Trekking - The TLS, September 25, 2020

 

 WALKING THE GREAT NORTH LINE 

From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to discover the mysteries of our ancient past 

ROBERT TWIGGER 

320pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20. 

The route Robert Twigger takes in this rambling adventure may seem unconventional, but it is guided by a neat idea. One day, having noticed that a straight line from Hengistbury Head in Dorset to Lindisfarne on the Northumbrian coast passes through no fewer than forty-two sites stretching back to prehistory – including Old Sarum, Stonehenge, Avebury, Thor’s Cave and Mam Tor – he sets out on a pilgrimage along this novel pathway. A question forever hovers in the background: does this alignment exist by accident, or by design? 

Luxuriating in the quotidian aspects of walking while keeping an eye on the bigger picture, Twigger sees his trek as a homage to the ancients, to “my freedom to do as I pleased, sleep and walk where I pleased. And freedom also includes not paying for things that are ours by rights, by the rights of ancient England”. “I was fondly hoping to develop ideas about England’s ‘primitive’ past”, he writes, “and to point out that ancient man was just as intelligent as us.” 

Part poet, part pub philosopher, he is sometimes friendly and open, discussing Jack Kerouac with fellow trekkers, for example; at other times, he is a misanthrope who enjoys being alone and unhappy, mired in bad weather, suffering from blisters and getting lost. In perhaps an accidental allusion to the eternal monomyth, he seems to be on his own Hero’s Journey: he grows dispirited as he zigzags through the Peak District, facing false starts, disenchantments and deliverances – he is frustrated by barbed wire and blocked passages, but elsewhere discovers an “island with a single small oak ... made for a great seat, a regal seat, a poet warrior’s seat” – while repeatedly vowing never to forget the pain of walking. 

An inveterate grumbler, Twigger is seldom a bore, however, and this melancholy, elegiac and meandering book is strangely satisfactory. It doesn’t matter that the original conceit, the supposed line from north to south, retreats into irrelevance (Twigger reluctantly concedes that he “had a correlation. Nothing more”), it is just good to be in his company as he walks and reflects on such esoteric subjects as shamanism, Continental philosophy, church porches, land ownership, autobiography, family history and the stressful and sometimes soul-destroying nature of modernity. 

Patrick West

Borders - The TLS, May 15, 2020

THE ATLAS OF UNUSUAL BORDERS

Discover intriguing boundaries, territories and geographical curiosities 

ZORAN NOKOLIĆ 

255pp. 

HarperCollins. £14.99. 

Given that Russia, the US and the UK have extended or threatened to harden their borders in recent years, while the EU has simultaneously sought to render its internal borders increasingly irrelevant, the matter of national boundaries remains as pertinent as ever. Although they often shift conspicuously, there have always been esoteric anomalies, and Zoran Nikolić’s engrossing guide takes readers into some truly strange territories. 

Nikolić mentions a few curiosities that the general reader might already be familiar with: the artificial Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea, sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania; the Armenian enclave of Nagorn-Karabakh, situated in Azerbaijan; and the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast. But these examples are positively conventional compared to other geographic peculiarities on parade here. These include counterenclaves such as the UAE village of Nahwa, located inside the Oman enclave of Madha, which is itself inside the UAE. Perhaps the bestknown such instance is the collection of Belgian enclaves inside the Dutch town of Baarle-Nassau, which themselves contain ten Dutch counter-enclaves. Here it is possible to cross a national border by moving from one end of a restaurant to the other. 

While boundary anomalies and enclaves are problematic in Cyprus, which contains pieces of land that remain part of the UK, they are less a problem in the Schengen area of Europe, where what belongs to which country increasingly doesn’t matter. The twin towns of Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany and Słubice in Poland, and Tornio in Finland and Haparanda in Sweden, are increasingly merging. The latter two reside in different time zones; as a result, it is possible for a ball to leave the ground on the border golf course in one hour and land an hour earlier. 

The reasons for such curiosities are manifold. The situation in Baarle-Nassau was the result of an accumulation of divisions, contracts and exchanges. The two islands of Big Diomede and Little Diomede, separated by less than four kilometres, are a day apart because they sit on either side of the International Date Line. Pheasant Island in the Moselle River between France and Spain has changed hands more than 700 times, because a late-seventeenth century peace treaty between the countries decrees that France should own it for one half of the year and Spain for the other half. 

The book isn’t entirely satisfactory, however. The origins of the oddities often remain unclear – the reader is left in the dark as to why, for example, the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon off the Newfoundland coast should be sovereign French territory. Nonetheless, it is on the whole a fascinating achievement from (fittingly) a former Yugoslav national.

Patrick West

There’s no need to shout - The Critic, March 15, 2020

There’s no need to shout

Patrick West reviews You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy


Our era is the shoutiest humanity has ever known. Thanks to the digital revolution, especially the emergence of social media, everyone can have an opinion. Indeed, many feel compelled to voice an opinion, to be a critic on most aspects of life. Many also succumb to the lure of the censorious mob, seeking to drown out dissent or unwoke heresy. Negativity and antagonism are the prevailing moods. Yet is anyone listening to what we are saying? More to the point, are such complaints, comments and grumblings making us more miserable? Perhaps it’s time we spent less time talking and more time listening. For there is the path to enlightenment and happiness.

This is the advice from Kate Murphy in You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why It Matters. Incessant online vociferating not only makes us unhappy — when we realise that no one really cares what we are saying — but it also makes us more stupid. The more we voice our opinions, the more we become convinced of them. It is the route towards complacency and stupor. People who listen, on the other hand, open themselves to the brave new worlds of doubt and mental exploration. “It is only by listening that we engage, understand, connect, empathise, and develop as human beings.” Listening, says Murphy, not only makes us happier, it makes us more clever.

Good listeners — priests, psychotherapists, air-traffic controllers, bartenders, spies, conmen — usually come up with the best solutions. It’s because they come to understand the complexities of life, that choices aren’t binary, that questions are often more fruitful and interesting than answers. The late Steve Jobs, for instance, used to hire people at Apple to disagree with him. The founder of Ikea used to wander his shop floor anonymously asking customers their opinions of his wares.

The best CIA operatives are not the aggressive interrogators and or those who feign empathy with mandatory eye-contact, a rudimentary nod of the head or insincere “Mmm-mmm”, but those who let prisoners tell their own life stories. Bringing forth such subjective perspectives better helps agents understand perpetrators’ world-view and motives. As one CIA chief interrogator told the author, “Even if you can’t get through to the suicide bomber, it helps you maybe get through to the guy later on, who is on the fringe or who is on the fence. You can relate to him after meeting the guy who took that wrong turn.” In a similar vein, the best hostage negotiator is not the man who deploys the best argument or conjures up some subconscious Jedi mind trick, but the man who tries “to understand the guy’s point of view”.

The most common cause of strife between a child and parent, writes Murphy, is when the former believes the latter isn’t listening. A failure to listen is also the cause for much marital breakdown. We assume we understand what those close to us feel, want or need. “As wonderful as intimacy and familiarity are, they make us complacent, leading us to overestimate our ability to read those closest to us.”

Often it’s the better-educated with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners

Listening isn’t the same as passive hearing, and the author stresses the importance of it being an interactive process. Researchers at the University of Utah found that when talking to inattentive listeners, speakers remembered less information and were less articulate in the information they conveyed. On the other hand, attentive listeners elicited more information, relevant detail, and elaboration from speakers, even when the listeners didn’t ask any questions.

Good listeners are good questioners, too. This doesn’t mean repeating impersonal, mundane questions such as “how was school?” but asking curious questions such as “what did you learn today?” or “what was the best part of your day?”.

Listening has become more difficult not merely because of technology — mobile phones, podcasts, social media, louder background music in restaurants, headphones that drown out one’s inner dialogue — but because of an allied culture of individualism, self-promotion and identity politics. We are subconsciously goaded to say things like “speaking as a white man” or “speaking as a woman of colour”. Murphy quotes Pascal Bruckner’s The Temptation of Innocence, in which he writes: “Everyone must sell himself as a person, in order to be accepted.”

Such a focus on the self, on one’s opinions, reinforced by incessant speaking and opining, only fortifies our convictions and closes our horizons. In turn, those with the firmest convictions become even worse listeners. And often it’s the better-educated and those with high IQ levels who are the worst listeners, being so adamant that they needn’t learn anything from anyone else.

A vicious circle ensues. Our shouty society hardens convictions, which necessitates turning up the volume further. Ultimately, this is why public dialogue today has become so antagonistic and fractious (see Brexit). For instance, neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that when people’s political views are challenged the amygdala region of the brain (the site of the primitive fight or flight reaction) lights up as if being chased by a bear. The amygdala is also what causes road rage or makes someone tweet vitriol so out of proportion when their political opinions are questioned. And when we are in fight, flight or freeze mode it is incredibly hard to reason or listen.

Murphy, a journalist and contributor to the New York Times, spent much time listening to experts while putting together You’re Not Listening (the best journalists should also be the most curious listeners), and the result is generous, humane and all too necessary. At a time when the bilious nature of public discourse seems to escalate by the day, it’s time that we all stopped speaking and started listening — and this even includes listening to ourselves, to what our inner dialogue is saying. It will make us smarter, happier and more content people.

You’re Not Listening, What You’re Missing and Why it Matters By Kate Murphy Harvill Secker, £16.99

Catholic Herald, July 18, 2019

It wasn't Colonel Blimp who gave us Brexit

The Catholic Herald, May 31, 2019

Spiked, December 23, 2018

Nietzsche: an explosion in thought
Sue Prideaux has written a fine biography of this most misunderstood of thinkers.

The TLS, April 13, 2018

Paul Anthony Jones
THE CABINET OF LINGUISTIC CURIOSITIES
A yearbook of forgotten words
384pp. Elliott and Thompson. £14.99.
978 1 78396 358 4

The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities by Paul Anthony Jones, a compendium of obscure and obsolete words, is designed to be read at a rate of one entry a day, with each word connected to the date under which it appears. For example, “pseudandry”, the use of a male pseudonym by a female writer, appears on November 22, the birth date of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Elsewhere, “antimetabole” (the repetition, in a transposed order, of words or phrases in successive clauses) comes on January 20, the date on which, in 1961, John F. Kennedy said:“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”.

The most rewarding way to approach this book is to guess the meaning of the word before reading its definition. It is thus an ideal companion for etymology enthusiasts and aficionados  of  other  languages,  ancient  or  modern.Jones cites  many words  coined in  the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the fashion for taking or creating words from Latin was at its height. Examples include “supervivant”(a survivor), “transmural” (situated beyond a wall), “singultus” (hiccup) and “breviloquent”(pithy  and  succinct  in  speech).  Elsewhere, from Ancient Greek, we have  “epistolophobia”  (the  fear  of  receiving correspondence),“arctophile” (a collector of teddy bears) and“crapulence” (a feeling of sickness caused by overeating or drinking).

Italian  readers  will  recognize  “abbozzo”,meaning  first  draft,  which  was  directly imported in the nineteenth century, and many will discern the French origins of “alamodic”, aseventeenth-century word meaning extremely fashionable.  Spanish  speakers  will  immediately detect that “cacafuego” signifies some-thing  unpleasant.  It  was  a  sixteenth-century term for a blustering braggart.

There is a lot  of  entertaining  trivia  here.Under “basiate” (to kiss) we learn that kissing was banned in England on July 16, 1439 to prevent the spread of plague. The Arctic is named not after the white bears that live there, but after the Great Bear constellation that is so prominent in the northern night sky. We also learn that cellophane and laundromat were once proprietary  names  (see  “anepronym”,  a  trade-marked  name  that  has  come  to  be  used generically). Jones might have added “heroin”to that list. And there are legions of euphonic words that might also have deserved inclusion,such  as  “ingurgitate”  (to  swallow greedily),“rubiginous”  (rust-coloured)  or  the  now archaic “to ostentate”. That fricative, staccato verb resonates so much more forcefully than“to show off”.

PATRICK WEST

The TLS, February 23, 2018

Sam Leith

WRITE TO THE POINT
How to be clear, correct and persuasive on the page
280pp. Profile Books. £14.99.
978 1 78125 476 9

The culture wars of the past sixty years have been fought in many fields, and on the matter of the correct way to write English, the battle still rages. There remain today the linguistic conservative prescriptivists, such as Simon Heffer and Lynne Truss, who believe that the rules of English must be obeyed. Facing them are the liberal descriptivists, such as Steven Pinker and Oliver Kamm, who say that the language should be allowed to evolve, and that many “rules” of grammar are merely conventions and needn’t be adhered to. (These conventions include not ending a sentence with a preposition.)

Sam Leith presents himself as lying between the two camps. His approach in this guide to improving your English is pragmatic. The most important thing when it comes to writing is to make friends with your reader, so how you write depends on who you are writing to or for. The prohibition on the split infinitive is indeed nonsense; English infinitives aren’t directly comparable to  Latin ones, which literally can’t be split. But a potential employer reading your CV might object to them – or to your using “disinterested” where you meant “uninterested”, or “like” instead of “such as”, or starting sentences with “but” – and interpret those usages as signs of a lazy, careless mind. “Knowing your audience is always more important than knowing a set of rules and prohibitions”, writes Leith. This is an eminently sensible approach.

Some may find Leith’s section on grammar somewhat forbidding, especially the part about verb tenses and moods. (Counter-intuitively, the best way to learn English grammar may well be to learn a foreign language, preferably a relatively uncomplicated one such as Italian. This teaches you what every word in any sentence is doing.)Leith’s advice on writing short, crisp sentences is sound, as is the reminder to read more. He excels especially on the importance of cadence and euphony, in making your prose sing. This, too, will endear you to your reader - and it is something that Leith achieves in this first class guide.

PATRICK WEST

The Catholic Herald, March 9, 2018

Truth be told, it's easy to mislead

Patrick West on the dangers of careless reading

Truth: A User's Guide
By Hector Macdonald, Bantam, 352PP, £20


Don’t be put off by the title of this book. At first glance, you could be forgiven for assuming that it was about “fake news” or our “post-truth” society – fashionable tropes that have come to dominate political discourse. Nor is this book concerned with a more long-standing question: is all truth relative, and is your truth as good and valid as mine? You will find no postmodern philosophising here.

Rather, Truth: A User’s Guide accepts from the outset that some things are facts and others are falsehoods. But it contends that what truth you accept or assert depends upon your point of view, upon which truth is useful to you, and which truth you would prefer to accord to your point of view.

For example, in 2015, both of these statements would have been true: “A teacher on a salary of £28,000 is earning below the average income”, and “A teacher on a salary of £28,000 is earning above the average income”. Both are true because the first statement is based on a mean average income that year of £31,000, the latter on a median average of £22,400.

Or consider, elsewhere, the fact that Canada and Australia have the highest rates of kidnapping in the world. Their figures are higher than those of Mexico and Colombia – but only because their governments included parental disputes over child custody in kidnapping statistics. Similarly, Sweden has the second highest incidence of rape in the world, because Sweden has one of the broadest definitions of rape. 

There are many competing truths out there, writes Macdonald, and it falls to us to discern how real facts can become misleading truths through various means.

Statistics can notoriously be used to mislead. The author reminds us to be wary of graphs where the Y-axis doesn’t begin at zero – these are always designed to exaggerate falls or drops in numbers. Also, beware those who proudly declare that the “Royal Family costs you just 56p a year”, rather than £35.7 million per year to the taxpayer; or those who boast that the Government spends just 0.7 per cent of GDP on overseas development assistance. This latter figure, in 2016, amounted to £13.3 billion, more than we spend on universities or the police.

We should also think twice when using GDP figures as barometers of happiness, particularly in our digital age. A car share app or a free dating site increases the sum of a nation’s happiness, but neither will add a penny to GDP. 

Meanwhile, a natural disaster or you breaking your leg in a motorcycle accident will increase GDP figures, as a consequence of reconstruction programmes or the incurred cost of ambulance travel, insurance claims and the purchase of a new motorcycle.

Truths are concocted in other ways. One is through the misuse of language. In 2013, the housing charity Shelter put out a press release with the headline “80,000 children facing homelessness this Christmas”. The word “homeless” evokes images of people sleeping in cardboard boxes on the streets, but Shelter was using the word in a more redundant, literal sense, referring to children dependent on temporary accommodation arrangements by their local government authority, usually in a B&B – ie not living in their own “home”.

Another example of how a truth can mislead – deliberately or otherwise – is by confusing correlation with causation. Take the well-known truth that left-handers have a shorter life-expectancy than right-handers, based on a study in 1991 – a truth that suggests that life is more perilous in a world built for right-handed people. Before the late 20th century, it was common to force left-handed people to become right-handed. Only in recent decades have people described themselves as left-handed. In short, because most left-handed people these days are on average younger, they are also recorded as younger on average if they die.

This confusion between correlation and causation was brought into relief in January, when a report in the Sun said that people called Mohammed were more likely to be quoted higher car insurance than people called John – a report which didn’t relate that men called John tend to be far older than men called Mohammed, and likely to live in suburbs or the countryside.

Not everyone is out deliberately to deceive us. Macdonald says that there are three types of communicator: the Advocate, who simplifies facts to communicate a positive message; the Misinformer, who passes on dubious truth by accident; and the Misleader, who does so on purpose. 

Each chapter concludes with advice on how to spot those using suspect means, but also on how to get your own truth across successfully in the eternal battle of competing varieties. Truth: A User’s Guide is not so much just a handbook on how to spot misleading truths as a field guide in how to propagate your own. 

Such a Machiavellian work is what you’d expect from a strategic communications consultant. Nonetheless, it’s an illuminating, judicious and lucid affair. It will surely change the way you read the news and see the world. 

The TLS, October 20, 2017

The TLS, September 22, 2017

Standpoint, June 2017

How Self-Help Doesn't Help
PATRICK WEST
Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze
By Svend Brinkmann
Polity, 138pp, £12.99

Svend Brinkmann is the self-help guru who paradoxically presents himself as the antidote to self-help culture. In this provocative and entertaining book he urges us to liberate ourselves from the edicts of the self-help industry, with their phoney promises of happiness and self-realisation. We should resist their mantra of “self-development”, and their exhortations to be forever positive and optimistic. He calls upon us to stand firm against pointless, perpetual incommands to be “true to oneself”. 

Brinkmann instead asks us to be happy with staying still and living with oneself, with saying “no” sometimes instead of “yes” all the time. Perfect happiness is an impossible goal. There is nothing wrong with being unhappy or being doubtful. His most abiding message is to resist the temptation to “look inside oneself”, and instead to suppress one’s feelings when they are infantile and destructive, and to look outside oneself. It’s usually people who give in to their base emotions, and those in possession of certainty, who have caused the most misery in the history of humanity.

Brinkmann introduces his own “seven- step guide to happiness”, a somewhat ironic and indeed risky approach, considering that he seeks to debunk therapy programmes. His steps are: 1. Cut out the navel gazing; 2. Focus on the negative in your life; 3. Put on the No hat; 4. Suppress your feelings; 5. Sack your coach; 6. Read a novel — not a self-help book or biography; 7. Dwell on the past. He urges the reader to look outwards, to be open to other people, cultures and nature. “You need to accept that the self does not hold the key to how to live your life. The self is merely an idea, a construct, a by-product of cultural history.” The much-vaunted journey of “self-discovery” is a dangerous one, as you may not like what you find — or you may not find anything at all.

With an eye for paradox, he talks about positivity as a negative thing, and attacks the prevailing notion that it’s good and healthy to “say yes” all the time. He exhorts the reader to eliminate the tyranny of the positive by accentuating the negative. It will make you better prepared to stand firm, where you are.

First, the “say yes” dictate paradoxically annuls personal agency. Second, not everything is possible if you merely “put your mind to it”. The notion that you can change things merely through positive thinking will only lead to ultimate feelings of failure.

The self-help industry has been marked by two paradoxes over the past decades. First, it celebrates the individual, freedom of choice and self-realisation, yet simultaneously it helps to create people who are increasingly addicted to self-help (does anyone know someone who has only bought a single self-help book?). The second paradox is that the self-help industry has flourished precisely because self-help books don’t work. The first author to create a successful self-help book would instantly finish off the genre. Self-help programmes merely create dependent users, who much like addicts are forever after their next fix — the next mythical, miracle dose that will give them final bliss.

Brinkmann is openly in debt to the Stoics, and the book contains an appendix on Stoicism. Yet there are more recent thinkers than the Ancient Greeks who came to identical conclusions. Schopenhauer wrote that life was essentially unhappy and the best way of dealing with it was to minimise displeasure and pain. In his footsteps came Nietzsche, who said that life was not about accepting life’s inherent sufferings, but facing and overcoming them. (Nietzsche also thought “the self” was a myth and that life’s calling wasn’t being “true to oneself” but “conducting a war against oneself, that is to say self-controlled outwitting.”) And it was Freud who wrote in Civilisation and its Discontents that peaceful societies were erected upon the very premise that people don’t give into their emotions. Without repression or control of our emotion we might think nothing of killing our neighbour. Still, Brinkmann does openly point the finger of blame at Rousseau, whose Confessions initiated the cult of “being true to oneself” — that the key to life is to be yourself and listen to your “inner voice”.

Brinkmann’s “just say no” message is a refreshing one, and one that might have caused more controversy — especially among mental health charity firms and the pharmaceutical industry, who are all too keen to promote the idea that there is something wrong with being unhappy or sometimes distressed by life. But Stand Firm was a roaring success upon its first publication in Denmark three years ago. Perhaps its success represents a backlash against the self-help and therapeutic consensus that has held sway over the years. Or perhaps it merely represents a return to the status quo ante, a need to “stand firm” in our hyperconnected society where there is a sense of information overload.


This book is indeed timely, considering that so many feel overwhelmed by an ever-accelerating globe, in which our modern maladies are sleep deprivation, digital addiction and “FOMO” (fear of missing out). Our culture has also witnessed increased stress, fatigue and depression levels. Brinkmann’s message — to stand still — encourages the reader to “take back control” (to coin a phrase) not only from the self-help ethos, but in everyday life from personal coaches. By standing still and saying no we return dignity to ourselves. Instead of trying to be authentic at any cost, a rational adult should strive for dignity, which assumes the ability to control our emotions.

The Catholic Herald, April 21, 2017

Don't blame the Frankfurt School

Patrick West on a bold critique marred by conspiracy theories

What Are They Teaching The Children?

Edited by Lynda Rose, Wilberforce, £12

Not a day seems to pass these days without a story in the newspapers about students or universities banning books or speakers for being “offensive”. Invariably, the offending text or person has said something taboo about someone’s gender or ethnicity, something which contemporary students find unbearably hurtful. Modern higher education appears awash with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” designed to protect today’s students who are at once easily offended and yet alarmingly belligerent in their perceived defence of minorities and the oppressed.

This 21st-century development shouldn’t surprise us, considering the schooling these students would have experienced. For decades now, the doctrines of race and gender equality and non-discrimination have been relentlessly instilled into pupils in secondary schools. 

To transgress these articles of faith is deemed to inflict severe mental anguish on the oppressed. The only surprise about our bellicose “snowflake” generation is that it didn’t emerge earlier.

As this collection of essays edited by Lynda Rose elaborates, this cultural revolution – the emergence of equality as a new dogma – materialised in the 1960s. This was a decade that witnessed a sustained attack on Christian and traditional values, with the emergence of socialism as an ersatz, substitute religion. 

The associated revolution in education was but one symptom of this cultural shift. As Rose writes: “Education thus became a tool for re-education and indoctrination, ruthlessly replacing the old values with socialist dogma, aimed at emancipating the individual from perceived social pathologies and transferring allegiance to the state.”

“Fairness” has since become the unspoken guiding ideology, which is why in schools it’s deemed important to enlighten children about “equality” and “tolerance” – whether it be towards gays, the transgendered or Muslims. 

Yet little comparable generosity of spirit is accorded to Christians, who, quite the reverse, have become objects of hostility. As Edmund Matyjaszek writes here: 

“The most ironic aspect is that increasingly – in employment, in education, in public pronouncements – it is the expression of Christian belief that is in danger of being criminalised.” This is because today’s creed of “fairness” only applies to those who are identified or identify themselves as victims – the new dogma excludes those that don’t fit this criteria. 

This book is well intentioned, and many will sympathise with the motives of the authors. But while there is much here to inform the reader, What Are They Teaching The Children? suffers from overstatement, and it lapses all too often into the shrill language of conspiracy theory. 

“The LGBT movement despises biblical Christianity, following the teaching of Karl Marx and Engels ... and the Church today needs to recognise that the media and government campaigns for the populace to embrace a new morality are just carrying out the mission of radical atheists,” writes Anthony Busk in one chapter. “Their aim is the abolition of the Christian church ... as one more stage on the journey towards fascist and communist totalitarianism.”

Rose herself believes this cultural shift was actually “orchestrated” and “consciously planned” by communists and the Frankfurt School: “The cult of political correctness that we see today is a direct consequence of the organised but covert manipulation devised in post-revolution Russia – and the goal is still the creation of chaos in order to allow the imposition of totalitarian control.” 

The book reaches its nadir in the chapter “Indoctrination in Scientism”, where Dr Alastair Noble laments that “evolution is always taught as ‘a fact’.” This is the ironic thing about today’s creationists: they employ the language of relativism that Christians are supposed to deplore: that all narratives can be equally valid. 

Hitler and the spectre of the Nazis are invoked more than once in What Are They Teaching The Children? and, as goes one principle of modern-day discourse – Godwin’s Law – as soon as you’ve done this, you’ve lost the argument.

Patrick West is a columnist for spiked-online.com. His new book Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times (Societas) is published in August

Book review: On The Edge

On the Edge
RAFAEL CHIRBES, TRANS. MARGARET JULL COSTA
(HARVILL SECKER, 421 PP, £16.99)

The final novel by Rafael Chirbes, who died two years ago, is ostensibly a bleak portrayal of a Spain ravaged by recession and plunged into despair. It is set in the seaside town of Olba, one of thousands of towns throughout the country devastated by the financial crisis, a land now left strewn with half-finished construction sites, debt and corruption. Laid-off workers sit idle at home on shabby sofas or wile away the time playing dominos in bars, while their wives wonder what they will fill their children's lunchboxes with. Everyone, so to speak, is on the edge.

The main protagonist of the novel, Esteban, was until recently the owner of a carpentry business, but is now penniless and living with his selfish, senile father - now mute and in nappies. The majority of the novel consists in relating his inner dialogue, often in paragraphs that go unbroken for pages, in which he wonders why it all went wrong and who is to blame. It is interspersed with italicized passages from those around him, including those of the staff he had to lay off, each also reflecting on their wretched predicament.

It is an intriguing and entrancing experiment. Esteban's stream of consciousness is rambling and meandering yet lucid: think Finnegans Wake with real words and normal syntax. The prose is thick and relentless, the seaside town is unrelentingly putrid and grubby. There are some wonderful turns of phrase: “Lagoons don’t get a very good press: fever, malaria, filth”; “Work? Only if you want a job digging graves for suicides.” It is a turbulent, tormented affair. “Economics in its purest form,” reflects Esteban, is about “how to stick the knife in the pig’s gullet so that it makes as little fuss as possible when it dies.” 

Although superficially a searing indictment of a system that brought a country to its knees, On The Edge is a far more ambiguous and nuanced story than first impressions might suggest. There is the nagging feeling that Estaban believes the town and the country has brought such calamity on itself, what with betrayal and disloyalties exhibited by the characters themselves in response to their plight. Estaban himself is a victim of his own weakness for cheap credit.

If On the Edge is a tale of embitterment, resentment and regret, it is as much Esteban's than the town of Olba or Spain's. His whole bungled life, he feels, has been frustrated by his father's contagious rancour. He reflects on ending as a bog-standard carpenter, unable even to have aspiration. "Perhaps, if I'd had ambition, I would have been even more bitter, would have become impregnated with the bile that has always filled my father". Esteban retreats for the most part into lurid sexual fantasies, before, in the end in seeks refuge in a vortex of childhood memories, to a time before death and money.

PATRICK WEST

(This book review was due to appear in a publication, but for administrative reasons did not)

The Tablet, February 4, 2017

TLS, November 18, 2016

Gary Hayden 
WALKING WITH PLATO 
A philosophical hike through the British Isles 
224pp. Oneworld. £12.99. 978 1 78074 656 2 

Friedrich Nietzsche used to walk for up to eight hours a day, often rising well before dawn. “I am always on the road two hours before the sun comes over the mountains,” he wrote from Switzerland in 1877, “and especially in the long shadows of afternoon and evening.” His fellow philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was of a similar disposition, writing to his niece thirty years before: “every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it”. It is no coincidence that these two men, each physically and mentally tormented, were both keen walkers. 

As Gary Hayden, the author, previously, of You Kant Make It Up!: Strange ideas from history’s great philosophers (2011) observes in his latest book Walking with Plato: A philosophical hike through the British Isles, there is something about walking that soothes the spirit and frees the mind, especially for those with a less than cheery temperament. Walking with Plato has the appearance of a semi-serious travelogue, in which the author and his wife make the sometimes arduous and often dreary hike from John O’Groats to Land’s End. One might expect Bill Bryson with a dash of Alain de Botton. But Hayden, by his own admission, isn’t very interested in the landscape. He hasn’t even taken a notebook with him. It’s mostly an inventory of damp campsites and nondescript hotels, where “we lounged on the bed, ate crisps and chocolate and watched Strictly Come Dancing. But, apart from that, it’s all a blank”. 

Candid throughout about his own sombre constitution, Hayden is here, rather, on an inward journey. The physical act of trekking becomes a challenge in itself, the landscape a sideshow. He introduces us to other characters for whom the simple act of perambulation was an end in itself. The cast includes Bertrand Russell (“The secret of happiness is to understand that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible”), Charles Dickens, who composed A Christmas Carol in his head in a series of nocturnal ramblings in the winter of 1843, and Plato, who came to learn that physical vigour promotes intellectual vigour, and that the two promote psychological vigour. 

The author emerges at the end a happier man in this affable affair. “I did take pleasure in pitting myself against these obstacles, day after day, and overcoming them.” At Land’s End he surfaces as a naive, everyday Nietzsche – the philosopher who proposed that life was about accepting strife in order to overcome it. 

PATRICK WEST

The Catholic Herald, October 21, 2016

Why not choose our politicians by lots?

Abolish elections and save democracy, says Patrick West

Against Elections

By David Van Reybrouck, Bodley Head, £9.99

Democracy today is in crisis. Never in modern history has there been more discontent with the democratic system in the West, with voter participation at the ballot box and party membership falling, and mistrust of politicians growing. Cynicism and apathy seem to abound. 

Yet the appetite for democracy is stronger than ever, as the emergence of protest groups and counter-mainstream populist movements bear witness. How do we resolve this paradox?

One radical solution, put forward here by Van Reybrouck, is to abolish elections and have democracy by lot. Those who legislate should be chosen at random, he says, as a means to eliminate bickering, factionalism, media distortion and corruption and to erase the distinction between the governed and those who govern.

This is not as outlandish as it first sounds. After all, we still choose juries on this random principle. And democracy by “sortition” was the norm in ancient Athens and Renaissance Venice. Our mental association of “democracy” with “elections” is but a legacy of the American and French revolutions, which borrowed the concept of elections from the papacy, in order to retain landed interests in large nation states. More than 200 years later, elections and political parties still prop up our now tottering “elective aristocracies”, he says.

There are problems, though. Sortition might have worked in small, culturally and racially homogenous ancient city states, but may not be suited to today. 

In response, Van Reybrouck argues that when citizens of all capabilities are brought together to make decisions that will affect their lives, they behave rationally and exchange wisdom and expertise. 

Having served on a jury this year, I am well inclined to believe that ordinary citizens of all hues are well suited to making responsible, sound decisions. Far from being facetiously contrarian, as it initially presents itself, Against Elections makes a compelling argument indeed.

The TLS, October 14, 2016

Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau
THE BONJOUR EFFECT
The secret codes of French conversation revealed
320pp. Duckworth Overlook. £16.99.
978 0 7156 5125 4

A traditional complaint from English speakers who go to France and try to speak the language is that such efforts are usually met with indifference or hostility. Unless your French is grammatically correct and pitch perfect, the nonchalant reply will either be in English, or – as used to be far more common – an actual reprimand. “Vous écorchez la langue!”, British visitors would often be corrected – “you’re flaying the language!” This has helped to shore up the Anglosphere stereotype that the French, especially Parisians, are incorrigibly rude. But, as the two French Canadian journalists Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau explain in this anthropologically flavoured guidebook, this perception is based on a misapprehension. The French don’t merely speak a different language. They communicate in a different code.

The French will correct you because their language is intrinsically bound to their national identity. In 1789 less than half the population even spoke French. Most spoke regional dialects. Thus, the acquisition and implementation of formal French subsequently became core to universalist Frenchness. This is why they don’t refer to a linguistic mistake as “une erreur”, as anglophones might, but rather as “une faute” – a word with a graver moral inference. This fear of being “at fault” explains such correctness. It also explains why French supermarket assistants, bus drivers or civil servants will never admit to being wrong.

The two most important words in the French language, write the authors in this fascinating and delightful work, are “bonjour” and “non”. The first signals less a mere “hello”, but instead: “hello, here I am, ready to engage and talk with you”. The French love rhetoric and argument. They consider conversation to be a sport. That is why the second most important word is “non”. When the French say it, appearing obstructive and unhelpful, they aren’t necessarily being negative. They are daring you to answer back. This is the country, after all, which created the salon, the place where one went to display one’s rhetorical prowess.

The authors conclude by recommending not to broach the following subjects: family, work, money or race relations. These are faux pas. Never try Anglo-Saxon-style, self-deprecating humour, either. You will look a fool. In France – the land of the public intellectual – one must instead display wit.

PATRICK WEST

The Tablet, October 8, 2016

The Catholic Herald, June 3, 2016

An anti-Establishment take on the 1916 Rising
1916: Ireland's Revolutionary Tradition
By Kieran Allen, Pluto Press, £12.99

Perspectives on the Easter Rising tend to assume two forms these days. On the one hand, they depict and revere the 1916 insurrection as a foundation myth of the modern Irish state. On the other, they regard it as a bloody betrayal of constitutionalism which left the island physically and emotionally divided. Kieran Allen takes a third position. He believes that the events in the Dublin GPO and elsewhere throughout Ireland were indeed a blow for Irish freedom, the culmination of Ireland’s revolutionary tradition – but that this tradition was betrayed by the Irish themselves. 

Allen, previously author of Austerity Ireland, is very much of the hard leftist tradition that is antagonistic towards nationalism, religion and capitalism. He has little sympathy for today’s Irish politicians who invoke the spirit of 1916. “The current Irish state is not a product of the Rising – it owes its existence to the counter-revolution of 1923,” he writes.

The IRA and the Republican movement’s failure to support the Labour movement in the crucial years from 1916 to 1923, focusing instead solely on military strategy, fatally compromised the revolutionary, anti-imperialist struggle against the British. “The Free State, however, offered its population one compensation for the dashed hopes of the revolutionary years – strict Catholic morality.” Allen speaks about religion as if it is imposed unwillingly from above, as though working-class individuals have no free will of their own. 

There is much rhetoric here, too, about “the Establishment”, “privilege” and “elites”. But the author is no Dave O’Spart and this book has many surprises. Allen demolishes the myth that the “good old IRA fought a fair, clean fight unlike the ‘terrorists’ of the Provos” between 1918 and 1923. The old IRA shot police officers in cold blood and executed informers. I didn’t know, either, that a soviet was established in Limerick in April 1919. 

We should have more books like this. For a tenured sociologist, Allen writes with a rare lucidity. And when it comes to history as blessed by politicians and the Establishment, a counter-narrative is always welcome.

Patrick West