when they run food kiosks or entertainment businesses in tourist spots. It’s not uncommon for families to own some property by way of a base, where the rides “sleep” during winter, but younger showmen, especially, live in their trailers full-time. These vehicles, increasingly, are not the customised wagons of old, but 40-foot mobile homes imported from America. On account of their nomadic lifestyle, showmen have long been mistaken for gypsies, an association they resent. “It’s a little bit heartbreaking, in a way,” says Johnson Green. “When you go to school you used to get bullied a lot. ‘Oh gypsy, gypsy, living in a tent, can’t afford to pay the rent.’” He goes on: “I’m not saying they’re bad people, but we’re doing something completely different.”

Being on the move does, however, create challenges when it comes to educating children. As Margherita Day explains of her own kids, “they was always behind, because they only went in the winter months for schooling. If we took them to other schools [while travelling], they’d just put them in the nursery class and let them do what they want. They didn’t know what to do with them.” So it was a big improvement when an innovative teacher devised work packs for the children, allowing them to stick to a syllabus even as they migrate from one school to the next. Then again, home schooling can still yield results: “My sister’s girl, she used to do her own work in the lorry on going away days, and she went to Oxford.”

The showmen’s retinue also includes workers who help to build, run and maintain the rides. These assistants, generally speaking, can be identified by a cigarette in their fingers and a conspicuous lack of dentistry. They do not belong to the ancient web of showmen’s families, but are often supported by it. Dylan, a 27-year-old who looks after the dodgems, is outspoken about his loyalty to the man he works for. “I had a bit of a hiccup as a kid. I got kicked out of my house… My boss said there’s a job for you here, there’s a place to stay, there’s everything sorted for you.” Dylan now has his own home and family in Essex, but still works at several fairs each year. “If he needs me,” he says of his boss, “one call and I’m here.”

Every family of showmen has its legends and lore. One of John Green’s great-grandfathers was apparently the first to bring cinema scopes to fairgrounds. Perry and Margherita Day have traced their genealogies back to the mid-18th century, where they found figures like Francis Wheatley, a celebrated painter and notorious rake. A later Wheatley is said to have had eight daughters, all of whom brought their husbands into the showmen’s community. Margherita Day is most proud of her great-grandfather, “a Leicestershireman who went to Balmoral with his menagerie show to entertain the princes and princesses of Queen Victoria”.

These are not frivolous tales. It is easily forgotten, after a century of radio and television, that the arts of entertainment were once a seedbed of extraordinary people, practices and skills. If you had gone to a popular fair in the 18th century, you’d have found fire-eaters, trick riders, jugglers, acrobats, and freak shows. Since medieval times, performers had appeared at the trade fairs which were mainstays of commercial life. These included London’s Bartholomew Fair, established by Henry I’s jester in 1120, or indeed the Mart at King’s Lynn, chartered by Henry VIII almost exactly 500 years ago. Thanks to its proximity to the Low Countries, Norfolk was once the commercial heart of Britain; its funfairs are a legacy of this prosperous past, no less than the handsome buildings at the quayside in King’s Lynn, where a ghostly quiet now reigns along the river Great Ouse.

Satirical performances and ribaldry flourished at the fairs, and so, much as with social media today, nervous authorities and outraged moralists were always trying to shut them down. The raucous Bartholomew Fair finally succumbed to these forces in 1855. In the late 19th century, the crusading MP George Smith sought to restrict the itinerant lifestyles of the showmen, a battle which led to the formation of the Showmen’s Guild. One branch split off to form the circus, while some enterprising showmen used steam power to build thrilling mechanical rides. Foremost among them was Frederick Savage, a mayor of King’s Lynn, who invented mechanisms to make carousel horses gallop. For the next century, fairgrounds would display some of the country’s most creative engineering.

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Here, then, is another contradiction: showmen are deeply immersed in their history, but have always been ready to embrace novelty and adapt to new circumstances. Even as safety standards have become stricter, the designers of white-knuckle rides have found ingenious ways to torture fair-goers with motion and speed. At King’s Lynn, they speak reverently of a brand new ride, ominously named “High Voltage”. (Yes, I held my breath and climbed aboard; yes, it was terrifying). Virtual-reality headsets and simulators are beginning to become part of the fairground experience.

It is natural to wonder, though, for how many more generations the showmen will stay on the road. While many showmen’s children have stayed in the family business, others have not. “Unfortunately, our children want things that we didn’t want,” says Perry Day, “as in, a good life, as far as finances go”. Day’s offspring didn’t stray too far though. His son is an artist who paints fairground rides, something which also happens to run in the family. According to Johnson Green, it isn’t unusual for showmen to swap their trailer for a “settle down business”, such as an amusement arcade or seaside café. His wife’s family were former showmen who ran ice-cream parlours in Skegness. But his sister has moved further from the fairground: “She went and got a job, she married a normal person. She’s settled down, happy. She just works.” He says many showmen never came back after the Covid pandemic, when they were forced to settle down and grew used to a stable income.

Less than a decade ago, the Government reported 7,000 fairs happening annually, three times the current estimate. In Norfolk, some of the old fairs are dying out as villages are hollowed out by second homes and holiday rentals, a development ironically driven by the area’s supposedly unchanging character. High fuel prices have squeezed showmen everywhere. But I suspect there’s a bigger threat to their future: what Johnson Green calls “the way the world is going”. Given that it’s now not uncommon to see toddlers in strollers staring numbly at a screen, oblivious to the world around them, one wonders if children will continue to be excited by funfairs, and if their parents will still bother to take them. “We’re the bottom of the food chain now,” Johnson Green says. “You got iPads, PlayStations, and kids are probably more indoor people than they are outdoor people.”

The image of an empty fairground suggests a depressing vision of the future: a society bereft of fun, with most people too distracted to even realise it. Nightlife is dying; pubs are continually bullied by a puritanical state; seaside towns are divided between extreme poverty and pompous art galleries; even music festivals are becoming glorified glamping trips for the middle classes. Funfairs are a reminder of how the festive spirit has been expressed since time immemorial: in a seasonal rhythm, within the local community, with young and old together. After a few hours of throwing darts, eating hot dogs, and grinning uncontrollably in the whirling arms of monstrous rides, I realise that the showmen are not the marginal characters I took them for; they represent a principle of merriment which is vital to a healthy society, but which may soon be gone for good.

This essay was originally published by UnHerd.

It is a cliché of more that 100 years’ vintage to say that modern warfare is disturbingly impersonal, its actors far removed from the destruction they dole out. The details still matter though. The technologies of death continue their remarkable progress, and the political structures that restrain them are falling apart. How can we be confident that we will not, one day, find ourselves in the crosshairs?

I have been reading with horrible fascination about the high-tech war that the Americans and Israelis are waging in Iran. At its heart is the practice of targeting: using streams of data, from satellites and drones in particular, to identify and strike targets deep in enemy territory. Iran has, in essence, become a giant panopticon, the object of an intense, highly automated surveillance apparatus. A report in the Financial Times this week described a game of cat and mouse that is unfolding between these deadly observers and their key targets, Iranian ballistic missile launchers. These are the vehicles that position and fire the missiles with which Iran has been sowing havoc across the region.

There is a science-fiction quality to the life of the Iranian missile crews. According to a researcher quoted in the FT, there are “long stretches of profound boredom where you are sitting in a cave… then you have moments of profound stress where you [are] asked to leave the cave and set up your missile.” When the orders come through, a crew of five to ten people first “loads a missile weighing hundreds of kilos on to the rails,” then “inputs encyclopaedic amounts of data to ensure the projectile can accurately reach its target.” The crew must then make a dash for their missile firing site, trying to evade the watching eyes of the Americans and Israelis. At this point, their “tiny cabin suddenly becomes one of the world’s most perilous places. If its crews do not give the drones and satellites above them the slip, within minutes the launcher… will be hit by a missile from above, becoming a smouldering wreck.”

And if they do manage to fire their missile, the heat signatures will be picked up by a satellite instantly. To save the launcher, and their lives, they must frantically dash back to cover.

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After the Second World War, the German jurist Carl Schmitt characterised America’s dawning empire as one of air power. Control of the skies marked a new kind of dominion over the ancient political elements of land and sea. Yet even Schmitt could not have foreseen how technologically sophisticated this air power would become. As the Economist reports, American strikes on Iran are coordinated from Central Command in Tampa, Florida, using a system called Maven. Designed by Palantir, this “decision-support” software weaves together data from numerous sources to prepare strikes:

If an Iranian mentions on Telegram… that they saw a missile-launcher driven past their house, Maven can correlate that snippet with data from radio-frequency satellites that detect the electronic emissions from Iranian military radios. Maven can then generate targets, work out which weapon is best placed to strike each one and assess the damage done afterwards.

In this way, warfare becomes workflow; software can find and destroy targets at a faster and faster rate. According to one general, “what would previously have taken dozens of people tens of hours… ‘That could be boiled down to two minutes.’” Another says, “We are moving from ten targets a day to 300… The aspiration is 3,000 a day.”

One of the problems of relying so heavily on technology, in war as in other domains, is the tendency to forget that it is always imperfect and prone to error. The dogs of war will not be tamed by algorithms. A preliminary enquiry by the US military has suggested that the disastrous strike on a girls’ school in Southern Iran on February 28^th, which killed over 150 children, was a targeting mistake; the school had formerly been part of a naval base that came under attack from American cruise missiles. In theory, every strike is assessed and confirmed by a human being; but as the Economist article notes: “some insiders acknowledge that the increasing scale and tempo of strikes has created incentives to give computers greater latitude in actually firing on the targets that they have generated.”

Still, this remote and mediated warfare is only part of the picture, albeit an ever-increasing one. In Ukraine, drones share the battlefield with hundreds of thousands of soldiers shivering in dugouts and treelines. When I wrote in January about the dire state of the British armed forces, I found many analysts warning against the fantasy of an automated battlefield. British planners try to justify their pitiful shortages of manpower, tanks and ships by conjuring images of all-powerful, AI-enhanced targeting systems. But competent enemies will obviously be prepared for this. The digital layer of operations will be hacked, jammed, stalemated and disrupted. At that point, supposedly obsolete skills and capabilities may be decisive again. And so we read that, when Iran’s harassed missile crews cannot reach their designated launch sites, they have to improvise, “falling back on analogue methods of calculating their co-ordinates.” Since their GPS systems are often jammed, this can involve archaic methods such as maps, sextants, and observation of the stars.

It also remains the case that, however powerful long-range strikes become, their strategic usefulness is limited. Missiles and bombs can cause immense destruction, but by themselves they cannot install a new regime or – short of deploying nuclear weapons – force a people to surrender. That still requires soldiers on the ground. Therein lies the pitfall of the dazzling technology such as the US military has amassed: it is a constant source of temptation to those who wield it, promising painless victories but, just as often, delivering a big mess.

During the first week of another war in the Middle East, the conversation in Britain has focused less on Iran than on Dubai, the Emirati metropolis where a quarter of a million Brits live as expats. The spectacle of those emigrants cowering from Iranian missiles has occasioned some Schadenfreude here in the home country, where Dubai has come to be associated with self-worshipping lifestyle influencers and Rolex-touting crypto guys who boast about their luxurious circumstances on Instagram. Imagining that the smug have been humbled is, from some in Britain at least, a positive result of the war.

Some have gone further, expressing outrage that people who moved to the Gulf entrepôt for its 0% rate of income tax may soon enjoy an emergency exit courtesy of the British state. But others point out that young Brits, whether ambitious or merely sane, can hardly be blamed for seeking to escape this country’s failing social contract, which asks them to pay ever greater levels of tax for broken public services and decaying town centres, without any prospect of owning a home or paying off their student debt.

I have never visited Dubai, unless you count an overpriced flat white consumed while stopping over at the airport, but the city does seem emblematic of the darker sides of globalisation. Like the Epstein affair which dominated the news before the strikes on Tehran, Dubai speaks to the corruption, exploitation and greed which has flourished among the globetrotting elites of the late-twentieth and early-twenty first century. It is a place where ill-gotten wealth from around the world exalts itself in surroundings built and maintained by an underclass of migrant workers, who are paid little and have few rights. (Oligarchs and white-collar criminals are familiar enough with London, of course). But Dubai also represents what we could call the tragedy of the global middle class. There are millions of people in different parts of the world who simply want to live with a degree of comfort in a functioning society, but have found this modest goal impossible to achieve in the countries where they live. For such families, an air-conditioned apartment on the fifty-fifth floor in an authoritarian Gulf kingdom is more a lifeboat than a lifestyle choice.

Dubious riches and frustrated aspiration are both endemic to the world today, so it isn’t surprising to see the Dubai recipe being exported elsewhere, with its accompanying ideals of luxury, efficiency and technology. Dubai is the model most frequently invoked by Africa’s “satellite cities,” privately managed settlements that offer low tax settings for international business, along with the opportunity, for the continent’s wealthier residents, to withdraw from the poverty and chaos of their societies. But the shiny urban projects of the Arab Gulf states – see also Saudi Arabia’s Neom – remain unique in the way that social media influencers have become integral to their political economy. For places that depend on attracting rich, highly status-conscious foreigners, image and hype are almost everything. This is why the Emirati leadership has rapidly cracked down on residents publicising the effects of the war in ways that risk damaging the city’s reputation.

But the disgust directed at Dubai from British shores appears to be, as much as anything else, the return of a repressed aesthetic judgement. Criticism of Dubaians often boils down to their alleged crimes against good taste: tackiness, vulgarity, louche extravagance and, in architecture especially, bland opulence. These things are all, of course, present in Britain. We encounter them every day on social media, in marketing and celebrity culture, in public spaces and in our own neighbourhoods. But since we have lost the ability to talk and think about the significance of aesthetics, and since we are scared to sound like snobs, these observations tend to be left unstated, at least publicly. Only when accusations of bad taste can be smuggled in with more established sins, like tax dodging and arrogance, do Brits feel they have permission to speak their minds.

Happy are they whom privacy makes innocent, who deal so with men in this world that they are not afraid to meet them in the next, who when they die, make no commotion among the dead.

– Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial, or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk

Thomas Browne was an uncommonly curious mind, living in a world that was ripe for curiosity. Born in 1605, the son of a Cheapside merchant, Browne studied on the Continent and practised as a doctor in Norwich, while dedicating his spare time to writings that span a fantastical range of subjects, from the causes of thunder to the sex life of worms. Though I’m far from expert in his works, I consider him a kind of hero: for his extraordinary intellectual appetite, for his dignified commitment to the life of the mind, and for the sad, melodious air of reflection that flows through his prose.

Browne’s life was a historical estuary, a tidal space where different eras overlapped and mingled. The scientific revolution was gathering pace, but the cosmos was still infused with religious significance. The barriers of medieval thought had broken down, but the compartments of modern knowledge had not yet taken shape. The English language was in a protean phase, there for the artful writer to forge into rich and wonderful forms. Experiment and theory, classical erudition and modern scepticism, scientific and humanistic enquiry still belonged to a single, chaotic sphere of learning. The freedom with which Browne surfed these various currents makes for a sad comparison with the narrow specialisms of our own time. As Claire Preston writes, introducing her excellent selection of Browne’s works, his output is “like an archaeological core sample of the varied strata of seventeenth century intellectual concerns.” Anatomy and chemistry, theology and numerology, astronomy, anthropology and ornithology were all fair game to the polymath.

In his famous essay Urn-Burial, Browne responds to the discovery, “not many months past,” of a trove of Anglo-Saxon burial urns in Norfolk, “deposited in a dry and sandy soil not a yard deep… containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jaws, thigh-bones, and teeth, with fresh impressions of their combustion.” These morbid findings inspire Browne to launch a meandering discussion of funerary customs in different cultures, replete with historical speculation, classical and biblical allusions, and reflections on human mortality. In a typically dry aside, he acknowledges that while the Christian faith requires burial instead of cremation, the latter is not without its advantages:

To be gnawed out of our graves, to have our skulls made drinking bowls, and our bones turned into pipes to delight and sport our enemies, are tragical abominations escaped in burning burials.

The enduring wonder for Browne is that the forces of nature and history should have preserved something so modest and anonymous. “Time which antiquates antiquities and hath an art to make dust of all things hath yet spared these minor monuments,” he writes. “To be unknown was the means of their continuation and obscurity their protection.”

Unravelling such mysteries was, for Browne, a religious mission. Through intellectual enquiry we might, he thought, raise ourselves up from our fallen state in sudore vultus tui, by the sweat of our brows. He often uses the word “hieroglyphics” to describe his view of nature as a divine code to be deciphered, insisting that “the finger of God hath set an inscription upon all his works, not graphical or composed of letters, but of their several forms, constitutions, parts, and operations.” This outlook was widespread among the natural philosophers and experimenters who laid the foundations of modern science during this period.

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People sometimes talk about the “low-hanging fruit” on offer in ages when little was really known about the world. Whereas making a fresh discovery now requires years of research, it used to be a case of simply looking around and taking note of what you see. The problem is that new information only appears significant or useful in light of what we have already learned, so early observers did not always know what they were looking for. Hence Browne’s superb list of “things to be investigated,” jotted in a notebook, and including the following:

Whether it be general that lepers have no lice.

Whether great-eared persons have short necks and long feet

That if a woman with child looks upon a dead body the child will be pale-complexioned.

That to make urine upon the earth newly cast up by a mole bringeth down the menses.

Why a pig held up by the tail leaves squeaking?

With the breadth of his reading and investigations, Browne made miscellany a method unto itself. He wrote a work called Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a kind of encyclopaedia of errors that he had identified in different fields of knowledge. Commenting on sexual intercourse in the animal kingdom, for instance, he observes that “nor is there one, but many ways of coition, according to divers shapes and different conformations.” As Browne explains, “some couple laterally or sidewise, as worms; some circularly or by complication, as serpents; some pronely… as apes, porcupines, hedgehogs.” But whereas all other creatures copulate in a single position, he adds regretfully, “only the vitiosity of man hath acted the varieties hereof.”

Browne also lived at a dangerous time. In the mid-seventeenth century, England experienced civil war, regicide and restoration, convulsions that brought not just political breakdown and violence, but intense religious conflict in the realms of culture and ideas. And yet, he stood back from the vortex. His works show barely a trace of contemporary political and ideological quarrels, except for the occasional plea for civility in intellectual discourse. As Browne writes:

I cannot fall out or contemn a man for an error or conceive why a difference of opinion should divide our affection; for controversies, disputes, and argumentations, both in philosophy and in divinity, if they meet with discreet and peaceable natures, do not infringe the laws of charity.

He goes on to warn that “passion” leads us astray in debate, “for then reason like a bad hound spends upon a false scent and forsakes the question first started.” I take this to be not an expression of naïve, “can’t we all just get along” centrism, but a recognition that the highest goods culture has to offer, knowledge among them, can only be properly pursued if we leave our sensitivities and pridefulness at the door. Something, perhaps, that we could reflect on in turn.

In December 1914, the first president of the Chinese Republic, Yuan Shikai, travelled to the southern outskirts of Beijing in the hope of reviving an ancient tradition. Here, at the Temple of Heaven, the Chinese Emperors had for centuries performed their winter solstice rituals. Through elaborate ceremonies, they had communed with the ancestors and sought auspiciousness on behalf of their subjects. Such longstanding conventions had played a stabilising role in China’s history, allowing new Emperors, and even new dynasties of conquering barbarians, to assume the mantle of continuous imperial rule. The rituals had been performed right up to the turn of the 20th century. Thus President Yuan, hoping to found a dynasty of his own, swapped his military uniform for ceremonial robes, and assembled the ritual handbooks, musical instruments and sacred paraphernalia demanded by the great occasion.

Alas, he did not fool anyone. Yuan’s bid to become Emperor was met with widespread revolt, and only hastened China’s descent into political chaos. The ancient rites could no longer be performed except as a modern charade; the giveaway was that Yuan had cameras present to record what none had previously been allowed to witness. There comes a point where the changes a nation undergoes are too large to be quietly folded back into a story of deep continuity.

Perhaps this tale can help us to parse the uncertainty which hangs over the ceremonial heart of British government, the Palace of Westminster. This month, a joint commission of the Lords and Commons published costed proposals for “restoration and renewal” of the building. The plans are so expensive, extensive and disruptive that the task of refurbishing Britain’s Parliament, which has already loomed for years, looks set to drag on much longer still. So now is the time, before this magisterial building is dismembered in the name of modernisation, to ask whether its own magic has not already turned to empty gesture.

The Palace of Westminster embodies a constitution that was also fabled for its continuity, its traditional framework evolving by peacefully incorporating change. Parliamentary government emerged without discarding the monarchy, which aged into a symbol of national unity transcending politics. Through the House of Commons, democracy was progressively extended to encompass more of the population, even as the aristocracy retained its influence in the Lords. New classes of wealthy businessmen were brought into the establishment through the lower house, and then the upper one, a path later followed by the Labour Movement. For generations, a widespread Whiggish view held that this gradual process of change, perhaps reflecting the hand of divine Providence, protected Britain from the revolutions and dictatorships that rocked the European continent.

The current Parliament building entered this story halfway through, but tellingly, it was designed to invoke a much deeper past. The Commission which selected it during the 1830s had asked for proposals only in the Gothic and Elizabethan styles (although the contract had originally been awarded without competition, leading to a procurement scandal; some things really are continuous in British history). The winning submission, by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, combined classical stability in its structure with delirious masses of Neo-Gothic ornament, the latter signalling Pugin’s preference for an idealised medieval social order over what he regarded as a squalid modern world. It was a bold decision by a political class which was, in the same decade, undertaking the contentious process of expanding democracy through the Great Reform Act. In the ensuing decades and centuries, Barry and Pugin’s masterpiece provided a symbolic anchor against countless further storms. This is where the great rituals of democracy are performed, investing the country’s leaders with authority: the debates and votes, the spoken formulas, the waving of order papers and confrontations at the dispatch box.

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But the new proposals to renovate Parliament are an omen, if one was needed, that this Westminster world cannot continue forever. It is a baffling report, symptomatic of deep problems with how the British state tries, and fails, to manage its projects. Parliament needs upgrades to its fire safety and services such as sewerage and heating systems, along with asbestos removal and conservation of the building’s fabric. Somehow this refurbishment has spiralled into a proposal of eye-watering cost and duration. One option, costing up to £11.5 billion, would see the works going on for 24 years, during which the Commons would leave the building for up to a decade, and the Lords for up to 15 years. Should the Commons prefer to remain in place, and Lords to decamp for a mere eight years, the works will take up to 60 years, at a cost of up to £20 billion in today’s money. Worst of all, the revamp will insert various new spaces into the building, including a visitor area and education centre, in the most horrifically dull style imaginable.

Part of the problem, as so often with state procurement today, is that a practical task has been swamped with nice-to-have social schemes. The renewal programme “will seek to create opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises”, with partners given “contractual obligations to achieve the widest practical geographic spread of the supply chain”. As Nicholas Boys Smith points out, the goal of reducing the building’s energy consumption by 40% comes at a price that could produce far greater environmental dividends if spent elsewhere, and step-free access is demanded for parts of the building where few people go even on foot. The Commission has gone for the second most expensive of six initial options, partly because it will allow still more tampering in the future. Even if this renovation avoids the budget overruns and delays we see in so many other projects, it will become a potent symbol of governmental dysfunction and waste, adding another layer of ridicule and scorn to the word “Westminster”.

Unless, that is, Parliament takes an option not mentioned in the report, and moves out of the Palace for good. This would surely be the best way to honour the historic beauty of the building itself, by saving it from further misguided renovations and allowing it to become a heritage site. More importantly, though, it would free Britain’s lawmakers from the weight of a civilisation which has already, for the most part, passed into history, and whose rituals they struggle to perform with conviction or plausibility.

The Palace of Westminster was built in a society in the midst of an Industrial Revolution, moving towards mass democracy, at the heart of an expanding global empire and undergoing a boom in Evangelical Christian faith. It served the country through enormous convulsions, including two world wars, the loss of its empire and a transformation in social attitudes. But whatever authority was once bestowed by images of green benches, state openings and robed peers is now largely gone. As Parliament’s own website reports, between 2014-24, “the proportion of people with low to no trust in MPs rose from 54% to 76%”. According to last year’s British Social Attitudes survey, just one-in-five respondents think that Britain’s system of government — the one embodied by Parliament — needs little or no improvement, whereas half did in 1999.

At what point does change become too great to bury behind the façade of continuity? This question is impossible to answer with certainty, but it feels as though the line was crossed at some point in the past few decades. There is nothing wrong with anachronistic customs; they are, in fact, important for nourishing the emotional dimension of politics. The problem arises when the figures performing those customs evidently no longer belong to the world they invoke, creating an impression of self-importance which makes those concerned appear like pigmies parading in boots several sizes too big.

Consider, then, that Britain’s constitution is increasingly remote from the one which the Palace of Westminster once represented. The upper house, whose grandeur Pugin sought to recognise with ornament far more lavish than that of the Commons, has only a dwindling rump of hereditary peers left, which the current Labour government has tried to remove. The Lords is now a constitutional appendage, hosting a combination of diligent legislators and political cronies, its ranks swollen by wave after wave of appointments and its future an elaborately dressed question mark. Meanwhile, some MPs are apparently unaware that the separation of powers, an American concept, doesn’t apply in Britain, which may be the result of confusing innovations like a US-style Supreme Court. The fundamental principle of Britain’s constitution, parliamentary sovereignty, has been undermined by Blairite reforms, dispersing authority to devolved governments, international courts and a vast web of unelected bodies.

No less striking are the changes in the nation that Parliament is meant to govern. Most obviously, London’s transformation into a city of immigrants means that fewer than half of its residents come from families that lived in Britain at the time of the Second World War, a single lifetime ago. Taking the British population in general, around a quarter have no familial presence in the country before 1945. British people no longer attends the churches, read the newspapers, work in the industries or hold the class loyalties that they used to, nor do they have the same understanding of themselves as a nation. These shifts are undermining the political foundations on which Parliament was built. The adversarial system of governing party versus opposition which always underpinned the House of Commons is falling apart, as Britain becomes effectively a multi-party system trapped in a two-party constitution. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Brits surveyed claimed to prefer coalition over single-party government.

It seems that no one currently benefits from British politics playing out against the traditional backdrop of Westminster. For voters of a conservative bent, that hallowed setting can only be a reminder of the history the country has abandoned; for those of a progressive or radical one, the survival of such a hidebound institution implies that history has not been abandoned enough. Politicians shout endlessly about “change”, about the broken system that needs fixing and the establishment that needs to be overturned. As long as they do so from what is itself the unchanging home of a broken establishment, they will struggle to be heard.

Providing a connection to the past, even an imagined one, is a valuable function for a public edifice. Indeed, historicist monuments like the Palace of Westminster, which inspired parliaments in a number of other countries, represent one of the great innovations of modernity, helping to steady a society in the face of disorientating change. But there are other roles which such buildings can perform. Britain does not have a great record of constitutional reform in recent decades, yet its leaders cannot just look on as the country’s governance becomes increasingly unfit for purpose and the public’s anger increasingly implacable. Commissioning a new Parliament building could be an opportunity to properly think through the roles of the two chambers, and possibly a spur to a wider reorganisation, or in some cases restoration, of the British system. It seems sacrilegious to move government away from Westminster, where it has existed for the best part of 1,000 years, but the alternative is a forlorn hope that the authority of the old rituals will return.

It would also be helpful to have a tangible representation of the British state as it exists today, rather than in its 19th-century pomp, for us all to see and judge accordingly. At present, Britain’s lawmakers are hiding in the remnants of a vanished country, cloaked in a borrowed dignity which is wearing thin. Is it not time to see, in the cold light of day, how the living centre of the constitution would choose to present itself? To judge by the recent renovation proposals, not to mention Scotland’s modern parliament building at Holyrood, the successor to the Palace of Westminster could be very uninspiring. But why the state manifests itself in such ugliness is not a question we can shy away from forever, and need not be the end of the conversation. Seeing its parliamentarians encased in soulless fibreglass, like glorified office workers, might be just the reality check the country needs.

This essay first appeared in UnHerd magazine.

Should we build a city for a million people in the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk countryside, surrounded by 12,000 acres of woodland? This project is being seriously proposed by businessmen-turned-campaigners Shiv Malik and Joseph Reeve. It is a crazy idea, and seems unlikely to be realised. Yet in many ways it represents a step forward in the vexed debate around building and development in Britain, something that only a crazy idea could achieve.

For starters, it is good to see Reeve acknowledge that Britain’s housing shortage is not the fault of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yard, i.e., people who block local developments for unreasonable and selfish motives). The war on NIMBYs inspires such passion that people who want more building now call themselves – you guessed it – YIMBYs. In reality, this grudge has long since become a way of blaming those who take pride in their local area for the failings of, inter alia, developers, house builders and local authorities. As Reeve explains, the objections of “concerned locals” to new housing typically include:

o “The houses are ugly.” (They are.)

o “The roads can’t cope.” (They can’t.)

o “It’ll be a soulless commuter estate.” (It will.)

o “The ‘affordable’ homes cost £900,000.” (They do.)

Reeve continues: “These objections are not irrational. They are accurate observations about British housebuilding, which has spent fifty years optimising for ‘maximum profit per acre’ and ‘aesthetic qualities of a cardboard box.’”

Reeve made a similar point last year at an event hosted by Looking For Growth, a movement seeking to reverse Britain’s economic decline (I reported on the LFG event here). Apparently he realised the wisdom of building a new city when driving through a rural area and seeing “shitty houses” going up “in the middle of nowhere”. He and Malik insist that the best way to spare the countryside, enforce better design standards, and boost economic productivity is to concentrate development in new urban settlements, built from scratch. Prices will allegedly by kept down through an innovative “community land trust” model, while environmental damage will be offset by doing something significant for nature regeneration at the same time; hence the forest.

What is significant here is the attempt to break the deadlock between conserving versus building, by taking greater responsibility for both. Along with their hatred of NIMBYs, the YIMBYs have spent too much energy complaining about the rules and regulations, especially regarding the environment, which have reduced Britain to a state of paralysis. They are not actually wrong; it is true that a monumental accretion of rules and bureaucratic structures have gummed up the economy and made life miserable for anyone who wants to make, build, or organise something. But there is another side to this problem. Despite all the regulation, we are still failing to protect our landscapes, waterways and wild animals. Britain is one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries, with almost one sixth of species classed as threatened with extinction. As for the countryside, it looks big in statistical terms, but the reality for those who live there often amounts to protecting small pockets of rural peace from ever-encroaching towns and traffic.

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In other words, when it comes to matters of conservation and development, we are close to a worst-of-both-worlds situation. That is, we are failing at both. So if one constantly denounces regulation without addressing the double-edged nature of the problem, there comes a point where one is effectively sweeping the environmental issue under the carpet. See, for instance, the recent controversy surrounding the so-called “fish disco” at the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant in Somerset. This is not, sadly, a place for fish to dance, but a system of underwater speakers meant to keep them at a safe distance. When a government review suggested that the fish disco cost £700 million and would not actually save any fish, YIMBYs saw yet another symbol of costly and pointless bureaucracy, an environmental absurdity to rank alongside the infamous bat tunnel and various scandals involving newts. But it now transpires that the £700 million covers a suite of protective measures, and early trials suggest the fish disco actually works.

More importantly, even if the fish disco did deserve to be ridiculed, I didn’t see its detractors acknowledge that marine wildlife is worth protecting. And yet, around the same time, researchers in neighbouring Dorset reported that the numbers of salmon in the rivers are now the lowest on record. Salmon populations have been falling rapidly across Britain, as the Times reported: “Numbers of wild Atlantic salmon have crashed by about 80 per cent in the past 40 years. Rivers that had tens of thousands of salmon in the 1980s now only have a few hundred.”

Again, I am not denying that intrusive and burdensome regulation is a problem. But it doesn’t change the reality that we are failing to protect things which ought to be protected. As I say, a worst-of-both-worlds situation. Britain is now a country where individuals are fined for dropping cigarette butts or pouring coffee down drains, while rapacious water companies are endlessly pumping raw sewage into the rivers, and fly-tippers dump lorry-loads of rubbish into the countryside. A country where eye-watering energy bills are inflated to pay for green policies and refurbishing a home can entail painful rigmarole, even as once plentiful insects and birds are vanishing along with the habitats that support them.

To make matters worse, even if we had highly efficient regulators, they would still face an extremely difficult task. Consider the fish again. The factors destroying the wild salmon population are complex and various. Rivers and streams are becoming too warm, reflecting climactic change but also the legacy of Victorian landscaping practices. Oxygen is being sucked out of waterways by vast algal blooms, fed by nitrates from sewage spills and agricultural fertilisers. Meanwhile at sea, where wild salmon spend the majority of their lives, they catch diseases from the farmed salmon we buy in the supermarket. They also fall prey to fishing nets, and suffer from the collapse of marine food chains through overfishing. The scope of such challenges means that addressing them probably will require some expensive and elaborate contrivances like underwater acoustic deterrents (as fish discos are formally known). It also means that it will be very difficult to stop even well-intentioned regulators from spreading their tentacles everywhere.

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I’m sure there are YIMBYs who see this mess and conclude that conservation simply isn’t worth the trouble. But could they win political support for a program of BUILD BABY BUILD (to quote the MAGA-style baseball cap worn by Labour housing minister Steve Reed)? I suspect there is more appetite for “cutting the green crap” than someone like me would like to imagine, but probably less than the YIMBYs would hope. Surveys by More In Common suggest that just one in five people think that weakening environmental standards is worthwhile for more house building, and also, remarkably, that 73% cite proximity to the countryside as important when looking for a home, which is more than prioritise being near a good school. These findings cut both ways, of course: if everyone who wants to live near the countryside actually did, there would be no countryside left. Still, there is reason to think that some city dwellers feel protective towards the natural and rural worlds, if only to preserve something outside the urban condition that threatens to swallow the vast majority of humanity.

The question then is how, given all these difficulties, we can move towards a best-of-both-worlds scenario. There are some obvious steps. We could, for instance, build a sanitation system to match a ballooning population, so that sewage isn’t dumped in rivers and on beaches. We could encourage more domestic manufacturing, so that we don’t need to import everything from countries with much lower environmental standards. We could create more homes in cities like London, where house building has fallen to a record low. But let’s push the boat out a little further, to acknowledge the depth of the dilemma. What would the best-of-both-worlds actually look like?

It would, presumably, demand a meticulous planning regime to distribute space between urban, rural and natural settings. It would require massive investment in nature conservation and regeneration, as well as in abundant, state-of-the-art infrastructure. It would involve new buildings of such quality and beauty, situated so sensitively in their environment, that local people would be happy to have them. It seems we have entered the realm of science fiction. To find the perfect balance between development and conservation, we will need a benign dictatorship of artist-engineers, flush with money and unbothered by existing political institutions or property rights, able to move populations and demolish and build settlements as their immaculate judgment required.

The point of this silly thought experiment is to illustrate that, if we want to get even one-tenth of the way to the best-of-both-worlds scenario, we will probably need some ambition and creativity. This is why I say the Forest City proposal marks a step forward in the debate. However flawed the project might be, it is not suggesting, as much YIMBY discourse seems to, that we can go back to the unchecked building sprees of earlier generations, the effects of which are precisely what created scepticism to further development. Malik and Reeve appear to recognise that developing our built environment must somehow be part of the same project as regenerating our natural and rural ones, and that this, in turn, will require a paradigm shift in vision and ambition. This is part, I think, of a wider High Modernist tendency emerging within YIMBY thought. Another example is Anglofuturism, a playful concept that tries to reconcile cultural heritage with technological change, toying with ideas such as “a spacefaring Britain building Georgian townhouses on the Moon, [and] small modular reactors delivering nuclear energy from underneath village greens.”

The problem with greater ambition, of course, is that it brings greater risk; and this raises major political obstacles. A bold, transformative vision may be effective at winning support in general terms, because everyone likes uplifting rhetoric, but it becomes frightening once specific projects and policies are on the table. The general mood in Britain today seems to be unhappiness with the status quo combined with fear that change will only make things worse. It is easy to say that the buildings will be beautiful and affordable, that the neighbourhoods will be lively and nature will be enhanced, but such promises are par for the course from property developers. Why should anyone believe that this time will be different? Once a Bristol-sized chunk of countryside is handed over to build a city, it will never come back.

Thinking big, devising new ways to pursue stewardship alongside development, is the only way to create a prosperous modern society without destroying the natural and cultural wealth that future generations ought to inherit. But we lack the trust, and probably the means, to get such schemes off the ground. Housing estates will continue to be shoehorned piecemeal into villages and fields because, ultimately, it is easier to stitch up a local community than to convince entire regions to take a leap into the dark.

As a Christmas treat, I bring you a dispatch from the frontlines of consumer culture. I investigate how an American giant, Costco, is reshaping the tastes and habits of British shoppers. This essay first appeared in UnHerd magazine.

In a Croydon car park, an aerospace professional is brandishing an enormous side of raw salmon. Where else, he asks, could you buy something like this? Where could you find such size and quality? The salmon, I must admit, is gloriously pink. The man has taken it from a shopping trolley the size of a small bathtub, which he is emptying into the boot of his car. It is like watching an epicurean prepare for the apocalypse. Behind us in the grey dusk looms the gigantic metal shed which divulged this bounty: Costco, an American wholesaler that is luring British shoppers away from traditional supermarkets and high streets.

My interviewee is explaining Costco’s appeal. It’s convenient: everything is in one place, and since you have to buy in bulk, you don’t need to come often (the store is meant to supply small businesses, though everyone I talk to here is shopping for personal consumption). Then there are the deals: even for electronics, it often has the best prices and warranties. It all sounds like a perfect exercise in prudence, getting the most out of your time and money. Except, did he really mean to buy all of this? Does he really need quite so much salmon? “That is the drawback,” the man says ruefully. “You see things as you walk around, and you end up spending a lot. I came here just to buy some chicken, some meat, and I’ve just spent £360.” I point to a pair of olive-green chinos recently added to the boot. “They’re nice,” he objects. “I thought I could wear them for work.”

It is not the only time I will hear such a tale of accidental indulgence. In fact, it almost becomes a running joke during my afternoon at Costco. Everyone says they are here to save money, before acknowledging that they treated themselves to something they couldn’t resist. “The problem is you get carried away,” says an elderly woman who comes with her neighbour to stock up. A builder eating pizza in his van tells me, as though I’m an idiot for asking, “it’s cheaper. You buy in bulk.” Then I raise the matter of spontaneous purchases, and he goes quiet. “Yeah, that does happen,” his friend chimes in. One man who complained of being broke was nonetheless leaving with a litre of Jack Daniels and a crate of Nigerian Guinness. These were, he assures me, excellent value for money.

Costco has, it seems, cracked the secret of selling to a population which is increasingly concerned with belt-tightening, as living standards are ground down by taxes and inflation. It lures people in with the prospect of cheap stuff in large quantities, and then overwhelms them with temptation. And frankly, there is such insane abundance here that I struggle to believe anyone could avoid this trap. Fancy three litres of vodka in a glass skull? Australian abalones? A “giant treat tower” comprising “3kg of festive treats”? And while you’re here, what about a 10-player poker table, or an oriental rug?

Everything about Costco is big: the stores, the products, and the money. It is currently the third-largest retailer in the world by revenue, behind only Walmart and Amazon. Much of its success comes from its membership model, whereby you pay £42 annually to access its stores (or £30 if you run a business), allowing it to operate with smaller margins on its products. The company came to Britain in 1993, a decade after it first opened in the United States, and has been steadily expanding since. Long ago, when my parents first got hooked, they made pilgrimages to Costco in Watford two or three times a year, but with each decade another branch has opened closer to home. There are currently 29 stores in Britain, and more than a dozen new ones at various stages of planning and construction. Last year, Costco managed sales worth £5.3 billion in the UK, almost double its turnover in 2019.

Croydon offers some insight into this success. Occupying a liminal zone where London bleeds into Surrey, people of every conceivable class and background live or work around here, from gilet-wearing rugby dads to African Muslims, from civil servants to white-van men. And despite the fact that Costco officially restricts its memberships to individuals from certain occupations, I found virtually all of these groups shopping there.

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It is safe to say that few people approach this place on foot — one can only carry so many five-kilo blocks of cheddar — but doing so is revealing, if you want to see the hinterlands where retail is migrating. The Croydon Costco, a rectangular fortress, is nestled among acres of dual carriageway and brick warehouses, school sports fields and self-storage facilities. Around the corner is the surreal Grand Sapphire “Hotel and Banqueting” venue, essentially a Travelodge with lots of neoclassical columns and pediments tacked onto it. This masterpiece of banality, I later learn, was due to host a Reform UK Christmas party, but pulled out after a campaign of complaints.

We are a long way from the reassuringly suburban forms of the Tesco, Asda or Marks & Spencer superstore, with their gabled roofs and detailed taxonomy of class signifiers (cheese and onion or cheddar and chive?). These remain a familiar setting for British life, but their position is being steadily eroded by the rise of warehouse shopping. Whereas the traditional supermarkets still gesture towards the ideal of the friendly local community of shops (which they in reality replaced), hiding their brutal efficiency behind a chatty marketing style and an emphasis on British produce, their challengers cut the frills and let the prices speak for themselves. Ikea’s giant edge-of-town warehouse-stores were pioneering in this regard, teaching the middle classes to swallow their pretences for the sake of a bargain. Lidl and Aldi brought the warehouse onto the high street, their chintzy copycat branding made more palatable by the ravages of inflation. With Costco, the trend approaches its zenith. Retail collapses into logistics and infrastructure; architecturally, Costco stores are cousins of the data centre and the Amazon fulfilment hub.

Look at the trolleys leaving Costco and you will see plenty of evidence of our straitened economic times. The company’s obvious audience in Britain are the comfortable but concerned; natural denizens of the M&S food hall who have been driven in search of bargains by the high cost of everything, and who have the current account balance and the cupboard space to buy several months’ worth of cashew nuts at once. According to market researchers, high earners are more likely to shop at Costco. But most of the shoppers I see at the Croydon store are not in this category. Unlike that gentleman with the green chinos, they cannot spend several hundred pounds on a whim. Rather, many have come to stock up on a small number of products — one family appears to be living off Yazoo milkshakes and tins of baked beans — even if they pick up a few treats along the way. The most common items appear to be toilet paper, laundry detergent, and above all, crates of bottled drinking water. (The people of South London, it seems, do not trust what comes out of their taps. I’m not sure why, though one young woman, a nurse, describes herself as “prone to typhoid”.) No doubt some Costco members like the idea that they have hacked grocery shopping by going wholesale.

Still, we have by no means entered an era of Gradgrindian retail, where enjoyment counts for nothing and all that matters are the numbers on the sticker. At Costco, the sheer volume and variety of products creates its own kind of pornographic spectacle, which is only heightened by the lack of ceremony. Add some promotional giveaways and an in-store canteen, and you get something like an experience. I have barely arrived when I find myself looking at a case of diamond jewellery — placed near the door, along with the fancy perfumes, for Christmas — trying not to think about what I paid for my wife’s engagement ring. Moments later, I am sampling coffee from a ludicrously discounted espresso machine, joking with two ladies in headscarves and their trolley full of young infants. With the aisles stretching ahead of us, there is a sense of anticipation almost like the start of a big night out. I later manage to sample a steak, a chicken Kiev, and a tot of Panamanian rum. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but by the time I reach the vats of olive oil my resistance is broken and I fetch a trolley.

After 45 minutes in the store, my theory of Costco has changed. I no longer think that people are being seduced into spending more than they wanted to; I suspect that, on some level, they come here to be seduced. The genius of warehouse retail is that it makes shoppers feel like they are behaving as purely rational economic agents, which seems like the responsible way to act when money is scarce. In truth, they are engaging in a kind of leisure, enjoying the chance to browse, fantasise, and buy things that they believe they probably shouldn’t. This is not without social and political significance. It suggests that, for all the manifest anger and unhappiness at our system today, a major plank of capitalist society — the desire to possess and to enjoy commodities — remains firmly in place. On the evidence of Croydon, American-style supersized consumerism is probably a more unifying cultural force in modern Britain than the vague British values which people are always trying to formulate.

Leaving the store, I join a chaotic queue of trolleys as it converges on a handful of overworked cashiers, frantically sifting through the mountains of goods with their barcode scanners. My turn comes and it turns out I’ve managed to spend £100. I check my receipt in disbelief, convinced there is a mistake. Is this actually saving me money? Probably not. Do I regret it? Not really.

In early November 1925, exactly one hundred years ago, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes closed in Paris. It had been quite a show. In six months, some 15 million people had visited an exhibition area occupying 57 acres of central Paris, bordered by twelve grand gateways. Though it was an international fair, French designers and department stores had occupied two-thirds of the pavilions. It is thanks to their work that the event is remembered in connection with one style of design in particular, the style which would later take its name from the 1925 expo: Art Deco.

In the years that followed, Deco was formalised as a visual language of sensual curves and stepped profiles, geometric motifs, and classical proportions with a dramatic modern accent. A century after its birth, its appeal remains strong. The Steinway Tower, a supertall skyscraper recently erected on “Billionaire’s Row” in New York, is one demonstration of the style’s lasting ability to evoke a sense of luxury (Edwin Heathcote aptly describes the building as “the purest illustration of architecture as an expression of surplus capital”). Art Deco’s streamlined shapes and smooth, polished surfaces have been a regular fixture in this century’s craze for the retro. Most influentially, Deco has become central to the aesthetic universe of Elon Musk, inspiring the logo of the entrepreneur’s social media platform, X, and the sleek appearance of his Tesla Cybercab.

Yet our intuitions about Art Deco obscure the style’s true significance in history. We think about Deco in relation to the gaudy glamour of Gatsby era America, but its character stems from a French tradition of luxury crafts that dates back to the 18^th century. This was a cultural movement – maybe the first – that originated in Europe but was given its fullest and most memorable expression in the United States. It was not an American style, but it became one; it represents the moment at which the currents of cultural influence began to reverse, and the attractions of the American high life and American popular culture started to wash over the old continent in earnest.

The exhibition that gave Deco its name had originally been scheduled for 1914, but was delayed by the outbreak of the First World War. And like that seismic conflict, it was an expression of Franco-German rivalry. In the first decade of the twentieth century, German industrial design had burst onto the scene with the distinctively modern, utilitarian products of the Deutscher Werkbund, precursor to the Bauhaus. These were simple but striking objects, mass-made for the machine age, and as Anne Massey explains in her history of interior design, they represented a challenge to the status of French designers as Europe’s dominant tastemakers. The French response was a conscious effort to move past the lyrical forms of art nouveau and to develop a more modern aesthetic, without, however, abandoning the traditions of fine craftsmanship and luxury production which France had sustained since the age of its Sun King, Louis XIV.

Deco thus displays an ornate classicism familiar from earlier centuries of French design, combined with elements that were fashionable in artistic circles of the early twentieth century, notably geometric patterns and exotic motifs borrowed from the cultures of the East. Allusions to Egypt became especially popular after the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 – many a provincial cinema would soon be adorned with semi-circular sunburst motifs – but this too had been anticipated by France’s own traditions: Egyptian symbols featured prominently in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire style, a considerable influence on Deco.

One could think of Art Deco, then, as a counterweight to the emergence of Modernism as the aspiring language of industrial modernity. Where Modernism was functional and economical, Deco was lavish and, well, decorative. Where Modernism argued for standardisation, Deco insisted that a space should express individuality. Where Modernism was egalitarian, Deco celebrated beauty and taste. And where Modernism was universal, Deco brought together an assortment of different periods and cultures. As it happens, the 1925 exposition would also be an important landmark in the Modernist story, not thanks to any German exhibit (there were none; the French organisers deliberately sent the invitation too late) but because of the Pavillon de l’Éspirit Nouveau, an audacious project by the young Le Corbusier. Inevitably, hybrid “Moderne” styles soon emerged, incorporating industrial materials and Modernist aesthetics into swanky upmarket interiors.

To understand the appeal of Deco’s opulent fantasies during the 1920s and 30s, we need only recall that this was a time of immense upheaval. In the aftermath of the First World War, Europe was rocked by economic instability, by class war and revolution, by the on-going collapse of long established social and political orders. Deco offered an escape, or at least a distraction. It was, as Catherine Slessor writes, “a soft style for hard times, a suave companion on the road to hell.” Slessor notes that Deco has also tended to revive at times of insecurity, such as the 1970s. (It is intriguing that another design movement of that decade, postmodernism, shares Deco’s promiscuous approach to borrowing from other times and places, as well as its appetite for make-believe). Over the past decade, Deco has again rekindled in an atmosphere of turmoil. Its appearance in luxury apartments, high-end shopping malls, and the retro-futurism of Elon Musk suggest that it has become especially suited to packaging wealth and technology as anaesthetics against an anxious world.

Deco did not initially take off in Britain, where the preferred form of escapism during the interwar years, as at other times, was a return to the warmth of its own past. Louche Parisian fashions were an awkward fit alongside the mock-Tudor facades and Jacobean furniture of the new English suburbs. In the United States, by contrast, Deco was enthusiastically embraced. From our current perspective, when America acts as a relentless pace setter for European culture, the strangest aspect of the 1925 exhibition is that the U.S. considered itself too backward to take part. Having consulted leaders in the arts and business, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover judged that American designers could not meet the requirement for modern work. Instead, he sent a delegation of more than 100 envoys, representing a range of design fields, to attend the exhibition and take notes. Furniture from the Paris expo was subsequently displayed around the United States, notably at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, while dozens of American museums and department stores held their own exhibitions of the new French fashion.

Whether this affinity for Deco came, as Massey suggests, from a young nation’s desire for a new decorative language, or less charitably, from a parvenu’s love of ostentation parading as refinement, the Americans proceeded to make the style their own. Some of the great skyscrapers built in this period – the Chrysler, the Empire State, the superb Chanin Building – became temples of Deco, as did the enormous picture palaces where thousands gathered to enjoy the new medium of cinema. Those audiences saw Deco on the screen too, as Hollywood set builders embraced the style. Then, in the 1930s, product designers hit upon an authentically American adaptation of Deco in the form of streamlining, a look derived from the dynamic profiles of cars and trains. Sumptuous, swishing curves, rendered in shiny chrome plating or smooth Bakelite, were applied to everything from gramophones and radios to fridges, telephones and cameras.

In 1928, the designer Paul T. Frankl, who had emigrated to the United States from Vienna, declared that “the foundation for a distinctive American art is already being laid.” The lasting association of Deco with American achievements in architecture, film, and mass production is a testament to the nation’s energy at that moment. Yet the return of Deco today cannot, of course, signify the same thing. Even if it encases the most advanced technologies, the style now looks backward as well as forward. Much as Art Deco once carried the prestige of France’s design heritage, it now invokes the classical era of American ambition a century ago.

In Britain, Chinese influence tends to hide in plain sight. Despite its obvious importance, the Asian superpower occupies little space in the public conversation. That has changed now, at least for the moment, thanks to the scandalous case of two British men accused of spying for Beijing. Inexplicably, and suspiciously, the British authorities have abandoned their efforts to prosecute these alleged spies. The government has tried to pin the blame elsewhere, but a multitude of inconsistencies and unanswered questions suggest that it nixed the trial to improve relations with China. Now attention is turning to the broader Sino-British relationship, and we find ourselves entering a rarely-opened room with dark corners and an alarming smell.

Why does China so rarely rise to the surface of public consciousness? Its prolific campaigns of espionage, hacking, surveillance, and intellectual property theft have long been common knowledge. So too has Britain’s dependence on Chinese supply chains and investment; our products have carried the Made in China stamp for most of my life. And yet, Chinese power has a ghostly quality. Yes, it is widely perceived as a threat, but one that is more like a force of nature than a political phenomenon. China’s rise is inexorable, like the sea levels. If our industrial capacity continues to drain eastward, if goods and technologies increasingly flow in the opposite direction, and if our energy infrastructure is built or owned by Chinese companies, that is just a natural process. Part of the lifecycle of nations, perhaps.

When Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump act, it is treated as a moral outrage, and plastered across the front pages. But despite the many malign policies of the Chinese Communist Party – its suppression of democracy and the rule of law in Hong Kong, for instance, or its deception regarding the origins of Covid-19 – China tends to be covered in the “World” section, alongside news of a distant flood.

Our inattentiveness comes partly from our expectation that power ought to be dramatic, charismatic or persuasive abroad. In their heyday, European empires sought to spread Christianity and neckties. The Cold War in Europe was as much a struggle for souls as for territory. Its victor, the United States, is a cultural power unlike any other; the political theatre of Trump’s America is only the latest manifestation of its empire of spectacle. China, by contrast, seeks neither converts nor an audience. Historically it was the epicentre of East Asian civilisation, but it has no significant cultural exports to the West today. (TikTok is a Chinese product, but not really a vector of Chinese culture: the app is not available within China itself).

Rather, China’s power stems from the position it has achieved within the global division of labour over the past four decades. It is largely invisible because the workings of this vast economic system, spread across the world, are largely invisible. Moreover, in a country like Britain, which opened up its economy with exceptional enthusiasm, the effects of this restructuring are by now taken for granted. We are used to products being delivered to our doors without any thought as to who made them or how. We are used to the former working classes being stripped of their productive role, and scattered as a political force. We are used to our infrastructure and major companies being owned by foreign investors and governments.

One of the factors that drove our reliance on China, as I noted in a longer essay on the subject back in April, was that it helped our leaders to avoid difficult choices and ignore inconvenient truths. Cheap goods compensated for lost industries and stagnating wages. The sale of assets boosted growth figures. The migration of so much carbon-intensive industry to China – where it has expanded massively – allowed our leaders to claim that we are making progress in reducing emissions. That China’s growing influence remained behind the scenes, as it were, only made these illusions more effective.

Allowing these trends to progress as far as they have was naïve at best. In many cases, the British authorities showed breath-taking incompetence in giving Chinese business interests – and through them the CCP – access to the foundations of the state. This week, multiple sources have claimed that a data system storing the most sensitive government information was compromised after being sold to Chinese investors.

If previous governments had a careless attitude to China, the current one appears more than a little desperate. The era of globalisation in which Britain could portray its hollowed-out condition as an “open economy” is turning to something more fragmented and hierarchical. The Starmer government has apparently decided that crumbs of investment are worth grovelling for, whether that means massaging Trump’s ego or studiously avoiding controversy with Beijing. Nor will China forever maintain the polite fiction that Britain is an equal partner. It is currently threatening that there will be “consequences” if it is not allowed to build its so-called super embassy next to the Tower of London – another project that poses major security risks, especially as it will sit atop important communications cables. Chinese power may not escape our notice for much longer.

I recently saw a friend for the first time since becoming a father this summer past. “How are you finding it?” he asked. I spent a few moments thinking how to respond, and realised I was getting nowhere. My lips opened in readiness for speech, but no speech was forthcoming. Where to begin? Did I even know the answer to his question? Fortunately he has had children much longer than I have, and understood my silence perfectly well.

If I had to put words into that silence now, I would say this. Having a small infant around is a delightfully strange, enthralling, often hilarious experience. It’s hard work, yes. But the real difficulty, for me, is trying to understand what exactly I have embarked on. When I think that I have to raise this creature – this unspeakably precious creature – into a child, an adolescent, and ultimately an adult, I am baffled that the cosmos has entrusted me with such a responsibility. Never have I felt so conscious of my shortcomings, so unworthy of a privilege.

This is when I take heart from the fact that feelings of inadequacy are common to many kinds of beginning. Every new skill or ability, every career and every art is a quest that starts with a punishing encounter with one’s limitations. When learning to play a musical instrument, your fingers initially cannot even perform the necessary movements, just as, when learning a language, you cannot form or even hear the sounds properly. The distance between such tentative beginnings and the goal of mastery is absurdly large, and yet people reach it all the time.

There are a few problems with this analogy – you won’t receive a visit from social services if you neglect your violin practice – but as a new parent, I find it helpful to think of my situation in these terms. As Richard Sennett argues in his book The Craftsman, parenting can be understood as a craft, meaning an activity in which knowledge, skill, technique, and improvement are possible. One does not have to rely on some innate talent that may or may not appear. “Craftwork,” writes Sennett, “focuses on objects in themselves and on impersonal practices; craftwork depends on curiosity, it tempers obsession; craftwork turns the craftsman outward.” In its social and moral dimensions, this vision of craft resembles the concept of a practice.

Sennett traces this approach to parenting back to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, with its boom in printed material seeking to spread knowledge to a wide audience. Hundreds of books appeared explaining “how to feed and to keep babies clean, how to medicate sick children, how to toilet-train toddlers efficiently, and, above all, how to stimulate and educate children from an early age.” Special mention goes to the saloniste Louise D’Épinay, who argued against theories of parenting based on natural instincts and capacities. She insisted that (as Sennett writes) “in place of blind love or command, there need to be objective, rational, guiding standards” for how to nurture infants, and that “implementing such standards requires skill that any parent develops only though practice.”

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Of course handbooks dispensing such advice are ubiquitous today, and to this extent most parents now subscribe to the idea of parenting as a craft. Then again, I’m aware that parenting philosophies clash on many questions of objective technique versus more freeform, “baby-led” methods, so I’ll just repeat that I’m a beginner who claims no special insight here. Besides, the knowledge that underpins parenting standards seems to be in constant flux. Much of the official advice dispensed by midwives and health visitors comes with an acknowledgement that our parents’ generation was told something completely different.

In the eighteenth century, rational parenting could be contrasted to the folk wisdom and popular intuitions that parents had always relied upon. Yet the distinction between reason and prejudice is not always very clear. There is a wonderful Norman Rockwell illustration, which appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1933, showing an exasperated mother with her son over her knee, ready to be spanked, while she peers into a volume titled Child Psychology. Perhaps the mother is seeking “expert” permission for a punishment that is really motivated by tradition and emotion; or perhaps the text has suggested the punishment to her, after dressing it up in scientific jargon. Either way, the image seems to suggest that parenting is bound to be a messy mixture of custom, sentiment, and efforts at rational understanding.

The other problem is too much knowledge – or at least, too much information. In Britain, where an infant’s first mark of citizenship is the National Health Service number it gets shortly after birth, the authorities impart to parents a mass of safety instructions. This is good in principle, but I was bemused to find that many of the rules are ultimately disregarded as unrealistic by most parents, though presumably after causing them a fair amount of anxiety. The official line on sleeping, for instance, which comes from the Lullaby Trust, is that a baby should sleep by itself, in a separate space “free from toys, blankets and pillows,” and on a firm, flat mattress. The stated reason is to reduce the risk of SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome). But the same organisation reports that 9 in 10 parents sometimes fall asleep with their babies – it would take a superhuman effort not to – while online forums and word of mouth reveal that many parents find the benefits of cot bumpers and nests too great to resist.

So how great is the danger? SIDS accounts for 200 deaths annually in the UK, or about 0.03% of the number of babies born (down from 0.05% in 2004). Around half of SIDS cases involve co-sleeping, but these may be associated with “hazardous circumstances” such as drunkenness or sleeping in a chair. For comparison, the number of families who take legal action against the NHS for obstetrics errors each year is over 1,000.

Should the authorities place less emphasis on guidelines when the risks are minuscule? I honestly don’t know. What does seem clear is that, the more data we gather about babies and infant development, the more we will find tiny statistical effects which can be classified as risks or opportunities. This information will find its way to every nervous parent typing questions into a search bar on their phone, who will then have to decide whether it justifies the burden of changing their behaviour. I am starting to realise, in other words, that the craft of parenting is not just about gathering knowledge and experience, but judging which knowledge and experience to act on.

There is no scheme that better captures the outlook of Britain’s current rulers than a “digital dashboard” for tracking policy goals. Proposed last autumn, this online platform would allow members of the public to measure their government’s performance. Rarely are the assumptions of modern technocratic politics so perfectly distilled: governance is about delivering and communicating a sense of progress; citizens need to feel “engaged” even if they are not involved; anything can be improved with an app. But how, you may ask, are we supposed to measure this progress objectively? With numbers, of course. During its first year in power, the Labour government introduced a raft of official “missions” and “milestones” covering everything from childhood development to house building to the proportion of renewable energy in the grid. Many are numerical targets.

One has to wonder how the designers of this strategy imagined it playing out. Perhaps people would pause a few times a day to open their Mission Tracker app, swelling with patriotic pride as they surveyed the latest figures on hospital waiting lists or teacher recruitment? Perhaps they would read it out to their friends at the pub? As I’ve heard others commenting, there is an odd but unmistakable echo of Soviet Communism or Maoism in all of this. It was Lenin, after all, who argued that statistics should not just be “a matter for ‘government servants,’ or for narrow specialists,” and impelled his comrades to “carry statistics to the people and make them popular… so that the comparison of the business results of the various communes may become a matter of general interest and study.” Alas, there is still no way to measure the failure of the government’s “digital dashboard” itself, as the idea appears to have been quietly shelved.

The fixation with quantifiable measurement, and the role of statistics in politics more broadly, was the subject of my latest UnHerd column. My argument, in summary:

Bereft of imagination in a rapidly changing world, our political class clings ever more tightly to numerical targets and indicators, hoping to convey an impression of competence and stability. Instead, they have only reinforced the sense that we are ruled by management consultants rather than leaders. Nor have metrics provided the bulwark against chaos that they promised; for the numbers, it turns out, do not always show what people think they show.

An over-reliance on statistical models and measurements comes with two great dangers. The first is that the seemingly objective quality of numbers can seduce us into believing that they present an infallible picture of reality. In fact, data are gathered and modelled by institutions with all the shortcomings and flaws that one would expect of a human undertaking. The second problem is that our behaviour is increasingly determined by what we can measure — or think we can measure — rather than what is actually important or desirable.

Ironically, British politics has become increasingly preoccupied with numbers at a time when those numbers have, in fact, become less reliable, due to on-going problems at the Office for National Statistics.

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But these tendencies are not confined to the realm of politics, as Steffen Mau observes in his 2017 book The Metric Society. Contemporary society is obsessed with measuring, quantifying, and rating just about everything it can. We assess our social standing through the number of followers or views we’ve amassed. We use devices to count our steps, track our heart rate and measure our sleep cycles. We choose products, restaurants and holiday destinations based on average customer ratings. Academics are judged by their “impact factor”, and universities by their rankings in league tables, while house prices rise and fall in tandem with the Ofsted ratings of the local schools. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has even suggested that citizens could give their local police officers individual scores. Consumer capitalism has done more to “carry statistics to the people” than Lenin could have dreamed for his socialist state.

All the while, of course, we too are being measured. Credit and insurance policies are part of ordinary life as never before, and rely on scoring our ability to generate income and remain healthy. Many employees seem to be evaluated more often than schoolchildren. Tech platforms and their marketing “partners” are measuring our every movement and keystroke, producing the data streams which have become the vital resource of the age.

There is no point denying the usefulness of measurement. For all their limitations, statistics are an essential tool for studying and understanding the modern world, a tool that journalists are often too ignorant of. Customer ratings and other forms of collective assessment can likewise bring clarity, convenience, and protection against frauds, while self-measurement can offer a degree of control over one’s life that many people need. But metrics pose a similar danger to culture and to our personal lives as they do to our politics. As Mau puts it, “if everything we do and every step we take in life are tracked, registered and fed into evaluation systems, then we lose the freedom to act independently of the behavioural and performance expectations embodied in those systems.” In other words, our decisions will be shaped by what can be measured, and what we choose to measure, at the expense of other considerations.

I worry that the metric society is one in which people never take risks, and never dare to be honest or original, because there are easier ways to avoid negative assessments and maintain a high score. And I worry that, in the metric society, we are less able to explore or to develop our spirit, because we only encounter what the measuring apparatus has concluded we already want.

A few weeks ago I joined the counter-revolution: I bought a dumbphone. Not one of these fancy boutique dumbphones, either, but the most basic dumbphone I could find – the Bic biro of telephony – a Nokia 32-10. It’s true, this Luddite transgression against the norms of technological change brought its own silly thrill, a bit like driving after three pints or telling a rude joke.

The 32-10 was released in 1999, around the time an illustrious economist was predicting the Internet would have no greater impact than the fax machine. Last year – after a quarter century and 160 million units sold – it was reissued in a slightly updated form. The model has lasted because it performs a narrow range of functions quite well, and in particular, doesn’t need to be charged very often. One could argue that the 32-10 represents the pinnacle of mass-market mobile phone design, given that mobile phones were never intended for shopping, trading stocks, or collecting and selling information about our lives.

I won’t bore you with my personal reasons for ditching the smartphone; chances are you’ve heard them already, or experienced them yourself. Besides, I haven’t really ditched the smartphone. I fire it up when I need to use WhatsApp – increasingly the only way that people are willing to communicate – or when I want to do something that requires a pocket-sized computer. Then I transfer my SIM back to the dumbphone, a simple trick to remove the ready-to-hand quality that makes the smartphone so invasive.

What I will venture is an argument against the smartphone dependent society: the situation where this device becomes increasingly necessary to access basic services and participate in public life. The smartphone has now completed its transition from exciting novelty to instrument of daily drudgery. Businesses and governments have long since realised that it offers a way to cut costs by offloading administrative tasks onto their customers and users, justifying this “shadow work” as more convenient (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t). We are drifting into a world of QR-code menus in restaurants, digital check-in at unmanned hotels, and endless apps required by everyone from estate agents to gyms. The British government recently promised to introduce an app for users of the National Health Service, and smartphones will presumably be central to its new plans for digital ID.

This seems like a foolish road to be going down. The corrosive effects of smartphones will only get worse as we stich them further into the fabric of daily life. And if you subscribe to the religion of technological progress, remember that semiconductor-based technologies have not stopped evolving. We may find we have overhauled the structures of life to accommodate the smartphone just as the gadget is becoming obsolete.

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The writer and musician Owen Haacke draws an interesting parallel between the smartphone dependent society and decisions taken in the last century to design our built environment around cars. It is an apt comparison. The automobile was a revolutionary technology, but a big part of the revolution came from the eagerness of planners and developers to facilitate a car-based way of life. The United States is perhaps the most notorious example, with its sprawling cities, suburbs lacking local amenities, and neglect of public transport and pedestrian infrastructure. Haacke notes that “asphalt and pavement dedicated to moving and parking cars” accounts for nearly 80%1 of the area of Houston, and 60% of Los Angeles. In L.A. County parking surfaces alone cover an estimated 200 square miles, more than eight times the size of Manhattan.

In Britain, meanwhile, the 1960s saw a rampage of car-centric redevelopment, as Modernist planners sent motorways ploughing through the historic cores of numerous cities, including Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Derby and Coventry. London narrowly escaped being carved up by three enormous ring roads, eight lanes apiece, which would have displaced 100,000 people. (One section that was built, the Westway, became a setting in J.G. Ballard’s 1973 masterpiece Crash, a novel that explores the latent violence and despair of a world made for cars rather than people. When the Westway was opened in 1970, local residents festooned their houses with a giant banner reading “GET US OUT OF THIS HELL: REHOUSE US NOW”). The assumption that the future belonged to the motorist also inspired the Beeching Cuts of the’60s, a decimation of the British rail network that it has never recovered from.

We have paid a high cost for these design decisions – in pollution and stress, in the health problems that stem from sedentary lifestyles, and in neighbourhoods blighted by busy roads or an absence of public space. In Britain, with its legions of cars stuttering around a small land area, the drone of A-roads is impossible to escape even in relatively rural areas. And once car dependence is entrenched, it is very difficult to dial back. Since so many of us need to drive on a daily basis, policies to limit the impact of cars provoke a lot of resentment.

Digital technologies have been embraced in a similarly reckless and presumptuous way to cars, as the example of education shows. The non-profit One Laptop Per Child spent hundreds of millions of dollars on laptop PCs for children in poor countries, despite warnings from those places that they had more fundamental needs (clean drinking water and electricity, for instance). The scheme’s architect, Nicholas Negroponte, modestly claimed, “if I really had to look at how to eliminate poverty, create peace, and work on the environment, I can’t think of a better way to do it.” More than three million laptops later, there is no compelling evidence that children who received these devices benefitted from it educationally.

Similarly, Sweden was in the vanguard of introducing digital tools to young school children, but now restricts them to stop basic learning skills from being eroded. Britain’s parliament has been debating whether to give parents a right to opt-out of digital homework, with students as young as five currently being asked to work with screens in the evenings.

If we continue designing our everyday infrastructure around smartphones, the consequences will be much harder to reverse. We will further ingrain the habit of having a smartphone always to hand, and that will amplify the screen-based pathologies of distraction, addiction, and reliance on devices for things we would benefit from doing ourselves. As Haacke writes, “commuters dream of reclaiming hours lost inside a car. We are already dreaming of reclaiming our time from smartphones.” Indeed, a recent survey reported that almost half of 16- to 21-year-olds wish the internet did not exist, and this is not the first time research has found such attitudes among young people.

Like the car, moreover, the smartphone will continue to have a deadening effect on casual sociability and the places where it ought to take place. Fewer venues and businesses will be staffed by people, and fewer of their customers will look up from their screens long enough to notice each other. Many of us will disappear from the public world altogether, handling the bureaucracy of our lives from our bedrooms.

How plausible is it, really, to think that we can stop this from happening? Haacke wants us to “treat non-smartphone access as a basic right,” insisting that digitised services come with analogue alternatives. This seems possible in certain controlled settings such as schools – smartphone bans are already being implemented or considered in 40% of the world’s education systems, according to the Economist – but generally speaking, such redundancies are abhorrent to the modern mind. Small businesses do not keep a cash till for the odd customer without electronic payment, and hospitals, as we learned at the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, do not keep many spare beds in case of an emergency. Besides, habits form quickly, and memories are short. Fifteen years ago we were doing fine, and in many ways better, with services that didn’t use smartphones, yet it now seems unthinkable that we could navigate the world without these devices.

We should resist this sense of inertia. No one says the construction of London’s inner-city motorways was inevitable, because it never happened; they were mostly blocked by campaigners and public unease. We are at a similar stage with the smartphone. The petition against digital ID cards in Britain is approaching 1.7 million signatures, less than 48 hours after the policy was introduced. Something like this could mark the point where people question how far into the digital panopticon they want to go. We don’t need to turn back the tide of smartphone use; we only need to keep enough channels open that the future can develop along a different course.

And there are different courses. That is the irony of committing to the smartphone now: with the on-going development of both software and hardware, it really is possible to imagine a near future – numerous versions of it, in fact – where the smartphone plays no role at all. Even the companies that want to make us more reliant on digital tools don’t think there’s much mileage left in sitting by ourselves and squinting at a screen the size of an index card.

What follows the smartphone – whether it’s a wearable pin that you talk to, something resembling eyeglasses, or (the most intriguing scenario) a new generation of robotics – could of course turn out to be worse. It has not taken long for people to feel they need so-called AI chatbots to spell their names and tie their shoelaces, suggesting that our longing to enslave ourselves to technology has not reached its limit. But those of us who dislike the current paradigm shouldn’t be content with stubbornly opting out, satisfying as that may be. Forces like network technology, data processing and computing power are not going away. So we need to help designers to formulate new and perhaps radically different visions of how they can contribute to a good life – how humanity can live in harmony with technology. The first step is not viewing the current trajectory as inevitable.

For those who enjoy my rantings at UnHerd magazine, I recently wrote about the University and the challenges facing intellectual life today. My own experience of the University is limited – I’m pretty under-qualified, to be frank – but since I care about the humanities and about learning in general, I feel I have a stake in its future. The University is not the only setting where these things can be sustained, but it’s a very important one. I previously argued, vis-à-vis the decline of reading, that literary culture can survive the current onslaught of techno-barbarism; this piece could serve as a coda to that argument, addressing the institutional side of things.

An extract from the essay:

Even those without political animus may agree that it’s past time to slim down the University, an unaffordable relic in an age when so much knowledge is freely available. A degree like mine, English Literature, now means incurring significant debts in exchange for poor employment prospects. Surely this does not need to be part of a state-subsidised institution? There are few signs, however, that the world beyond the University can sustain a healthy intellectual culture. Yes, many public intellectuals have used new platforms to attract large audiences, whether it be Jordan Peterson’s ascent to stardom via Youtube, or phenomenally successful newsletters like that of economic historian turned policy pundit Adam Tooze. Westbrook himself writes on Substack, speaks at film festivals, and has been involved with a new play by Matthew Gasda, the fashionable New York author. But it’s no accident that each of these individuals, and many more like them, can draw on years of study and teaching at universities. For obvious reasons relating to time and money, it is rare for a blogger, journalist or podcaster to achieve a similar intellectual depth without any academic background.

Moreover, if the University has problems with falling standards and groupthink, it seems crazy to think that a public culture dominated by social media could do better. The relentless crushing of attention spans, the restless mob mentality, the constant exposure to the judgment of our peers: these do not seem like promising conditions for original, fearless intellects to be forged.

…

Looking back at my own academic experience, cut short as it was, I can think of no better way to have spent those three years immersed in Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Eliot, and I’m glad that there are people who can dedicate their careers to this cause. Can such study be useful in life? Undoubtedly. But a stronger defence of the humanities is surely that they keep alive our stories, our history and our cultural inheritance, as well as the practice of scholarship itself. Now more than ever, as the wider culture grows intellectually barren, these things need some sort of institutional form to survive; losing them would make us infinitely poorer.

The impetus for these ideas came from an excellent new book, Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party. Its author, David A. Westbrook, has had a wide-ranging career in academia, and writes the Intermittent Signal Substack. David has since pointed out to me that I portrayed his book as more straightforwardly critical of the University than it actually is. And it’s true: Social Thought from the Ruins is a carefully layered work, situating the crisis of intellectual life within the wider moment of confusion and unravelling which we inhabit today (though for one reason or another, David’s critique of the University was the part that stood out to me).

Perhaps this is further evidence of the point I am trying to make. A journalistic essay typically limits itself to advancing one perspective within the dialectic of public debate. In a book, by contrast, the different sides of a question can be brought together, their sharp edges smoothed, their opposition placed in some broader context and given a coherent form. Staying in contact with these deeper modes of thought is one of the main reasons we need to keep reading books. In much the same way, our public discourse needs institutions to supply it with more substantial knowledge and ideas than it can generate by itself. It needs the University, or something like it.

Regular readers may have noticed that The Pathos of Things has some new visual trimmings. Logos, favicons, and email banners are not artworks that reward deep reflection – at least, mine are not – but they do provide an excuse to discuss some sources of inspiration.

I’ve long complained that digital culture is aesthetically impoverished because it encourages everyone to adopt a uniform, “user friendly” minimalism. Visual elements and layouts have to be easily digestible to eyes trawling large volumes of content, and doing so on a tiny smartphone screen. The obvious answer is to go for something bold and simple, a formula that can look pleasingly “classic” in any case. When everyone does this, we end up with an environment that is hyper-stimulating in sensory terms, but artistically rather drab and utilitarian. We are deprived of that kind of beauty that arises not from simplicity, but from the harmonious arrangement of complexity.

I suspected that I couldn’t entirely escape the minimalist logic of the Internet. That would require considerable skill, and I’m no graphic designer. But maybe I could pull in a different direction? So I chose a starting point about as far from the digital era as one can imagine: a book created 1,300 years ago, on a tidal island off the coast of Northumbria, northeast England.

That island is Lindisfarne, most famous as the site of a monastery that was brutally pillaged by Vikings in 793AD. A few generations earlier, a bishop called Eadfrith had made the book now known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. It is a strange, mesmerising, extraordinarily beautiful artefact; an early example of the lavishly decorated (or “illuminated”) manuscripts that would become treasures of medieval art. It comes from a world in which books were revered not just for their religious significance, but because they were extremely rare and difficult to produce, requiring years of patient labour in the scriptoria of monasteries.

Eadfrith reportedly worked for a decade on the Lindisfarne Gospels, which is actually quite brisk when one considers the endless prayer and toil demanded by monastic life, not mention his responsibilities as a prominent bishop. One hundred and fifty calfskins supply the book’s pages, a considerable investment. He managed to create dozens of exquisite colours using, for the most part, a handful of local pigment materials. Clearly he wasn’t lacking in purpose. For such artists, says former British Library curator Dr Michelle Brown, “the act of making [was] a symbolic sacrifice on behalf of all human kind and all creation.” Should not that be the spirit in which we compose every Substack post?

Joking aside, we share greater affinities with the people that made and treasured illuminated manuscripts than one might think. Our visual experience has become so flat, standardised, and mediated that we can well appreciate the aura which surrounded rare works of manual skill and physical beauty. Besides, as I argued in a recent essay on the future of reading, declining literacy may mean that, before long, the culture of books will again belong to a small, dedicated minority.

Anyway, I chose a few pages from Eadfrith’s book and tried to come up with some kind of contemporary interpretation. It didn’t quite take me a decade of work, though it did involve some trial and error and doing things by hand. Starting with reasonably complex designs, I gradually simplified them while trying not to lapse into default minimalism. A solution of sorts was to incorporate patterned papers from Shepherds, a wonderful bookbinding store in Victoria, London. I used drawing and collage because I find such things satisfying, and because they ensured a degree of imperfection that seemed appropriate for the DIY ethos of Substack.

The keyhole motif emerged more or less spontaneously, though I think it has some nice resonances in the context of writing as a means of exploration and a quest for understanding.

There has recently been another bout of anxiety about the future of reading, after a study reported a steep drop in the percentage of Americans who read for enjoyment. Similar patterns have been found in numerous other countries; reading appears to be in decline everywhere. A few months back, I wrote an in-depth essay about this trend for First Things magazine, which I can now republish here.

My take differs from most others in three ways. First, I emphasise that, if we are heading for a world in which only a small proportion of us can read proficiently, then were are just returning to the historical norm. The era of mass literacy was the anomaly. Second, during that era of mass literacy, many people read only for news, entertainment, and distraction – the same purposes for which they later turned to TV and then smartphones. So when we think about the consequences of declining literacy, we should remember that there were relatively few “serious” readers to begin with (which doesn’t mean the consequences won’t still be very significant). Finally, I argue that the practice of reading, and literature more broadly, can still flourish in the future, even if only a very small part of society engages with it.

You, of course, can be part of that wise minority who keep the sacred flame of reading alive. And why not start now, with my essay on the future of reading?

“More is read now in a year than was read before in a hundred years.” So declared Lectura Popular, a Catholic publication aimed at the working classes of Chile, in September 1889. Such was the public’s appetite for written materials, the magazine warned, that “readings are devoured and that is why people become sick.” Peasants moving to the cities were adapting their traditional forms of poetry, orally transmitted for generations, to cover politics, scandal, and social commentary. These lira popular, or “people’s lyres,” were printed on cheap leaflets and hawked in the markets and train stations of Santiago. A contemporary account captures their resonance:

The announcement of a new broadside by ­Guajardo circulated throughout the morning in the warehouse district . . . and by the afternoon one could see a group of men, huddled in a corner of a street or a building under construction, smoking cigarettes and reading unhurriedly, as if to savor down to the last detail the emotions of their small Homer.

It was in response to this unruly print culture, notes University of California professor Juan ­Poblete, that social reformers launched publications such as Lectura Popular, hoping to channel mass literacy toward respectable ends.

What was happening in Chile was happening across much of Europe and the Americas in the latter half of the nineteenth century: a dramatic growth in the practice of reading. It was a development without precedent in history. Whereas reading had previously been confined to an educated minority, it was now being taken up by an expanding middle class and even by the laboring poor. As Jonathan Rose has documented, there were by the early twentieth century formidable strands of intellectual culture within Britain’s working classes, based on the efforts of individual autodidacts, mutual help societies, and eventually cheap editions of the classics. Factory workers, domestic servants, and policemen read and discussed Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Hardy. As one Welsh miner recalled, “guidance in the choice of good books came to me deep down in the pit, in the darkness and dark dust of a narrow tunnel more than a thousand feet below the earth’s surface.”

This great reading boom started going into reverse with the arrival of television in the mid-twentieth century. Today, the decline is accelerating. The most startling changes are observable in higher education, including at prestigious universities. College students have an unusual amount of time to read and encouragement to do it, allowing them to establish intellectual habits for later life. For a number of years, though, I’ve heard professors complain that students can no longer cope with their reading assignments. Last fall, a widely shared report in The Atlantic, by Rose Horowitch, highlighted the problem at elite colleges in the United States. Academics say that, for the current generation of students, “the reading load feels impossible.” They have difficulty concentrating for extended periods, following plotlines, and registering details. They arrive with “a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have.” Some were never required to finish an entire book in high school.

Surveys suggest a steady erosion of reading in developed countries. Twenty years ago, a group of sociologists summarizing the latest evidence could report that “most Americans and Europeans read during their leisure time.” Seventy percent had read novels, short stories, poems, or plays over a twelve-month period. In the U.S. today, by contrast, less than half manage at least one book per year. Between 2004 and 2018, those reading for pleasure on a given day fell from 28 percent to 19 percent, and the average American’s daily reading time is now around fifteen minutes. In the UK, meanwhile, the median person read just three books during the past year, and 40 percent read none. Studies in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines report that reading is on the wane.

The picture among school pupils suggests that further declines await. Last year, the National Assessment of Education Progress in the United States found historically high rates of thirteen-to-fourteen-year-olds and nine-to-ten-year-olds with “below basic” reading skills, with negative trends evident across race and class lines. In both the United States and the UK, fewer children and teenagers are reading for enjoyment.

These developments deserve serious attention, but we should remind ourselves what an unusual activity reading has been throughout most of history. Discerning literacy rates for earlier eras is an imprecise business—­especially as there are many forms and degrees of literacy—but it is safe to say that, in the vast majority of societies that have existed, most people had neither the ability nor the opportunity to read, and would have found literacy of little use anyway.

To be sure, literacy was necessary for societies to grow beyond a rudimentary stage of com­plexity. By the second millennium b.c., writing had sprung from three separate sources—in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China’s Yellow River valley—and was being used to manage the resources of royal ­palaces and to record various other things: law codes and legal agreements, loans and dowries, rituals and medical recipes, prayers, spells, divinations, and astrological ideas. Yet this work required only a tiny elite of scribes and priests; the vast majority lived and worked on the land. Even in the Roman Empire, a sophisticated society with a considerable literary output, rates of literacy were as low as 10 to 15 percent, and in some regions much lower. Reading was concentrated, again, in centers of commerce and bureaucracy: cities, coastal regions, and military frontiers.

The ability to print text mechanically, rather than copying it by hand, helped literacy to expand—but only to a point. Before the modern era, the idea of educating the masses did not much appeal to rulers or to the literate minority, who tended to be jealous of their skills. The first boom in printed literature occurred in China under the Song dynasty, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries a.d. Historians have credited the Song dynasty with fostering a common culture across a large territory, but it did so mainly by creating a vast civil service steeped in Confucian scholarship, “a governing elite,” as Michael Wood puts it, “that was unique in world history and would be for centuries.” Likewise unusual in the Middle ­Ages was Judaism, which encouraged all men to read and study the Torah. In medieval Christendom, by contrast, Bibles, books of hours, and psalters were revered as objects, but it is probable that, in 1400, only about one in ten Europeans was fully literate (and still fewer could read Latin, the language of intellectual life). The arrival of printing increased literacy only gradually, as people usually listened to texts being read aloud. By the early eighteenth century, most inhabitants of England still could not sign their names.

The decline of reading in our day represents a move toward the historical norm, not away from it. The new element is the circumstances in which the decline is happening. The effect of networked digital devices is brutally ­obvious. During the 2010s, readers seemed to share an almost universal realization that to read in a deep and sustained way required of them more effort than it once had. We felt our brains being rewired in real time, our attention becoming weaker even as powerful new demands were placed on it. Social media platforms are exciting centers of discourse, the lira popular of our time. They are also akin to a drug epidemic, with interfaces designed to hijack the limbic system and make the mind dependent on their rapid patterns of stimulation. Nor is this the only way smartphones override deeper thought processes. Their constant proximity means that social networking, entertainment, and the demands of work are not so much in your pocket as always in the back of your mind. In France, a recent study found that half of young readers now engage with other media, such as sending messages or watching videos, while they read.

But we need to look beyond a simple economics of attention to understand why reading is embattled today. For one thing, written culture is part of the content overload. In terms of sheer volume of words and sentences, we probably read more than ever—the problem being that text messages, emails, and social media posts calibrate our minds to the fragmented and ephemeral. In a subtler way, serious reading and writing have been sucked into a high-volume, low-status digital model. A depressing portion of the “books” I consulted for this essay were PDF files that I skimmed with tired eyes on a laptop screen; the university library where I have a membership has almost entirely stopped stocking new titles in physical form. This development may reflect the fact that, in the academic world, far too much is published for even fellow specialists to appreciate. A good deal of reading now feels like a listless Netflix binge. At Substack, a platform that allows writers to build audiences through subscriptions, high output is regarded as a good strategy for growth, leading to a glut of blogs and essays that ultimately devalue their own art.

Meanwhile, the wider framework of customs and ideals that once supported reading is crumbling. The moments in which people used to open their books—the advent of railway travel contributed to the growth of reading—are being overwhelmed by less structured, more frantic and distracted lives. More important still, reading formerly had prestige as a means to becoming an educated person, in the sense of cultivated rather than merely credentialed. Great literature was rightly regarded as providing intellectual ­resources for a meaningful life, just as a wide and active reading habit provided tools for citizenship. Today, a different set of attitudes toward knowledge and self-worth are making reading seem superfluous. In my experience as a teacher of British teenagers, many schools treat literature as an ordeal to be ­negotiated by means of approved formulaic responses. ­Jonathan Malesic, another professor who has drastically cut his students’ reading assignments, notes that “for decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else,” while absorbing from the broader culture a sense that “success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies.” With these assumptions, Malesic asks, “why should they make the effort to read?”

The loss of reading proficiency among students is of particular significance because they would otherwise represent the bulk of future readers. In 2005, commenting on the declines in mass reading that had been apparent already for half a century, the sociologist Wendy Griswold emphasized that “reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites.” There was, she said, “a reading class,” a “self-perpetuating minority” of educated people whose reading habits were both more prolific than, and independent of, the casual forms of reading typically found in other sections of society. This reading class is now shrinking. In some ways, however, it is also becoming more conscious of itself as a group.

According to Horowitch’s Atlantic article, students regard their peers who read books as members of an anachronistic subculture, like collectors of vinyl records. Many of these young readers no doubt see themselves in the same way, especially as virtual spaces like BookTok provide them with a berth amid social media’s constellation of niche cultural identities. Reading has also become a marker of the conspicuously cultured middle-class consumer, a species whose preferences are reflected in the trappings of the typical bookshop: good coffee, progressive politics, expensive stationery, and tote bags. Latent in these conjunctions of reading with lifestyle and media is a phenomenon that Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness,” a tendency toward “exploring and demonstrating love for the book as symbol, art form, and artefact.” Rather than receptacles of knowledge or literature, books are becoming objects of aesthetic desire in their own right. This no doubt reflects a wish to save reading from the uninspiring morass of digital content, but it also suggests how, increasingly, one might acquire a book in the way one acquires designer furniture—as something to associate oneself with and to savor the thought of, but not necessarily to use very often.

Corresponding with these shifts, we see a tendency to frame the benefits of reading in personal and therapeutic terms. Proponents of reading often make it sound like exercise or a healthy diet. “Quite simply, reading is good for you,” says the CEO of one charity. In a detailed study of women’s reading groups, María Angélica Olave emphasizes that fiction provides opportunities for emotional growth, reflection, and “self-care.” Many of her respondents talk about reading as a luxury or indulgence, reflecting the deep pleasure they find in it as well as their perception of its intrinsically private nature.

Such findings may not be fully applicable to male readers, since the sexes have quite different relationships with reading. From an early age and across many societies, women tend to read more, develop more sophisticated literacy skills, and form a greater preference for fiction. Nonetheless, the decline of reading has surely been exacerbated by its drift over time into the domain of personal leisure activities, leaving us without ready arguments for its social and public value. The flight of young people away from humanities subjects over the past decade not only reveals a more hard-nosed attitude to employment qualifications; it also reflects a general perception of literary pursuits as pointless and somewhat decadent. Yet as Olave ­observes in her study of fiction lovers, the imaginative “­enchantment” involved even in middlebrow reading has profound social implications. Individuals who engage with the lives and thoughts of others in a sustained way have an enriched perspective on the world. They may be better equipped to model the experiences and motivations of people around them, to develop their own beliefs more ­coherently, and to grasp intuitively the depth and complexity of human affairs.

This raises the question of the wider consequences of the decline of reading. Adam Garfinkle is among those who argue that it is undermining the political culture on which democracy depends, most notably by fueling the growth of irrational populism. Garfinkle is especially concerned about the loss of “deep literacy,” a competence earned through careful engagement with longer texts, whose benefits include “nurturing our capacity for abstract thought, enabling us to pose and answer difficult questions, empowering our creativity and imagination, and refining our capacity for empathy.” The transition from deep literacy to social media, as Garfinkle portrays it, is driving us into mental prisons of unexamined prejudice and tribal emotion, where we are prey to manipulation and incapable of independent thought.

Intuitively, it certainly seems as though the mental powers we develop through certain kinds of reading—powers of questioning, supposing, forming connections, interrogating our own ­responses—are valuable for societies that aspire to self-government, and especially societies that face formidable pressures of propaganda and groupthink. As is often pointed out, the language and intellectual rigor with which we conduct politics today are almost absurdly impoverished by contrast with even a single lifetime ago, when the utterances of public figures were routinely strewn with literary references. Such prowess in rhetoric and debate was surely not window dressing. And yet, the question remains whether “deep literacy” was ever very widespread. Was it achieved, for instance, by the workers reading lira popular in Chile at the turn of the twentieth century? No doubt many countries had some equivalent of the British miners quoting Shakespeare at the coalface, but how common were these autodidacts?

A 1957 report by the British academic Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, criticized working-class newspapers and magazines in terms remarkably similar to those leveled at social media today. According to Hoggart, this popular culture left its readers unable to engage in abstract argument, to look beyond their personal perspectives, or to be sufficiently skeptical. “There must be no connected sequences of any length,” he complained. “Everything is interesting, as interesting as the next thing, if only it is short, unconnected, and pepped-up. . . . One doesn’t read such papers; one ‘looks at’ them.” Broadly concurring with Hoggart’s analysis of the press, Ross McKibbin adds that, in England before the Second World War, “there was no common literature and the reading public was remarkably segmented,” with men’s fiction being “almost exclusively sport, sex, . . . crime, and violence.”

It may be, in other words, that in its heyday, the appeal of reading for much of the population was similar to that of the audiovisual media that later supplanted it. Of course those who did become precocious readers of highbrow literature might still, within the complex workings of the body politic, have contributed something significant. At the very least, though, we should be careful not to overstate the importance of reading for democracy, political liberalism, or other modern developments that we associate with intellectual autonomy and maturity. It is a predictable conceit of those who spend a lot of time with books to underestimate the importance of the active life—of commerce, innovation, ­material resources, and common sense. Besides, one need not look far to find literacy implicated in fanaticism and oppression.

In Europe, the high point of reading in the first half of the twentieth century coincided with its most destructive outbreaks of organized violence, conformity, and mass hysteria. The written word can indoctrinate as well as liberate. The most printed book in history, with the exception of the Bible, is Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Joseph Stalin, who referred to authors as “engineers of the soul,” is said to have responded thus when confronted about the mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers during the Second World War:

You have, I know, read Dostoevsky? Do you see what a complicated thing is man’s soul, his psyche? Well then, imagine a man who has fought from Stalingrad to Belgrade—over thousands of kilometres of his own devastated land, across the dead bodies of his comrades and dearest ones. How can such a man react normally? And what is so awful in his amusing himself with a woman, after such horrors?

Even if these remarks were delivered cynically, there is an important lesson here about the evils that can be rationalized through literary virtues such as emotional insight and appreciation of human complexity.

Whatever the long-term consequences for ­society, the current crisis of reading might not be a bad thing for the practice of reading itself. A future in which proficient, active readers continue to decline as a share of population, perhaps returning to a historical norm of one in ten, or even less, may still be a world in which the literary arts flourish.

If this sounds paradoxical, consider that there are more ways of judging the health of a cultural form than numerical participation. Downsizing can be traumatic, but what matters is the vitality of what emerges from it. The world is full of activities and skilled disciplines that thrive with relatively small numbers—in music, sports, artistic and craft practices, and countless other fields. Scale is not irrelevant, but beyond some minimum cultural footprint, scale matters less than the ability of such undertakings to provide their practitioners with a path to beauty, satisfaction, and accomplishment, and with a community that shares in the pursuit of those things.

Will reading, in an increasingly post-literate world, support such a practice? The answer is surely yes. For those with the means and inclination to read, there will still be excellent reasons to do so. Literature has provided so many important themes and ideas that cultures will continue to ring with references to them, and their unfamiliarity will make them all the more alluring. Once discovered, the extraordinary riches of this literary inheritance will justify the time and effort needed to enjoy them. Developing a reading habit will probably require even more discipline in the future, as it falls further out of step with the surrounding culture. If new communication technologies place less emphasis on written messages—replacing them, for instance, with audio formats—many people will do no reading at all on a regular basis. But it is precisely this effort, and this sense of cultivating a rare faculty, that will give reading a sacred quality for those who commit to it.

The ongoing saturation of life by media will no doubt influence the kinds of literature that people choose to read, and to write. The provision of information will become less important; style, charisma, and richness of thought will become more so. If writers no longer need to appeal to a wide audience, then literature could well become more esoteric in style and more elitist in outlook.

The social standing of this literate minority is difficult to predict. Much depends on the degree of prestige accorded to reading in education and elite circles. In earlier societies, in which literacy was rare, it had a high practical value as an instrument of administrative and ideological power. It is difficult to imagine readers of the future achieving mandarin status of this kind, but they may prove to have qualities that are desirable in certain roles or as a form of social distinction. Nor should we overlook the ancient association of literacy with religious functions. That reading enables a kind of communion with ancestors is an uncanny detail we tend to overlook but which may appear more significant when fewer people can do it. Assuming such positions will not be filled by the descendants of ChatGPT, familiarity with scriptures and histories could again be regarded as a priestly calling. Alternatively, the technological society may result in a perception of reading as entirely obsolete, both as a skill and as a mark of status.

In the nearer term, I would bet that reading will evolve into something analogous to classical music. Though it retains a presence in the broader culture, its primary audience skews toward the educated, and though it remains lively and has avant-garde elements, it is also rooted in history. Surveys from the U.S. and UK suggest that just over 10 percent of people play a musical instrument, and just under 5 percent do so in front of an audience (though admittedly this statistic includes all forms of music, not just classical). These figures could plausibly correspond to future numbers of occasional and ­serious readers. Just as a much larger percentage listen to classical music, there will be a wider sphere of people who maintain some contact with literary culture and ideas, perhaps through audiobooks or adaptations.

Even if the audience becomes very small, people will continue to write. The economist and tech evangelist Tyler Cowen recently advised authors that their work should be aimed not at human readers but at artificial intelligence. Since algorithms will manage access to knowledge in the future, our intellectual legacies depend on them. Our descendants won’t want to “page through a lot of dusty old books to get an inkling of your ideas.” This is probably true in a broad sense, but the depressing prospect of writing to impress some tech company’s software is a useful reminder of where literature’s real, transcendent value lies. It lies in the special bond between author and reader, established in the course of their dialogue through the written word. This bond gives literature the character of a gift, and as long as there are readers to appreciate it, some will want to become authors and give in turn.

I vividly remember, during my summer holidays as a child, waking up excited to watch the cricket test match, only to find that play had been rained off. Again. I would turn on the TV and feel my heart sink at the sight of low, leaden cloud and groundsmen pulling rain covers onto sodden outfields. In hindsight, it was part of the drama of a fair-weather summer sport in a country where summers were rarely fair (and, perhaps, a useful introduction to the disappointments of life). Even when the rain stayed away, the players often wore thick wool jumpers in July.

That feels like another country today. For a few weeks in late spring and early summer, southern England now has arguably the best climate in the world: warm and verdant, with long days and soft breezes. After that, however, come long stretches of baking sun, with very little rain. My family in southern Africa would be appalled to hear me say it, but much of the British summer is simply too hot now. As Duncan Robinson points out in his amusing Bagehot column, Brits have not yet accepted that they live in a hot country, and so have not adapted their habits. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence that excessive heat is detrimental to sleep, appetite, energy levels, mood and cognition, among other things. Hence the finding that people in hot countries reliably buy air conditioning in large numbers once they reach average income levels of around $10,000 annually (a trend which means that, by 2050, India will consume more electricity for air con than the entire African continent will consume for everything). Heat has political implications too. The demonstrations and riots which are becoming a feature of British summers usually happen when temperatures are high. Phrases like “boiling point” and “simmering tensions” are less figurative than they sound.

And this is not the only way that hot spells threaten the legitimacy of the governing classes. Despite the fact that Britain’s public authorities have been anticipating climate change for decades, our buildings and public spaces are still totally unsuited to heat. In fact, the reaction to climate change has made the problem considerably worse. Measures to insulate homes against cold weather, so as to lower carbon emissions from heating, have turned many properties into ovens in hot weather. Air conditioning is likewise discouraged on emissions grounds. Building regulators have decreed that air con can only be installed if passive cooling options – meaning design features that regulate temperature without the use of energy – have been exhausted first. These options, which have not turned out to be very effective in heat waves, include adjacent green spaces, cross ventilation, and tiny windows (passive cooling mandates are one of the reasons that so many new builds in Britain look like prisons).

As a result, almost no new dwellings have been built with air conditioning, and the media is full of angry residents of expensive London apartments suffering in temperatures above 30C. Most perversely, while the government offers subsidies for homeowners to install heat pumps as a green alternative to gas heating systems, those subsidies don’t yet apply if the pump provides air conditioning as well.

The addition of brutal heat to Britain’s cramped apartments and visibly decaying public spaces plays into the fear that the country is entering a quasi-third-world state. According to Politico, London’s tube trains frequently exceed the temperature at which it is legal to transport cattle. When I was researching this subject, my advertising algorithms began targeting me with a British-designed portable cooling system called “Nurabreeze.” Ominously, the makers thought it worth emphasising that it remains functional during power cuts.

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Yet the official preference for passive cooling, though badly implemented, accords with good design principles. It may be, as some have suggested, that filling the English countryside with solar power plants facilitated by Chinese slave labour will soon grant us abundant clean electricity for air conditioning. But even if air con will be necessary in many places, it should not be the first and only way to combat heat. Air con is the kind of solution that encourages architects and planners to ignore the conditions of the places they are designing for, in favour of templates that can be profitably erected anywhere – the classic example being the high-rise apartment building, which is uninhabitable without air conditioning in humid cities. In this sense, it is like flattening a hillside rather than building into its sides, or erasing an existing street plan to replace it with a grid. Such alienated structures risk producing alienated inhabitants.

So why aren’t designers proposing better forms of passive cooling? Actually, they are. The world’s vernacular architectures contain a wealth of cooling methods that predate air conditioning by centuries. Some are very simple, such as high ceilings to allow warmth to rise overhead (a technique used by the Victorians) and shutters to shield large windows from sun (as seen across France). Many structural features are designed to produce shade, like loggias, overhangs, and internal courtyards. Other vernacular methods are more sophisticated, as this study of traditional Iranian architecture suggests.

Of course, modern ingenuity and engineering can be brought to bear on passive cooling as well. A thermal labyrinth, for instance, is an underground structure which passes air through a maze of cool, thermally absorbent surfaces before it enters a building. A house can even be insulated against extremes of temperature by burying it under a mound of earth, much like a Hobbit hole.

So the problem is not a lack of ideas. It is the unlikelihood of the ideas being translated into actual buildings. Partly this is due to the rather hypothetical way that such “solutions” are discussed, whether in academic papers, NGO reports or the media. “This could be a really useful way to combat heat [leaving aside the one-hundred practical obstacles to doing it on a significant scale].” New materials and architectural elements require building regulations to be updated, knowledge to be transmitted and workforces to be trained. Above all, they have to compete on cost, which means good supply chains and economies of scale. Though some think tanks do detailed policy work on design, there generally seems to be a big gap between the idealistic atmosphere in which ideas are generated and the constrained reality where they must be implemented.

On the other hand, it’s not as though British property developers, builders and government bodies are striving to meet the designers half way. Many inventive and graceful approaches to passive cooling should be achievable. Why can’t we have towns of turf-covered houses, apartment buildings with shady courtyards, and housing estates atop thermal labyrinths? It is depressing to realise that the various private and public actors who determine our built environment are collectively incapable of trying new things, and will continue to erect the same generic new builds and plastic-panelled offices come what may.

What the problem of Britain’s hot summers reveals, in other words, is a system that is very bad at delivering creative answers to new problems, and often fails to deliver any answers at all. And so people will have to improvise their own solutions, which will likely come in the form of cheap portable devices like the Nurabreeze. As temperatures continue to rise, such gadgets will multiply and become a familiar feature of our lives, until each of us is walking around in a private microclimate.

This essay was originally published by UnHerd

In an era when “crisis” is the word on everyone’s lips, there are still few places as crisis-stricken as the Horn of Africa, where war, drought, a booming population and a dearth of economic opportunities are making life unbearable for millions. European eyes may glaze over at the news of hardship in Africa, but such apathy looks increasingly untenable given the scale of migration in the 21st century. Somali refugees have been settling in Europe, and Britain especially, since the Nineties. In the 2010s, a wave of Eritreans took the northern route across the Sahara Desert and Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Ethiopian asylum seekers are among those occupying the state-funded hotels which have attracted protests in British towns this summer.

While the Horn of Africa endures some of the worst conditions, huge swathes of the continent experience chaos and deprivation in some degree. To understand the structural reasons for this, we must look at Africa’s cities. Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing an urban transition of a kind unique in history. Though it is currently the world’s least urbanised region, with slightly less than half of its 1.4 billion people living in cities, that proportion is climbing rapidly, driven by phenomenal birth rates and migration from rural areas. In other parts of the world, starting with Britain in the 19th century, movement to cities was accompanied by the growth of manufacturing industries, providing jobs and helping to supply modern infrastructure. In Africa, however, this economic transformation has not yet taken place. Along with its increasingly dry and unpredictable climates, the greatest strain on Africa’s future comes from the simple fact that there is not enough formal employment for its rapidly growing numbers of young, urban people.

As Robert Rotberg has written, sub-Saharan Africa is “experiencing the most rapid population increases anywhere, ever”, such that “half of all the babies born on the planet between now and 2050” will be delivered in the region. African women begin having babies, on average, in their early 20s, meaning that generations compound faster than elsewhere. Thanks to improved medicine, more of those infants, and mothers, now survive.

The population statistics are far from reliable, but those collected by the World Bank at least give a sense of scale. On average, women in sub-Saharan Africa have 4.3 children each. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Chad, they have more than six each. Whereas, in 1975, Africa had half as many people as Europe, by the middle of this century it will have three times more, and the median African will still be in their mid-20s. This growth will be concentrated in urban Africa. The continent has 15 of the world’s 20 fastest-growing cities, and in the coming decades many of its urban centres will double or triple in size.

Many African cities display what appear to be impressive feats of development. Returning to the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa is a case in point. Flush with Chinese and Emirati cash, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is razing much of the city’s historic core and replacing it with grand parks and museums, plazas, hotels and offices. The horizon blooms with skyscrapers and condominiums. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian state has for over two decades been seeking to foster an industrial revolution, directing investment towards factories, railways, housing, and an enormous hydroelectric plant in the form of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. For much of that time, economic growth has averaged an impressive 9% annually.

And yet, behind the glamorous projects and flattering statistics, prosperity remains scarce. Despite Ethiopia’s frighteningly low wages — Ethiopian textile workers earn half as much as those in Bangladesh — the country is struggling to follow East Asian countries along the manufacturing route to development. There is much more automation now, and complex supply chains allow firms to use African workers for discrete tasks, such as assembling components made elsewhere, which don’t add up to proper industries. This leaves few paths towards mass employment or higher-skilled, better-paying jobs.

The struggle to industrialise has grave consequences for political stability. Ethiopia has Africa’s second largest population (though estimates vary significantly), and drought-stricken rural areas are regularly on the verge of famine. Like many African countries, Ethiopia also has deep ethnic divisions, with the army struggling against violent uprisings in three different regions. Young men without hope of employment provide the recruiting pools for local militias, and for the bandit parties that kidnap travellers and employees of foreign businesses.

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As for the shiny precincts of Addis Ababa, these cater to a relatively small middle class that works for the state or has managed to plug into the global service sector. Thousands of less fortunate residents have been forcibly evicted by Abiy’s schemes. Much of the property development in the city is highly speculative, and many projects are never finished. Urban development has been a source of conflict in the past. The previous government’s plans to expand Addis Ababa at the expense of farmers in the surrounding region were abandoned amid protests and violence.

Little wonder that so many Ethiopians, and Africans more generally, do not remain in the cities where they first arrive, but want to emigrate further afield. Thanks to modern media and communication, they know that people elsewhere have better lives and far higher wages, that there are routes for reaching those places, and that some emigrants actually make it. With Europe’s current asylum system, ambitious and determined young men especially have a good chance of being awarded work and residence rights, if they can just get there. But Europe is only the destination for a small percentage of Africa’s emigrants, most of whom move within the continent itself. For Ethiopians, another major migration route flows eastwards across the Red Sea, towards Saudi Arabia. It is a brutal journey along roads littered with decomposing corpses, and those who are not gunned down by Saudi border guards often face appalling exploitation within the Gulf kingdom itself. Millions of Ethiopians try their luck anyway.

Many of Africa’s swelling cities show similar patterns to Addis Ababa. Globalisation has fractured these spaces, allowing small pockets to leap ahead and join the advanced industries of the 21st century, while leaving the rest with Chinese-made phones and consumer goods but few opportunities for training or employment. A large part of the continent’s wealth, such as it is, has come from primary resources like fossil fuels and metals, often extracted by foreign companies, creating small numbers of rich individuals rather than a large body of skilled wage earners. Well over half of urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in slums, lacking reliable access to clean water, sanitation, and other basic services. A still higher proportion earn their living in the informal economy, working as street vendors and casual labourers, smugglers and traders, their businesses and occupations unknown to the government.

Nowhere will the dramas of the African city play out on a larger scale than in Lagos, the Nigerian metropolis on the Atlantic coast. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country by far, and that population is growing rapidly, due to overtake the United States by 2050. Lagos is destined to become one of the world’s largest urban centres. It may eventually merge with coastal cities in four other countries, together forming, as Howard French puts it, “the largest zone of continuous, dense habitation on earth, with something in the order of half a billion people”.

Nigeria has one of Africa’s leading economies, boasting the continent’s largest oil and gas reserves, as well as strengths in manufacturing, tech, finance and other services. Yet 90 million Nigerians are thought to live in extreme poverty. Likewise, Lagos is home to an impressive middle class of educated professionals and businesspeople, but the city cannot keep up with the sheer speed of its own growth. More than 1,000 new inhabitants arrive each day.

According to the Polish-Nigerian political scientist Remi Adekoya, the situation in cities like Lagos is worsened by the bad governance of Nigeria’s narrow political elite. There is, he told me, “huge frustration” and “a feeling of helplessness” among middle-class Nigerians, who are unable to leverage their resources to improve the country since they have “zero influence over the political system”.

One might think that a frustrated middle class combined with large numbers of underemployed young people would make Nigerian cities ripe for political unrest. But Adekoya says there are powerful factors working against such a possibility. One is simply repression. “They know that their governments are ruthless, and will not hesitate to send out soldiers on the streets to shoot at them,” he says. Another is religion, which plays an important role in the lives of most Africans, and can lead them to interpret inequality in terms of divine favour. Finally, there is the fear that political convulsions will lead to Nigeria — like Ethiopia and many other African nations composed of different groups ­­— “descending into ethnic-based civil war”.

Instead, political disillusionment has encouraged what Adekoya calls “a form of escapism”, whereby middle-class people focus their energies on the private sphere. Many have opted for a more literal escape too. A large diaspora of talented Nigerians is making its mark overseas, in countries like Britain, where it has been notably successful in politics, business, the arts, and many other fields. Between 2017-2023, about 100,000 Nigerians departed to study in the UK. 75,000 nurses left Nigeria over the same period. Polls regularly report that 60-70% of young Nigerians are eager to relocate to other countries.

This is not just a problem for Nigeria, of course. Somewhere in the region of 70,000-100,000 trained professionals leave Africa each year. In Britain, we tend to discuss the morality of immigration rather myopically in terms of the value of openness, the merits of diversity and the benefits to our economy, rarely considering the cost to poorer countries of losing their most educated and ambitious young citizens. Yet there is surely a cost when a third of African scientists live outside the continent, when there are more Zimbabwean midwives in Britain than in Zimbabwe, and more Ethiopian physicians in Chicago than in Addis Ababa. The World Health Organisation predicts that sub-Saharan Africa will face a deficit of 5.3 million health workers by 2050.

But as European governments struggle with rising anti-immigration sentiment, they are now most concerned with reducing the numbers that are coming to the continent illegally or to claim asylum. According to the current consensus, endorsed by Britain’s Labour government as well, this is best achieved by investing in Africa to address the conditions that spur migration, and to bribe African governments to act as an advance border control. In theory, this diplomatic approach can tie in with other European agendas in Africa, such as gaining access to natural resources, combatting radical Islam and checking Chinese and Russian influence.

The British government last year pledged £84 million to address factors driving migration in North and East Africa, through a combination of skills programmes and humanitarian aid. But the real champion of this African strategy is Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who has consistently pushed something called the Mattei Plan for Africa. A series of meetings with African leaders has resulted in a scheme for €5.5 billion of investment in energy, education, health and agriculture across more than a dozen African countries. Italy wants help stemming migration in the Mediterranean, while looking to benefit from African oil and gas.

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This summer, the Mattei Plan was officially folded into EU policy, as Meloni staged a joint summit with European commission president Ursula von der Leyen in Rome. They announced funding for a railway in the Lobito Corridor, an area rich in strategic minerals that links Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola. They also committed to debt relief and an undersea cable linking Europe with East Africa.

But Europe’s stance is not quite as it appears. The key goals guiding the EU’s investment in Africa are “sustainable growth” and an “inclusive, green and digital” economic transformation. These are the same policy clichés preferred by most of the Western NGOs supporting development in the continent. The problem, as numerous African politicians and activists have pointed out, is that no other region has successfully developed its economy by green or sustainable means; they have all relied on the intensive use of fossil fuels to foster industrialisation. There is as yet no proven path to development through renewables, let alone through digital technology, and the evidence in Africa is hardly promising so far. Almost half of Africans lack reliable electricity, while three quarters of those in rural areas have no internet access.

The grim truth is that European leaders and development agencies do not want Africa to turn into an even bigger China sitting just across the Mediterranean; a powerful industrialised region with over two billion people, placing enormous demands on the world’s resources and producing vast quantities of carbon emissions. Like infrastructure investments which facilitate the extraction of natural resources, contributions to “sustainable growth” in Africa are a cynical form of generosity. They really amount to paying Africans to remain poor.

And yet, Meloni was surely right when she said at the recent summit in Rome, “Africa is the continent where our future is most at stake.” The Mediterranean and even the Sahara are no longer clear civilisational borders; millions of people in Europe now have family ties with Africa. Short of dramatically different immigration policies, or breakthroughs in automation that reduce demand for foreign labour, it is difficult to see how these connections will not continue to grow. Asylum systems will need to change if European governments are to address popular anger over porous borders and immigration. But Africa will soon have a larger working age population than India or China, and there will be plenty of economic interests clamouring to use that workforce on our own ageing continent.

For Africa itself, the greatest challenge remains that of providing its burgeoning numbers of young people with livelihoods to meet their needs and ambitions — something which can only be accomplished within the continent’s new urban worlds. If it fails this challenge, then the pressure valve of emigration will not be enough to prevent growing political instability, an outcome that is already manifest in many African countries. Cities will be the engines of Africa’s transformation, or the ultimate symbols of its tragedy.

A few weeks ago, the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. His best known work, After Virtue, is an extraordinary book. Despite its considerable impact over the past few decades (it was published in 1981), it still reads as a startlingly original, radical critique of modern society, and of moral philosophy itself. Essentially, MacIntyre argues that we have lost the ability to think coherently about what constitutes a good life. To rectify this situation, we have to look beyond our own time and place, viewing our assumptions in a broader cultural perspective; but we also have to consider human life on a more intimate scale, noting the kinds of social settings and narrative structures through which it tends to unfold. I’m no moral philosopher, but this bifocal curiosity, attentive to the unfamiliar as well as the taken-for-granted, strikes me as a compelling way to try to understand the world.

“We have to learn from history and anthropology of the variety or moral practices, beliefs and conceptual schemes,” writes MacIntryre in a preface to After Virtue. An awareness of variety does not, however, lead him to conclude that morality is arbitrary. After Virtue begins with a rejection of what he calls emotivism: the belief, characteristic to modern society, that moral judgements are ultimately just expressions of personal preference, and so cannot be rationally justified. Emotivism, for MacIntyre, is the product of a moral culture which has dramatically lost its bearings. By way of analogy, he asks us to imagine a world in which the natural sciences have been almost wiped out in a political upheaval, and later only partially recovered, so that “all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance; … instruments whose use has been forgotten; half-chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred.” This, according to MacIntyre, is the state of morality today.

How did this come about? The thesis of After Virtue is that a great rupture occurred during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, only to be subsequently forgotten. Philosophers of that era abandoned the notion of telos, or “man-as-he-could-be,” an ideal state which human beings have the potential to achieve. The purpose of moral principles, or more particularly moral virtues, is to guide us towards our telos. Once we lose the crucial concepts of character and potential, we are left with a morality consisting of abstract rules, or an acceptance of “human nature” as it is, or judgements about particular actions removed from their proper context. As MacIntyre illustrates with abundant examples, ranging from the Homeric epics to Jane Austen, different cultures have developed their own understandings of the good life and the virtues necessary for it. Yet all are part of a greater human quest for moral truth that each society, and each individual, must undertake from a given starting point.

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But while the virtues often find lasting expression in great works of literature and philosophy, they do not originate in the minds of intellectuals. Rather, they emerge organically from the practices that constitute culture. This is the aspect of MacIntyre’s theory which most resonates with me, not least because it shows how, even if modern society is as morally defective as he claims, we still have the resources on a more local level to live with purpose.

A practice is an activity involving skill and knowledge, in which people strive to achieve things that they consider to be valuable in and of themselves. In certain cases, a practice might also be called a discipline, a field, an art or a vocation. Practices are social in the sense that those pursuing them form a kind of community, and they are open-ended, evolving from one generation to the next. Examples of practices (some from MacIntyre, some not) could include painting and piano playing, boxing and ballet, photography, football and fashion design, astronomy and gastronomy, acting and architecture, mathematics and historiography, carpentry and medicine, gardening and fishing, singing, surfing, and scientific research, to name but a few.

Such activities provide not just pleasure but deep emotional nourishment, in specific ways that only those who in engage in them can appreciate. They allow us to develop our talents and capacities. And as MacIntyre emphasises, they require us to cultivate moral virtues, whether we realise it or not. Humility, for instance, is necessary for anyone entering a practice; in order to learn, the beginner must first accept that his opinion is not just as valid as anyone else’s. Similarly, practices demand honesty and integrity, for if we love the practice we will value its health more highly than our own self-interest. They demand perseverance and fortitude, without which no practice can be mastered. The list goes on.

As someone who is interested in the role of artefacts in human life, it can’t escape my notice that many practices also rely on tools, instruments, and objects of various kinds (the design and fabrication of which often constitutes a practice unto itself). While buying equipment can never substitute for commitment and skill, part of the satisfaction of a practice comes from an intimate familiarity with the artefacts involved. This is obviously not the focus of MacIntryre’s philosophy; and yet, any theory of human flourishing and virtue that is grounded in an appreciation of culture will, at least implicitly, show the importance of our relationship with inanimate things.

I haven’t written all that much about AI – maybe I should. A short piece for UnHerd, reproduced below, allowed me to sketch some ideas about the significance of the technology for those of us who strive to produce culture.

I am curious about people’s attitudes to this new generation of machines (the word “tool” is misleading, I think). Are you eagerly embracing it? Wearily resigned? Unsure what the fuss is about? Do write and tell me, if you care to.

On Thursday, British MPs voted against a proposal to limit the ability of artificial intelligence companies to violate copyright law. Introduced by Baroness Kidron, a filmmaker and peer, the amendment would have required firms to disclose any copyrighted work used to train their algorithms. It was the latest desperate effort by artists and creative professionals to protect their intellectual property from AI. The government, no less desperate to make Britain attractive to tech firms, plans to make it easier for them to use material without permission.

Technology secretary Peter Kyle has previously scolded protesting artists for “resisting change,” as though mass copyright infringements were an inevitable historical process, rather than a consequence of the tech industry having the British government over a barrel. (It comes as no surprise that Kyle made these remarks at a conference hosted by leading AI chipmaker Nvidia).

On the same day as MPs were rejecting Kidron’s amendment, a more honest assessment came from former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg. Fresh from his 7-year stint as the cuddly face of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, Clegg admitted it is “a matter of natural justice” that artists should be able to opt out of feeding their work into AI content mills. The problem with making firms ask permission to use existing work, Clegg said, was that they would simply threaten to leave: “If you did it in Britain and no one else did it, you would basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”

Clegg is quite right to speak in terms of justice. Though rarely followed to the letter, creative copyright reflects an ethical code that the makers of culture share with each other. By discouraging outright theft, it allows individual contributions to exist in public as a common pool of creative resources, one we can all borrow, adapt and draw inspiration from. By contrast, AI software seeks to soak up the entire cultural reservoir so that it can churn out artistic media on an industrial scale, turning a public good into private profit and degrading it in the process. It is not only a theft from individual artists; it is the theft of culture itself.

Yet Clegg is also right to suggest that creative practitioners are now essentially powerless to stop this development. The problem is that, over the past two decades, they have been duped into participating in a digital economy where their role has been to produce “content” for the benefit of Big Tech. Too many bought into the idealistic talk of creative industries and artistic entrepreneurship. A very small number became spectacularly successful, but most ended up sharing their work for nothing, or next to nothing, while helping to draw consumers to platforms like Spotify, Youtube and Instagram. These companies presented themselves as a new kind of artistic commons, but the crucial detail was that they now owned the commons.

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Artists thought they were working for themselves, but they were working for the companies that owned the digital realm all along. Their music, films, images and ideas became a new kind of resource – data – that would, in due course, help to make possible the software that now threatens to overwhelm them with oceans of slop.

Creatives are right to make a stand on behalf of their copyright – they should fight for their interests as far as they can – but it is likely to be too little, too late. The trap has closed, and the exploitative logic inherent to Internet 2.0 has reached its predictable conclusion. As they consider what cultural paradigm might emerge in the post-AI world, they should also ask why they did not see this coming.

You may have read my recent essay on China’s rise as an economic superpower. Following that piece, Persuasion magazine asked me if I’d be interested in looking at the other side of the coin. Is the Chinese economy really all it’s made out to be? Whatever its advantages vis-à-vis the United States, does the country not have weaknesses of its own? These are good questions, rightly suspecting that there is an illusory aspect to China’s ascendancy.

So here is the essay I wrote for Persuasion, which they published under the headline China’s Economy Is Weaker Than You Think.

“If you want to strike China on the cheek, China will strike you back.” So declared Victor Gao, a lawyer and vocal supporter of China’s ruling Communist Party, in a recent debate with former U.S. State Department official Elliott Abrams. The two were sparring on a Saudi news network, but Gao’s remarks were quoted approvingly in the China Daily, a paper owned by the CCP’s propaganda department. His toe-to-toe, blow-for-blow defiance was typical of the tone that China’s leadership adopted at the outset of their latest trade war with America. As Donald Trump ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods, ultimately reaching 145%, China implemented its own 125% tariffs and insisted that it was not interested in negotiation unless Trump retreated from his policy first.

That pride and bellicosity are consistent with how the world views China at the moment—a tightly-run ship moving into a Chinese Century and in position to be the prime beneficiary as the United States self-destructs. But a closer look shows that the picture is much more complicated. China has gotten very good at hiding high debt rates and low income levels in the economic face it presents to the world. Government interference in the economy has resulted in prodigious waste and overinvestment in unproductive sectors. China’s dizzying growth is real, but the underlying strength of the economy will be seriously tested in the trade war.

The Trade War

Going into this uncertain period, China does seem to have a few trump cards in its hand. Put simply, Chinese imports are more difficult for the United States to replace than vice-versa. Among the goods supplied by China—which has a $300 billion trade surplus with the United States—are valuable shipments of smartphones and computers, industrial machinery, and rare-earth minerals (used in various high-tech products such as EV batteries and advanced weaponry). American exports to China also comprise some sophisticated goods like aircraft parts and chemicals, but are weighted towards fossil fuels and agricultural products (soybeans were the biggest single export in 2024). What is more, around 40% of U.S. imports from China are components used by America’s own manufacturing sector. So Trump’s tariffs will hurt not just American consumers, but American factories and farms, the same parts of the economy that he is supposedly trying to support.

China can also seek other destinations for its exports. It is true that many countries will be reluctant to accept an overspill of cheap Chinese goods, which would undercut domestic competition, but nor will U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have an easy time marshalling allies to his own cause. China has used its position as a global manufacturing hub to dominate the supply chains for many crucial resources and products. Japan, India, and Australia are among the major economies that trade more with China than with the United States, and they will not find Chinese imports any easier to replace than America will.

Then there is the question of social and political resilience. Given the country’s speech restrictions and dearth of reliable data, it’s difficult to judge the attitudes of Chinese people towards their government. But the fervent nationalism of the China Daily is likely closer to the popular sentiment than most Westerners realise. The historian Odd Arne Westad has compared contemporary China to 19^th century Europe in its embrace of nationalist ideologies. I have personally heard young Chinese people insist that the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, which ended with the Communist government massacring its own citizens, were really organized by Americans. The Chinese state can draw on such sentiments to justify the hardships produced by an extended confrontation with the United States, whereas even Trump’s committed supporters are not united behind his eccentric trade policies.

China’s Liabilities

And yet, all of this amounts to just half of the story. We might ask why, if China’s position is so secure, has it already softened its position, agreeing to negotiate with the American tariffs still in place? Talks began in Switzerland earlier this month after Chinese state media signalled the leadership’s openness to dialogue, leading to a temporary agreement to lower tariffs on both sides. Or consider another discrepancy. If China is such an economic powerhouse, selling its goods around the world, why do we keep hearing that it is drowning in debt? Why, for that matter, do Chinese people remain on average so poor, with a disposable income per head of less than $6,000 each year?

These questions point to the fact that, for all its undoubted strengths, China’s economic model has profound weaknesses, and the two are closely linked. The country is so dominant when it comes to making and building things because the state has structured the economy to prioritize massive investments in housing, infrastructure, and manufacturing. Many Chinese firms are effectively subsidized to one degree or another, and frequently produce more than China or the world wants to buy. The nation’s warehouses bulge with unsold stock, its urban lots with abandoned cars and share bikes, all casualties of ill-conceived government schemes. The problem, aside from waste, is that these investments have long yielded diminishing returns in terms of sustainable economic growth. China has therefore become dependent on growing levels of debt.

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The consensus among economists is that China desperately needs to shift towards higher levels of household spending. Rather than pumping cash into more railways, cars, and factory machinery, the government should try to raise the spending power of Chinese consumers, creating domestic demand for goods and services. It has taken some tentative steps in this direction, but China’s economy and society have already become too brittle for the Party to risk dramatic reforms. So for the most part, it has doubled down on borrowing and investment in pursuit of an increasingly hollow image of development.

Xiang Songzuo, an economist at Beijing’s Renmin University, summarized the country’s problems bluntly in 2019: “Basically China’s economy is all built on speculation and everything is over-leveraged.” The most infamous example was the real estate sector, a gigantic bubble that accounted for more than a quarter of national economic output before collapsing in 2021. As a result, tens of millions of apartments have no residents, millions have been sold but not finished, and those that are inhabited are declining in value. That is not to mention the financial losses incurred by local governments and large companies. But the implosion of the property market has not slowed down Chinese borrowing. To the contrary, government sector debt, including local government financing vehicles and associated funds, stood at 124% of GDP in 2024, while China’s total debt was measured at 312% of GDP. Both figures have risen steeply over the past five years.

Ordinary Chinese have paid a steep price for the state’s focus on infrastructure and industry. Household income has lagged behind economic growth, and, despite having a communist government, China’s welfare services remain meagre. Social spending is kept down in part by the hukou system of residency permits, which denies China’s vast army of rural migrant workers access to healthcare and unemployment insurance, pension benefits, or schooling in the cities where they toil. Putting aside basic questions of justice, households in such circumstances do not provide a lot of demand for goods and services, since they have to save to insure against hardship and debt.

Nor does their insecurity bode well for the CCP’s vision of a high-skilled, high-tech economy. The Chinese education system remains poor overall, especially in rural areas where the hukou system confines 70% of children. Meanwhile, the manufacturing and construction jobs that so many workers benefited from are becoming much less abundant. Chinese wages may not be high, but they are high enough to incentivise the offshoring of labour-intensive industries like garments and electronics to other parts of Asia. So rather than moving up the value chain into higher-paying employment, Chinese workers are instead entering the informal economy, working as drivers, casual labourers, or street sellers.

If such flaws in the Chinese model are underappreciated in the West, it is partly because the authorities hide them from view. The China Daily does not devote a lot of space to the country’s failings, with the exception of President Xi’s never-ending anti-corruption drive within the Party (an initiative that has naturally been more successful at removing potential opposition than actual corruption, which remains endemic). There is a certain shimmering quality to a great deal of what the outside world sees of China. International agencies such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) give glowing assessments based on the Potemkin projects they are shown. Before he became paramount leader, Xi’s major gig was the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a spectacle so successful at laundering China’s reputation that, when I visited the capital more than fifteen years later, it was still being celebrated in museum exhibits.

To quote a metaphor used by the historian Frank Dikötter, “China is a tanker that looks impressively shipshape from a distance, with the captain and his lieutenants standing proudly on the bridge, while below deck sailors are desperately pumping water and plugging holes to keep the vessel afloat.” This does not mean that China is bound to crumble in a prolonged trade war. Its strengths may be matched by weaknesses, but they are still real strengths, and have been chosen in part for a situation like this one. China has a strong grip on the world’s supply chains, a high degree of self-reliance, and an ability to compete with the United States in advanced technology. Still, the CCP’s apparent eagerness to negotiate over tariffs is suggestive. It may well show that, as Peking University professor Michael Pettis has argued, China is becoming increasingly dependent on trade surpluses as one of the few ways it can deliver growth without incurring more debt.

That, in turn, raises the question of why the Chinese leadership has not taken more decisive action to rebalance its economy in the ways that all agree it should. The answer is surely that it would require a painful readjustment in the short term, as powerful industries are forced to do without subsidies they have long enjoyed. Yet this is precisely the kind of long-term governance China’s dictatorship is meant to excel at. The fact that it cannot take this step suggests that, for all China’s nationalism, the Party does not feel as secure as it lets on.