Pre-scientific conceptions of deity burden the godhead with endless work; divine fingers are curled around the thunderbolt, the supernal hand moulds the clay and the heavenly lungs breathe instil it with life; he or she or it watches over falling leaf and sparrow.

 The situation now is rather different, not because there is any definite proof of non-existence (there can be no such thing). But our understanding of physical process and the record of that process over time has pushed god, gods, and godesses to the margins of time and space. There is almost nothing for such creatures to do, almost "no need for such hypotheses". If we bother with the concept of a god at all, we sketch an almost infinitely distant prime mover, an all but insignificant and only blandly benevolent royalty hesitantly breaking a bottle of cheap fizz over the bows of a universe already sliding down the slipway under its own weight.

"Good morning, I'm Daniel your train guard". The contrast with Japan is sharp: "Tanaka desu." (Not that Japanese train staff would think of introducing themselves personally. Indeed, if their company required them to do this, and I suspect that "Daniel" was under orders, they would almost certainly refuse, very politely of course.)

We struggled for long to gain surnames, with all the collection of entitlements (and obligations) and dignities that go with them, and they are not lightly to be cast aside.

Lord Lawson has today published a powerful article, "I'll be voting to quit the EU" (07.05.13), arguing that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union. My own views on this matter have turned round completely in the last decade. I began by being in favour of the EU on the grounds of affection and admiration for Europe; the same grounds now lead me to conclude that the EU is a threat. Lord Lawson's article makes the point well:

This has nothing to do with being “anti-European” [...] The issue is not Europe, with its great history, incomparable culture and diverse peoples, but the European Union. To confuse the two is both historically and geographically obtuse.

Curiously, the 'issue' with Europe is not so much its strength, but its overall weakness, which makes it harsh and bullying in those areas where it does in fact have some control. I tried to make this point in a letter to The Times (published 06.11.09):

Sir:

In the United Kingdom much public anxiety about the European Union mistakenly revolves around its supposed intrusive and unbridled strength. On the contrary, the fundamental cause for concern is that the EU is in practice far too weak to protect the interests of its member states.

Indeed, the EU bureaucracy, for all its bluster, cannot effectively exercise even a small part of the power currently sought by the executive. The contrast with the United States is sharp and instructive. But this weakness cannot be remedied through any Lisbon or other treaty fiat. Power of a Federal kind can only be built incrementally, and with the consent and approval of the member states, who will cede actual authority when it is justified by an increase of security and wellbeing, and not otherwise.

Until the EU deserves respect and earned the right to rule we will need national governments to order and defend our societies.

In practice this is precisely what is occurring, as witness the gulf between the increasingly pragmatic national approaches to energy and climate change, and the infeasible and counterproductive mess that passes for European Union policy on these matters.

Yours sincerely,

John Constable.

I still believe this to be the case, and my experience of visits to the European Parliament have reinforced this feeling. Consider the motorcades of Washington, which for all their grandeur, star-spangled banners, and outriders, simply carry elected representatives in the dignity that the American people believe fit; it is demonstration of public self-respect. Compare this with the aggressive convoys that force their way through the traffic of Brussels, their windows blacked out and only the yellow and blue commission flags and the sheer arrogance of their sirens to identify them. The passengers are unknown, unknowable, and unelected. It is a ceremony of pure oppressive power. There is no denying that it is authentically European, such is the history, but it is not a Europe that deserves resurrection.

The patriotic collectivism of Empire and its apologists laid the groundwork for British socialist politics in the 20th Century, and like so many other Victorian constructions it has proved immensely durable, and today Britain has one of the most thoroughly socialist cultures and populations anywhere in the world. Other states with an imperial heritage appear to have been less prone to subsequent social-democratic drift, though the United States is an interesting case, since the Roosevelt years seem to have achieved a deep socialisation of the economy without any previous imperial phase, unless we are to see this as a result of the empire of federated states that emerged after the Civil War.

Certainly, where we find patriotic collectivism we often find the emergence of intense varieties of socialism, and the growth of Nazism from Prussian militarism, amongst other fertile sources, is a good example, but an extreme one that failed to last. A more useful illustration is the moderate, enduring, and all-pervading socialism of British politics, where the major parties offer only slightly different varieties of the same fundamental approach, is a more useful illustration. It is commonplace to refer to this as the Post 1945 Settlement, and I would be the last person to underestimate the importance of the Attlee government in realising and fixing this ideology. However, the transformation of a train of thought into a set of grounding presumptions  is clearly evident in the inter-war period, and can be seen coalescing throughout the nineteenth century. Throughout its growth the Empire is a distinct and notable causal factor.

Perhaps we can go further and suggest that insofar as British socialism has characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds, then the Empire is a plausible explanation. The continuities are to me at any rate striking, for far from being a purely rapacious commercial operation, the imperial administration, certainly in the later 19th Century, and arguable exceptions such as Milner aside, has the appearance of a condescending and intensely conceited philanthropic enterprise, determined to do good regardless of the cost to the taxpayer in Britain or the lucrative opportunities it presented to the companies employed to do its bidding overseas. Indeed, this unrealistic altruism was carried over into the post-imperial phase, and accounts for part of the otherwise paradoxical patriotism and imperialism of the Attlee governments, which jeopardised its domestic programme through a stubborn adherence to a world role in Korea and elsewhere.

It may at first seem odd to claim Kipling as the herald of modern socialism, and no one will deny that the implications of his writings are mixed; but his world-view often, though not invariably, puts a collective aim above that of individual satisfaction, and this commits the mind to a process of reasoning that inevitably tends leftwards, in spite of the numerous disadvantages and falsehoods of that orientation.

I have just posted a new article on the publications page: "The Doom of Youth: Wyndham Lewis' Conspiracy Theory". The piece was written in 1995, or thereabouts, but I made no attempt to publish it. The subject is a detailed analysis of the argument of Lewis', The Doom of Youth (1932), a book that very few people have read, and I couldn't see that it would be of interest to general literary critics or historians, and the points that I felt bound to make were and still are very unlikely to please most Lewis specialists, who are by and large enthusiasts first and truth-seeking scholars second. I kept it on hand to use as a chapter in a book on Lewis, if such a thing ever presented itself as worth the writing, which it never did. No attempt has been made to update the article in the light of more recent research on Lewis, indeed I haven't kept up with that work, but I have a hunch that the thesis is still novel. To be straightforward, I think the book is an important element in Lewis' antisemitic conspiracy theory, and by saying this I do not mean to suggest that Lewis' antisemitism was of a superficial, or golf-club, type. Indeed, my conclusion is that Lewis's views were part of a extended and systematic interpretation of cultural and racial history that produces an ideological antisemitism with few British but many European correlates.

Unhelped by anaesthetic dullness,
And strangers to euphoria,
They see far and clearly,
But speak in halting spasms,
Short flights of unrhymed words.

Then, brooding on the landscape,
They hang in that thick emptiness,
Like fish.

Contemporary architects, in common with many writers subsequent to the modernist revolution, seem deliberately to affront the passerby with their independence of the need to respect the interests of the viewer. The austere building is deliberately vile, and boasts of its aggressive economy, as if the inhabiting institution or company were to say "We are rich but won't spend money on your feelings." It also declares that the views of neighbours, their vistas and their opinions, have no weight for those in that building. By contrast the decorated building is generous, and grants that its builders and residents are concerned, if only a little, with what others think. Such a considerate structure offers intricate surfaces, and pointless swags of leaves and flowers to entertain the mind of the external inspector, a delight not available to those within the structure.

Curiously, this distinction makes official buildings of the past very much less intimidating, however impressive they may be. Think of the Banqueting House, or the Royal Courts of Justice, or the gates of Nanzen-ji. These structures certainly give evidence of power, and were presumably designed for such a purpose. A provincial priest visiting the Kyoto headquarters would be delighted to think that "This is us!", or a little fearful ("This is them"), depending on whether he felt welcome or not. However, these buildings are implicit with an acknowledgement that the viewer's opinions are not without value. After all, the building seeks to persuade and influence. By contrast the sheer-sided and angular concrete structure of a modern British Crown Court, for example, suggests, at least to me, a deliberately anonymous, harsh and indifferent power quite independent of the individual standing before it, rather than, as one might hope, an institution aware that its being and its authority are constituted from the respect of a supporting population.

Contemporary architects have a very low reputation with the general public, a hostility that the architects themselves think of as being only a reactionary reluctance to accept the new. However, it seems to me more likely that the man in the street is revolted by the architectural profession's servile complicity with the scornful corporate or bureaucratic power that so deliberately turns its back on the neighbouring society. Of course, it is possible to like brutalists buildings, but the pleasure that architectural critics take in such structures is not dissimilar, in my view, to the delight of the listener stretching out their arms to salute the Tyrant Singer (discussed in earlier piece here). The viewer projects themselves into the position of the independent autocrat and finds freedom in the implied domination of others. That is a loathesome aesthetic, and deserves our contempt.

Shortly after nine
At Punta Arenas,
Notorious for fire even in this
Tierra del Fuego
A noble warship of the Queen’s
Went bang, and fell in smithereens.

First there was a noise
And all the glass blew in;
We were standing by the window at the time, and then
Dark smoke, bright flame, little smuts of flying men.

The captain,
Naked from his bath,
Had plunged into the sea
When he felt the first explosion,
Surfacing in time to get his hair burnt by the second,
Treading water, weeping.

He was taken to the cabin of our boat,
Which thankfully survived,
And, too bemused to think of stooping,
Left a trail of smudges on the ceiling.

If we could hear the endless material clatter of our bodies, the rustle of its elements one over another would hinder most efforts at communication. Much would be white noise, but some, and the most disturbing, would display the regularities of life, like the engine room hydraulics audible when lying in the bath with our ears beneath the waterline. It is fortunate that we so rarely catch even a fleeting half-heard fragment of this strain, which if not a dirge does suggest that, when all the variations have been worked through, the concert must come to an end.

The old, of course, are increasingly haunted by this music, while the young are happily insensitive to the physical and mechanical aspects of their perfectly functioning bodies and hear nothing but their own sweet voices. Consequently, the under thirties are the greatest enthusasts for the philosophy of spirit, which can only seem plausible when physical problems are fewest and the anaesthetic of dualism quite unnecessary. On the other hand, those who have the greatest need for a comforting division between mind and matter are denied an easy path into that view by the increasing racket of our functions, which throws before them the uncomfortable possibility that knocking pipes, creaking bone, and tearing muscle not only impinge on but constitute mental presence.

Though Attical plotting is tight
And the justice ingeniously right,
    Greek Fate lacks the flair,
    And punctilious care
Of the matriphagistical mite.