These past few days, I’ve been trapped indoors by the rain. England has been hit by a cloud of unhappiness; a cyclone of damp. I stood beneath an umbrella in the garden one afternoon, shielded imperfectly from a storm of hail – bare feet on the stone path, hands trembling at the stub of a cigarette. It’s a martyr’s weather, but without the satisfactory ending.

What to do between writing? There’s an occasional visit from my mother, which means a cup of tea and church gossip. [A mad woman comes every Sunday and interrupts the sermons. She says the pastor is an agent of the devil. Several members of the congregation probably agree.] Otherwise, unable to go out, it’s a cigarette beneath an umbrella, a cheese sandwich, and some music. I don’t like to read. Other people write so much better than me – it’s insulting.

In the same way that Proust was transfixed by smell, I find the right kind of melody transports me somewhere else. By accident, I rediscovered Couperin and now I’m listening to Leçon de Ténèbres again and again. I’m probably confusing my composers (Gesualdo? Palestrina?), but if I stretch out on the floor and close my eyes, I think I can hear this music ten years ago in a room in Cambridge. I have few happy memories of that place, but one of them was the year that I took lodgings at the lonely end of my college. The windows wouldn’t shut properly and a wind blew from the living room, down the hall, and into my bedroom. There wasn’t a corner of my home that wasn’t cold. The pain was exhilarating: like a wet electric shock running all over my body.

I converted to Christianity while living in those rooms, thanks to several exciting conversations with a priest in his study. He had a big black Labrador that stunk of nicotine. Then I’d return home and stretch out on the bed, close my eyes, and listen to the sacred music that travelled the breeze from the living room, down the hall, and into my bedroom. “Qui tollis peccáta mundi, miserére nobis; qui tollis peccáta mundi, súscipe deprecatiónem nostram.”

In that crystal clear isolation, I came closer to God than evermore. Perhaps it was the product of physical and mental discomfort, I do not know. But whenever someone opened the door of my cell – letting the wind and the music escape - the spell was broken. And yet, I could never resist inviting them in. I dreamt one night that I had put the nails through Christ’s hands myself. When I awoke in terror, I called a girl. Physical infatuation followed and I never felt the same frozen peace again. Lord, have mercy.

Some months later, I went to confession at an abbey. They said on the phone that I could turn up at any time and someone would hear me. I rang the bell repeatedly for ten minutes, until a man in his eighties opened the door wearing nothing but a bathrobe. I said I was here to confess. “I was asleep,” he replied. “I’m very old.” He complained about his knees throughout the confession and, at the end, said he was going back to bed. I suspect that I went home and did the same.

Ten years later, the music ends and I peel myself off the floor. Back to the kettle, back to the fridge, back to work. Tap, tap, tap, type, type, type.  The days of innocent slumber are over. A pretty memory for an ugly spring.

Caroline Lucas has stood down as head of the UK Green Party. Lucas is her party’s first and only Member of Parliament, an honor that voters nowadays rate about as highly as being “the last person to be hanged in England.” It’s a fascinating piece of trivia, but not the most flattering way to be remembered.

With Lucas gone the Greens will set about choosing a replacement in the traditional manner: whoever can eat a four course meal in a vegan restaurant and survive wins. Expect the contest to come down to a tight race between an unshaven sociology lecturer and a dolphin called Roger. Roger will win on personality.

I lived for two years in the Green Party’s political stronghold of Brighton, a seaside town on the Sussex coast. I was still a partisan Labour man back then, so I witnessed firsthand the slow decline of socialism and its eclipse by the ecology movement. The cause was demographics. Our people were dying out or couldn’t be bothered to vote. The Greens, on the other hand, benefited from the influx of middle-class professionals and students. By nature, Brighton is a working-class town (even those bits of it that are proudly gay), but gentrification took its toll in the noughties and changed its character. I lived in a Georgian dive opposite the burnt-out pier for just £650 a month. Three minutes down the road, BBC producers were forking out £2000 for a studio flat opposite an excrement-fuelled eco garden. The future was Green.

The Greens thus suited the peculiar social dynamics of Brighton - something they couldn't replicate elsewhere at a Parliamentary level. They won the seat by offering to send Labour a message from its disaffected core of middle-class sympathisers. Oddly, there was very little about that message that was green. Instead, there was a lot of classic socialist rhetoric about ending war, doubling pensions, being nice to immigrants, yadayada. It was obvious that the Greens were a catch-all for the disaffected Left; had they not existed, their place might have been taken by Respect. Lucas herself was perfectly pleasant, although it’s hard not to be when you offer the voters “the moon on a stick.” Dracula would sound nice if he promised to end dental charges.

In the course of an election, you come to hate your opponents. Usually, that’s entirely justified, but not in this instance. The green agenda is rooted in a conservatism that I’m actually very sympathetic towards: the idea that you are what you do. If you eat rubbish, you become unhealthy. If you disrespect the living space of others, you become uncivilized. If you exhaust the planet’s resources, you become hooked on money yet also impoverished. About once a month I seriously consider turning to vegetarianism; it pains me that our global economy is rooted in the cruel and senseless murder of other creatures.

The desire to conserve, to be frugal, to respect nature, to promote the Good Society above material greed – these are all conservative attributes. In its respect for the inherited earth, the Greens are perhaps the most conservative party on the ballot paper. 

And yet … no. By elevating environmentalism to a moral order, they sacrifice the freedom of the individual on the altar of the common good. When in power, bureaucracy flourishes. Poor people are fined for using the wrong bin bags and rich people are crippled by high tax rates. The folks in the middle are squeezed by lifestyle tariffs that seem determined to force us to operate within a single square mile – no flights to New York or car journeys to Cornwall. It’s a bleak outlook that swaps the pollution of Original Sin for the literal pollution of the urban space. Man is corrupt because he needs to survive, and by surviving he takes from nature and thus despoils it. Environmentalists miss the fact that we might be stewards of this Earth but we are not its servants. Eventually, we’ll move on to somewhere even better.

Then there is that cultural difference that I’ve alluded to crudely in this post – a sense that the Greens are the party of tofu and Gaia, Wicca and Quorn. Great fun if you enjoy them; but anemic and odd to those of us who are red meat and square. Conservatism is about preserving what’s good about the culture, not just the wilderness that shaped it. That’s why “heritage” – archived in churches, towns, cities, factories – is so important to the Right. To neglect or destroy these things seems foolhardy, even though some of them are built upon the insatiable exploitation of the natural world.

When I contemplate the green/conservative dilemma, I’m reminded of a moment in the movie The Shooting Party when an eccentric protestor walks in front of a volley of gunfire to halt the shooting of birds. The Lord of the Manor stops the guns and confronts the radical. He argues, “These pheasants wouldn’t have been here at all if we hadn’t hatched them, reared them. One could argue that we give them life and then, after a bit, take it away from them again – abrogating to ourselves somewhat godlike powers.” 

That makes my point about the relationship between man and his environment being rooted in necessary evil. But what happens next is equally pertinent. Studying the protestor’s manifesto, the Lord asks, “This is a very well produced pamphlet. Where do you get a thing like this printed? Is it expensive? You don't mind my asking you?” The protestor pricks up his ears and replies, “O no, not at all. I know a very good printer in Dorking, just near where I live. An excellent man of anarchistic views. He gives me very good rates.” The two men – Left and Right – find a common passion in words and debate. It’s a pithy lesson in tolerance. By competing in the public sphere, the conservative and the environmentalist can at least agree that they care about the world around them – that there is something about mankind that is still worth saving.

Britain went to the polls last week, which led to the following conversation with my mother. Me: "What did you think of the elections yesterday?" Mum: "There were elections?" Me: "Yeah." Mum: "O. I was out all day so I missed them." Whenever I want to know what the people of Britain aren’t thinking, I ask my mother. 

The old girl certainly spoke for the majority. In all the parts of the country that hosted elections on Thursday, only 32 percent of people bothered to vote. The dismal turnout was eclipsed by Labour’s landslide victory, but, as Brendan O’Neill argued in the Telegraph, it was surely the more significant story. That the British are so uninterested in politics in the middle of such a terrible recession speaks volumes about the decline of democracy. 

A few years ago, I might have been outraged. Like a lot of young people on the Left, I defined civic engagement by voting. In fact, turning out once every two years to cast a ballot for a complete stranger - who will go on to do (at best) nothing or (at worst) a lot of damage – hardly screams Citizen of the Year Award. There are countless other, better ways to improve the lives of your fellow man, of which the surest is to care for your family. You really want to create good citizens, rebuild the jobs base, and advance educational opportunity, all at no cost to other people? Try homeschooling.

But what of the argument that by not voting you lose a right to complain? It’s a magician’s misdirection. Across the West the relationship between the citizen and the state isn’t defined by voting but by paying taxes. That’s what gives you the right to complain. The citizen is rather like a consumer purchasing a car. He’s at liberty to involve himself in the process of making that car – become an engineer, buy shares in the company, vote at shareholder meetings, demonstrate outside the factory against pollutants etc. But even if he didn’t do all those things, he still has the right to complain when he lifts the bonnet of his brand new car to discover that it has no engine underneath. Why? Because he paid good money for it. As with cars, so with schools, hospitals, and even nuclear weapons.

Likewise, nothing is more irksome that the righteous MP or congressman who tells us that we have lost all right to complain about potholes or wars because we didn’t vote for or against them. Maybe the apathetic citizen didn’t vote for them, but he sure as heck paid for them – and that’s his mandate to moan. If we could come to some arrangement by which nonvoters could abstract themselves altogether from the farce that is modern government, then perhaps voting would reassert itself as a true act of civic-minded volunteerism. Democracy for the engaged; anarchy for the self-contained. Let’s call it “pay to play.”

I’m not anti-politics. On the contrary, I spend 90 percent of my life with a laptop on my lap writing about it. I’ve probably lost my fertility in the great cause of exposing Barack Obama’s insatiable appetite for dog meat. But my interest has shifted from partisan politics to the realm of ideas.

Show me a good thought and I’ll give it column inches. If it seems sometimes like I’m a schill for the American Right, it’s because they have the most interesting ideas at the moment. Be it their critique of the media, their emphasis upon constitutionality, or their concern for marrying the temporal and the spiritual, they never fail to fascinate. Among them, the most coherent (and therefore, from an academic point of view, most useful) is Ron Paul. That’s why I’ve written so much about him: he’s intellectually lively, consistent, engaging, and pure.

Conversely, my taste for big ideas is why I find it tougher to write either about the American Left or the diminishing spectrum of British politics. I was unmoved by the London mayoral contest – a battle between two personalities rather than contrasting philosophies. What differences there were had to be teased out, and they all typically came down to a few pence here, a couple of policemen there, and a refurbished sewer. All very important to people who consume whatever services the mayor controls but not the stuff that feeds the soul. Not enough to climb a barricade for. And not, in the opinion of 62 percent of Londoners, even worthy of a ten minute detour to the polling station. The silence of two thirds of the electorate was far louder than the applause for Boris Johnson when he won the final count.

Perhaps it’s time for a retreat from national democracy, for a return to the politics of the private sphere. This could translate into a greater emphasis upon individual or community activism. But most of all it should mean a revival of coffee house, salon culture. Away from the ceaseless mudslinging and name calling, we need a quieter, sophisticated debate about ideas. We’ve allowed politicians to set the tone of political debate for too long.

I wrote a piece on Marine Le Pen – sexy gauleiter of the French Far Right – on Monday morning that attracted a lot of comments. A lot of comments. They ran about 100-1 against what I wrote, which is to be expected. In case you haven’t read the original post, I’m anti-Le Pen. To me that’s as inoffensive as being anti-acid reflux, or the Massacre of Amritsar. But a lot of people seem to disagree.

Unlike some bloggers, I’m not against a spot of vitriol in the comments and I’m not worried about email abuse.  I’ve had it all: in fact I’ve been called everything from a Nazi homophobe to a boy-hungry communist – with paradoxical allusions to evangelical zealotry and unnatural relations with a tree. My hair (which entirely my own) is a frequent target of abuse, as is my age (I’m older than I look, which is the right way round to have it). I am often called “Timmy,” sometimes "Timbo." Might I suggest, as an alternative, a play on my middle name of Randolph? In the US “Randy” is a perfectly acceptable boy’s name, but in the UK it has sexual connotations (“Switch off the electric blanket, I'm feeling randy.”) If people are going to insult me, may it at least be Chaucerian.

None of this bothers me. But I am surprised that I should have to defend myself because I came out against a nationalist.  Let me clear something up for those who left negative comments: no one told me what to write. I do not receive orders from the politically correct lobby over a morning conference call with Jesse Jackson, the King of the Freemasons, and Israel’s press officer. Whatismore, I’m not a “liberal,” as was suggested by some people. In fact, of all the terms of abuse you could use against me, that’s the one I actually find offensive. To me, “liberalism” is the summation of everything wrong about the last two hundred years of history – all of the ineptitude of Marxism, the interference of petite-bourgeois conservatism, without any of the Romanticism of either. “Liberal” is interchangeable with “secularist,” “eco-friendly,” “politically correct,” and “Dr Who fan.” Please don’t use it again.

In fact, I sympathize with some of the policy positions that Marine Le Pen holds. Just because her philosophy is wrong doesn’t mean that she’s incapable of stealing a good idea or two from here or there. Protectionism? Yes, I could protect a few British enterprises that face unfair competition from China. Curbs on immigration? Yup, a country has the right to at least know who goes in and out. Death penalty? I hate it in the abstract, but recognize that it’s necessary to maintain some semblance of  law and order. In fact, my traditionalism probably convinces most liberals that I, too, am a nationalist authoritarian.

So why come off against Le Pen? Two reasons. First, her brand of communitarianism isn’t volunterist – it’s coercive. It accords with a strong state tradition in France that conflates the needs of the individual with the will of the nation. Hence, her economics is far to the Left and her social policies smack of authoritarianism. Her desire to tear the burqa off the heads of Muslim girls is a fine example of muscular liberalism turned into fascism, along with its disregard both for the ability of the individual to chose to wear the headscarf and for the strength of religious belief found beneath it. A truly Christian voter cannot endorse Le Pen’s statism because it rejects free will on every level - and a coerced faith is valueless. She is Robespierre in high heels.

The second problem I have with the Front National is the whole racism thing. I despise it. Sorry to get all holier-than-thou here, but racism is loathsome, contrary to ethical standards of human behavior, and a barrier to the kinds of relationships that keep our society and species ticking along. So long as we hate, we cannot love. And the highest commandment of God (and man) is to love. I do not privilege myself above Jews, African-Americans, Asians, or even the French. I don't even judge them by their character as the Americans are want to do: I regard them as fellow sinners and souls of equal value. I love them, insofar as my personality will allow.

I wrote this in the post: “The FNP’s underlying concern is not the preservation of secularism, feminism or La Revolution. It is that little white babies not be outnumbered by little brown babies. It is racism, vile and simple.” That sentence received a lot of outrage, with many people arguing that what I am describing here is not an attempt at racial preservation but cultural preservation - that I was wilfully misrepresenting Marine's politics as racism. As a cultural conservative, I take that challenge very seriously. And here is my answer.

Culture is not rooted in race. Some of us believe that it has a spark of divine will, but for the most part it is the product of environmental factors, intellect, tradition, trial-and-error, and change. Over time, culture matures like a fine wine to the point when it can be enjoyed by all. It is not limited by geography or race, which is why European Christian culture was able to spread across the globe, adapt, and survive. Very few faith-based cultures have accepted race as a determinant because it contradicts the universalism of faith and it places artificial boundaries out its message.

Hence, whenever you see a self-described nationalist (a term not necessarily racist), ask yourself what “culture” they are trying to preserve. If it is a system that can survive a little dilution of the blood – a culture that can be communicated through ritual or language – then you have someone genuinely trying to preserve a cultural tradition that they believe makes meaning of the lives of those who live it. If, however, a nationalist determines wellbeing by birthrates and closed borders, you have something else. You have biological determinism masquerading as social identity. I reject it, I hate it, I will have nothing to do with it. And Timbo will continue to condemn it so longs as the Telegraph employs him.

John Carpenter is a man of diminishing talent. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he made some truly great movies: Assault on Precinct 13 (LA gangs make life Hell for a guy just trying to find a smoke), Halloween (chap in a William Shatner mask kills teenagers who largely have it coming), Escape from New York (eye-patched bandit rescues Donald Pleasance from Manhattan hospitality), and The Thing (big blop of goo does what we do every night and tries to take over the world). But by the late 1980s, Carpenter’s abilities were fading. Memoirs of an Invisible Man was so bad it starred Chevy Chase, and Ghosts of Mars made the cardinal error of telling you the end at the beginning (zombies take over Mars, but the good guys shoot their way out). The world waited with bated breath for his 2010 feature The Ward, which promised to be a return to form. Alas the story of a girl being chased by demons in a mental hospital was about as frightening as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

What went wrong? It’s probably not a case of choosing bad scripts – Carpenter’s early efforts were just as silly as his later ones. Nor was there a shift in theme, because all of Carpenter’s movies are about a cool dude getting harassed by some bad asses (leading to tons of gore and violence).

What did alter from 1980 to 2000 was Carpenter’s once consistent and personalized style of production. He lost his small gang of loyal actors, along with their 80s haunted eyes and sexless bodies (for an example of which, see the scarily beautiful Meg Foster). For example, no one is going to claim that Kurt Russell is sexy or believable in anything. But in Escape From New York, he embodies the classic Carpenter antihero: someone who doesn’t want to do what they have to do, but does it anyway and entirely on their own terms. No one is good or evil in early Carpenter, just trying to survive. 

Carpenter’s amoral dynamics were completed by minimalist electronic music and the use of soft, dark light. These gave every scene the aura of dusk, the moment when bad stuff starts to happen. Dirty, grainy film combined with stylized acting and sound created an image that is, perversely, naturalistic. Because that’s what the West was like in the 1980s – a world trying to define itself between the pressures of 1950s conformity and postmodern liberation. Substance matched style. Hence, Halloween is set among the middle-classes in the middle of America (Illinois) in a neighborhood that has only every known peace and plenty. It is shattered by the faceless, mad terror of urban violence (killer Michael Myers) as he senselessly chops up the local teens. If Carpenter couldn’t replicate the complete vision of Halloween in the 21st century, then it’s because it’s a movie that could only be made and appreciated by an audience living in the late 20th. 

The same is not true of the film that might prove to be the most culturally significant one made by Carpenter (although it’s artistically inferior to much else). They Live (1988) is a dystopian romp which postulates that the world is controlled by aliens whose true identity is disguised by a powerful satellite signal. When our hero (yet another gritty guy just trying to do his thing) picks up a pair of magic sunglasses, he’s suddenly able to see the world as it really is. Adverts contain subliminal messages such as “Consume” and “Don’t Think.” Around one-in-ten people are exposed as alien monsters, all the more repulsive for the fact that they dress and behave much like humans. At one point a human is making love to her boyfriend when his true likeness is suddenly revealed in ugly Technocolor. The monster – unaware that he has been unmasked – innocently asks, “What’s the matter, baby?”

The movie has cult appeal for two reasons. One is its abominable script, which feels like it was written by a teenager trying to imitate Raymond Chandler. Hence: “Life's a bitch... and she's back in heat,” “The world needs a wakeup call, gentlemen. We're gonna phone it in,” and my personal favorite, “I ain't Daddy's little boy no more” (cue the pounding of a shotgun). Throw in the longest fight scene in history and you’ve got a good movie to get drunk by. My theory with the fight is that it started out scripted but then got real about five minutes in, and Carpenter kept the camera rolling. It turns nasty about the time that the white guy elbows the black guy in the groin, and the black guy cries out, “You dirty motherfucker!” Watched at two in the morning with a crate of Corona, it sounds like Shakespeare.

But the movie also touches upon a lot of late 1980s paranoia that’s still relevant today. The US economy started a post-Reagan dip towards the end of the decade that was most pronounced in manufacturing. Our meathead hero used to work in a steel mill but, like thousands of others, is driven into the cities in search of casual labor. As the Cold War ended, conspiracy theorists graduated from blaming everything on communists to blaming everything on the emergent New World Order. They Live was a little ahead of the curve – the movie makes no mention of international bankers, secret societies or the NWO. But the idea that both the government and the free market are controlled by an elite (whose orders are carried out by greedy quislings) feels very current. At one point the protagonist channels Ron Paul when he quotes, “The Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

They Live doesn’t belong in the ghetto of conspiracy movies – as do Red Dawn or The Ninth Gate – partly because it’s so self-consciously funny that it defies being taken too seriously by the usual crowd of numerologists and alien abductees. But the movie also encompasses every partisan obsession, to the point that its politics are universally batty. On the one hand the subliminal messages tell everyone to consume (surely a Left-wing critique), and on the other hand the movie is concerned with both state power and the decline of the American middle-class (a Right-wing obsession). Everyone is ordered to conform, yet they are also told to put themselves first. The aliens simultaneously encourage monogamy and polyamory. The movie attacks the capitalist class in theme, but its style is redolent of the 1950s B-movies that warned of Reds under the bed. In short, The Live is open to a myriad of interpretations, which gives it a much longer shelf life than its production values really deserve.

Then again, maybe that speaks to the eternal desire to find answers to complex problems in diabolic plots. Sometimes life is so confusing and weird that the only way to order it is to imagine a conspiracy. The reason why They Live feels more contemporary than any other movie by John Carpenter is that it is the only one with a socio-political theme that extends beyond its years. It shifts the blame from humans to monsters; which is foolish, because the only real monsters in this world are human beings.

This is a brief post to wish everyone a happy Easter. It’s been unusually sober and religious for me. I had hoped to stay with friends in South Carolina but work commitments kept me in Washington. Everyone I knew in DC was out of town, so it was just me and Netflix for most of the weekend. I ended up going to church every day, culminating in an Old Rite Mass on early Sunday morning (I got up at 7am!). Now I feel rested and happy. The ordinary Lent-ending binge – with its associated regret and paranoia – has been averted. This year I have walked the straight and narrow path without a single tipsy trip or turn. Heck, I might be a candidate for sainthood.

I’ve spent Sunday on my knees, vomiting. I came down in the morning with what I misdiagnosed as flu but now suspect was food poisoning. Cue a good few hours on the bathroom floor, hacking the very essence out of me. Once you gain a rhythm, throwing up can become rather exhilarating – “pant, pant, heave, yak. Pant, pant, heave, yak.” Did I start to enjoy myself? Perhaps. I’ll let my neighbors be the judge, for I forgot to lower the sash on the bathroom window and my journey to the dark side was both audible and visible for miles around. Next door were having a barbecue on their balcony. They gamely got through their hot dogs, despite my wild sobbing and occasional cry for the sweet release of death.

The one good thing about illness is that you can’t do anything. It’s like an enforced holiday. So in-between barfs, I finished two good books, watched every episode ever made of The Thick of It, and even got around to throwing out the empty Pellegrino bottles that litter my floor. One other thing I did, which I now regret, is I went on The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website. For Americans who are unfamiliar with it, I always describe The Guardian as a Pravda for public sector workers. And it’s a damning indictment of everything wrong with the modern Left.

The Sunday “edition” of Comment Is Free offers the following articles:
1. A priest who simply refuses to wear a dog collar tells us that the super cool redevelopment of South London is unnecessary, because the beautiful deathtraps and plague hovels that the residents currently live in are just in need of a bit of “maintenance.”
2. A South Korean gentleman explains that his fellow countrymen are unhappy because they have to work for a living (I feel their pain).
3. A bizarre woman – with literally no facts to support her case – writes that grammar schools are on the increase and are some sort of threat to community cohesion because they help bright poor kids to get into university. [By the way, the total number of new grammar schools being built? One.]
4. A fellow who says that the police are at war with the communities they serve (in legal jargon: "arresting criminals").
5. And, because The Guardian is keen to break into the shrinking market of American liberals, a hit piece claiming that Rick Santorum burns crosses for fun.

The overarching message that everything is broken, everything is awful, and unless the government spends a lot more money soon, we’re all going to be going to Hell in a handcart. Every piece is leaden with melancholia. And they are least excited about the mean-spirited aspiration of the working poor. Don’t go to a grammar school because you would be betraying the people you grew up with. Don’t redevelop London because that will upset the integrity of the ghetto. Don’t study or work hard because, as the South Koreans will tell you, it just makes everyone sad. Because life is so much gayer in North Korea.

At the top of the page is an article asking what the Labour Party must do to win back the confidence of the British voter. Here's one answer, and it was at the heart of the hugely successful New Labour experiment: admire, embrace, and promote aspiration. 

The British Left is at war with the ambitious working and middle classes. They seem to regard them as traitors to the class struggle – selfish snitches because they want to raise and elevate their families on their own dime rather than the government buck. Day after day, this is the message of the Guardian. There is no solution to problems beyond the material largesse of the state. If the money dries up, then we’ll beg, borrow, or steal to keep it rolling on out. And if we must have poverty, then let us all be poor so that no one feels excluded.

But what is worst about The Guardian’s website is its predictability. You know what every article is going to say before you read it. And this isn’t just a facet of the Left’s intellectual authoritarianism, it’s a reflection of the Left’s obsession with endless political campaigning. Never thinking, or discussing, or simply creating good art – no, campaigning. Everything a good Left-wing writes is propaganda for the cause: another blow against the elitist Right. They all think they’re revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins (pictured above).

But the difference between Camille Desmoulins and Polly Toynbee is that Desmoulins had a genuine revolution to win. He was the spokesman for a happening movement that would change the world. In contrast, Comment Is Free is an archive to dying and dead thought. It writers are agitators for the past, guardians of mediocrity. No one would bother to guillotine the editor of The Guardian - that's why dear Desmoulins stands head and shoulders above him.

I’m writing this at thirty thousand feet, after a long, horrid wait for a delayed flight. The kind people at Virgin Atlantic obviously know how much I love Heathrow Terminal Three, which is why they gave me an extra four hours to explore the Sunglass Hut.

I spent one glorious summer as an Anglican. I rediscovered my faith while at university and the only place to explore it was the Church of England. I wasn’t interested in the non-Conformism of my parents and I had been raised to think that the Pope was the Antichrist, so the Anglicans it was. I settled on an Anglo-Catholic bastion called Little St. Mary’s and was Baptized there in the New Year of 2003. It was a magical place. It was very old and the grey stone steamed with incense. In winter, three tramps slept in the hallway. I went there one snowy night for Mass and found myself alone with the priest in the Lady Chapel. You could see his breath in the air as he muttered the liturgy. I can close my eyes now and still hear the choir signing the Antiphon on a Sunday morning. That is what Heaven will sound like.

I became an Anglican around the time that Rowan Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury. At first, I was very excited about the new broom. Something about Rowan spoke to a peculiarly English spirituality – half druid, half monk. He was a soft spoken intellectual in an age that abhors thoughtful silence. Rowan’s language was uncompromisingly difficult and ripe with metaphor. Best of all, he was an Anglo-Catholic. I hoped – and I still do – that the English and Roman churches might be reconciled. Aside from institutional oddities (married priests, female clergy) the Anglicans seemed spiritually in “the right place” for reunion. 

But it all went horribly wrong. Poor Rowan had an impossible task. Anglicanism is home to a liberal Protestant movement that orientates towards social reform. Unfortunately, it is also home to an alliance of Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals that is more conservative in hue. The conflict isn’t just realized in opposing theologies. The liberals tend to be Western and rich; the traditionalists are found more in developing world congregations and among the poor. While the liberal group is older and smaller, it is institutionally far more powerful. The Christian Left predominates in the universities and conclaves.

The liberal and traditionalist viewpoints were irreconcilable. Rowan responded to the crisis in the only way that an Englishman knows how: he compromised. The result was nine years of confusion. He might say that he wanted women bishops, but he opposed them in the pursuit of unity. One day he would lament the “dim witted” attacks on Christianity and another he would describe crosses as “religious decoration.” He seemed personally open to gay priests, but tried to ram through an arrangement within the Anglican Communion that would keep them from becoming bishops. Intellectually, he was a liberal. Organizationally, he always accommodated traditionalists. In practice, he frustrated both schools of thought and only deepened the divisions within the Communion further.

A lot of people have concluded that his failure was the fault of his personality. To be sure, he is an irremediably and unforgivably boring priest. Often I would hear one of his sermons on the radio and be outraged by its multitude of blasphemies. Only later, when I had the chance to go through a hard copy with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, would I realize that he was actually talking perfect sense. The man made an art out of muddle.

Yet, there was nothing Rowan could have done to resolve the contradictions of the Anglican Church. Division within the Communion is nothing new: disagreement over theology was at the heart of the English Civil War. But what makes the current struggle impossible to resolve is that it isn’t just about doctrine – it’s about the very purpose of the Anglican Church itself. The liberals think that the Church should be the servant of society. The traditionalists think that society should be the pupil of the Church. Servant or teacher, which is it to be? You can’t be a servant if you spend all your time lecturing your master about his many sins. Nor can you be a teacher if you believe that your pupil already has all the right answers. The Church had to decide what it was and stick to it.

I recall one evening watching a debate on television between a liberal woman “vicar” and a conservative male “priest.” They were arguing over female bishops. The woman vicar said that the Church should adapt to reflect society’s makeup and mores, or else it will become irrelevant and thus a poor servant. The male priest replied that the Church was there to teach eternal truths and that the World of God wasn’t up for consultation and reform. I asked my mother, who was also watching, who she thought won the debate. She replied that she felt the woman vicar was nicer and that my mother would be more likely to go to her if she was seeking comfort. “But,” I asked, “who would you want to marry or bury you?” “The man,” she replied instantly. “He actually sounds and looks like a priest.” The woman vicar had compassion but the male priest had authority. 

This existential conflict – between whether to be a servant or a teacher – was physically embodied by Rowan Williams. Ultimately, he failed to satisfy on both counts. He refused to “teach” the public because he didn’t want to drive anyone away. But he also failed to “serve” us because the confusion he created made the Church even more irrelevant. Nothing speaks more to Rowan’s ineffectuality than his parting words: “I think there is a great deal of interest still in the Christian faith.” After nine years of leadership, is that all he has to offer? People are sort of curious about faith? One would hope that they would feel a stronger emotion than “interest” for a religion that thousands have died for, which is the official faith of England, and which is, by Rowan’s own reckoning, The Truth.

I did not stay an Anglican long. I wasn’t raised in it, so I felt little affinity for the endless round of lunches and tombolas. Nor was I impressed with where it was headed. It seemed to offer no resistance to the de-spiritualization of Britain; in many regards it felt like a conspirator.

Of course, there are flourishes of nostalgia. A snatch of Parry, a few lines from the Book of Common Prayer, Remembrance Sunday etc etc. But these are, I fear, relics. Britain is now a post-Christian society. Little St Mary’s isn’t a church – it’s a museum.

Many weeks ago, I promised to review a book by a friend and I failed. It isn’t my fault. My pile of reading is a mountain high, stacked with a mix of the diaries of William Byrd and the latest Margaret Atwood. In addition, I receive literature from readers all the time – and I make an effort to delve into it. Some of it’s very good. Roughly 90 percent is mad. Just today, someone Tweeted to ask if I thought Barack Obama might have authored an “anti-Christ gospels.” I replied, “Probably not. He prefers to use ghostwriters.” 

But I’m pleased that I found time to read Paul Lay’s History Today – And Tomorrow. It’s a fine book that reminds us that history is the “king of disciplines,” for it synchronizes all others and turns disparate studies into a coherent narrative of the human drama. It is good to be reminded of how great we historians are.

Paul makes two points that I think are particularly potent. The first is that history is not a comfortable discipline. A lot of what one sees in popular history is tawdry nostalgia. From the endless History Channel documentaries about being a Spitfire pilot to the insufferable BB2 shows about life in a Georgian household (“Look ma – they made their own cheese!”), history has become something that affirms rather than challenges. Commissioners are terrified of anything that a modern audience will not instantly recognize, so they only produce that which “speaks” to them. That’s why domesticity is such a popular theme, or the history of the last forty years. When did BBC4 last venture into political territory that wasn’t to do with Harold Wilson or Margaret Thatcher? 

Dramatists must be given credit for throwing their nets wider (The Tudors, The Borgias) but even these shows invariably give ancient characters modern sensibilities. Take the dreaded Downton Abbey. At the center of Downton is the lie that the Edwardian household was like a modern extended family: open, warm, democratic. It was not. In fact, African-American slavery was arguably a more intimate type of service than the manorial system. Don’t get me wrong – it was sustained by violence. But most historians of slavery now argue that it was surprisingly geographically unsegregated (it was common, for instance, for slave and free children to play and be nursed together). By contrast, in Edward England social relations were simply impermissible and if any servant spoke to an employer in the way that they do in Downton, they’d have been sacked … or worse. Downton Abbey has nothing to do with the past and everything to do with today. Whenever the English are in trouble, they retreat into nostalgia and reflect upon their present circumstances by looking backwards. They see at history through the dark glass of their own context and conclude, "We are, and we always have been, bloody marvellous."

Instead, history should be honest and ugly. It ought to present the facts “warts and all” and strictly on the terms of the people who lived it. If there is a benefit to doing this, it is to understand that other people in other times are capable of viewing the world differently – and not just because they are ignorant or savage. There is a tendency – I’d call it cruel – to presume that because everyone born before 1940 didn’t think that the Earth circles the Sun or that constant uninhibited sex is a God given right, they were all ignorant peasant scum; worthy only of being a lesson in how stupid talking monkeys can be. That isn’t to say that we should suspend our moral faculties when regarding the past: the folks living there were sometimes scathing in their judgement of it (consider the foundational ethics of Socrates, Thomas Moore, Mary Wollstonecraft, or Sojourner Truth).

But we must sink ourselves into the sanctity and the depravity of history, if only to understand what man, under certain circumstances, is truly capable of. Paul Lay expresses this better than I can in the Huffington Post: “History, at its best, calls everything into question. It offers no comfort, no shelter and no respite, it is a discipline of endless revision and argument. It forces its students to confront the different, the strange, the exotic and the perverse and reveals in full the possibilities of human existence. It is unafraid of casting its cold eye on conflict, both physical and intellectual.”

Second, the study of the past teaches humility. The great sin of modernity is arrogance, and it is sustained by two false propositions – 1) We can make things better and 2) No one has tried this before. 

It is correct that we now have the technological resources to screw things up on a truly industrial scale, but we are far from the first people to attempt to improve man’s lot. History shows that these efforts quickly end in tyranny. Invariably, it begins with an effort to eradicate the past – precisely because it usually offers sound argument against change. The French Revolution had its Year One; the Soviets had their Historical Determinism. Sweet requests for social justice in the New Age then become violent demands for the keys to the kingdom, unlimited by the precious checks and balances that traditional culture had hitherto exerted. Progress made by mobilizing the people has always turned out to be a authoritarian disaster. We can, as individuals, redeem ourselves. But social reform of the type that modern states have invested in is just violently rearranging the furniture.

Nor does everything stay the same. Today in the West we are still living as if history is at an end. Liberal democracy and free markets are here to stay. If we are honest, we look upon the Chinese or Brazilian models of capitalism with contempt (Niall Ferguson looks upon the former with terror). The Islamic world is a land of 14th century barbarians and Africa – epitomized by Joseph Kony’s child army – is irredeemable. The West regards its backyard with as much loathing and incomprehension as it does the Tudors and the Borgias. Our inability to understand other people is made worse by a lack of sympathy for our own history.

And yet, we show the exact same arrogance of the Victorian British who presumed that the sun would never set on their own empire. As Paul Lay reminds us, “[History] has no end, as the benighted Francis Fukuyama discovered when the permanent present ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall came crashing down on September 11th, 2001. History opposes hubris and warns of nemesis. It doesn't value events by their outcome; the Whig interpretation of history expired long ago.”

Paul would probably stop there, but I’ll throw in a little postmodernism. The great irony of the West’s attachment to its liberal system is that this system is so fragile that it is arguably already gone, swept away by war, recession, the erosion of the Good Society, and the tyranny of the senses. We are now living and perpetuating a myth, sustained by a deliberate ignorance of the alternatives. “Everything that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

As Dennis Kucinich would say, “Wake up America!” I’ll never forgive Ohio for voting that man out of office.