It is a common error to suppose that populations become restive when they lack political freedom and that they can be pacified with the offer of extensions to that freedom. However, the proximate cause of dissatisfaction is always economic constriction or coercion, and only distally lack of of political avenues for the expression of political choice.

The Scottish case is an example. The devolution of political power to the Holyrood administration has in no way diminished desire for liberty, and national independence for Scotland will not address it either. The relationship between the European Union and England (nota bene: England, not the United Kingdom) is similar. There is an increasing desire for economic freedom, which manifests itself in part as a wish for political freedom, for restoration of the nation state, but in both these cases, Scotland and England, political freedom is a proxy or at best a preliminary to economic freedom, and it will not in itself satisfy the desire for a life free from constriction on the individual's wish to better his or her condition and that of their family.

Thus, a government faced with a restive population or subsection of that population errs if in attempting to pacify the rebellion it offers an extension of political freedom. This will not only fail to dissipate resentment, but it will actually increase it, since this extension of political freedom, say self-government or a tier of local government, will inevitably only serve to increase the economic coercion that is the primary cause of the initial disaffection. Indeed, the political cadres and bureaucracies that benefit from self-government will usually tend to be illiberal, as we can see from the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP); and in any case, funding an extra tier of government will necessitate the levying of additional taxes.

Given this, a wise central government will respond to separatist movements not with political palliatives, but with deep cuts in taxes and public services at the local level.

This may seem counterintuitive, and many will imagine that while tax cuts would have some appeal, local services should be increased if at all possible, since the offer of 'something for nothing' will surely please the electorate. However, this is mistaken since the central provision of services is constricting in itself, and will lead to public frustration even if those services are provided at no cost to the user. This is a point that is poorly understood even by many on the economically liberal side of the argument.

This is not to deny that political freedom can and does facilitate economic freedom, or that there is some degree of correlation between the two. The point is that political liberty is not the principal and most intensely desired good of the typical individual, an observation that I derive not from what people say, but from what they do. If political freedom were in fact so important, democratic participation would currently be at high not low levels. I conclud that people wish to do and to make, not to vote.

Indeed, we are not that troubled by distant political government. If we were so, there would be a much a powerful emotional loathing of Westminster and the European Union, not the mild contempt and irritation that is everywhere evident, much to the frustration of eurosceptical politicians. But, as anyone who has engaged with local government knows, deeply felt, passionate hatred of state coercion really only emerges when the individual is faced with local councillors or local government officers, and particularly the latter. This leads me to predict that in the event of Scottish independence, which I think more or less probable because of the extremely close referendum result, that country would prove to be more or less ungovernable, and that a return to Westminster control under distressed and distressing circumstances would be the inevitable and ultimate result. This is undesirable, and can be prevented by tax cuts and the abolition of one or more tiers of local government across the United Kingdom as a whole.

In a heavily regulated economy where risk is largely socialised, the ability to judge and evaluate situations atrophies. People just don't know how to make up their minds about goods and services. This simple fact accounts for much of the difference in societal tone between, for example, the US and the UK. It is noticeable even when comparing the United Kingdom and Japan, where I have seen housewives unwrapping supermarket shirts to test the seams almost to destruction before buying or tossing them contemptuously back on the pile. Such a scene is almost unthinkable in Britain, which is marked by passivity in the face of choices, a pacific willingness to accept the assertions of salesmen, waiters and shopkeepers, a lazy incuriosity about the details of an offered good, and a self-pitying resignation when it proves to be disappointing. All these are British traits, though less marked in some parts than others (Essex is a Little Japan, a Little America in some respects).

Teams are obviously collective interests, but they plainly compete, and of course it is this competition that gives interest to the spectacle. No one would pay for tickets to watch two teams walk on to the pitch, shake hands and agree to call it a draw (though this is the normal state of British politics). It would seem then that the attraction of such sports is to be explained not by collectivism in general, but by the special form that presents collective alliances in competition.

However, since we enjoy watching individuals in sporting competitions it seems safe to infer that competition in general is indeed very interesting to us, but then again there is a powerful tendency to represent single combat as a collective activity by regarding the individuals as representatives of larger collective teams, suggesting that we are significantly more interested in team sports than in competitive situtations involving individuals. That is to say, we do not project ourselves into a struggle between individuals by identifying with one of the two individuals, but by supporting a group of which one of the combatants is a member or at least a representative.

Thus, while it is clear that that competition in general is exciting to us, whereas collectivism in general is not, it is equally obvious that the limited form of collective alliances in competition is still more interesting than single combat. The implications for our evolutionary past are plain: inter-individual competition is real, but the interests of individuals frequently clashed through the medium of collective alliances and it is these latter situations that have moulded our psychological preferences.

Furthermore, competitive sports of all kinds seem to become more interesting to individuals in situations where real-world or economic competition is suppressed, by socialism for example or by the wealth preservation strategies of the elites (who castrate and remove the horns of their cattle, all the better to farm them). Unable to strive and better their lot in life, much of their energy is directed into the support of agents who are engaged in less restricted competition for advantage. In this economic environment individuals will enjoy the spectacle of single combat, especially in fictional situations or on film, but, as noted above, the struggle is often rendered collective in that the individual is held to be the representative of a collective interest, often nebulously the "good".

And of course, it is obvious that team sports, perhaps sports in general, are less interesting to individualists, who often enough betray themselves to their work colleagues by failing to take an interest in cup finals and test matches. In the UK enthusiasm for football overall and regardless of the team supported, is an important test of socialisation, and serves as an indicator that you are a placid member of the collective, venting competitive urges through this harmless medium.

Historians are terrible abusers of words, but to no other do they owe a fuller apology than 'emerged'.

A few years ago the climate campaign 10:10 released a short film co-written by Richard Curtis, known for his work on "Blackadder" and a household name as the author of "Four Weddings and a Funeral".

Entitled 'No Pressure', the film predicts terrible consequences for those who don't 'join in' with the consensus view on climate change, and shows these people exploding horrifically. One vignette presents a broadcaster in a sound-proof recording booth, the glass window of which is suddenly covered in blood, the remnants of her eyeballs, still joined by the optic nerve, sliding slowly down the glass. (It is still available on YouTube, though I have not refreshed my memory of the facts.)

The films became instantly notorious, to the all-but universal discredit of 10:10, which never recovered. Curtis was understandably embarrassed and made a number of evasive remarks to the effect that it was very difficult to be funny about serious subjects, which is a sound observation but should perhaps have warned him off the attempt. Humour is always insidiously suasive rather than intersubjectively argumentative; it employs the black arts to reduce the value of one thing relative to that of another, while at the same time offering the audience the opportunity of inhabiting a safe location, within the chalk circle, either above the comparison or on the favourable side of the balance. In a serious discussion it is correctly mistrusted as betraying a lack of substantial grounds.

Nevertheless, Curtis has been forgiven, and largely on the grounds that 'No Pressure' was a mistake, an aberration quite out of and other than the benevolent character that was the author of 'Love Actually'. The point is fair, and I am not about to suggest that Curtis be retried; nevertheless, it should be acknowledged, I think, that in his film for 10:10 he was doing what he had always done before, with considerable skill and to general acclaim, and what he has continued to do since. Namely, act as a sensitive retailer of the received wisdom, the unconsidered and principal or activating views of those around him; he collects these voiceless opinions, concentrates and returns them to the audience conceptually unchanged but objectified and immediately intelligible. Mostly, this ingenious reflection is welcome to all, since he takes his hints from a very broad population. But such talents made him a dangerous partner for a more exclusive organisation such as 10:10.

Some have said that Curtis should have realised what a monster he had created, and suppressed the film. Certainly, it would have been prudent; but that would have been dishonest to his art, which though modest in kind has a mystery that must be respected as much as any other; and overall, I think he deserves credit for consenting to the release of 'No Pressure'. He enlightened the public at some cost to his reputation. One cannot ask more of a writer.

A further short article on Wyndham Lewis has been uploaded to the publications page. "The Sin Against Genius: Settling Scores in the Human Age", suggests that one of the figures in Lewis's late novel, a second-rate extension of the vastly superior Childermass (1928), is a malicious representation of Charles Prentice, Lewis' one-time editor at Chatto & Windus. While spiteful and trivial in itself this satirical portrait provides, I think, a reminder that Lewis was no gentler in his later age than he had been in the 1920s and early 1930s. Alternatively, while there is certainly, as many of critics of Lewis suggest, a discontinuity between the writings after the later 1930s, and those that had preceded them, this is a difference in quality not thought.

Three new articles on Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) have been added to the publications page. All are previously unpublished, and date from ca. 1993, with a little re-writing in subsequent years.

I have not made any attempt to revise the arguments or check the evidence or the quotations, though the texts have been tidied up and reset. They can be read independently, but probably make more sense if examined in the following order, before and after the piece on The Doom of Youth published here last year:

1.  "Wyndham Lewis' Hitler: Content and Public Reception: the Truth" is a somewhat revised chapter from my doctoral dissertation. I make no apologies for the title. When it was written the misconceptions about the book were so numerous that the corrections offered in this study seemed to me, and still seem to me, to represent a major improvement.

2.  "The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory'". Published on www.libellus.co.uk last May, this article discusses in detail one of the rarer and most unread of Lewis's works from this period.

3. "Two Filibusters in Barbary: Wyndham Lewis and Alfred Rosenberg" is highly controversial, or was so when it was written. It suggests that Lewis knew the writings, at least, of Alfred Rosenberg and was to all appearances convinced by many elements of Rosenberg's cultural diagnosis. As far as I am aware this suggestion is novel, though I have myself touched on it very briefly in a footnote to the study of Doom of Youth, above.

It was while working on the first of these pieces that I first realised that the received wisdom about Lewis in the non-specialist world (i.e. outside the charmed circle of Lewisians), namely that he was for at least parts of his writing life an anti-semite, was far from being an error and, if anything, understated the case. In my view, anti-semitism was a crucial motivating component in his work throughout the 1920s and at least part of the 1930s, and (at this point I become less assertive but still suspicious) arguably to the end of his life.Whether it was as important as I think it, others will decide. In any case, it is reasonably certain, I argue, that Lewis's interest in Nazism was grounded in a reading of the philosopher-painter Alfred Rosenberg, editor of the Völkischer Beobachter and leader of the party during Hitler's imprisonment, not in Hitler himself. I have often wondered whether archival research in Germany would provide evidence of a personal relationship or correspondence with prominent members of the Nazi movement, but this is work for someone else.

My point in publishing this material now is that since the mid 1990s understanding of Lewis's anti-semitism has deteriorated still further, largely, I think because of the surprisingly mistaken observations of Anthony Julius, in his influential book, T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form CUP, 1995), where, misled by mainstream Lewis scholarship, he writes that:

"Admirers of Wyndham Lewis's work freely concede its anti-Semitism. Essentially trivial, it took the form of personal abuse or a bellicose, political invective. He didn't care much for or about Jews; he routinely said as much. The anti-Semitism in his fiction and poetry is typically casual, unreflective, and slight: 'Is he a Nigger,/ A Chink, a Jew, or some yet odder figure'; 'Chacun son Jew! is a good old english saying.' This is an anti-Semitism that lacks commitment. His portrait of Lionel Kein in The Apes of God is more hostile to the friend on whom it was based than to Jews as a whole. It is not so much anti-Semitic as anti-Schiff [...]. The contrast here with Eliot's anti-Semitism is striking [...] Eliot's Jews tend to slide into anonymity, while Wyndham Lewis's bloom into an extravagantly personal eccentricity. The anti-Semitism of his critical prose is as bluff and unreflective as that of his fiction. Though vigorously, even splenetically expressed, it lacks consideration. Again in contrast to Eliot, there is no sign of any pressure of thought behind the anti-Semitism; it is unthinking. [...] This is an anti-Semitism without sting. It is simply the only language Lewis knows." (pp. 187-188)

None of this is right, but it has had the effect of closing down debate on the matter (see for example the Wikipedia entry on Lewis). As the material in the papers I am releasing shows, Wyndham Lewis's anti-Semitism was profound, interested, persistent, intellectual, substantial, committed, principally racial (and only secondarily personal), self-conscious, evasive, intense, learned, and driven. In short it was programmatic.

It is commonplace to refer to science as the religion of our age, but this is wrong in the sense that it fails to capture those differences we actually observe; but it is understandable as a response to the overstatement of difference between the network of propositions we see in a snapshot of early 12th Century life, say, and that available to us today. There is more continuity here than the advocates of 'science' will admit, and the assertion of that continuity is an important truth. But to do so by describing science as just our version of religion goes well beyond this into satire by attempting to erode respect for science, to cut it down to size, or put it on a level with religion. But this is futile; the technological power of scientific propositions is manifestly superior and undeniable.

Nevertheless, the continuity must be respected, and accounted for, in our theory, and a simple and just way of achieving this end is to see religion as the science, or part of the science of the past, and very poor science too.

The particular merits of this approach are:

a) No difference of kind is asserted, but degrees of quality constituting difference are recognised.

b) No difference of kind in psychological experience of science and religion is asserted, but difference in complexity and in consistency with experience of the world, or evidence, is recognised. (In other words, both can seem entirely normal to the subject, but the lack of complexity in the religious view is noted, as is is lack of correspondence with the world.)

c) No difference of kind in the network of propositions is asserted, but improvements in the principle of extensionality are recognised, as is flexibility in the face of error. (I.e. the religious network tends to be systematic in the sense that faulty propositions tend to drag down many other connected propositions. Then when facts challenge religious propositions, the priests and other interested parties will resist the facts. This is also true of modern science, notoriously so in fact, but it is so to a much lesser degree; indeed it is statistically true, rather than absolutely so, that science changes under pressure from the facts.)

In summary, the continuity between states of knowledge is best recognised by granting that our science has improved over time. In the states that we think of as 'religious' it was extremely poor, today it is relatively better, though with many areas in which improvement is possible. It is better in the sense that, statistically not absolutely, our network of propositions and the use we make of them is flexibly responsive to the facts of the world as we can see them, and delivers greater technological power.

Did Kipling prophesy the Google Glass? Yes, but perhaps a hundred others did it too. Ideas are cheap at any time, and vague gestures towards faint possibilities in the far future erupt in any idling intellect like daisies after spring rain. Nevertheless, he gets credit for this well-aimed shot of 1885:

"Ever used a telephone?" said Le Diable Boiteux airily. "Sometimes" I answered; the telephone in my office being the bane of my daily life. "That's all right" said the Le Diable Boiteux. "You will see when you put them on, that this pair of glasses is to the eye exactly what the telephone is to the ear. One hundred and fourteen years hence similar instruments will be invented by your kind, when you shall have brought electro-magnetism to a higher pitch of perfection."

("My Christmas Caller, or the Prescription of Sieur Asmodeus", Civil and Military Gazette (25 Dec. 1885), in Thomas Pinney, ed., Kipling's India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88 (Macmillan: London, 1986), 128.)

The glasses are voice and mind controlled and "will work as fast as you can think", the devil explains, thus allowing the user to rapidly investigate any subject or view and listen to though not speak with acquaintances and relations. However, the outcome is not quite what the human user expects or would wish for, and here perhaps is Kipling's most interesting prediction:

"I tested their powers exhaustively [...] They enabled me to see and hear as quickly as I could think, and also to understand that Hastings Macaulay Elphinstone Smallbones had disappeared from the thoughts of all the great family of Smallbones as well as from the minds of his friends. [...] I was penetrated with a deep sense of my personal insignificance – a wholesome but unpleasant experience which some men go through life and miss." (129)

Wholesome it may be, but also dangerously disturbing; and while this story ends happily with Hastings waking from his dream and rushing out to a Christmas party, the seed of doubt is sown in the reader's mind. However, as Kipling realised, without the Devil's glasses his contemporaries were relatively safe because they knew so little and could only with exertion know a little more. In the vale of unknowing self-respect flourishes, being a shade loving plant. Before information began to flow in such quantities and with such ease did anyone really and for more than a moment believe and understand themselves to be ignorant, friendless and insignificant? I suspect not; they had little enough reason to do so. For us the situation is more difficult; knowledge chases us round every corner and into the blind alleys where we chose to hide. No wonder that we have developed electronic social networking alongside universal and almost instant data; it is a necessary analgesic, a useful fiction, a trompe l'oeil to people with smiling faces the gaping void.