Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World describes the rise of a tireless politician at a time of great change and the response of the Church, weakened by fading belief in the supernatural. It is set in a world in which nation-states have been protectorates of three great blocs — the European Confederation, the Eastern Empire and the American Republic — which vie for supremacy. War seems certain unless a unifying figure, with unifying ideals, appears to bring the world together. Pope Francis called the book ‘prophetic’. Condemning calls for a ‘new world order’, Benedict XVI invoked it, saying any world state would destroy the spirit.

The story follows the Catholic priest Father Percy Franklin and Oliver Brand, the Labour Member of Parliament for Croydon. Brand is an MP in a single-party state: the Royal Family has been deposed, the House of Lords abolished, and both Oxford and Cambridge closed down. But peace is remains elusive: the East has annexed India, Australia and New Zealand, and a war against Europe now seems certain. Brand blames this rush towards conflict on faith, which is still extant in the Eastern Empire. He hopes the mysterious senator in charge of the American peace delegation, has the answer.

Brand blames this rush towards conflict on faith, which is still extant in the Eastern Empire.

That senator, whose name is Julian Felsenburgh, interests Franklin, too. Felsenburgh has been crossing the East, giving speeches in many tongues and with remarkable fluency, always to rapturous applause. His rise seems to have hastened the loss of faith throughout the world, including that of Franklin’s colleague, who is set to leave the priesthood. More and more, Brand and others see Felsenburgh as someone who can bring the world together beneath a new, secular law. Franklin muses that the Church, too, needs a new order if it is to last.

So the book seems to ask a question: What would happen were we to foist a single worldview, however peaceful-seeming, on a diverse and imperfect world? What would happen were we to accept what Pope Francis calls ‘ideological colonisation’? Yet ‘foist’ is not quite the right word: for Felsenburgh is welcomed before he is obeyed. More troubling is the question why people should be so keen to give up their freedom for an answer to everything. Benson’s answer is perhaps predictable; but in our age, it can sometimes seem almost to be a given that we are, or ought to be, moving towards just the thing that Benson fears. That we can guess Benson’s view takes nothing away from his story. Nor does the portrayal of Felsenburgh from the start as a sort of Antichrist figure make his eventual appearance any less striking. For it is the world that he enters — the world that accepts him so readily — that is Benson’s concern. The point is that the people who welcome Felsenburgh are not fools. They quite reasonably want peace, belonging and an end to their suffering. The trouble starts when these goods are turned into a complete system from which nobody is allowed to dissent. Humanitarianism, in other words, is not the absence of religion: it, too, has rules, rites, sacrifices, and so forth. People have not ceased to worship but merely found an object of worship that for now, seems more agreeable. I hasten to add that this is not confined to secular belief systems. Any religion can harden into ideology when obeying its rules becomes more important than the lives of its members, when law usurps spirit, if you like.

What would happen were we to impose a single worldview, however peaceful-seeming, on a diverse, imperfect world?

Benson writes in a clear and exacting style that has something in common with the prose of Orwell, whose own contribution to dystopian literature also featured an ever-lasting war between three blocs and the raising of a man or idea — ‘Big Brother’ — to the level of God. This hastens the pace of the story, which evokes the speed and inevitability of Felsenburgh’s rise and the inability of the Church (to which Benson, a priest, belonged) to stop it. Lord of the World seems to warn us that by the time we realise that we are asked forced to do things we do not want to do, it is already too late to refuse. The barbarians are not at the gates: they have been welcomed into the city, and now they have the keys.

It is a Catholic novel but one I think with wider appeal — which, given that it was written before the world wars, the rise of the godless totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia, and a long and brutal cold war, must have seemed rather far-sighted. I suppose that Benson’s central message, or one of them at any rate, is in fact quite simple: that even with our technological prowess and prosperity — even when our mastery of nature seems complete — we really know nothing. The world is intrinsically mysterious: it is not just the absence of knowledge. Hence there will never be a ‘total solution’ to our woes, and any belief system that claims to contain the whole of life must eventually get rid of whatever does not fit the scheme.

Say you are being chased by a crocodile. You know that crocodiles are not particularly friendly and that it might be wise for you to get somewhere the thing cannot harm you, and to get there fast. It is because you know this that you run as quickly as your legs will allow, and you just about escape the situation with your body, if not your dignity, intact. Now imagine that you did not know that crocodiles were dangerous. Imagine that you thought they just loved a good scratch, say—but that you loathe giving things a good scratch. Keen to avoid embracing the reptile, you move as if pursued by creditors and—lucky thing—you get away.

You may see where I am going with this. That you survive both scenarios has nothing to do with whether you know the truth about crocodiles and whether or not they might like to eat you. Evolution selects for adaptive behaviour—that is, the ability to stay alive—not for whether or not we grasp the truth. Indeed, you are here, reading this, because your forebears outlived their peers; and their survival did not rest, of necessity, on, say, whether they thought a storm was a punishment from God, or whether killing a goat brought good luck. For the naturalist, one who thinks the world is wholly physical, our mental powers were shaped for survival, not for getting things right.

Naturally, some atheists point to this as truth that God does not exist. So the argument goes, our belief in God is a mere adaptation that helps us, and our communities, to survive. And yet the same idea must apply to all beliefs, including the belief that we can trust that belief. Put differently: we cannot know that the mind that invokes evolution to deny the existence of God can be relied on. My mental powers are what they are so that I can stay alive, not so that I can establish the truth. Thus, the atheist finds himself in a bind. Either, because of evolution, our minds are reliable guides to the truth, or our minds are not reliable guides to the truth. If the first is right, them the believer might be onto something: his belief in God may not be a mere adaptation. If the second, then one cannot debunk religion on evolutionary grounds because the argument is self-defeating: our reasoning cannot be trusted.

We cannot know that the mind that refutes religion on evolutionary grounds can be relied on. My mental powers are what they are so that I can stay alive, not so I can know what is true.

Darwin himself was puzzled by this. ‘The horrid doubt always arises,’ he wrote, ‘whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?’ One answer to this, perhaps the most persuasive, is to say that, broadly speaking, our minds are in fact shaped to perceive the truth. In other words, just because we believe some things that are false if useful—in a classic study, 93 per cent of American drivers thought they were better than average—does not mean that we cannot trust anything we think. If we thought that all snakes were friendly, that rotting food was healthy, that fire was safe to touch, or that all strangers could be trusted, we would not last very long. Our minds are not perfectly adapted to the world, but they are good enough (or at least, have been good enough so far) to keep us alive.

Another, related answer is that we have evolved to create the means of finding out the truth when we get things wrong. Through the scientific method, for instance—observing carefully, asking questions, forming hypotheses, running experiments, analysing data, sharing results—we get closer and closer to the facts. The goal of cognitive behavioural therapy, perhaps the psychological treatment best supported by empirical evidence, is to help the person see distortions in his thinking—when, for example, he is jumping to conclusions on the basis of little evidence, or thinking in black and white, or believing he knows what is going on in someone else’s head. In other words, it works on the basis that we cannot trust our thoughts, but that we can learn to think more objectively.

In Miracles, C. S. Lewis proposes a very different answer to the question with which we are concerned. He distinguishes cause-and-effect from ground-and-consequent, which is to say that he claims there is a difference between what causes us to believe something and whether that belief is true. You may believe something because you are tired, angry, frightened, or because your brain works in a certain way. But that does not make the belief true. It can be true for a different reason. Say, I presented you with the following syllogism:

1. All parrots are birds.
2. I have a parrot named Coco Chanel.
3. Therefore, Coco Chanel is a bird.

We have evolved to create the means of finding out the truth when we get things wrong. Through the scientific method, for instance, we get closer and closer to the facts.

You did not believe the third statement in that syllogism simply because your neurons fired. It made sense to you: the first two sentences led you to the third. Lewis’s argument is that the naturalist cannot say why some thoughts—(1) and (2) in our syllogism—count as good reasons for other thoughts (3). Put more simply still: we trust reason—we trust maths, logic, arguments, evidence. We think some beliefs are justified. So, says Lewis, perhaps reason is not an accident that has arisen in a meaningless universe. Perhaps our minds grasp truth because they are made by a greater Mind—that is, God.

Alvin Plantinga, who framed the original problem best, says that since naturalism eats itself, as it were, God becomes a more plausible reason why we can trust our thoughts. Evolution may still be true, but God stands behind it. This is a point the mathematician John Lennox often makes: there is a difference (wilfully misunderstood by the New Atheists) between mechanism and agency. Evolution explains how our minds developed; but not what (or who) put the wheels in motion in the first place. Thus, says Plantinga, it is possible that God directed evolution to produce minds capable of knowing truth and, to a believer like Plantinga, knowing Him.

Atheists can reason, and the evidence for evolution is very strong indeed. But if our confidence in reason is to be—well, reasonable, it seems to me we need to say why minds shaped for survival can reach beyond usefulness towards truth. The naturalist will say we think ‘well enough’, that through culture and technology, we correct errors in our thinking all the time. He may be right. Lewis and Plantinga will say that if we trust our reason, it is because it issues from an ultimate and rational source. They may also be onto something. But the question remains unanswered: not whether crocodiles might like to eat us (they might), but why a being evolved to flee them might also seek the truth, and why it should trust whatever answers it finds.

If Evolution Shaped Our Minds, Can We Trust Our Reason? was originally published in CREATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You might have seen that Reid Wiseman, commander of Artemis II, was so overcome by what he had gone through on that mission that when he saw the cross on the Navy chaplain’s collar he broke down in tears. He had never been particularly religious, he said; but clearly he lacked a way of making sense of what he had experienced and fell back on religion. Wiseman is not the first to have found going to space profoundly spiritual, for want of a lighter word. In fact, the history of space travel is full of people who have said just this.

If going to space, or rather being in space, has a way of giving rise to feelings of awe, wonder, unity, and serenity, it might be said that the urge to go to space speaks to our yearning to go beyond the range of physical human experience. Indeed, you will have noticed the distinctly religious character of Elon Musk’s talk of saving the species from extinction. Just as the transhumanists could be said to practise a form of Christianity shorn of morality, the drive to explore the stars could be called a religious impulse.

Wiseman is not the first to have found going to space profoundly spiritual, for want of a lighter word.

In Dante’s time, the cosmos itself was sacred. The Earth was at the centre, surrounded by celestial spheres: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the stars, and the Empyrean, the dwelling place of God. Heaven was a physical place that was quite literally above us, and upon his death the Christian literally ascended into it. In the Divine Comedy, particularly the Paradiso, Dante does just this: having climbed the seven-storey mountain of Purgatorio, he makes his way upwards through these spheres. The structure of the medieval universe and the structure of salvation (assuming you behaved yourself) were more or less the same thing.

The Copernican revolution put an end to this. After Copernicus, the Earth was a planet; after Galileo and Newton, the heavens were governed by the laws of mathematics. The stars ceased to be heavenly bodies fixed against a vast black backdrop and became distant suns. And so religion turned inwards, and became something more — that word again — spiritual, concerning the non-material parts of our existence, our ultimate fulfilment, our relationship with God. Cosmology did not do away of theology but it did change it, as it always does.

After Copernicus, the Earth was a planet; after Galileo and Newton, the heavens were governed by the laws of mathematics.

It could plausibly be argued that contemporary science, far from making our world smaller and less mysterious, might in fact have enlarged the religious imagination. Relativity, evolutionary history, cosmology — these give us a universe vastly larger than Dante’s and just as mind-boggling. There is a reason why the Nobel Prize category that contains the largest number of believers is physics, the most scientific of the sciences, and why Niels Bohr said that when we talk of atoms, words can only be used as poetry. So, just as we should not be all that surprised that our forebears links the planets and stars to the divine, we should also not be completely astonished that those who have everything, and even those that don’t, feel impelled to explore the cosmos.

Space exploration involves asking questions that the religious have long puzzled over. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What is our place in the universe? Of course, there are a whole host of practical benefits to be got from exploring the cosmos; but these surely fail to explain the emotional force of the exercise. Few people watched the Apollo landing because of its downstream effects on the sophistication of weather forecasting, for example. And even now, when we know how space underpins many of things we rather like, the Artemis II mission caught the public imagination for different reasons.

Space exploration involves asking questions that the religious have long puzzled over. Where do we come from? Why are we here?

Perhaps space satisfies some desire for transcendence that is bound up with our nature. We seem to have a pressing and recurrent urge to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary life: to climb mountains, cross oceans, build skyscrapers. Martin Amis says somewhere that the writer is like the dog in Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, howling in ‘protest against the limits of experience’. Space may be a means of expressing that same impulse. The astronaut waves his goodbye to his family, leaves the world, undergoes transformation, and comes home with a different outlook in things. This is a pilgrimage by a different name.

As I mentioned at the start, Wiseman said once he got back to earth that, though he had never been religious, he felt so moved by what he had seen on his sojourn to space that he called for the Navy chaplain, took one look at his cross, and burst into tears. His story echoes that of countless others who have described feelings of unity, humility, and awe on seeing the Earth from space. What Carl Sagan called the ‘pale blue dot’ looks tiny, frail, and whole. It is hardly a shock that this produces in the viewer something like a sense of boundaries dissolving, worries disappearing. This has more than a family resemblance to the experiences described by mystics like Meister Eckhart or Rumi.

What Carl Sagan called the ‘pale blue dot’ looks tiny, frail, and whole. It is hardly a shock that this produces in the viewer something like a sense of boundaries dissolving.

Then, there is the eschatological bit. Elon Musk is revealing more than his own folie de grandeur, as the French put it, when he talks of turning our species into a multi-planetary race in words practically dripping with religiosity. We have taken a wrong turn and are headed for fiery extinction; Mars is the great ark that will sustain us in the cosmos until we can settle across the galaxy, he is our Noah, called upon to lead us into the future and protect the ‘the light of consciousness’ … Here is a story with prophets and prophecies, martyrs and sacrifices, a promised future and a promised land.

The heavens may no longer be arranged in concentric spheres above a stationary Earth, and no astronaut expects to find the Empyrean beyond the Moon. Yet it seems we still look in awe to the skies, seeing space and our attempts to grasp it, to master it, as not merely romantic, but religious. Our star-sailors return changed from their travels, having had, on seeing our home planet, the feeling of the raindrop falling on the ocean: of being absorbed into some all-consuming vastness that cannot be grasped, let alone expressed, in the language of poetry. We can assume that these aren’t credulous people, prone to romanticising things. It seems to me that though Dante’s universe has gone, the longing that gave it life it has not. Whatever else drives us towards the stars, it isn’t just curiosity. It is also the desire to understand, as Dante put it, ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars.’

Is the Desire to Explore Space a Religious Impulse? was originally published in CREATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It seems the end is nigh. Nate Soares, the A.I. researcher, says that the coming super-intelligence will gobble up our resources and make us extinct. In his lurid essay, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’, David Wallace-Wells predicts climate-caused famine, heat death, war, plague, economic breakdown, poisoned air, dying oceans, and the elimination of most of our species. More recently, and closer to home, David Betz foresees an impending civil war, with Western countries splitting down ethnic lines. People have become rather apocalyptic.

The authors of the Book of Revelation claim that those who have been sinful and disobedient will see the coming of the Antichrist, war and death, famine, plague, violence, and more death — and all of this before God pours out his wrath. Yet the word apocalypse does not mean something like ‘the end of everything’. It means unveiling, or — the clue is in the name of the book, I suppose — revelation, the disclosure of the truth. The doomsayer is claiming that the present order is rotten, that we are complacent or complicit in the disorder, that we are living on borrowed time. He is not just predicting the future, but telling us ‘the truth’ about who and how we are today. And like the jealous lover who hopes deep down that his wife really will sleep with his handsome friend and prove him right, one suspects that such a prophet of doom wants, on some level, to see the end arrive, and so be vindicated.

The authors of the Book of Revelation claim that those who have been sinful and disobedient will see the emergence of the Antichrist.

It seems the apocalyptic imagination is a feature of the human mind. The objects of our thinking, but the pattern is remarkably stable. Ordinary fear is perhaps unsatisfactory: it tells us something is wrong, but not always what, or whose fault it is, or what we ought to do about it. An apocalyptic story furnishes us with the missing pieces of the puzzle, if you like. Now, there is a cause, a causer and a concrete set of effects. This also flatters the one the doomsayer: for he is no longer fearful. He is awake; he has seen through the lie in a way, perhaps, others have not. But what is new today is the sheer number of apocalyptic fantasies we have dreamt up for ourselves. There is our erasure by A.G.I., climate collapse, civil conflict, a fresh pandemic, nuclear holocaust, demographic winter, religious struggle, a third world war, the return of Fascism. Each vision comes with a cast of prophets, sinners, heroes — those who (should they survive) will be deemed to have been on ‘the right side of history’. I am not saying these outcomes are impossible. Some are crankish and some unlikely; but some are surely possible, and others could even be said to be probable. What I am interested in is why our worries turn so quickly into visions of the end-times.

The apocalypse has a certain shape in the Christian tradition, as I have said. There is all our wrongdoing, and then the various warnings that if we do not repent, everything will get very ugly indeed. Then comes the judgement, and the punishment, as the truth is revealed. Today, we may feel this contains a grain of metaphorical truth; some of us will see it as nonsense and others, the sandwich-board-wearers, may take it a little too literally. In any case, it seems to me that these stories exist less to frighten us than to put our fears in order. As any psychologist will tell you, we have a trying way of going shopping, as it were, for a reason why we feel the way we do, something to help us make sense of emotions which, at least in some cases, may just be the product of a poor night’s sleep.

Today, our fears remain. But we lack a common story that makes sense of them. And so our nightmares multiply. I am not the first person to note the religious character of the environmentalist movement, with its own form of original sin (the Industrial Revolution, free-market capitalism), its saints and prophets (Al Gore, Greta Thunberg), its many and various martyrs (Berta Cáceres, the anti-natalists). But it is not the only modern fixation to have these features. The ‘AI pessimists’ are certain that the curtain is soon to come down on our species, and on both the political left and political right, there are people warning of nuclear war, civil war, world war, ‘demographic replacement’, Fascism, and so on. Before anyone accuses me of sticking my head in the sand, I am aware that there are some very thorny problems that we are all going to have to deal with at some point. What I am saying is simply that we are in the habit of turning fear into an apocalyptic vision, but without a shared religious framework to make sense of our fears, to contain them, there is little to stop every collective fear from breeding its own nightmare.

As I have already suggested, the ‘AI pessimists’ are certain that the curtain is soon to come down on our species.

Hysteria can be amusing, though alarmism is always a little trying. Both, at any rate, are counter-productive. The events we foresee might not be equally likely to happen, and might not be equally grave; some are particular to a place and time, and others are universal. Still, to fix a problem it helps to be clear-eyed about what the problem is. This is, after all, part of the goal of philosophy: to ask better questions: questions have a funny way of answering themselves when we put them well enough. The second issue is that this apocalyptic habit of thought has a way of dividing people into believers and non-believers, when much of the mess we must deal with affects us all. Jonathan Schell, in his The Fate of the Earth, makes a similar point about the threat of nuclear war: we only have one planet, and we all have to live on it. It is not particularly helpful to be at each other’s throats.

If people feel apprehensive in our time, it is hard not to sympathise. But there is no need to fall to pieces. Perhaps it is inevitable, in the absence of a common eschatology, that we will blow our fears out of proportion, picturing red skies and cities turned to ash. We ought perhaps to resist that temptation and to try instead to work out what is possible, what is probable, what can be done, and what cannot be done. That might be more fruitful, as well as more dignified.

Why We Keep Thinking It’s the End of the World was originally published in CREATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medieval theologians were much concerned with the thorny question of whether God can sin. If God, being all-powerful, could do everything, then surely he could. But God was also perfectly good, so how could he do evil? Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas Aquinas argued that God’s inability to sin was not a defect; sin itself was a defect. To be unable to sin was akin to being unable to be weak, not being unable actually to do something.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV deals with protecting the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It was a serious intervention in a debate often led by the technically brilliant but, shall we say, ethically and philosophically lacking. More still, the parties in that debate have a vexing way of carrying the thing on in the language of the management consultant. It is all about ‘safety’, ‘fairness’, ‘transparency’, ‘accountability’.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV deals with protecting the human person in the age of artificial intelligence

The Church speaks in an older and rather more poetic tongue, which gives Her view on such matters a certain gravitas. But Leo’s encyclical is significant more for what it says than the way in which it is said; and what it says is that there are ineradicable differences between man and machine, and this must be affirmed. Bound up with the notion that we are persons, and not merely or only animals, is the idea that we are responsible for our actions. We give reasons and not causes for what we do; we choose; we praise those we like and condemn those we don’t.

To sin is to err, and to err in a very particular way. It implies a certain turning-away from what is good. In any case, it is not just to do harm. A falling rock can kill a man, but nobody will say it has sinned. In order to sin, we must be able to grasp the moral law and to break it, in a way that hurricanes, viruses and falling vending machines cannot. For this reason, we cannot possibly call A.I. a moral agent. It responds to our prompts but does not grasp truth, goodness or justice. When an A.I. produces a falsehood or ‘hallucination’, you can scream or shout at it all you want, but it has not ‘lied’ to you. To lie is to wish to deceive.

To sin is to err, and to err in a very particular way. It implies a certain turning-away from what is good.

The same principle applies to A.I.’s other apparent vices. If it seems deceptive, then that is because appearances — well, deceive. As I have already said, we are different. In Lewis’s immortal phrasing, ‘men propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.’ We are not mere information-processors; indeed, a calculator is a better information-processor than we are in a particular respect. We possess self-awareness and can reflect on our actions and judge them against moral standards. That we feel guilt, shame, remorse, and so on presupposes a sense of having done wrong.

So A.I. cannot sin. It can cause harm — consider those unfortunate souls who have been talked into killing themselves by ChatGPT — but to cause harm is not to sin. Of course, the question gets trickier still if A.I. ever becomes conscious — something that Richard Dawkins, somewhat rashly, suggests has already happened. He gave the name ‘Claudia’ to an instance of the Claude A.I. chatbot and, after engaging in a lengthy conservation, concluded that the system met the criteria both for humanlike intelligence and consciousness. Consciousness alone does not imply moral responsibility: a dog is conscious; so is a baby. To sin, we need be able to grasp a moral law, to understand ourselves as bound by it, and to choose to act against it.

The question gets trickier still if A.I. ever becomes conscious — something that Richard Dawkins, somewhat rashly, suggests has already happened.

Hence the issue, it seems to me is, not intelligence but personhood. I have already given the example of the calculator, which is better than you and me at arithmetic, yet would be claimed by very few indeed to have a soul. As it is, we do not know whether machines might ever become persons. The danger is that as it becomes more powerful, we may begin to unbind ourselves from, if you like, ourselves, and transfer responsibility to the machines. Already, you see perfectly intelligent people defer to A.I. unthinkingly, perhaps on account of its perceived self-confidence in its own responses. This transferral of responsibility must be resisted. You do not have to think for very long to imagine how ‘the algorithm said’ might crop up in criminal trials. But it is no less a defence than ‘the gun went off’ or — to use Theodore Dalrymple’s example, which lent itself to the title of his book, ‘the knife went in’.

Responsibility belongs with those who design, use, procure, distribute, authorise, and regulate A.I.. The machines for now remain our instruments. We should keep it that way. As Orwell puts it, technology developed for peaceful use has a way of achieving other, less desirable ends:

We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another.

Morally, it seems to me that our greatest danger lies now not in whether machines will sin, but in whether we will use them to shirk our own responsibility to do good, or enable our desire to do evil. Sin remains a human privilege. A.I. cannot choose to do wrong, but the people who build it and use it can.

Can A.I. Sin? was originally published in CREATION on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been following with mild amusement the slow-motion car crash unfolding in my country’s government. Last week, the Conservative leader gave both barrels to the whole Labour front bench, accusing the Prime Minister of failing to show leadership because leaders ‘have a vision’. And this—what some would call a commonplace—led me to ask myself whether it was in fact true that leadership of necessity involved having a vision. Oakeshott calls visionary politics the ‘politics of faith’; he says, in effect, that outside of some crisis (say, defensive war) visionary politics is intrinsically anti-liberal. A leader will tell his people to do what he says so that some goal may be achieved. Similarly, in his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, Isaiah Berlin says any defence of ‘positive liberty’—that is, the freedom to do something—is as a gift to the tyrant, who loves to claim, as he walks all over your ‘negative liberty’ (your freedom from outside restraints), that is for your own good.

It seems the historian Alec Ryrie would not agree with this: for he believes that what we in the Western world lack is a positive vision or set of values by which to live. As it is, we define ourselves negatively – that is to say, in opposition to something; and that something, Ryrie says, is Hitler. To put it slightly differently, instead of thinking (for instance) ‘What would Jesus do?’, we ask, ‘What would Hitler do?’ and then try to do the opposite. So appalled were we by the crimes of the Third Reich that we did away with our previous moral horizon, which was formed by Christianity, and embraced a secular system of human rights. On Ryrie’s view, the Western liberal is utterly obsessed with the Second World War: consider the language of modern politics, with its loose use of terms like ‘Nazi’, ‘Fascist’ and ‘Holocaust’.

As it is, we define ourselves negatively — that is to say, in opposition to something; and that something, Ryrie says, is Hitler.

It is all very well and good saying, with Berlin, that we should be wary of any positive account of how we should live. It is harder than it looks to build and maintain a social order that rests on the opposite. By now, it is almost a cliché that liberalism only claims to be neutral. As long ago as 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre made the ‘disquieting suggestion’ that modern ethical discourse is muddled because there is no shared objective framework for what adds up to a ‘good’ human life. Our moral claims are expressions of emotion or preference or attempts to control others, not claims that are grounded on truth. Liberalism is built on sand; and to settle disputes, governments invariably back one party. More recently, Patrick Deneen has argued (in Why Liberalism Failed and Regime Change) that in breaking the bonds that tie us together, liberalism creates such a mess that the state must step in—that is to say, must choose a side in some dispute—to keep the peace. Thus does individualism bring about statism, its apparent opposite.

As I have said already, it is a worn-out critique of liberalism that it is inconsistent. All systems of belief—or, more exactly, those who subscribe to them—fail to live up to the values they espouse. Ryrie is asking something much more specific: Can a system—can liberalism—survive on negation alone? The ‘anti-Nazism’ or ‘anti-Hitlerism’ championed by the liberal risks leaving him flat and exhausted, tired of seeking out anything that smacks of prejudice and lacking anything to do but, in the words of Roger Scruton, ‘get and spend’. But I wonder if an ideology of negation is the problem. ‘Never again’ can be a powerful slogan; but surely, at some point, it just fails to compel. Every year, I see fewer poppies on Remembrance Day, and more writers claiming—wrongly, in my view—that it celebrates war, rather than the (often young) men and women who must wage it. Rishi Sunak was attacked for leaving the D-Day commemorations early; but the fact that he thought he could without disaster suggests we may not be quite as gripped by the Second World War as Ryrie thinks. Put slightly differently, we may not be living in the ‘age of Hitler’ any longer, but the age of—nothing.

A similar anomie set in after the First World War. Hemingway’s ‘Lost Generation’, as depicted in The Sun Also Rises, drift through Europe, drowning their sorrows in parties and booze. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is his great critique of the 1920s Jazz Age, one obsessed with wealth and shallow pleasure, yet wholly lacking in direction, relationships and soul. In Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, the narrator muses:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

He saw modern people as physically alive but spiritually dead: marching mechanically to work, detached from a deeper sense of purpose. A great wave of blood had rolled over what Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, calls ‘the old gods’—quaint-seeming notions like honour, country, family, faith—and been carried out to sea; but nothing had replaced them. But this is not liberalism. Some might say that liberalism’s ‘hypocrisy’ is, in fact, its strength, or at least necessary. To put it another way, if liberalism has lasted as long as it has, it is because it does in fact have a positive vision, even if it tries to conceal it, and denies it. From time to time, a thinker, writer or politician has made this explicit. David Cameron spoke of a ‘muscular liberalism’ that defends liberal values at home against those who are not liberal. It is a view that finds expression in foreign policy terms in the neoconservatism that animated the war in Iraq.

David Cameron spoke of a ‘muscular liberalism’ that defends liberal values at home against those who are not liberal.

Ryrie’s achievement is to make a moral history read like intellectual detective work rather than a sermon. But clearly he is troubled by what he views as a kind of vacuum into which all sorts of bad ideas might flow. If Christianity once furnished the West with a moral horizon, and anti-Hitlerism supplied it with a substitute, what happens when even that substitute begins to fade? This is the most interesting question raised by the book, and perhaps the one that Ryrie does not quite answer. He is convincing when he talks of Hitler as a kind of negative moral absolute, and right, it seems to me, that this cannot tell us what courage, family, or sacrifice are for. That need not matter very much. But it might turn out that in fact, courage, family and sacrifice are necessary for the health of the social body. We need young people to pay for the old, after all; we need nurses and carers and teachers; we need soldiers. I am surprised that Ryrie does not give very much space at all to what liberalism implies about the good life. It seems to me that if liberalism makes freedom the highest value, and money allows us to express our freedom, then does it not say, implicitly, the best thing we can do is make money and spend it? I do not say this is good or bad: only that it seems to be the case.

The very least we can say about The Age of Hitler (which bears the rather hysterical subtitle And How We Will Survive It) is that it identifies the part that ‘values’ plays in our common life. Once this would have been a platitude, but for some time, we have been getting by in the belief that since we all broadly hold the same views, we need not wonder what they are. Recent events have made it plain that this is not the case, and that we cannot agree on—for example—what constitutes personhood, whether the self and body are separable, what adds up to nation and nationality, whether protecting life is more important than giving persons choice, and so on. For Ryrie, it seems, some chastened, culturally capacious form of Christian morality is the best replacement for the negative set of values embodied by Hitler. Whether you think this is attractive or not, one wonders whether we can really choose our values à la carte.

Among the better-known claims made by the Savoyard diplomat and thinker Joseph de Maistre is that the French Revolution, including the Terror, was an act of Providence: a divine rebuke, if you like, for the moral and spiritual decay that preceded it. Written in 1796, while the Revolution was still ongoing, de Maistre argued that men think they are the shapers of events when in fact, they are the tools of something greater. Later reactionaries, nationalists and authoritarians would all draw something, though not always the same thing, from his thought. What makes de Maistre unusual is not just that he hated the Revolution, but that he thought it had been sent by God.

The thrust of de Maistre’s argument is that France has a divine mission in Christendom, and that the Revolution has come about because the monarchy, aristocracy and Ancien Régime more widely have failed to use French civilisation for the good of mankind, instead promoting the atheistic doctrines of the philosophes. The Terror is the fruit of a philosophy that cuts reason loose from custom, religion and inherited authority: for abstract reason, unmoored from tradition, leaves a void and a hunger for authority. Thus men who believe only in reason often end by worshipping force. In trying to free themselves from dogma, they inadvertently create new dogmas far more savage than the old ones. On this view, the guillotine is a product of the Enlightenment.

The thrust of de Maistre’s argument is that France has a divine mission in Christendom.

For de Maistre, political theory is inferior to inherited practices and the institutions which encode them. Stable societies grow organically out of religion, monarchy, custom. His defence of the monarchy is particularly noteworthy: he argues that monarchy is not merely a means of ruling a state but the heart of a whole social order. Around the throne arise generals, magistrates, bishops, ministers, diplomats, provincial nobles, military orders, court offices, innumerable lesser dignities. A monarchy gives the gifted, driven man many ways to distinguish himself honourably. The crown, then, acts almost like a sun around which lesser bodies orbit. One hereditary monarch at the summit permits a thousand gradations of rank, service, and prestige below. Get rid of the monarch, and you do not abolish hierarchy but cheapen it: the fine distinctions of honour dissolve, power ceases to be spread across a network of roles, and authority gathers in force, bureaucracy, or wealth. The old ruling class is swept away only for another, coarser ruling class to take its place.

But de Maistre also defends pain as one of the means by which the social body is joined together and renewed. The executioner is the basis of civilisation: get rid of him, and order turns to chaos. Law, authority, and peace rest, in the end, not on a set of abstract rights or rational consent but on the credible threat of force, de Maistre says: thus does sacrifice acquire a political meaning. For him, bloodshed waters the fields of earthly life. Civilisation rests on fear, obedience and the willingness to kill. Here, de Maistre ceases merely to affirm conservatism and becomes something darker.

The executioner is the basis of civilisation: get rid of him, and order turns to chaos.

We cannot separate this rather grim view of politics from de Maistre’s view of human nature. We are fallen, he says; and violence cannot be abolished by enlightened plans because war is natural for fallen beings. In one memorable passage, he recounts all the wars that have taken place in the past centuries or so, concluding that the ubiquity of conflict points to something fixed in human nature. Man is not a reasonable animal, led astray by institutions, as Rousseau had claimed. Indeed, take away those institutions, and man becomes dangerous. Peace is rare and temporary.

Style matters; and de Maistre writes with certainty as well as a palpable sense of urgency. He avoids over-explaining himself, qualifying his claims or, if you like, hedging his bets, and the effect, which is on some level invigorating, is also rather unsettling: for—to paraphrase Yeats—‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity’. That is to say that in times of great disorder, the tentative suggestions of the reasonable tend to be drowned out by the bellicose certainties of the extreme. We often mistake certainty for truth.

Style matters; and de Maistre writes with certainty as well as a palpable sense of urgency.

As for extremism, it is easy, perhaps lazy, to paint de Maistre as a theocrat and precursor of later authoritarian trends. There is some truth in this; but it would be truer to say that what he is in fact arguing is, at bottom, that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and that the manifest flaws of the throne-and-altar Bourbon state are more bearable than the bloodshed and disorder that will always flow from a revolution based on dry theories. Societies are organic; they do not of necessity or obviously ‘make sense’ at first glance; change must be managed. Conservatism starts in this distrust of grand designs and tidy theories: it starts from the sentiment, said Scruton, that ‘good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created’. The strength of de Maistre’s case lies in this: in his seeing that societies are more fragile than reformers suppose. His weakness lies in the ease with which reverence for order turns into reverence for power. Those who make peace with cruelty in the name of order are liable to end excusing far more than they first intended to.

And so the book belongs to a wider European response to the Enlightenment. Edmund Burke feared revolution because it swept away habits and institutions that had been formed over centuries. De Maistre went further: he feared it because it challenged the divine order itself. That matters: for while Burke is a voice of prudence, de Maistre is a metaphysician of authority. Later conservatives, nationalists, and authoritarians all found some nourishment in his work, though not always the same material. Some admired his defence of throne and altar; others admired his willingness to justify violence in sacred terms. But once politics becomes a branch of theology, cruelty is easily made sacred. That is the risk which hangs over de Maistre’s writing from beginning to end.