The discussion had been prompted by two papers. The first was Gabriel Abend’s The Meaning of Theory, which argues that sociologists use the word theory in several different ways, often without noticing that they’re doing so. The second was Kieran Healy’s Fuck Nuance, which makes the usefully provocative case that the demand for more nuance is often not a mark of sophistication, but a way of preventing theory from doing the thing theory is supposed to do.

Taken separately, these are quite different interventions. Abend’s paper is careful, taxonomic and semantic; Healy’s is brisker, funnier and rather more likely to wake up a bunch of lethargic postgrads on a hot summer day after lunch. But read together, they raise a common problem: what do we want theory to be?

This question can sound abstract in the least flattering sense of the word. It can feel like a question for people who have spent too long in the administrative wetlands of postgraduate training, picking through the phrases that appear in reviewer reports: under-theorised, conceptually thin, insufficiently nuanced, lacking a theoretical contribution. But the question isn’t merely academic housekeeping. It goes to the heart of what explanation, interpretation and criticism are for.

The first mistake is to assume that a theory is valuable because it gets as close as possible to reality. This sounds sensible until we remember how representations usually work.

Alfred Korzybski’s famous line is that “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” The first half of that line has become a cliché, mostly because it’s true in a way that keeps being useful. The map isn’t the territory. The model isn’t the world. The concept isn’t the thing. The word isn’t the experience. The menu isn’t the meal - and thank goodness it isn’t!

But the second half is where the more interesting argument sits. A map works not because it reproduces the territory exactly, but because it preserves some relevant structure in a usable form.

That word, usable, is doing a lot of work.

The best maps are, in one obvious sense, quite poor representations of the places they describe. They aren’t full-size. They aren’t three-dimensional. They have a limited colour palette. They ignore the exact texture of the pavement, the smell of the air, the weather on a particular Thursday, the dog currently doing something unfortunate beside the postbox, and the slow psychic collapse of the person trying to find a parking space in Crookes. A perfect map of Sheffield would be Sheffield. It would contain every road, kerb, pothole, bus stop, building, hedge, argument, Greggs, hill and badly parked car at a scale of one to one.

It would also be completely, utterly, hilariously useless.

A useful map is not a failed attempt at being the territory. It’s a disciplined refusal to be the territory. It leaves things out so that other things can be seen.

That, I think, is a good way into theory.

The One-to-One Map

Suppose we were to make a map of a place. The first question wouldn’t be how much detail can we include? It would be what is this map for?

An Ordnance Survey walking map, a Tube map, a geological map, a constituency boundary map, a flood-risk map and a tourist map of the same city could all be accurate, but they wouldn’t be accurate in the same way. The Tube map is famously uninterested in geographic proportion; its genius is that it makes a transport system legible by preserving lines, connections and stations rather than surface geography. An OS map cares about footpaths, contours and field boundaries. A constituency map cares about electoral units, not whether the road between two places is walkable. A flood-risk map cares about water, elevation and probability. A tourist map cares about where the museums and public toilets are, which is sometimes the most civilised theory of urban life available to us.

These maps can disagree without one of them simply being wrong, because they’re selecting different relationships from the same underlying place. The issue isn’t whether each map captures everything. It’s whether it captures the right things for the job it’s meant to do.

This is where academic discussions of theory often go wrong. We talk as though theory names one kind of object, and then we argue about whether this object should be general or specific, explanatory or interpretive, empirical or conceptual, normative or descriptive, abstract or historically grounded. Abend’s great service is to point out that this is often a false argument. Sociologists aren’t always disagreeing about theory. Quite often, they’re using the same word for different intellectual activities.

Sometimes theory means a general proposition about how variables relate. Sometimes it means an explanation of a particular event or social phenomenon. Sometimes it means an interpretive account that helps make sense of something. Sometimes it means work on canonical authors. Sometimes it means a broad conceptual perspective, such as Marxism, feminism, rational choice or poststructuralism. Sometimes it means normative critique. Sometimes it means reflection on the philosophical problems sociology runs into, such as structure and agency, social order, causality, interpretation or value.

That’s not just academic tidying. It changes the argument. Asking whether a theory is good without asking what kind of theoretical work it’s trying to do is like asking whether a map is good without asking whether it’s meant for walkers, train passengers, planners, geologists, soldiers, canvassers or tourists. A walking map that fails to show railway interchanges may be perfectly adequate. A Tube map that fails to tell you where the bridleways are has not thereby betrayed the public.

This is also why the phrase more theory can be so maddeningly unhelpful. More of what? A broader explanatory claim? A clearer conceptual vocabulary? A more explicit normative argument? A more serious engagement with existing literature? A deeper account of causality? A more coherent interpretation of meaning? A better worked-through ontology? These are not trivial differences. They’re different maps.

When a reviewer, supervisor or seminar participant says that a paper needs more theory, the charitable reading is that they’ve noticed a real gap. The less charitable reading is that they’ve reached for an academic all-purpose seasoning and shaken it over the manuscript. Either way, the useful follow-up question is not whether the paper has enough theory in the abstract. It’s what kind of map the argument is trying to draw, and whether the current version leaves the reader able to get anywhere.

The Virtue of Leaving Things Out

This brings us to Healy’s argument against nuance.

At first glance, this seems like an absurd position. Nuance is one of those words academics tend to use as pure praise. A nuanced argument is careful, subtle, sensitive to complexity. A lack of nuance is blunt, crude, simplistic, probably tweeted. Surely the world is complicated. Surely social life is full of exceptions, contradictions, mediations, histories, institutions, meanings, asymmetries and awkward residues. Surely, if anything, we need more nuance, not less.

This is plausible, but incomplete.

Healy isn’t arguing against careful thinking. Nor is he arguing for stupidity, although one of the pleasures of the paper is that he recognises how often people confuse the two. His target is what he calls Actually Existing Nuance: the habit of making theory richer by adding more dimensions, more levels, more caveats, more mediating variables, more conceptual furniture, more everything, without any strong method for specifying how these additions relate to one another.

Anyone who has spent any length of time around academics (personally I’m coming up on 14 years now) will recognise the move. Someone proposes an argument. Someone else says, yes, but what about agency? Or temporality? Or affect? Or embodiment? Or capitalism? Or discourse? Or power? Or place? Or materiality? Or the state? Or the household? Or the more-than-human? Or, because we’re all having such a nice time, all of them at once.

Sometimes this is a fair challenge. Sometimes the missing element is not a decorative omission, but a structural failure. A theory of schooling that leaves out class may have a problem. A theory of racism that leaves out institutions may have a problem. A theory of online conflict that leaves out platform architecture may have a problem. There are omissions that clarify, and there are omissions that deceive.

But a demand for more nuance can also become a way of refusing abstraction altogether. It’s the academic equivalent of objecting to a road map because it doesn’t show every kitchen table along the route. True, in a sense. Not helpful, in most senses.

Theory depends on leaving things out. It has to. This isn’t a regrettable limitation to be overcome by ever more conceptual bric-a-brac; it’s the condition of theoretical usefulness. If a theory includes every feature of the case, it hasn’t explained the case. It has redescribed it. If a map includes every feature of the territory, it hasn’t mapped the territory. It has become an eccentric storage problem.

This is the danger of the one-to-one map. It flatters our desire for fidelity while destroying usefulness. We think we’re becoming more accurate because we’re adding detail, but we may only be refusing to decide what the argument is about.

Healy’s point, in cartographic terms, is that a good map has to be rude. It has to commit. It has to say: for this purpose, these features count, and those features don’t. The rivers, yes; the individual stones, no. The footpaths, yes; the exact emotional condition of every sheep, regrettably no. The line connections, yes; the actual curvature of the railway, only if it helps.

This is not a licence for sloppiness. Quite the opposite. Leaving things out responsibly is difficult. It requires judgement, and judgement is where many of the real arguments live. Bad abstraction leaves out what it doesn’t understand. Good abstraction leaves out what it can justify leaving out.

The Legend Is Part of the Argument

A map doesn’t merely omit. It also translates.

Roads become lines. Heights become contours. Rivers become blue strokes. Constituencies become bordered shapes. Areas of deprivation become shaded patches. Public toilets become small icons of civilisation. The map doesn’t just reduce the territory; it recodes it into a system of symbols.

The same is true of theory. A theoretical vocabulary is a legend. It tells the reader how to interpret the marks on the page.

This is why concepts matter, even when they’re annoying. A theory that describes an event as conflict, deviance, resistance, social reproduction, boundary work, moral panic, collective action, symbolic violence or platform governance isn’t merely attaching different labels to the same thing. It’s telling us what sort of thing we’re looking at, what relationships may be relevant, what causes might be plausible, what evidence should be gathered, what interventions might follow, and what forms of misrecognition should be avoided.

This is also why Abend’s semantic caution matters. If theory can mean several things, then theoretical vocabularies can do several kinds of work. Some concepts are designed for explanation. Some are designed for interpretation. Some are designed for critique. Some are designed to connect cases. Some are designed to disturb common sense. Some are designed to make visible what dominant forms of description have made invisible. These aren’t interchangeable tasks.

A geological map of Sheffield and a political map of Sheffield can both show the same broad area. One might help you understand coal measures and sandstone. The other might help you understand ward boundaries, campaign targets and the occasional spiritual suffering of people who have agreed to run a committee meeting. It would be very odd to complain that the geological map lacks electoral nuance. It would be equally odd to complain that the political map has failed to capture sedimentary structure. They’re maps of the same place, but not maps of the same problem.

In social science, we often forget this. We judge one theoretical map by the standards of another. A conceptual essay gets criticised for not producing causal identification. A causal model gets criticised for lacking interpretive thickness. An ethnographic account gets criticised for not generating general propositions. A normative argument gets criticised as though it were pretending to be value-neutral. Sometimes these criticisms are justified because the author has overclaimed. But often they arise because the critic has mistaken one genre of map for another.

This is why the first question should be: what is this theory trying to help us see?

The second is: what does it make harder to see?

Because every map does both.

Distortion Is Not Always Error

A map that distorts is not necessarily a bad map. The Tube map distorts distance and direction, but it preserves connectivity. A cartogram distorts geographic size, but it may reveal population, voting power or economic distribution more clearly than a conventional map. A risk map may exaggerate boundaries that are, in reality, probabilistic and uncertain, but the exaggeration may be useful if the purpose is decision-making.

The question isn’t whether distortion exists. It’s whether the distortion is honest, disciplined and appropriate.

This is where theory becomes both useful and dangerous. A theory distorts social reality by selecting some relations as more significant than others. It may compress a long historical process into a mechanism. It may treat messy human beings as cases, actors, positions, subjects, agents, bearers of capital, nodes in a network, members of a category or participants in a discourse. Sometimes this is illuminating. Sometimes it’s grotesque. Often, irritatingly, it’s both.

Take rational choice theory. It’s easy to criticise because its model of human action can seem comically thin. People are not little utility calculators with shoes. They’re inconsistent, relational, emotional, habitual, morally committed, historically situated and often gloriously bad at knowing what they want. Fine. But the thinness is part of the point. By stripping action down to preference, constraint and choice, rational choice theory creates a map that can travel a long way. It often travels too far, and with too much confidence, and in a manner that makes you want to hide the passports. But its influence is not accidental. Its simplifications are powerful because they’re disciplined.

By contrast, a theory that includes structure, agency, culture, power, temporality, affect, institutions, discourse, embodiment and materiality may sound richer, but richness isn’t the same as explanatory force. If everything matters, then nothing has been specified. If every relationship is mutually constitutive, then the phrase may become less an argument than a fog machine. If every phenomenon must be understood at every level simultaneously, then theory hasn’t deepened; it has panicked.

That’s Healy’s warning. A taste for nuance can become a taste for unfalsifiable overgrowth. The theory grows more elaborate, but less useful. It acquires more compartments but less traction. It can explain everything after the fact because it commits to very little beforehand.

The map now has every road, every garden wall, every passing emotion, every cloud, every possible route and a small annex on the metaphysics of signage. The legend is seventy-three pages long. Nobody can fold it. Nobody can use it. But it does look terribly sophisticated on a seminar table.

A Small Test for Theoretical Maps

One way to make this more concrete is to treat theories as maps and ask a few cartographic questions of them.

First, what is the map for? A theory should have a use, even if that use is interpretive, critical or conceptual rather than predictive. It might help explain why something happened, identify a mechanism, clarify a category, reveal a hidden assumption, compare cases, generate hypotheses, or reframe a moral problem. A theory that can’t say what sort of journey it supports is already in trouble.

Second, what is its scale? Some theories are local maps. They’re designed for a particular case, period, institution or interaction. Others are regional, comparative or general. Trouble begins when a local map pretends to be universal, or when a highly general map is condemned because it doesn’t show the texture of every local path. Scale isn’t a defect; it’s a choice.

Third, what is in the legend? The key concepts of a theory are not ornaments. They’re the symbols through which the social world becomes legible. If the legend is unclear, the map can’t be read. If the legend is overloaded, the map becomes an exercise in decoding rather than understanding.

Fourth, what does it distort? This question should be asked without the theatrical gasp that often accompanies the discovery of simplification. Of course it distorts. The useful question is whether the distortion clarifies the relevant structure or smuggles in a false one.

Fifth, where does it stop working? Every useful theory has limits. This is not a confession of failure. It’s a condition of responsible use. A theory that knows where it stops is usually more valuable than one that expands to consume every objection.

None of these questions requires us to abandon nuance. They require us to put nuance in its place. Nuance is not the enemy when it sharpens a distinction, specifies a mechanism, identifies a boundary condition or prevents a lazy generalisation. It becomes a problem when it operates as an all-purpose demand for more detail, more caveat, more complication and more conceptual upholstery.

The point is not to prefer simple theories to complex ones. The point is to prefer theories whose complexity is earned.

Theories Are Not Territories

The map metaphor also helps with a deeper anxiety, which is the fear that abstraction is somehow a betrayal of lived reality.

This fear is understandable, especially in qualitative, interpretive and critical work. Social life is thick with meaning. People aren’t variables. Institutions aren’t merely containers. Experiences are not exhausted by categories. There is always more going on than the theoretical account can hold. Anyone who has spent time with interview data, fieldnotes, archives or the ordinary strangeness of human behaviour knows this. The problem with abstraction is not imaginary.

But the answer can’t be to preserve everything. Research always involves loss. Description involves loss. Quotation involves loss. Coding involves loss. Narrative involves loss. Even attention involves loss, because to notice one thing is to place something else outside the frame. The question isn’t whether we lose something. It’s whether the loss is worth what becomes visible.

This is a hard discipline, and it’s especially hard because omissions are not politically innocent. A map can erase communities. A category can flatten difference. A model can treat historically produced inequalities as individual choices. A theory can universalise a privileged case. A concept can make domination look natural. A boundary can turn a human problem into somebody else’s administrative inconvenience.

So the defence of abstraction can’t be a defence of indifference. It has to be a defence of accountable simplification. We need theories that can say: this is what I’m leaving out, this is why I’m leaving it out, this is what my simplification makes visible, this is what it risks obscuring, and this is where you should stop using me.

That, in practice, may be the best answer to both Abend and Healy.

From Abend, we take the warning that theory is not one thing. We should stop asking what theory really is, as though somewhere in the metaphysical stationery cupboard there’s a single correct definition waiting to be found. We should ask what sort of theoretical work is being done.

From Healy, we take the warning that more detail is not always more thought. We should stop treating nuance as the automatic mark of intelligence. Sometimes the intelligent thing is to make the distinction. Sometimes the intelligent thing is to stop making distinctions and see whether the argument can stand.

The cartographical metaphor holds these together. A theory is a map, but there are many kinds of map. A theory simplifies, but not all simplifications are equal. A theory distorts, but distortion may clarify. A theory omits, but omission may be either disciplined or dishonest. A theory is useful not when it becomes identical to the world, but when it preserves enough of the world’s relevant structure to help us think, explain, interpret, criticise or act.

The best theory is not the one that contains the most reality. That would be reality, and we already have quite a lot of that. The best theory is the one that lets us see a structure we couldn’t otherwise see, while leaving us alert to the price of seeing it that way.

The map is not the territory. Thank God. The territory is far too big to fold.

Sources

Gabriel Abend, The Meaning of Theory, Sociological Theory, 26(2), 2008, pp. 173 to 199.

Kieran Healy, Fuck Nuance, Sociological Theory, 35(2), 2017, pp. 118 to 127.

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933.

They are exposed. They are revealed. They have shown us who they really are. A bad argument becomes a diagnosis. A mistaken belief becomes a moral confession. A clumsy sentence becomes evidence for the prosecution. The person who changes their mind is not someone who has learned something, but someone who has tried to wriggle out of being caught.

This is, to put it mildly, not an atmosphere ideally suited to thought.

There is a familiar complaint here, and a familiar bad version of it. We have all heard, perhaps rather more often than necessary, the lament of the professionally unconstrained speaker: nobody is allowed to say anything any more, the mob is coming, free speech is dead, civilisation trembles every time a columnist receives mild pushback below the line. This complaint should not detain us for long. A great many people who say they have been silenced are, in practice, saying so from a newspaper column, a podcast studio, a parliamentary chamber, or a publisher’s advance. If this is silence, it has unusually good distribution.

But the fact that the stupid version of an argument is stupid does not mean there is no serious version underneath it. There is a real problem with a culture that treats error as contamination. There is a real problem with forms of public judgement that leave no meaningful path from being wrong to becoming less wrong. There is a real problem, too, with the opposite temptation: to insist that because error is human, no one should ever be criticised, challenged, corrected, embarrassed, removed, or made to face consequences for the harm their wrongness has done.

The difficulty is holding both truths together.

People need room to be wrong. They do not have a right to make their wrongness everyone else’s burden indefinitely.

That distinction matters because almost everything interesting about this question lives inside it.

The necessary humiliation of thinking

Most of us have only become wiser by passing through versions of ourselves we would now argue with.

This is an awkward thing to admit, partly because it deprives us of the pleasure of imagining ourselves as people who were always basically sound. But almost nobody reaches their better judgements cleanly. We inherit assumptions. We repeat slogans before we understand them. We mistake intensity for conviction and conviction for truth. We borrow the politics of our friends, the prejudices of our families, the manners of our institutions, the anxieties of our age. Then, if we are lucky, something interrupts us.

Sometimes that interruption is an argument. Sometimes it is a relationship. Sometimes it is the slow embarrassment of noticing that our old certainties no longer fit the world. Sometimes it is simply time, which is not as efficient as a good teacher but has a certain grinding persistence.

This is why the right to be wrong is not a decorative liberal principle. It is not a little courtesy we extend because we are all terribly open-minded and charming over coffee. It is one of the conditions of intellectual development. If people cannot be wrong provisionally, they cannot become right except by accident. If every mistaken view is treated as final evidence of character, then the safest course is not reflection but concealment.

And concealment is not the same as learning.

A person who knows they will be punished equally for ignorance, doubt, revision, apology and bad faith has very little reason to move from one to the other. They may still change privately, because human beings sometimes do, despite our best efforts to make moral growth as socially unrewarding as possible. But the public culture will have taught them that honesty is dangerous. It will have taught them to hide the process by which a person comes to know better.

That is not moral seriousness. It is a bad pedagogy of virtue.

Mill, but not as a slogan

John Stuart Mill is the obvious ghost at this particular feast. In On Liberty, his defence of free discussion is not merely that individuals should be left alone to say whatever happens to pass through their heads. His argument is more demanding than that, and more useful.

Mill argues that suppressing an opinion because we are certain it is false involves treating our certainty as though it were infallibility. He also argues that even false opinions have value, because the collision between truth and error helps prevent true beliefs from hardening into dead dogma. We come to understand what we believe not simply by repeating it, but by testing it against contradiction.

This is powerful, but it becomes tedious very quickly when flattened into free-speech boilerplate. Mill is too often dragged onstage to perform a short routine about censorship, after which everyone returns to shouting exactly as before. The more interesting point is not simply that wrong views may contain fragments of truth, though they sometimes do. It is that people often need to inhabit error temporarily in order to get beyond it.

Thought is not a clean progression from ignorance to knowledge. It is messier than that. People test arguments badly before they test them well. They use provisional language clumsily. They overcorrect. They flirt with ideas they later reject. They ask questions that reveal not only curiosity but confusion, defensiveness, vanity, loyalty, fear. This is not ideal, but it is recognisably human. To demand that people think only in publishable conclusions is to misunderstand thinking.

The mind does not move only by announcement. It moves by rehearsal.

That does not mean every rehearsal should be staged in public, or that the public is obliged to applaud patiently while someone slowly discovers that other people are fully human. There is a difference between the private awkwardness of learning and the public imposition of ignorance. But a culture with no patience for the former will get more of the latter, not less.

People do not stop being wrong because error becomes dangerous. They become more careful about where they show it.

Error is not innocence

The generous case for error can become sentimental if we are not careful. It is tempting to imagine wrongness as an essentially innocent state: the student asking a clumsy question, the friend revising an inherited prejudice, the younger self stumbling towards moral adulthood. These cases matter. They are probably where our patience should be widest.

But error is not always innocent.

Sometimes wrongness is negligent. Sometimes it is self-serving. Sometimes it is a way of avoiding what one has already been told. Sometimes it is profitable. Sometimes it is a costume worn by cruelty because cruelty has learned that honest malice has worse public relations.

There is a substantial difference between a person who does not yet know better and a person who has built a career on refusing to know better. There is a difference between a teenager repeating something ugly because they have never had it challenged and a minister laundering ignorance into policy. There is a difference between someone thinking aloud in uncertainty and someone using institutional authority to make their confusion administratively real.

This is where the right to be wrong begins to weaken.

It is strongest where there is vulnerability, learning and revision. It is weakest where there is power, repetition and refusal to correct.

That is not hypocrisy. It is proportion. A private person making a bad argument in good faith deserves more patience than a pundit who repeats the same debunked claim every six months because it reliably produces bookings, clicks or applause. A student testing an idea deserves more room than a headteacher turning that idea into a punitive policy. An ordinary voter may be mistaken about the effects of a law; the people drafting the law have fewer excuses.

Power changes the moral status of error because power changes its consequences.

If I am wrong in my kitchen, the damage may be limited to a tedious evening for everyone present. If a columnist is wrong in a national newspaper, the error can become part of the weather. If a minister is wrong, the wrongness may acquire a budget line, a press release and enforcement mechanisms. At that point, patience is no longer the only relevant virtue.

Good faith is not a magic shield

There is another trap here: the invocation of good faith as though it settles the matter.

Good faith matters. It is much better, morally and practically, for people to be honestly mistaken than cynically dishonest. A person who is genuinely trying to understand can be reasoned with. They can ask better questions, receive correction, update their view, apologise without converting the apology into a second offence. Good faith is one of the conditions under which error becomes fertile.

But good faith is not a magic shield against criticism.

A person can be sincerely wrong and still cause harm. They can mean well and still speak lazily. They can be honestly confused and still put the burden of that confusion onto others. They can be unmalicious and still be irresponsible. This is an important distinction, because otherwise the conversation collapses into a dispute over interior purity. The question becomes not whether the claim was false, or whether it caused damage, or whether correction was available, but whether the speaker meant to be awful.

That is often unknowable. It is also often beside the point.

Intent matters most when deciding how to respond to a person. It matters less when deciding whether the thing they said was true, fair, careful or damaging. We can treat a person more mercifully because we believe they acted in good faith without pretending their error has become harmless. Mercy is not the same as acquittal. Understanding is not the same as exoneration.

This is where many online arguments go wrong, in both directions. One side treats every bad claim as proof of bad character. The other treats any mention of good intentions as a demand for full immunity. Both positions are evasions. Character matters, but claims still need answering. Intentions matter, but consequences still exist.

The right to be wrong is not the right to be untouched by reality.

The burden of being someone else’s lesson

There is also a problem with making patience sound costless.

It is easy to praise the virtues of open dialogue in the abstract. It is harder when the same people are repeatedly expected to absorb, correct, contextualise and forgive errors made about them. There are forms of wrongness that do not simply float in the intellectual atmosphere. They land somewhere. They land on groups who have heard the argument before, answered it before, lived under its consequences before, and are now being asked to perform a patient seminar for someone encountering the issue for the first time.

That exhaustion is real.

No humane account of error can require endless compulsory patience from the people most affected by it. The right to be wrong cannot mean that everyone else has a duty to tutor you through it. A person may deserve room to learn, but they are not entitled to choose their teacher, set the timetable, or demand emotional labour from those already carrying the weight of the mistake.

This is not a rejection of persuasion. It is a recognition that persuasion has costs, and those costs are not evenly distributed.

A decent culture of argument should therefore create routes back from error without making the injured party responsible for building every road. Friends can challenge friends. Institutions can train staff. Editors can apply standards. Political parties can discipline representatives. Schools and universities can teach people how to think rather than merely sorting them into the pure and the damned. The work of correction should exist, but it should not be dumped automatically on whoever has already been harmed.

The right to be wrong is a right against moral finality, not a claim on other people’s endless availability.

Revision is the test

The crucial question, then, is not whether someone was wrong. Of course they were. We all are, with impressive frequency and often with considerable confidence. The more interesting question is what happens next.

Do they correct? Do they listen? Do they show any sign of having understood the objection? Do they distinguish between being challenged and being persecuted? Do they become more careful? Do they stop repeating the claim? Do they repair what can be repaired? Do they accept that an apology is not a receipt entitling them to immediate absolution?

Revision is the test that separates humane error from bad-faith performance.

This does not mean every change of mind must involve a public ritual of humiliation. In fact, we would probably get more genuine revision if we demanded fewer theatrical apologies. The modern apology has become a strange genre: part legal statement, part brand management exercise, part hostage video filmed in the fluorescent corridor of public disapproval. Sometimes people need to apologise. Sometimes they need to make amends. But sometimes they simply need to stop being wrong in the same way.

The measure is not emotional spectacle. It is correction.

That is why repetition matters so much. A first error may deserve patience. A second may deserve sharper correction. A tenth is no longer an error in the same sense. At some point, the refusal to revise becomes part of the wrong itself. Someone who has been repeatedly corrected and keeps saying the same thing is not merely mistaken; they are choosing the comfort of their mistake over the burden of knowing better.

Nobody has a right to permanent intellectual adolescence.

Institutions do not get to be innocently wrong

The distinction becomes even sharper when we move from individuals to institutions.

Institutions love the language of learning, especially when it helps them avoid the language of responsibility. Mistakes were made. Lessons will be learned. Processes will be reviewed. A small working group will be formed, probably with a title so bland it could anaesthetise a horse. The organisation will express regret for any distress caused, which is usually a way of regretting the distress while leaving the cause itself looking suspiciously unsupervised.

Here, the right to be wrong must be much narrower.

Institutions have resources, duties, procedures, records, expertise and power. They are not teenagers at a dinner table trying to work out what they think. When an institution gets something wrong, the question is not only whether it intended harm. The question is whether it should have known, whether warnings were ignored, whether dissent was punished, whether evidence was available, whether the error benefited the institution, and whether anyone affected had meaningful recourse.

The same applies to public figures. A minister, columnist, broadcaster, academic, police chief, council leader or headteacher may still be human. They may still make mistakes. But their wrongness operates through structures other people have to live inside. The threshold for patience is therefore different. So is the threshold for consequence.

This is not because powerful people are uniquely wicked. It is because they are less vulnerable to the ordinary costs of being wrong and more capable of exporting those costs to others.

A culture that cannot distinguish between a private person learning in public and a powerful person failing upwards has lost its moral instruments. It will either punish the weak too harshly or excuse the powerful too easily. Often, with the sort of grim efficiency that makes one doubt human progress, it will do both.

Why mercy matters

Still, the case for mercy remains.

Not because error is harmless. Not because criticism is cruel. Not because everyone deserves a permanent platform for their least informed opinions. Mercy matters because without it, people learn to defend every position as though their identity depends on it. They double down because the alternative is annihilation. They treat correction as attack because, in the social economy around them, correction often is attack. They become less capable of saying the words on which all serious thought depends: I was wrong.

Those words should not be made easy in the sense of costless. Sometimes being wrong has consequences. Sometimes it should. But they should be made possible.

That requires a culture of argument that can distinguish between correction and condemnation, between accountability and permanent disgrace, between disagreement and persecution, between ignorance and malice, between growth and evasion. It requires, in other words, moral discrimination. Not discrimination in the bureaucratic sense, but in the older sense: the ability to tell unlike things apart.

The right to be wrong is really the right to remain morally unfinished.

It is the right not to have the worst version of your thinking treated as the final version of your soul. It is the right to ask a clumsy question and then ask a better one. It is the right to move, under pressure, from confidence to doubt, from doubt to understanding, from understanding to repair. It is a right that belongs most fully to those who are still learning, still listening, still revising.

But it is not a right to irresponsibility. It is not a right to demand endless patience from the people your error harms. It is not a right to turn ignorance into policy, prejudice into entertainment, or repetition into innocence. It is not a right to be wrong forever.

A humane culture should leave people a route back from error. A serious one should still insist that they take it.

There is a particular kind of television writer who makes you feel, very early on, that you are in safe hands. Not comfortable hands, necessarily. Not gentle hands. But hands that know where everything is going. A door closes. A clock starts. A monster is glimpsed but not explained. Someone says something that sounds like a joke, then twenty minutes later it turns out to have been a clue. The story folds back on itself, the impossible becomes inevitable, and you experience the neat, slightly smug pleasure of having been tricked by someone who was good enough to get away with it.

Steven Moffat is extraordinarily good at this.

At his best, he writes television like a magic trick performed in a locked room. Blink is the obvious example, partly because it is still the episode people recommend to those who think they do not like Doctor Who. The Doctor is barely in it. The monster does not move when you can see it. The plot depends on a conversation that can only happen because one side of it has already been recorded. It is a puzzle box, but one with feeling: loss, fear, romance, loneliness, the melancholy strangeness of lives pushed out of sequence. It is clever, yes, but not merely clever. It knows that the trick only matters because the people trapped inside it matter.

The same is true of The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances, still one of the great two-part stories of the revived series. Again, the mechanism is elegant: a wartime ghost story, a child in a gas mask, a phrase that becomes more frightening through repetition, a medical technology misunderstanding the shape of a human body. But what makes it work is not the mechanics alone. It works because the horror is finally resolved as a kind of catharsis. The child is not a demon. The infection is not evil. The frightening question is answered by an act of recognition. For once, just once, everybody lives.

This is why the familiar anti-Moffat rant has always felt a little too easy. The problem with Moffat is not that he is a bad writer. It is not even that he is merely a clever writer, though cleverness is plainly part of both the success and the issue. The problem is that his gifts are unevenly distributed. Give him a premise and a constraint, and he can produce some of the sharpest popular television of the last twenty years. Give him a whole mythology, a years-long emotional arc, or a beloved source text he feels compelled to outflank, and the same instincts can begin to turn against him.

A locked room needs a solution. A universe needs consequences. Moffat is often brilliant at the first, and much less reliable with the second.

The Case for the Defence

It is worth making the generous case first, because otherwise this becomes just another piece of fandom prosecution: Exhibit A, the duck pond; Exhibit B, the Silence; Exhibit C, something about why the Doctor could not simply land in New Jersey and get a taxi.

That sort of argument can be fun, but it is rarely as decisive as its advocates think. Doctor Who is nearly impossible to keep tidy. This is a programme in which continuity is not so much a rulebook as a compost heap. Things are buried, forgotten, contradicted, revived, reinterpreted, and occasionally turned into Cybermen. Demanding strict consistency from Doctor Who is like criticising a pantomime horse for not having plausible veterinary records.

Nor should Moffat be judged only by the story arcs that became unwieldy. His contribution to modern British television is enormous. He was lead writer and executive producer on Dr Who through some of its most successful years, steering the programme through Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, the fiftieth anniversary, and the global expansion of its modern brand, while doing his acclaimed Sherlock mini-series at the same time. At the height of his powers, two of the BBCs most valuable IPs were under his purview simultaneously.

That is not a small achievement. It is also not a neutral one. The Moffat era of Dr Who has a texture. It has fairy-tale narration, speeches about stories, loops of time, clever girls, impossible boxes, ancient questions, confession dials, memory tricks, monsters that operate as thought experiments, and a Doctor who increasingly understands himself as both person and legend. When it works, it is magnificent. When it does not, it can feel like being trapped in a TED Talk delivered by a conjurer.

Even Blink, the early exhibit most often used against the later Moffat, should be understood as evidence of genuine brilliance rather than as a stick with which to beat him. That is the crucial point. The best Moffat stories are not good because they are complicated. They are good because their complications clarify something. Blink is a terrifying inversion of the typical companion arc in the show - it’s about being stolen from your life and finding yourself in a different time. The Empty Child is about war, childhood, shame and restoration. The Girl in the Fireplace is about intimacy across impossible distance. Heaven Sent, perhaps the strongest defence of Moffat as short-form dramatist, is a formal experiment about grief, endurance and obsession. These are puzzles with wounds inside them.

The criticism, then, has to be more precise. Moffat does not fail because he is too clever. He fails when cleverness becomes a solvent: when it dissolves consequence, rewrites emotional reality, or turns characters into components in a machine whose final movement is designed to make the writer look one step ahead of the audience.

Closed Systems and Open Worlds

The distinction that matters is between closed systems and open worlds.

A closed system is a story with boundaries. It may be a single episode, a two-parter, a bottle episode, a miniseries with a clear premise, or a story built around one formal problem. The audience understands, even if only subconsciously, that the promise being made is finite. Here is the monster. Here is the rule. Here is the puzzle. Here are the people trapped inside it. By the end, the mechanism has to be resolved. Not every mystery must be explained in full, but the story must give the impression that it has paid its debts.

An open world is different. A long-running television universe cannot survive on clever resets alone. It accumulates. Characters remember things, or should. Deaths alter relationships, or should. Historical events become part of the emotional architecture. A line said in Series 5 can return in Series 7, but if it returns only as a flourish, the audience starts to notice the gap between foreshadowing and fulfilment.

This is where Moffat’s strengths become unstable. He is a master of setup. He can make an image feel instantly mythic: a crack in a bedroom wall, a name hidden in plain sight, a woman meeting the Doctor in the wrong order, a question that must never be answered, a hybrid, a confession dial, the myth of a tomb on Trenzalore. These are potent hooks. They do what good serial television hooks are supposed to do: they make the viewer feel that the story is larger than the episode in front of them.

The difficulty is that a hook is not a payoff. A mystery is not an arc. A promise is not a conclusion.

Moffat’s long-form writing often gives the impression of someone laying track while the train is already moving, which, to be fair, is probably what all television showrunners are doing most of the time. The difference is that Moffat’s tracks are so ornate that you expect them to be leading somewhere architecturally exact. When they do not, the disappointment is sharper. The problem is not that the puzzle is unresolved. The problem is that the story has trained you to expect a solution, then offers a flourish, a technicality, or a lovely speech in its place.

This matters because clever television relies on trust. The audience does not need to guess the ending, but it does need to believe that the ending has been arrived at rather than escaped through.

Doctor Who as a Magic Trick

The Matt Smith era begins with one of the cleanest soft relaunches imaginable. A child meets a strange man in her garden. There is a crack in her wall. He promises to come back in five minutes and returns twelve years late. It is funny, sad, strange, and instantly legible. Amelia Pond is introduced through absence. The Doctor is introduced as someone wonderful who nevertheless ruins lives by accident. The fairy-tale language is not yet self-indulgent; it is doing useful dramatic work.

Series 5 remains the strongest of Moffat’s full seasons because its central image is simple enough to bear repetition. The cracks in time are visual, thematic, and emotional. They erase people from history. They mirror Amy’s abandonment. They give the series a recurring wound. The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang may already rely on a certain amount of hand-waving, but they are buoyant enough to get away with it. They feel like a conjuring trick performed with enough energy that you admire the movement even when you suspect the cards are being palmed. The episode itself was in some ways riffing on his Comic Relief episode, The Curse of Fatal Death, but played seriously. Still clever, and very Moffat.

But the habits that later become frustrating are visible even there. The universe ends, then is rebooted. Rory dies, then returns, then becomes plastic, then waits two thousand years, then perhaps remembers it and perhaps does not, depending on what the scene needs. The Doctor is erased from history, then restored by memory. The emotional effects are real in the moment, but the rules are already getting soft around the edges. The constant playing-around with the fungibility of time starts to take away from the weight of anything that happens in a given story (hence why Rory dying became a bit of a running joke later on).

By Series 6, that softness and flexibility has become the point. The Doctor dies, except he does not. Amy is pregnant, except she is not even there. Melody is stolen, except the story is less interested in her rescue than in the elegance of revealing that she is River Song. A fixed point in time becomes a technical performance. The Doctor’s death is faked in front of false witnesses, inside a manipulated event, to satisfy a universe that appears to care about narrative form rather than reality.

That is a clever idea. It is also, emotionally, a bit of a cheat.

The abduction of Amy and Rory’s child should be one of the most horrifying events in the revived series. Their baby is taken, weaponised, conditioned, and effectively folded into the Doctor’s mythology. Yet the story never fully sits with the parental devastation of that. It cannot, because the machinery has already decided that Melody is River, River is glamorous, the timeline is closed, and the sadness must be transmuted into clever inevitability. The result is not that the plot literally makes no sense, though parts of it are certainly underpowered. The deeper problem is that the plot demands an emotional seriousness it does not then sustain. The only way it can be rationalised against the events we already know have to happen is that we have to believe that Melody’s parents agree, if only tacitly, to let her be tortured, brainwashed and whatever else because it’s a bit of a faff to prevent it - though, for a counterexample, they rewrite Kazran’s entire history to suit their own purposes in ‘A Christmas Carol’, so it’s unclear why (see my earlier comment about ‘playing-around with the fungibility of time’).

In the Russell T Davies era, there were clear, consistent rules to the story. Fixed points in time, and the mythos of the Time War, functioned as both narrative and moral limits. The Doctor could be brilliant, improvisatory, even godlike, but some things had happened and could not simply be made unhappened. His grief over Gallifrey mattered because it was not just a misunderstanding waiting for an anniversary special.

Moffat’s fiftieth anniversary story, The Day of the Doctor, is in many ways a triumph of event television. It is funny, warm, generous, and theatrically satisfying. It gives the revived series a way to stop making the Doctor’s identity rest on an act of double genocide. I understand the impulse. There is only so long a family adventure series can carry the premise that its hero burned his own people and billions of children.

But the cost is real. Once Gallifrey is saved, even in a pocket universe, the emotional architecture of the previous era shifts. The Doctor’s guilt is not erased, exactly, because he still believed he had done it. But belief is not the same as deed. The story wants the catharsis of redemption while also wanting to preserve the tragic weight of the original sin. It relies, temporally, on a Schrodinger’s Cat style setup - Gallifrey destroyed and not destroyed, the Doctor guilty and not guilty, the past changed and not changed - in order to get everyone to the right place.

This is very Moffat. The contradiction is not ignored; it is made shimmering. The audience is invited to admire the paradox. But paradox is not always depth. Sometimes it is a beautifully lit escape hatch.

Sherlock, Dracula, and the Source Material Problem

This pattern becomes clearer when you look beyond Doctor Who.

Moffat’s Sherlock, co-created with Mark Gatiss, begins with a near-perfect act of translation. The original Holmes stories are not treated as museum pieces. They are adapted into the texture of contemporary London: texts, taxis, nicotine patches, blogs, forensic labs, police irritation, celebrity menace. The first episode has the same thrill as the best Moffat premises: it feels at once obvious and new. Of course Sherlock Holmes would thrive in the age of the smartphone. Of course Watson would blog. Of course deduction could be made visually kinetic. Of course Moriarty would become not simply a criminal mastermind, but a kind of performance artist of chaos.

Again, the early pleasure is real. The problem comes when the series increasingly has to answer the implications of its own cleverness. Sherlock’s apparent death at the end of Series 2 is a perfect example. As a cliffhanger, it is irresistible. As a character moment, it is powerful. As a problem for the audience to solve, it became a phenomenon. But the longer the show teased the solution, the clearer it became that no answer could satisfy the promise being made. By the time the series returns, the solution is displaced into jokes, fake-outs, fan-baiting and meta-commentary. The show does not resolve the trick so much as mock the desire for resolution.

There is a defensible version of that move. Audiences can become tedious in their demand that every trick be diagrammed. Explanation can kill magic. But Sherlock had not merely allowed viewers to wonder; it had actively trained them to believe that the machinery mattered. To then shrug at the machinery is not liberation from pedantry. It is a breach of contract.

The same broader tendency appears in Dracula. The first episode, set around Jonathan Harker’s captivity and escape, has atmosphere, menace, wit and structure. It understands Dracula as both predator and conversationalist. It has a strong central location, a limited field of action, and the slow tightening of dread. Then the adaptation begins to expand, update, reverse, comment on and outmanoeuvre its source material. By the time it arrives at its later movements, the question becomes less ‘what is this story about?’ and more ‘what surprising thing are Moffat and Gatiss going to do with Dracula?’ I won’t even talk about the Jekyll miniseries.

That is the source material problem. Moffat is rarely content simply to adapt. At his best, that is admirable. Dead reverence is not fidelity. A good adaptation should have an argument with its source. But there is a difference between arguing with the source material and trying to beat it. The latter produces a particular strain of adaptation in which the writer seems less interested in the story’s durable power than in proving that he has seen through it.

The result can be exhilarating, for a while. Then it starts to feel defensive. The show keeps winking at the audience, anticipating objections, reversing expectations, revealing that the old story was really about this other thing all along. At some point, one begins to miss the simple confidence of the original premise. A vampire in a castle is not an unsophisticated idea merely because it is old.

The Difference Between Clever and Wise

The deeper distinction here is between cleverness and wisdom.

Cleverness is not a vice. It is fashionable, in some circles, to treat clever writing as somehow less sincere than plain writing, as though art becomes morally purer when nobody involved appears to have enjoyed constructing it. This is nonsense. A well-made plot is a joy. Formal ingenuity can produce emotional force. Some of the most moving stories ever told are intricate machines.

Moffat’s best writing proves this. Blink is clever all the way down, but the cleverness is also the source of its sadness. Kathy’s letter, Billy’s life, Sally’s conversation with a man trapped out of order: these are structural tricks, but they are not empty ones. The form creates the feeling. You cannot separate the puzzle from the ache.

Wisdom is something else. Wisdom is knowing when the trick should stop. It is knowing that a death cannot always be a misdirection, that grief cannot always be converted into lore, that the audience’s investment in a mystery is not the same as investment in a person. It is knowing that stories need friction. They need the resistance of things that cannot simply be revised.

This is why Moffat’s handling of death can become oddly weightless. Characters die and return, are copied, saved, uploaded, remembered back into existence, revealed to have avoided the real consequence by a technicality. To be clear, Doctor Who has always done this to an extent. You can argue that Regeneration itself is one of television’s great anti-death devices - but it does, fairly definitively, end something. When every ending comes with a hidden escape hatch, the audience stops believing in the ending.

The trouble is not that Moffat refuses darkness. His writing can be very dark. The trouble is that he often wants darkness without finality. He wants the emotional grandeur of sacrifice, but also the intellectual pleasure of undoing it. He wants the tomb, the ghost, the impossible survival, the loophole, the speech, and the applause.

Sometimes that works. Both Blink and Heaven Sent work because the time is the horror. In the former, living a happy life and dying of old age is turned into something cruel; in the latter, the eventual escape is paid for through billions of years of suffering. The trick and the trauma are aligned. But elsewhere the balance slips. The story says: this matters. Then the structure says: not quite as much as you thought.

That is the point at which cleverness stops deepening the drama and starts protecting the writer from it.

The Joy of Constraint

This is why Boom, Moffat’s 2024 return to Doctor Who, is such a useful test case. He takes away the Doctor’s usual advantages: he cannot run about, cannot bamboozle people, and one wrong move could be fatal.

Whatever one makes of the episode as a whole, that premise is pure Moffat in his strongest mode. It is a constraint. It is a locked-room problem, even absent the four walls one would usually expect. The Doctor, a character defined by movement, improvisation and verbal control, is made still. The story’s tension comes from subtraction. What happens when you take away the running? What happens when the cleverest man in the scene cannot physically dominate the scene? What happens when charisma cannot substitute for action?

That is the sort of problem Moffat understands instinctively. It has rules. It has pressure. It has a theatrical shape. It does not need to sustain three seasons of mythology. It needs to hold, intensify, complicate, and resolve.

There is a lesson in that. Moffat’s best work often emerges when he is denied sprawl. The cheap episode, the Doctor-lite episode, the bottle episode, the single impossible scenario: these forms discipline him. They stop the premise from multiplying indefinitely. They force the story to end.

This is not a minor virtue. Endings are not just the point at which a story stops. They are where the story reveals what it thinks it has been doing. A weak ending does not merely disappoint the final ten minutes; it sends a tremor backwards through the whole structure. The clues become decoration. The promises become vibes. The emotional stakes become temporary intensities rather than durable facts.

Moffat’s recurring problem is that he is often better at generating promise than at submitting to the obligations promise creates. He can make you believe that a mystery matters. He can make a phrase sound ancient, a question sound fatal, a character sound mythic. But sooner or later, the story has to decide whether those things are more than atmosphere.

The locked room helps because it refuses infinite deferral. There is no next season to hide in. No myth arc large enough to absorb the contradiction. No source text to outsmart. Just the problem, the people, and the ending.

Conclusion: Let the Trick End

The frustrating thing about Steven Moffat is that the criticism only matters because the talent is real.

There would be no point complaining that a mediocre writer sometimes fumbles a story arc. Most television does. The reason Moffat provokes this particular irritation is that he so often gets close to greatness. He has written episodes that are not merely good Doctor Who, but exceptional television in a larger sense: elegant, frightening, funny, emotionally precise, formally inventive. He can turn production constraints into virtues. He can make exposition dance. He can make a monster out of an idea you wish you had thought of first.

But he can also mistake complication for depth, reversal for resolution, and self-awareness for emotional honesty. His long arcs sometimes feel less like stories unfolding than like promises being refinanced. The debt is never quite paid; it is rolled into the next mystery.

Perhaps this is partly a Doctor Who problem rather than only a Moffat problem. The programme resists definitive answers because its format is a machine for renewal. It eats endings. It turns finality into anniversary material. It has been contradicting itself since before most of its current audience was born. Big myth arcs have often sat awkwardly inside it, from classic-era experiments like The Key to Time and The Trial of a Time Lord to the revived series’ various attempts at seasons-long mysteries.

Still, Moffat’s writing makes the problem unusually visible because his stories are so invested in the elegance of design. Russell T Davies often resolves arcs through emotion, spectacle and melodrama. Whether that is better is a separate argument, and not always an easy one. But Davies’s messes tend to feel like explosions. Moffat’s messes feel like equations that have noticed, too late, that one of the numbers was a person.

That, finally, is the difference between a puzzle and a story. A puzzle is solved when the mechanism is revealed. A story is resolved when the consequences have been faced. Moffat is one of modern television’s great puzzle-makers. The trick is dazzling. The box is beautifully made. The hinges are invisible.

But sometimes the best thing you can do for a writer like that is shut the door, lock it, and refuse to give him a universe to escape into.

The first is the old nostalgic version: empire as railways, cricket, civil service examinations, parliamentary manners, and a general sense that Britain, while perhaps a little severe at times, mostly went around the world improving things and making tea. This is the empire of sentimental maps and grand strategy games, the ‘pink bits’ version of history, in which domination somehow becomes a form of national generosity. It is not always an explicitly wicked argument. Quite often it is worse than that: it is complacent, incurious, self-flattering, and historically lazy.

The second is the flattened anti-imperial version: empire as one undifferentiated block of brutalising evil, stretching across centuries, continents and political forms, with every institution serving the same purpose in the same way. This version has the virtue of being far less morally evasive. It at least begins from the correct premise that empire was a system of domination, not a charming international outreach programme with better uniforms. But it can still fail as history. It can turn empire into a mood of condemnation rather than an object of analysis.

The problem with imperial nostalgia is that it tries to launder power through vibes. The problem with the cartoon version is that it sometimes accepts the same basic framing in reverse. Both are tempted to treat the empire as a moral atmosphere: pride or shame, grandeur or guilt, civilising mission or criminal conspiracy.

But the British Empire was not a vibes-based institution.

It was not a mood. It was not a personality trait. It was not a single moral substance spread evenly across the map. It was a changing set of institutions, practices, bargains, fantasies and coercive arrangements. It was companies, governors, soldiers, surveyors, missionaries, district officers, planters, judges, investors, settlers, police, prisons, customs houses, schools, ports, railways, maps and files. It was commerce becoming sovereignty. It was violence becoming administration. It was hierarchy becoming common sense.

That distinction matters, because the argument we keep having about empire is usually too small for the thing itself.

The question is not whether empire was good or bad

This is the first trap.

Ask whether the British Empire was good or bad, and you have already made it easier to talk nonsense. The question invites a balance sheet. On one side: railways, parliamentary institutions, the English language, the abolition of slavery, perhaps the rule of law if the speaker is feeling especially pleased with himself (and it’s almost always a himself). On the other side: slavery, famine, massacre, land theft, racial hierarchy, forced labour, punitive violence, extraction, and the long afterlife of colonial inequality.

This format is not neutral. It quietly implies that history can be measured like supermarket produce. So many ounces of railways. So many quarts of massacre. Add cricket, subtract Amritsar, divide by parliamentary procedure, and see whether the total comes out as national pride or national shame.

Can we all please agree, as a baseline, that this is a ridiculous way to think.

It is not ridiculous because moral judgement has no place in history. Of course it does. The empire involved domination, and domination requires moral judgement. But judgement without mechanism is often just a posture. To say that empire was bad may be true, but it is not yet an explanation. To say that it was complicated may also be true, but it is often used as a way of avoiding the rather important fact that many complications are complications of coercion.

The more useful question is not: was the empire good or bad?

It is: how did it work?

Who governed whom? By what authority? For whose profit? Through what institutions? Backed by what violence? Justified by what language? Recorded in whose archives? Remembered in whose textbooks? Forgotten by whose descendants?

Once you ask those questions, the empire becomes harder to sentimentalise and harder to flatten. It becomes something more interesting than a national pride exercise, and more disturbing than a slogan.

Commerce did not accompany empire. Sometimes commerce became empire.

One reason nostalgic accounts of empire fail is that they often begin too late. They start with administrators, governors, imperial conferences and constitutional reform. They prefer the empire once it has acquired a mahogany desk.

But one of the central facts about British imperial history is that private commerce could become territorial power. The East India Company is the obvious case, though obvious things still need saying because people keep declining to say them.

The Company was not founded as a moral project. It was founded to trade. Yet the institution that began as a commercial enterprise came to rule large areas of the Indian subcontinent, exercising military power through what the National Army Museum describes as its formidable private army. The British Library’s India Office Records include records of the East India Company, the Board of Control, the India Office and the Burma Office, which is a neat archival reminder of the path from corporation to empire to state administration.

This is not an incidental detail. It changes the argument.

If empire were merely an overexcited expression of national destiny, the East India Company would be an awkward preface. In reality, it is one of the main plots. Commercial privilege required protection. Protection required soldiers. Soldiers required revenue. Revenue required territory. Territory required administration. Administration required classification, taxation, courts, records and coercion. At each stage, the arrangement became harder to describe as mere trade and easier to recognise as rule.

This is why the phrase ‘the British Empire’ can mislead as much as it explains. It suggests a single actor with a single intention. In practice, empire was often improvised by people and institutions pursuing narrower interests: merchants seeking monopoly, settlers seeking land, governors seeking order, officers seeking prestige, missionaries seeking souls, politicians seeking advantage, investors seeking returns.

None of this makes empire accidental, and the improvisational nature of the thing is not innocence. A mugging is not less of a mugging because the mugger had not written a five-year strategic plan.

But it does mean that empire should be understood as a system that grew through contextualised incentives as well as ideology. It was not just imposed from the centre. It was pulled outward by profit, fear, local conflict, strategic rivalry, debt, prestige and the self-reinforcing logic of possessions already held. Britain acquired commitments, then acquired further commitments to defend them, then justified those commitments as civilisation.

Empire, in that sense, was often less like a single blueprint than a machine that kept discovering reasons to continue being a machine.

The abolition story is true, and also not the story people want it to be

The abolition of the slave trade is one of the favourite rescue exhibits in nostalgic accounts of empire. Britain, we are reminded, abolished the slave trade in 1807, abolished slavery in much of the empire in the 1830s, and used the Royal Navy to suppress the Atlantic trade. This is all true as far as it goes. The West Africa Squadron captured around 1,600 slave ships and freed around 150,000 Africans between 1808 and 1860.

But as usually deployed, the argument performs a moral conjuring trick. It touts Britain’s later suppression of the slave trade while conveniently forgetting Britain’s earlier implication in slavery. It turns abolition into a national absolution.

That is not history. It is laundering.

The British state compensated slave-owners, not the enslaved. The Bank of England notes that the 1833 abolition settlement emancipated more than 800,000 enslaved Africans and included a £20 million compensation package to slave-owners for the loss of what the law had treated as their property. UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project has traced the long-term effects of that compensation and the ways slave ownership shaped British wealth, institutions and families.

This is exactly the kind of historical fact that breaks the sentimental version without requiring us to deny the abolitionist one.

Britain was not simply a slave-trading villain and then, one day, a virtuous abolitionist hero. Nor was it simply a humanitarian power unfairly criticised by people who refuse to acknowledge moral progress. It was an imperial state deeply entangled with slavery and plantation wealth; it then abolished slavery in a settlement that protected property claims in human beings; it then used naval power to suppress parts of the slave trade elsewhere.

That sequence is morally serious precisely because it is not neat.

The same state could profit, compensate, suppress and congratulate itself. The same empire could produce abolitionists and enslavers, naval patrols and plantation fortunes, humanitarian rhetoric and racial hierarchy. The same imperial power could help end one form of organised atrocity while preserving the wealth produced by it.

If your account of empire cannot hold all of that at once, it is not an account of empire. It is a poster.

Administration was not the opposite of violence

Another comforting myth is that empire became respectable when it became administrative. Settlement and conquest may have been rough, the story goes, but later came government: courts, officials, roads, law codes, censuses, district reports, schools, development schemes. The sword gave way to the file.

There is something to this, but again it is incomplete in a way that matters. Administration did not replace coercion. Administration organised coercion, regularised it, gave it a budget line and a filing system.

This is where empire becomes harder to see if we only look for spectacular violence. Massacres are morally clarifying. Papers are not. A village burned in reprisal announces itself as violence. A tax demand, a labour ordinance, a pass system, an imposed boundary, a legal distinction between types of subject, a land settlement or a census category may appear merely bureaucratic. Yet these are also ways of making power durable.

The British Empire was very good at turning domination into procedure.

In parts of Africa, indirect rule provided a governing method that could present itself as continuity while reorganising authority under colonial supervision. Lugard’s famous ‘dual mandate’ framed British rule in tropical Africa as serving both metropolitan economic benefit and the supposed uplift of colonised peoples. That formulation is revealing not because it was uniquely hypocritical, but because it was so perfectly imperial. It fused extraction and improvement into one administrative language. Britain would benefit; colonised peoples would supposedly be developed; the contradiction would be managed by officials.

The paternalism was not decorative. It was functional.

If empire can persuade itself that it is ruling for the good of the ruled, then coercion becomes discipline, extraction becomes development, resistance becomes disorder, and dissent becomes evidence that the natives are not yet ready. The empire did not need every official to be personally sadistic. It needed enough of them to believe that hierarchy was natural, that British authority was preferable to the alternatives, and that opposition could be read as immaturity, fanaticism or sedition.

This is why arguments about whether individual imperial servants were good or bad people often miss the point. Some were brutal. Some were diligent. Some were corrupt. Some were sincere. Some believed themselves to be doing good. The machinery did not require pure villainy. Indeed, it probably worked better when staffed by men who could write home with a clean conscience.

That is often how oppressive systems survive: not because everyone inside them wakes up each morning thinking evil thoughts, but because the work has been divided into respectable tasks.

Violence was not a regrettable exception

Still, we should not let the administrative texture of empire soften the point. The British Empire was also violent in the ordinary, physical, unmistakable sense.

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 remains one of the clearest examples. British troops fired on a crowd of unarmed Indians in Amritsar, killing hundreds and wounding many more; the House of Commons Library describes it as a notorious episode in the history of British colonialism in India. Parliament’s own records note its significance as a turning point in the history of the Raj and British Empire in India.

But even here, the point is not simply that an atrocity happened. The point is what the atrocity reveals about the political order around it.

Massacre is never only massacre. It is also a statement about fear, legitimacy and the imagined boundaries of obedience. General Dyer’s violence was shocking, but it did not descend from nowhere. It emerged from a system in which imperial authority interpreted Indian political mobilisation as threat, disorder and potential rebellion. The violence at Amritsar was extreme. The anxiety behind it was imperial.

The same is true, in a different late-imperial setting, of Kenya. The Mau Mau rebellion began in 1952; the colonial government declared a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, and Kenya became independent in 1963. This is not some remote Tudor prehistory of empire. It belongs to the age of television, jet travel, the welfare state and the postwar international order. It sits uncomfortably close to the modern Britain that prefers to imagine decolonisation as a polite constitutional seminar conducted by men in suits.

The violence of late empire matters because it punctures a consoling chronology. It is tempting to imagine British imperial history as a gradual softening: conquest, then governance, then reform, then independence. That sequence contains some truth. It also makes the story too tidy. The end of empire was not simply the moment Britain magnanimously handed over the keys. It was also a period of insurgency, repression, detention, censorship, emergency powers, strategic withdrawal and archival management.

The paper trail matters here too. The National Archives’ guidance on migrated colonial administration files is itself a reminder that imperial power did not end when the flag came down. It continued in decisions about what records were retained, removed, destroyed, classified or released. The empire governed people in life and then tried, in places, to govern the evidence by which that life would later be understood.

That should make us suspicious of any account that relies too heavily on imperial self-description. Empires are very rarely neutral witnesses to themselves.

Development was real. That does not make it innocent

At this point the nostalgic critic usually reappears, slightly irritated, and asks whether we are allowed to mention anything that empire built.

Yes. We are. In fact, we have to.

The British Empire built railways, ports, courts, universities, civil services, schools and administrative systems. It spread the English language. It shaped legal and parliamentary institutions. In some contexts, postcolonial states inherited and repurposed imperial institutions in ways that mattered. People educated in colonial schools used that education against colonial rule. Lawyers trained in imperial legal systems challenged imperial injustice. Railways built for extraction could also move people, ideas and anti-colonial politics.

The problem is not mentioning these things. The problem is treating them as if they answer the moral and historical question by existing.

A railway is not an argument. A court is not a verdict on empire. A school is not proof of benevolence. Institutions have purposes, beneficiaries and exclusions. They are built somewhere rather than elsewhere, funded somehow rather than otherwise, and designed to serve some needs more than others.

Many imperial infrastructure projects were built around extraction, military movement, administrative control or settler convenience. That does not mean nobody else benefited from them. History is not that simple. But it does mean that benefit cannot be read backwards as intention, and intention cannot be used to erase hierarchy.

This is where the ‘balance sheet’ view of empire becomes especially misleading. It asks whether colonised societies received some benefits, as if the receipt of benefit settles the question of domination. But domination does not become consensual because the ruler builds things. A prison with excellent plumbing is still a prison. This is not to compare every imperial institution to a prison; it is to point out the poverty of the argument. Provision and domination are not opposites. They can coexist. Indeed, governing systems often provide precisely because they dominate.

The serious question is not whether empire developed things. It is what kind of development, under whose control, for whose purposes, with what exclusions, and at what cost.

The empire was also a myth-making machine

Empires do not survive by force alone. They need stories.

The British Empire told several stories about itself. It was a commercial story, in which Britain brought trade and improvement. It was a humanitarian story, in which Britain suppressed slavery and barbarism. It was a constitutional story, in which British rule trained peoples for eventual self-government. It was a racial story, in which hierarchy was naturalised as maturity, civilisation or capacity. It was a domestic story, in which imperial expansion became part of British identity: school maps, exhibitions, adventure fiction, military memory, museums, statues and family fortunes discreetly converted into respectability.

These stories were not merely propaganda pasted onto the real machinery. They were part of the machinery.

A governor who believes he is preparing a people for self-rule can justify delaying that self-rule indefinitely. A public that believes empire is fundamentally humanitarian can treat anti-colonial resistance as ingratitude. A country that remembers abolition but forgets compensation can imagine itself morally heroic without asking who was paid, who was not, and whose wealth survived the transition.

This is why the empire remains so politically usable. It provides emotional raw material for arguments that are not really about the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries at all. Arguments about empire are often displaced arguments about Britain now: immigration, race, national decline, foreign policy, museums, education, patriotism, guilt, class, sovereignty and the question of whether Britain is still allowed to think well of itself.

There is polling evidence for this continuing emotional charge. In 2025, YouGov found that the most common British view was that countries colonised by Britain were better off for the experience, though views varied sharply by party and age. That does not tell us what the empire was. It tells us that the empire still functions as a test of political temperament.

And that is precisely the problem.

If empire becomes a test of whether you are patriotic or ashamed, proud or woke, grateful or resentful, then the historical object disappears. You are no longer talking about India, Kenya, Jamaica, Ireland, Nigeria, Malaya, Australia, Canada, Egypt or the countless other places folded into different imperial arrangements at different times. You are talking about yourself.

This is what I mean by vibes-based history. It is history as self-expression.

The pink map was never the whole story

There is a practical question here about scope. Should we talk only about the formal empire, the pink-shaded map that stretched from the early modern period through the great decolonisations of the twentieth century? Or should we include the post-imperial world: Commonwealth connections, aid, migration, finance, law, military bases, overseas territories and the persistence of old imperial lines?

The answer, I think, is both, but not equally.

The core subject should be formal empire. Otherwise the piece risks becoming too large and too vague. The British Empire already covers a huge range of institutions and experiences. Britannica summarises it as a worldwide system of dependencies over roughly three centuries, with British territorial acquisition beginning in the early seventeenth century through settlements and trading posts in North America, the West Indies, South Asia and Africa. At its greatest extent, it covered about a quarter of the world’s land surface and more than a quarter of its population.

That is quite enough to be getting on with.

But the afterlife matters because formal decolonisation did not wipe the slate clean. Old imperial relationships shaped migration routes, diplomatic habits, aid priorities, legal systems, educational institutions, military ties, financial networks and cultural memory. In a 1965 House of Lords debate, the government stated that in 1964 Britain’s total bilateral aid, including technical assistance, was £174 million, of which the independent Commonwealth received £108 million, or 62%. That is not empire in the old sense. It is not the Raj. It is not a governor in a plumed hat, thank God. But it does show how post-imperial Britain continued to move through channels shaped by empire.

The distinction is important. Saying that imperial influence persisted after empire is not the same as saying nothing changed. Things changed enormously. Independent states were not simply colonies under another name. Anti-colonial movements won real victories. Sovereignty mattered. Domestic politics mattered. The Cold War mattered. Global capitalism mattered. Postcolonial governments made their own choices, sometimes under severe constraint and sometimes with considerable agency.

But neither should we pretend that the end of formal rule dissolved the structures empire had made. A flag can come down more quickly than a trade pattern, a legal code, a racial hierarchy, a border, a military relationship or a national fantasy.

So yes, we should talk about the afterlife of empire. But we should talk about it as afterlife, not as proof that nothing ended.

How to talk about empire without making everyone stupider

The aim here is not balance. Balance is often the wrong ambition. If one person says the empire was a noble gift to the world and another says it was a structure of domination, the truth does not necessarily lie halfway between them. Sometimes the midpoint between fantasy and reality is just a more moderate fantasy.

The better aim is precision.

Precision means refusing nostalgia. The empire was not a national charity. It was not a global infrastructure scheme. It was not a long, misunderstood act of British helpfulness. Its institutions rested on unequal power, and that unequal power was enforced. Sometimes it was enforced spectacularly, through massacre, detention, punitive expeditions and emergency rule. More often it was enforced quietly, through law, land, labour, taxation and administrative classification.

Precision also means refusing to make the empire simpler than it was. It was not one thing happening in one way for one reason. It changed over time. It varied by place. Settler colonialism in Australia was not the same as Company rule in India; plantation slavery in the Caribbean was not the same as indirect rule in Northern Nigeria; the white Dominions were not governed like Kenya; Ireland sits awkwardly and revealingly inside the story; the empire of free trade, finance and naval supremacy does not map perfectly onto the empire of formal annexation.

Precision means asking what institutions did, not merely what they claimed. A railway may be infrastructure, extraction, military logistics and unintended political connection all at once. A school may be assimilation, opportunity and anti-colonial training ground. A court may impose foreign law and provide tools later used against colonial authority. An archive may preserve evidence and conceal it. An abolition campaign may represent real moral progress while leaving intact the wealth of slave-owners.

Precision means remembering that colonised people were not scenery. They were not passive recipients of British action, whether benevolent or brutal. They resisted, collaborated, adapted, negotiated, converted, litigated, rebelled, governed, translated, profited, suffered and survived. One of the quiet failures of many British arguments about empire is that even the anti-imperial versions can become too Britain-centred. Britain does a thing; Britain regrets a thing; Britain debates whether the thing was good or bad. The rest of the world waits patiently to provide moral evidence.

That, too, is an imperial habit.

Most of all, precision means accepting that moral seriousness and historical complexity are not enemies. Complexity does not rescue empire from judgement. It makes the judgement better.

The British Empire was an engine of commerce, coercion, administration, hierarchy, violence, improvisation and myth. It created institutions and destroyed worlds. It built and extracted. It governed and classified. It educated and subordinated. It abolished slavery after profiting from slavery, compensated enslavers rather than the enslaved, and congratulated itself for the moral achievement. It produced officials who believed in duty and systems that depended on domination. It ended formally in many places while leaving behind lines of connection, dependency, resentment, inheritance and memory.

None of this fits comfortably into pride or shame. That is the point.

Pride and shame are things people feel. Empire is something people did to other people, through institutions that can be studied. The first task is not to decide whether it makes us feel good or bad about Britain. The first task is to look at the machinery.

And once you have looked properly at the machinery, the vibes become rather harder to sustain.

This is understandable. Empathy has often been used as a laundering device. People with hard-edged views learn very quickly that their position sounds better if presented as pain. Prejudice becomes concern. Reaction becomes anxiety. Cruelty becomes a cry for help from a community nobody listened to. Before long, the demand for empathy becomes less a request to be understood than a claim to immunity. You are not allowed to criticise the belief because the belief comes wrapped in feeling.

So let us get the caveat out of the way early. Understanding why someone believes a cruel thing does not make the thing less cruel. Empathy does not decide whether a belief is true, just, proportionate, coherent, or politically acceptable. A person may have entirely intelligible reasons for arriving at an appalling conclusion. Their fear may be real. Their humiliation may be real. Their sense of loss may be real. None of that means the conclusion deserves obedience.

But the opposite mistake is also serious. If empathy can be abused as moral shelter, anti-empathy can become a permission slip for stupidity. Refusing to understand bad arguments does not make them disappear. It often makes them stronger, because you end up fighting a cartoon rather than the thing as it actually lives in people’s heads.

The distinction matters because empathy explains why a belief makes sense to someone. It does not decide whether that belief is right.

The unhelpful warmth of the word

Part of the problem is that empathy sounds nicer than it is. It comes to us dressed in the language of kindness, care and fellow-feeling. It sounds like something one should obviously have more of, like fibre or sleep. Nobody wants to be the person who says they are against empathy, unless they are auditioning for a very particular kind of podcast.

But empathy is not one simple thing. Psychologists often distinguish between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is closer to feeling with someone; sharing or resonating with another person’s emotional state. Cognitive empathy is closer to understanding another person’s perspective; grasping what they think, feel, fear, want or believe without necessarily sharing it. That distinction is not just academic housekeeping. It changes what we are asking of ourselves in political argument.

Political empathy is usually cognitive before it is emotional. It is not necessarily a warm bath of fellow-feeling. It is not a requirement to feel the world exactly as your opponent feels it. It is the colder and more disciplined act of asking: what experience, fear, incentive, humiliation, media diet, institutional failure or social world makes this view feel reasonable to this person?

That question is not sentimental. It can be forensic. It asks what work the belief is doing. Is it explaining a loss? Displacing a fear? Providing someone with status? Giving moral shape to resentment? Offering a villain? Turning confusion into certainty? Making a complicated world feel legible?

This kind of empathy does not soften judgement. Done properly, it sharpens it.

The diagnostic use of empathy

Imagine someone who believes that immigration is responsible for every visible strain in their town: the queue at the GP, the pressure on housing, the change in shops, the lack of secure work, the unfamiliar languages on the bus, the sense that the place they knew has altered without their permission.

One response is simply to say that this is racist and move on. Sometimes the statement will be racist. Sometimes the politics attached to it will be racist. Sometimes the conclusion will be empirically wrong, morally crude, or encouraged by people who know exactly what they are doing. But the one-word dismissal rarely explains why the argument has purchase.

A more useful response asks what has made the claim feel true. Perhaps local services have been visibly degraded. Perhaps housing is scarce. Perhaps work is insecure. Perhaps the national political class has spent years talking as though belonging is a childish feeling unless it can be expressed in the correct metropolitan vocabulary. Perhaps newspapers and politicians have spent decades converting every social pressure into an immigration story because it is easier than talking honestly about underinvestment, labour markets, planning failure or the British state’s chronic preference for muddling through.

None of this means the anti-immigration conclusion is right. It means the conclusion is attached to something. If you do not understand the attachment, you cannot detach it.

The same is true across half the arguments that make public life unbearable. Some people talk about crime because they genuinely feel unsafe, not because they have read a policy paper on sentencing. Some talk about welfare through resentment because they feel trapped in a system where work has not delivered dignity. Some talk about patriotism defensively because they experience cosmopolitan disdain long before they encounter a serious argument about national identity. Some talk about trans rights with displaced anxieties about sex, authority, childhood, institutional trust and social change. Some talk about Gaza not as a foreign policy question but as a test of whether certain lives are allowed to matter in public.

Again, explanation is not acquittal. A displaced anxiety remains displaced. A false claim remains false. A cruel policy remains cruel. But arguments rarely survive on facts alone. They survive because they organise feeling. Empathy helps us see the organisation.

Listening is not obedience

This is where the language of listening becomes slippery. Politicians are forever listening to concerns. It is one of those phrases that can mean almost anything, which is why it is so useful. It can mean taking people seriously. It can mean buying time. It can mean triangulating towards a position you already wanted to hold. It can mean laundering panic into policy while looking sorrowful about it.

The danger is that listening becomes a mini-referendum. Someone expresses a concern; the politician validates the concern; the validation is treated as a mandate; the mandate becomes a policy whose cruelty is then defended as democratic humility. What else could we do? We listened.

But listening is not obedience, and empathy is not policy. A concern can be sincerely held and still badly aimed. It can describe a real wound while misidentifying the cause. It can be morally urgent in one register and politically disastrous in another. The task of politics is not to convert every expressed anxiety into legislation. It is to understand what people are saying, work out what is true within it, identify what is false or unjust, and respond in a way that is both humane and responsible.

This requires more than nodding sympathetically in a village hall. It requires judgement. It requires being able to say: yes, I can see why this feels like betrayal; no, I will not blame that neighbour for it. Yes, I understand why you feel unsafe; no, I will not build a justice policy on panic. Yes, I accept that rapid change can be disorienting; no, I will not pretend that dignity for one group requires humiliation for another.

Empathy without judgement becomes surrender. Judgement without empathy becomes theatre.

The cartoon opponent problem

One of the bad habits of modern argument is the assumption that bad beliefs must have stupid origins. Sometimes they do. There is no need to romanticise every prejudice into a tragic sociology. Some people believe ugly things because ugly things benefit them, flatter them, entertain them, or give them permission to treat others badly. There is such a thing as bad faith. There is such a thing as cruelty. There is such a thing as enjoying the boot and then composing an essay about economic anxiety afterwards.

But even bad faith has mechanisms. Even cruelty recruits stories. Even prejudice needs a structure of plausibility if it is going to travel beyond the already converted.

When we refuse to understand that structure, we make our opponents easier to despise but harder to defeat. This is especially tempting online, where the reward system favours the most contemptuous summary. Your opponent is not merely wrong; they are a fascist, a snowflake, a groomer, a tankie, a centrist dad, a bigot, a liberal elitist, a traitor, a crank, a ghoul. Some of these labels may occasionally be accurate. Most become less accurate with repetition. All of them can become substitutes for thought.

The cartoon opponent is emotionally useful. It allows you to win the argument before it begins. But it also leaves you with no explanation for why anyone disagrees with you except stupidity or wickedness. If the disagreement persists, your only remaining theory is that there are more stupid and wicked people than you hoped. That may be satisfying. It is not a strategy.

A serious politics has to ask why certain claims become believable. Not because belief confers legitimacy, but because durability requires explanation. If an argument keeps returning, across constituencies, platforms, factions and decades, then something is feeding it. The feed may be material deprivation. It may be status anxiety. It may be institutional failure. It may be propaganda. It may be theological, national, familial, aesthetic, or simply habitual. But unless you know what feeds the belief, you are reduced to swatting at symptoms.

Empathy can be manipulative too

There is another caveat, and it is important. Empathy is not automatically virtuous. Cognitive empathy can be used by therapists, negotiators and peacebuilders. It can also be used by interrogators, con artists, demagogues and advertisers. To understand what someone fears is also to know where pressure can be applied. To understand what someone wants is to know what can be sold to them. To understand someone’s humiliation is to know which enemy to offer them.

This is why the sentimental account of empathy is inadequate. Empathy is not goodness. It is a form of access. What matters is what you do with it.

A politician who understands why people feel abandoned can build solidarity, repair institutions and tell a more truthful story about power. They can also redirect that abandonment towards migrants, benefit claimants, public sector workers, judges, students, trans people, Muslims, cyclists, or whoever is currently available as a national stress ball. Both moves require empathy of a kind. The difference is moral and political judgement.

This is also why empathy should not be treated as the opposite of reason. Paul Bloom’s critique of empathy is useful here, even if one need not follow him all the way. His basic warning is that empathy can be biased, narrow and overly responsive to vivid individual cases. We feel intensely for the person placed before us and fail to reason well about the wider pattern. That criticism is worth taking seriously. Empathy can draw attention, but it cannot by itself allocate justice.

The answer is not to abolish empathy from public life. That would leave politics even more inhuman than it already is, which is quite an achievement. The answer is to put empathy in its proper place. It is a means of understanding, not a final court of appeal.

What empathy is for

The purpose of empathy in public argument is not to collapse disagreement. It is not to make all positions equally valid. It is not to ask vulnerable people to be endlessly patient with those debating their dignity as though it were a seminar question. Nor is it to demand that every person harmed by a political view must perform therapeutic curiosity towards the person harming them.

That last point matters. The duty to understand should fall most heavily on people with power, responsibility, security and a serious interest in persuasion. It should not become another burden placed on those already expected to absorb the consequences of other people’s fears. There is something obscene about telling the target of cruelty that their first obligation is to understand the cruel. Sometimes the first obligation is protection. Sometimes it is refusal. Sometimes it is simply getting through the day.

But for those engaged in argument, politics, organising, writing, teaching or leadership, empathy is part of the work. Not because everyone is secretly reasonable. Not because every conflict can be dissolved by tone. Not because the right conversation will magically convert the committed bigot, the bad-faith operator, or the man in the replies whose profile picture suggests he has strong views about both taxation and women in films.

Empathy matters because most political beliefs are not just propositions. They are identities, loyalties, memories, wounds, habits, class signals, moral intuitions and social inheritances. People do not usually experience themselves as selecting opinions from a shelf. They experience themselves as noticing what is obvious. The task of persuasion is therefore not only to correct information. It is to understand what has made the false thing feel obvious.

That is difficult work. It is slower than denunciation and less flattering than contempt. It does not always succeed. But it is the difference between arguing with a living belief and arguing with a paper target.

The harder discipline

The phrase empathy is not agreement risks sounding like a plea for politeness. It is not. Politeness is sometimes useful and sometimes merely decorative. There are polite forms of cowardice, polite forms of cruelty and polite ways to say monstrous things. Civility, by itself, is not the point.

The point is accuracy.

If someone’s belief is false, we should want to understand the particular shape of its falsehood. If it is cruel, we should want to know what makes the cruelty feel justified. If it is disproportionate, we should want to know what scale of fear it is answering. If it is politically dangerous, we should want to know why it is spreading. The better we understand the belief, the less excuse we have for lazy responses to it.

This is the harder discipline: to understand without surrendering, to judge without caricaturing, to listen without obeying, to empathise without granting moral shelter.

A belief may make sense to someone because of what they have lived through. It may make sense because of what they have been told. It may make sense because it protects them from shame, gives shape to loss, or makes them feel briefly powerful in a world that otherwise humiliates them. All of this is worth knowing.

And then, having known it, we still have to decide.

That is where empathy ends and politics begins.

The Election Night Trick

There is a strange ritual that follows almost every set of local elections. Councillors are elected, councils change hands, planning committees are reshaped, transport priorities shift, and the people responsible for social care, bins, roads, libraries, parks and neighbourhood services are either returned to office or removed from it. Within minutes, the question becomes: what does this mean for Westminster?

This is not a stupid question. It is just a revealingly incomplete one.

Voters do use local elections to send messages to national politicians. Parties campaign under national brands. Councils operate inside financial and legal settlements designed, or neglected, elsewhere. Nobody who has spent more than ten minutes near an actual doorstep can seriously pretend that national politics politely waits outside the ward boundary.

But still. There is something absurd about treating local government as the B-team of politics when it is the part of the state most people encounter without needing to watch the news. You may have no strong view on the internal dynamics of the Cabinet Office. You will, however, notice if your bin has not been emptied, your parent’s care assessment is delayed, your bus disappears, your high street declines, your road becomes a cratered assault course, or the patch of land at the end of your street slowly becomes an unofficial monument to nobody being in charge.

That is where politics hits the kerb.

It is not that Westminster politics is unreal. It plainly is not. National government sets taxes, spending envelopes, legislation, rights, duties, benefit rules, immigration systems, foreign policy, public service settlements and the broad weather in which everyone else has to operate. But national politics often arrives in people’s lives through institutions closer to home. It becomes a pothole filled or left open; a library kept open or closed; a care package approved or delayed; a planning application granted or refused; a street cleaned or abandoned to the patient archaeology of crisp packets, broken glass and vape cartridges.

Local elections are therefore not merely a temperature check on Westminster. They are elections to government. Less glamorous government, certainly. Worse paid, usually. Less likely to produce a memoir, a podcast circuit or a ministerial car. But government all the same.

The problem with treating local elections as national opinion polling with rosettes is not that the national picture is irrelevant. It is that this habit makes local government disappear at precisely the moment when people are choosing who should run it.

The State, at Street Level

Local government is often described in a way that makes it sound administrative rather than political. Councils ‘deliver services’. They ‘manage local priorities’. They ‘support communities’. This language is not wrong, exactly, but it does have the anaesthetic quality of public-sector abstraction. It makes councils sound like filing systems with ward boundaries.

A better description is simpler: councils are the state at street level.

They are where the shared conditions of everyday life are maintained, rationed, repaired, negotiated and sometimes allowed to decay. The Local Government Association’s introductory description of councils is almost comically broad: schools, care for older people, roads, rubbish, libraries, planning and a wider bureaucracy most residents only glimpse when something goes wrong. That range matters. Local government is not one service. It is a dense bundle of responsibilities, some intensely visible and some almost invisible until a family depends on them.

The visible services shape whether a place feels cared for. Bins, roads, pavements, parks, street cleaning, lighting, enforcement, libraries, high streets, public toilets, leisure centres, grass verges, bus stops, crossings, benches. These are not trivial matters, though national politics often treats them as such. They are the texture of public life. They are the difference between a neighbourhood that feels governed and one that feels merely inhabited.

The less visible services shape whether people survive moments of dependence, vulnerability or crisis. Adult social care. Children’s services. Homelessness support. Public health. Safeguarding. Temporary accommodation. Special educational needs transport. The machinery is quieter, but the stakes are higher.

This is one reason local politics produces such an odd mismatch between public salience and institutional importance. Many residents experience councils through annoyance: the missed collection, the pothole, the planning notice, the overgrown alleyway, the reply that arrives three weeks late and answers a slightly different question. But councils also sit underneath some of the most morally serious decisions made by the British state: who receives care, who waits, who is housed, who is protected, which child is supported, which family is left to navigate a system already fraying at the edges.

The bins are political. But they are not only political because people complain about them. They are political because they reveal whether the basic promise of collective life is being kept. We pay in, we share space, we accept rules, we tolerate inconvenience, and in return the ordinary systems are supposed to work. When they do not, people do not experience that as a spreadsheet problem. They experience it as abandonment.

This is why local neglect is so politically potent. A broken pavement does not need a theory of the state attached to it. It teaches one by repetition. Every unfilled hole, every unanswered report, every fly-tipped mattress left to acquire local landmark status, every bus route quietly withdrawn, every shuttered youth centre, every family told there is nowhere suitable to live: these things instruct people in what they think power is for.

The Pothole Is Not Just a Pothole

A pothole is rarely just a pothole.

This is, admittedly, the sort of sentence that makes politics sound more self-important than it needs to be. Sometimes a pothole is also, very straightforwardly, a hole in the road, and it would be nice if someone filled it in before it eats another tyre.

But the pothole is also a system made visible by failure. It is inspection schedules, revenue budgets, capital programmes, risk thresholds, highway contracts, contractor performance, officer capacity, reporting systems, political priorities, winter damage, traffic volume and the slow depreciation of public assets. It is what happens when the invisible work of maintenance is postponed until it becomes visible as decline.

The same is true of the missed bin. To the resident, it is immediate and simple: the bin was full, the bin day came, the bin remains full. Behind that simplicity sit route planning, staffing levels, vehicle maintenance, depot management, contract terms, communications systems, industrial relations, contamination rules, weather disruption and whether anyone has designed a complaints process capable of producing an answer before the smell becomes its own argument.

This is not an attempt to excuse poor service. Quite the opposite. One of the evasions of modern politics is to hide bad outcomes behind complexity. Residents are entitled to expect the basics to work. They should not need a working knowledge of municipal logistics to get their rubbish collected or a Freedom of Information request to understand why the road has been patched so badly that the repair itself looks temporary by lunchtime.

But complexity does matter, because it helps distinguish between two different political failures. One is the failure of competence: the council knew what it had to do, had the capacity to do it, and did it badly. The other is the failure of capacity: the council is operating in a system where demand, legal duties, inflation, workforce pressures and funding constraints have made good government harder than the public conversation admits.

The public has no obligation to find this distinction emotionally satisfying. Nobody standing next to an uncollected bin wants a seminar on structural pressures. But politically, the distinction matters. If every failure is treated as proof of laziness, waste or indifference, then every solution becomes performative toughness: sack the managers, cut the ‘nonsense’, stop the waste, run the council like a business, audit everything, outsource everything, insource everything, declare war on bureaucracy, appoint a commissioner, launch a taskforce, rename the taskforce, put a hi-vis jacket on the taskforce and send it to look concerned next to a blocked drain.

Some of these things may occasionally help, minus perhaps the ceremonial hi-vis. But they do not settle the deeper question. What would it actually take to make the system work? What capacity is missing? What trade-offs are being hidden? What duties are crowding out what services? What national decisions are being laundered through local blame?

The pothole is not just a pothole because maintenance is political. Not in the adolescent sense that everything must be dragged into partisan warfare, but in the older and more serious sense: common life depends on unglamorous systems of repair.

The Cruel Arithmetic of Local Government

Local government is full of cruel arithmetic.

The services most people see are often not the services consuming the greatest pressure. Adult social care is the obvious example. The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that English local authorities budgeted £24.5 billion for adult social care in 2024–25, and that adult social care now accounts for more than 40% of all local authority service spending. That is not some marginal line in the accounts. It is one of the central facts of local government.

The moral weight of that spending is obvious. Care is not optional. A civilised society does not tell older people, disabled adults, people with complex needs, or families in crisis that the council would love to help but unfortunately the park budget is looking a little thin. Statutory services exist for a reason. They are meant to protect people from being sacrificed to local popularity contests.

But the budget does not become infinite because the duty is serious. Money spent meeting acute need cannot also be spent on every preventative, universal or environmental service that makes places feel liveable. The Institute for Government notes that councils are funded through government grants, council tax and retained business rates; in 2024–25, local authorities in England received 32% of their funding from government grants, 46% from council tax and 22% from retained business rates. That funding mix matters because it leaves councils exposed to national policy choices, local tax bases and demand pressures they cannot simply wish away.

The National Audit Office’s 2025 report is particularly useful here because it cuts through the fantasy that the problem can be reduced to a few badly run councils. It found that, as financial pressures have increased, local authority spending has focused more heavily on demand-led services and unavoidable costs, including adult and children’s social care, homelessness, waste disposal and debt servicing. It also noted that temporary accommodation costs nearly doubled in real terms from £1.10 billion in 2015–16 to £2.13 billion in 2023–24.

That is the local state in a sentence: more crisis, less prevention; more statutory demand, less discretionary repair.

The result is a politics of visible deterioration. Residents notice the things that vanish from ordinary life: youth work, parks maintenance, library hours, local bus support, public toilets, street cleaning, road repairs, neighbourhood wardens, early intervention, small grants to community groups. They may not see the care package, the placement cost, the temporary accommodation bill, the legal duty, the safeguarding risk or the debt servicing that has swallowed the room.

This creates a vicious democratic problem. Councils are judged most often by the services that make places feel cared for, but they are increasingly dominated by services that respond to acute need. The services that build trust are squeezed by the services that prevent catastrophe. It is hard to run cheerful doorstep politics on the message: yes, the high street looks worse, but you should see the statutory pressures.

Still, that is the truth. And politics that cannot say true things about budgets is not serious politics. It may be very electable politics for a while; it may even be emotionally satisfying. But it is not serious.

Local Accountability in a National Cage

None of this means councils should escape blame.

There is a tempting version of the local government defence that goes too far: councils are underfunded, Westminster controls the framework, statutory duties dominate the budget, therefore every local failure is really a national failure. That is too neat. It turns councillors into spectators of their own institutions.

Councils make choices. They set priorities. They manage contracts well or badly. They communicate clearly or evasively. They plan for the long term or drift between crises. They consult in good faith or treat consultation as the decorative stage before a decision already made. They notice neighbourhood neglect or become habituated to it. They can be creative, stubborn, competent and rooted. They can also be complacent, opaque, factional, defensive and slow.

Local accountability matters precisely because councils are not powerless. A council that replies properly, fixes what it can, explains what it cannot, publishes usable information, treats residents as adults, manages money honestly and notices small signs of decline will be experienced differently from one that sends every complaint into a procedural cave system and hopes the resident eventually loses the will to live.

But local accountability operates inside a national cage.

Councils cannot print money. They cannot ignore statutory duties. They cannot borrow freely to plug everyday revenue gaps. They are legally bound into budget discipline, and the chief finance officer has a statutory duty to issue a Section 114 notice if they believe the authority cannot meet its expenditure commitments from its income; once issued, a council cannot make new spending commitments and must meet to consider its response. The phrase ‘council bankruptcy’ is technically misleading, but politically useful, because it captures the point at which local discretion collapses under financial reality.

This is why the usual rhetoric around local government is so often dishonest. It simultaneously demands that councils act as independent local champions and treats them as mere delivery arms of national policy. It blames councillors for visible decline while ignoring the funding and legal structures that shape what they can do. It calls for localism, then designs systems in which local leaders take the blame for decisions whose causes lie elsewhere.

The honest position is less convenient. Councils are accountable for choices, but they are not omnipotent over conditions. Westminster is responsible for the architecture, but local leaders still decide how to inhabit it. A bad national settlement does not excuse bad local government. Good local government does not abolish a bad national settlement.

That distinction is where much of the serious politics sits.

Why This Matters Politically

This matters because local government is one of the main places where anti-politics grows.

People do not usually become alienated from politics because they have carefully compared constitutional theories. They become alienated because things do not work, nobody seems to listen, blame moves in circles, and every institution appears to have a reason why responsibility lies somewhere else. The council blames the contractor. The contractor blames access. The councillor blames the budget. The minister blames local inefficiency. The opposition blames waste. The resident is still standing next to the same pothole.

This is fertile ground for populism because populism is very good at converting neglect into accusation. It looks at complicated institutional decay and offers a cast list: the corrupt council, the woke officers, the wasteful bureaucracy, the metropolitan elite, the migrants, the consultants, the cyclists, the environmentalists, the previous administration, the next administration, anyone except the person currently making the promise.

The appeal is obvious. When people feel ignored, a politics of blame can feel like recognition. At last, someone is saying the place has been neglected. At last, someone is angry. At last, someone is naming the people who let this happen.

The trouble is that recognition is not repair. Anger is not a waste collection strategy. Suspicion is not a social care settlement. Denouncing bureaucracy is not the same as having enough planners, enforcement officers, social workers, housing officers, highways inspectors, procurement expertise or legal capacity to run the place.

Local government is therefore dangerous for protest politics in a way Westminster often is not. In national politics, a party can live for a long time on mood, grievance and symbolic conflict. In local government, the abstraction has a shorter shelf life. Sooner or later, somebody has to set a budget. Somebody has to approve the contract. Somebody has to decide whether to raise council tax, cut a service, close a building, increase charges, sell an asset, reduce opening hours, change eligibility, delay maintenance, or admit that the numbers do not add up.

This is not an argument against insurgent parties winning councils. Democracy includes the right to throw the old lot out. Sometimes the old lot deserve it. But local government exposes the difference between being anti-establishment and being capable of governing. The first requires a microphone. The second requires a budget, a workforce, a legal framework, a delivery plan and the ability to disappoint people honestly.

The same challenge applies to every party, including the more respectable ones. Labour councils cannot live forever on blaming Conservative austerity, however real its consequences. Conservative councils cannot demand fiscal restraint nationally and then act surprised when local restraint hurts. Liberal Democrats cannot campaign as hyper-local fixers while dodging the harder choices of prioritisation. Greens cannot simply describe a more humane, sustainable localism without explaining how planning, transport, housing and budgets would actually be aligned. Reform cannot turn every problem into a morality play about waste and betrayal, then discover in office that statutory duties are not defeated by vibes.

Local government is where rhetoric is forced into contact with the curb edge. That is why it matters.

Conclusion

We should stop treating local elections as if they are merely Westminster’s quarterly performance review.

They are that, in part. It would be precious to pretend otherwise. A voter angry about the government does not become a different citizen because the ballot paper lists council candidates. National politics seeps into local elections because national politics seeps into everything.

But local elections are also decisions about who governs the ordinary conditions of shared life. They decide who sits closest to the services people rely on most directly and notice most quickly when they fail. They shape whether neighbourhood decline is tolerated or challenged, whether residents are answered or managed, whether scarce money is spent with clarity or drift, whether the council understands itself as a living democratic institution or merely as a machine for processing statutory obligations until the next crisis.

There is no romance in this. Local government is not pure, intimate and authentic while Westminster is distant, theatrical and false. Councils can be petty, bureaucratic, evasive and maddening. Local politics has its own vanities, its own cowardice, its own little empires. Anyone inclined to sentimentalise local democracy should attend a planning committee, a budget meeting or a residents’ forum about parking.

But the absence of romance is part of the point. Local government is political because maintenance is political. Care is political. Roads are political. Planning is political. Buses are political. Libraries are political. Housing is political. The weed-covered pavement is political. The unanswered email is political. The missed bin is political.

Not because every irritation deserves a grand ideological explanation, but because ordinary public life depends on institutions that either work or do not.

Westminster writes the grand arguments. Councils inherit the consequences. Politics becomes real when someone has to decide which road gets repaired, which care package is funded, which library survives, which bus route matters, which family is housed, which development is approved, and which neglected neighbourhood is told, once again, to wait.

The state is not an abstraction when your bin has not been emptied. It is at the end of your drive, smelling faintly, waiting for someone to take responsibility.

If the state had better information, perhaps welfare could be distributed more fairly. If platforms knew more about their users, perhaps children could be better protected online. If employers, landlords, regulators, journalists and voters could verify more claims more quickly, perhaps fraud, abuse, corruption and dishonesty would become harder to hide. If identity were easier to prove, perhaps access to services would be smoother, public administration would become less wasteful, and the dishonest minority who exploit gaps in the system would find those gaps closing around them.

It’s not hard to see why this story appeals. Some of the things said in defence of greater transparency and stronger identity systems are not merely plausible, but true. Fraud does exist. Children are harmed online. Public trust is damaged when powerful people lie without consequence. The internet has created whole shadow economies of impersonation, manipulation, harassment and scam artistry. The state already holds huge quantities of information about us, often badly joined up, badly secured, badly explained and badly used. Against that background, the promise of a cleaner, safer, more accountable digital order has obvious moral force.

That’s why the weaker civil-liberties argument is not enough. It’s easy to oppose surveillance by saying it won’t work, or that it will be abused, or that the claimed benefits will turn out to be exaggerated.

Often that’s true. Governments overpromise. Technology vendors overpromise more. Databases rot. Errors proliferate. Outsourced systems find bold new ways to be expensive and useless at the same time, which is admittedly a sort of technical achievement. But the more interesting question begins when we grant the premise.

Imagine, then, that the government legislates to abolish privacy as a social institution. Not merely to create a new ID card, or to require age checks for certain websites, or to join up public records more efficiently, but to create the logical endpoint of total transparency: a free-to-use, publicly accessible database containing all information about everything and everyone.

And suppose, for the sake of argument, that it works.

Social welfare improves enormously. Benefits are distributed more fairly because need is visible and fraud is harder to conceal. Journalistic and political integrity improve because public claims can be checked instantly against public facts. Crime rates fall. Dangerous people are easier to identify. Corrupt officials are easier to expose. Hidden conflicts of interest become public knowledge. The vulnerable are easier to find and support. The dishonest are easier to catch. The evasive are easier to pin down. The whole system becomes cleaner, safer, more efficient and more truthful.

The question is whether such a society would be better.

My answer is no. Or, more precisely, it might be better at some things, while being worse at the thing that makes political and social life worth having in the first place: the ability of a human being to exist as something more than a public file.

The problem with total transparency is not only that it might fail. The problem is that, even when it succeeds, it succeeds by destroying the private sphere. It gives us safety by making everyone searchable. It gives us integrity by making everyone permanently auditable. It gives us efficiency by making everyone administratively legible. It doesn’t merely reveal facts. It changes the conditions under which people live, think, experiment, associate, dissent, mature, recover and become themselves.

That is why the usual framing of privacy as a trade-off between security and secrecy is too thin. The real question is not whether we have something to hide. The real question is whether we’re still allowed to have a door.

The seduction of transparency

There’s a reason transparency has become one of the great moral words of modern politics. It sounds clean. It sounds democratic. It suggests sunlight, accountability, open records, honest administration and the end of cosy deals done behind oak doors by people with hereditary furniture. In that sense, transparency is not the enemy. Much of modern democratic life depends on it.

We should know who funds political parties. We should know what ministers have declared as interests. We should know how public money is spent. We should know whether a company dumping waste into a river has also been lobbying the regulator meant to stop it doing precisely that. A great deal of corruption survives because relevant information is hidden, scattered, inaccessible, expensive to obtain, or technically public but practically impossible to find without a law degree, three free afternoons and the personality of a terrier.

So the argument against total transparency cannot be an argument for total opacity. That would be absurd. Secrecy can protect the powerful as easily as the vulnerable; indeed, it usually protects them better, because the powerful can afford lawyers, shell companies, non-disclosure agreements, reputation management consultants and the sort of filing practices that make accountability feel like archaeology.

The question, then, is not whether transparency is good. The question is where transparency belongs, who it is for, what it is meant to expose, and what kinds of life it makes possible or impossible.

That distinction is crucial because transparency does not mean the same thing when applied upwards as when applied downwards. Transparency directed at powerful institutions can be a democratic tool. Transparency directed at ordinary individuals can become a disciplinary one. There is a difference between making the Home Office explain its decision-making and making every citizen’s medical history, romantic life, religious doubts, income, debts, mistakes, complaints, searches, friendships and political affiliations visible to anyone with an internet connection and a slow afternoon.

A society in which the powerful are accountable to the public is not the same as a society in which every person is accountable to everyone else at all times. The first can be democratic. The second is not democracy at all. It’s exposure.

The crowd is not a court

The internet has already given us a partial preview of what happens when private information becomes easy to find, easy to copy, easy to detach from context and easy to weaponise.

Some of this has been genuinely emancipatory. People once silenced by institutions can now speak around them. Abuse once concealed within families, workplaces, churches, schools, parties, clubs and industries can now be documented, shared and believed. The old gatekeepers were not neutral guardians of truth; they were often bouncers for reputation, class, money and institutional convenience. Anyone defending privacy has to take this seriously, because privacy has also been used as a polite name for burying harm.

But there’s a difference between enabling victims to speak and turning public accusation into public punishment without procedure. Social media does not need to wait for evidence, relevance, proportionality, context, right of reply, appeal, limitation periods, or any of the other boring procedural devices by which civilised societies try to distinguish judgement from appetite. It moves quickly, often thrillingly so. A name appears. A screenshot circulates. A thread begins. Someone adds a second-hand story, then a third-hand interpretation of the second-hand story, then someone with a podcast voice and a ring light announces that the silence from the accused is itself revealing. By lunchtime, the crowd has become detective, prosecutor, jury, judge and public executioner, although naturally it still has strong feelings about institutional overreach.

There are cases where public anger exposes what formal systems refused to see. That’s the strongest version of the defence, and it should not be dismissed. Courts fail. Police fail. HR departments fail with the dead-eyed fluency of institutions that have discovered the passive voice. But the failure of formal process doesn’t mean the crowd is a better process. It may be faster, louder and more emotionally satisfying, but speed, volume and satisfaction are not substitutes for justice.

The danger here is sometimes described as the tyranny of the majority, but even that phrase may be too organised. A majority at least implies a polity, a defined body, a decision rule, a mandate. The online crowd has none of that. It does not need to explain who belongs to it, what authority it claims, what standard of proof it applies, what punishment would be proportionate, when punishment should end, or what it would take to be forgiven. Its power comes from aggregation rather than legitimacy. Enough people looking at you can become a form of government, even if none of them individually thinks they’re governing.

Total transparency would make this dynamic permanent. It would not merely let the public judge wrongdoing. It would supply the public with an infinite archive from which wrongdoing, or something close enough to wrongdoing for present purposes, could always be assembled.

That is not safety. It is exposure to unlimited retrospective prosecution by people who don’t have to tell you what law they’re applying.

The state is not a saint

The opposing danger comes from the state, and here the usual libertarian warnings are often stated too crudely but not entirely wrongly.

There’s an old line attributed to Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.” It survives because it names something unpleasantly durable about power. Give an institution enough information about a person, enough time to search through it, and enough motive to harm them, and innocence becomes beside the point. The question is no longer whether someone has done anything seriously wrong. The question is whether something can be found, isolated, reclassified, exaggerated, misread, or placed before the wrong audience.

The problem is not that every government is tyrannical. Most aren’t, at least not most of the time. The problem is that states are continuous in ways citizens are not. Administrations change. Ministers change. Laws change. Political moods change. Databases remain. Data collected for one purpose can be reused for another. Powers created under one moral emergency can be inherited by people with different enemies. A system built to find benefit fraud can be used to find dissidents. A system built to verify age can become a system for routine identity checking. A system built to protect the vulnerable can become a system for classifying the inconvenient.

This is why good intentions are not enough. The question is not whether the present minister sounds reasonable in a consultation document. The question is what structure is being built, what it permits, what it normalises, what safeguards exist beyond ministerial reassurance, and what a future government could do with the same machinery under different political conditions.

A benevolent database is still a database. A humane surveillance system is still a surveillance system. A well-administered architecture of total visibility is still an architecture of total visibility. Its moral character cannot be judged only by the intentions of the people who first switch it on.

There are, of course, practical objections too. Public records contain errors. People share names. Addresses go out of date. Relationships are complicated. Data taken from one context is often misleading in another. But, again, the thought experiment asks us to go further. Suppose the system is accurate. Suppose it catches the right people. Suppose it works exactly as advertised.

Even then, the citizen has been converted into a permanently inspectable object.

That conversion is not a side effect. It is the point.

Privacy is not secrecy

The laziest argument against privacy is that only people with something to hide need it. This is rhetorically effective because it makes privacy sound guilty before the argument has even begun. It quietly replaces the right to a private sphere with the right to conceal evidence, and then invites us to be suspicious of anyone who objects.

But privacy is not the same thing as secrecy.

Secrecy is about the content of what’s hidden. Privacy is about the existence of a sphere in which hiding is possible. That distinction, made powerfully by Emilio Mordini in his work on biometrics and the private sphere, changes the whole argument. The point is not that everyone has a scandal in the cupboard. The point is that a human life requires cupboards.

This may sound melodramatic until one thinks about the ordinary architecture of social life. We already live through forms of selective disclosure. We don’t present ourselves to our parents exactly as we do to our friends, or our colleagues, our partners, our doctors, or at the pub, at the polling station, in the group chat, the confessional, the therapist’s office, the classroom, the union meeting, the job interview, or the moment when we idly search for something odd on the internet and hope, for a moment, that no one is watching. We present as different people when given different audiences or contexts.

This is not hypocrisy. It is personhood.

The same fact can mean different things in different contexts because the relationship, purpose and audience are different. A medical diagnosis belongs in a medical context. A political opinion may belong in a meeting, a notebook, a ballot box, a conversation, an essay, or nowhere at all. A sexual preference may belong between consenting adults and no one else. A debt may be relevant to a lender but not to a neighbour. A past mistake may be relevant to safeguarding in one setting and wholly irrelevant in another. To collapse all of those contexts into one public database is not to reveal the truth of a person. It is to destroy the conditions under which truth can be interpreted properly.

This is where Helen Nissenbaum’s idea of contextual integrity is useful. Privacy is not simply violated when information becomes known; it’s violated when information moves in ways that break the norms of the context in which it was disclosed, produced, or held. The fact that a GP knows something doesn’t mean an employer should know it. The fact that a tax authority knows something doesn’t mean a journalist should know it. The fact that a friend knows something doesn’t mean a stranger should be able to search it.

The transparent society pretends that information is morally neutral once it’s accurate. It isn’t. Information has context, and when context is stripped away, accuracy can become a form of falsehood.

The administrative person

Total transparency would also change the kind of person the system expects us to be.

A private person is unfinished. They can think things they don’t yet believe, try on opinions they later reject, make mistakes without those mistakes becoming permanent public property, recover from humiliation, change affiliations, leave groups, enter relationships, exit relationships, experiment with identity, abandon foolishness, learn, contradict themselves, apologise, mature and quietly become someone else.

An administratively legible person is different. They are a record. They are a profile. They are a searchable sequence of attributes, transactions, affiliations, associations, risks, flags, scores, statements and deviations. They may still have an inner life, but the public system has less reason to care about it, because the file is easier to process than the person.

This is one reason the nothing-to-hide argument is so inadequate. It imagines privacy as a shield for incriminating content, when privacy is also the condition under which non-incriminating life can remain human. Most of what we wish to keep private is not criminal. Much of it is not even shameful. It is private because it’s fragile, unfinished, intimate, experimental, context-dependent, or simply nobody else’s business unless we choose to make it so.

The right to privacy protects the awkward draft of the self.

A society without that right doesn’t merely expose wrongdoing. It changes incentives. People become more cautious, more performative, more risk-averse, more conformist. The issue is not that everyone would become obedient overnight, because human beings are stranger and more stubborn than that. The issue is that everyone would learn to live before an imagined tribunal. Every search, joke, friendship, message, purchase, diagnosis, meeting, donation, doubt and desire would carry the question: how will this look when retrieved later?

That question is not morally neutral. It colonises the mind. It turns life into reputation management.

And although people sometimes say that the innocent have nothing to fear, innocence has never protected people equally. Those with conventional lives, secure jobs, respectable accents, supportive families, boring hobbies and the good sense to have been born into socially approved categories will always experience transparency differently from those whose lives are messier, poorer, queerer, more marginal, more stigmatised, more politically exposed, or simply less legible to the people doing the judging. Total transparency doesn’t flatten power. It gives power more material to work with.

The policy temptation

None of this means every digital identity proposal is tyranny, or that every form of age assurance is the first brick in the tower of Foucault’s panopticon. That would be too easy, and too silly. States need to know some things. Institutions need ways of verifying identity. Children do need protection online. Welfare systems do need to reduce fraud. Public services can be improved when records are accurate, portable and sensibly joined up. There are privacy-preserving technical designs that may answer some real problems better than the current mess of passwords, photocopied documents, insecure uploads and proving one’s existence to five different agencies in five different ways.

But this is precisely why the conceptual argument is important. The danger often doesn’t arrive as a villain stroking a cat and announcing the end of liberty. It arrives as an interface improvement, a safeguarding measure, fraud prevention, convenience, verification, service integration, child protection, risk management, public confidence and administrative efficiency. Sometimes these are genuine goods. Sometimes they’re even urgent goods. But none of them removes the need to ask what kind of citizen is being designed into the system.

The live debate about digital ID and online regulation is not identical to the thought experiment above. It would be unfair to pretend that a phone-based identity credential, or a requirement for age checks on ‘high-risk’ platforms, is the same thing as a universal public database. The serious argument is not that we’re already living in the hypothetical. It is that the hypothetical reveals the direction of travel we should be wary of: a society in which access to ordinary life increasingly depends on being identifiable, verifiable, classifiable and traceable.

That may be acceptable in some contexts. It may be necessary in others. But it should never be treated as cost-free simply because the interface is neat and the stated aim is benevolent.

The key questions are not only technical. They’re constitutional, moral and social. Who holds the data? Who can see it? Who can combine it? Who can compel it? Who audits the system? Who can refuse? What happens to people without smartphones, documents, stable addresses, conventional family structures, or trust in the institutions demanding proof? What information is disclosed to the service being accessed? Can identity be verified without identity being exposed? Can age be proved without a permanent record of the attempt? Can the state design systems that know only what they need to know, rather than everything they can know?

These questions are often treated as implementation details. They aren’t. They are the substance of liberty under digital conditions.

The right to close a door

The private sphere is not a sanctuary for wickedness. Or, at least, it is not only that, and no serious defence of privacy should pretend otherwise. Bad things happen behind closed doors. Secrecy protects abusers, fraudsters, hypocrites and cowards. Privacy can be invoked cynically by people who don’t want accountability, and any argument for privacy must face that fact squarely.

But a right can be abused without becoming worthless. Speech can be used to lie. Association can be used to conspire. Due process can be used by the guilty. Political freedom can be used by fools. The answer is not to abolish the right, but to understand why the right exists and where its limits should fall.

Privacy exists because a human being is not public property.

That is the point I keep returning to. We can concede almost every practical benefit claimed for transparency and still reject the transparent society, because the deepest case against it is not practical but civic. Total transparency would not merely help institutions know more about us. It would change our relation to institutions, to one another, and to ourselves. It would make life permanently inspectable. It would make context fragile. It would make error indelible. It would make identity less something lived and more something retrieved.

The point of privacy is not that every room contains a scandal. Most don’t. Some contain grief. Some contain illness. Some contain fantasy, prayer, boredom, sex, resentment, doubt, stupidity, recovery, unfinished politics, bad poems, worse search histories, and the small, undignified machinery by which people remain people. Some contain nothing very interesting at all.

That doesn’t weaken the case for privacy. It is the case for privacy.

A person should not need to prove that the room contains something important before being allowed to close the door. The door is the point. The power to close it is part of what separates a citizen from an object of administration, a neighbour from a suspect, a person from a profile.

A safer society may require some information to be shared. A fairer society may require some secrecy to be pierced. A more accountable society may require some doors, especially the doors of the powerful, to be opened more often and more forcefully than they are now. But a society with no doors at all would not be an honest society. It would be a society in which honesty had been confused with exposure, and exposure had been confused with justice.

The right to privacy is the right to remain partly unknown.

It is the right to be more than the sum of one’s records.

It is the right, sometimes, to disappear.

There are few phrases in politics more soothing than listening to concerns. It has the soft upholstery of democratic virtue. It suggests patience, humility, rootedness, a willingness to get out of Westminster and discover that the country is not entirely composed of select committee witnesses, policy officers and people whose job title contains the word strategy.

And, to be fair, listening is good. It is usually better than not listening, which remains a surprisingly popular option. A politics that cannot hear anxiety, irritation, fear, resentment, confusion or grief is not a serious democratic politics. It is either a seminar pretending to be a movement, or a management consultancy with a flag outside.

The problem is what happens next.

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In contemporary politics, listening to concerns often performs a small act of moral laundering. A concern is heard. Because it has been heard, it is treated as authentic. Because it is authentic, it is treated as legitimate. Because it is legitimate, it is treated as a mandate. And before long, a voter’s anxious sentence on a doorstep has somehow become a policy position, a press line, a rebellion against the courts, a tightening of eligibility criteria, a crackdown on protest, or a promise to do something drastic at the border.

This is not listening. It is ventriloquism with polling.

The problem with listening to concerns is not the listening. Politics would be intolerable without it. The problem is the way the phrase collapses several different acts into one: hearing what someone feels; understanding what they mean; assessing whether their account of the world is accurate; deciding whether their proposed remedy is workable; and judging whether it is morally acceptable.

Those are not the same thing. A concern may be sincere and still misdirected. It may be understandable and still unfair. It may point to a real pressure while blaming the wrong people for it. It may be politically salient without being morally sovereign. Listening is diagnostic, not legislative.

The concern is not always the argument

A useful starting point is to concede the obvious: public concern is not imaginary.

People are worried about the cost of living, the NHS, immigration, crime, housing, welfare, social cohesion, protest, speech, identity, services and the basic competence of the state. These are not inventions of focus groups or tabloid editors, even when focus groups and tabloid editors do their best to make them worse. In April 2026, the Office for National Statistics found that the most commonly reported important issues facing the UK were the cost of living, the NHS and the economy, with crime, immigration, housing and climate change also selected by large numbers of adults. Among those aged 70 and over, immigration was one of the three most commonly selected issues.

That matters because a certain kind of liberal or left-wing politics sometimes talks as if the public only believe troubling things because someone has maliciously inserted them into their heads. That is comforting, but too neat. People can arrive at bad conclusions from real experiences. They can live in neighbourhoods where public services are visibly strained, where GP appointments are hard to get, where housing is expensive, where anti-social behaviour feels uncontrolled, where local civic life has thinned out, and where change has happened faster than anyone has bothered to explain.

None of that means their diagnosis is right. But it does mean their anxiety is not simply a failure of moral education.

This is where the first misuse of listening begins. Parts of the Left have developed a habit of praising listening in the abstract while becoming terribly awkward when people say things outside the approved moral vocabulary. Immigration is the clearest example, though not the only one. Patriotism, welfare conditionality, crime, disorder and protest can produce the same evasive shuffle: yes, of course we must listen, but perhaps not quite to that, not in those words, not from those people, not without first translating it into something more congenial.

The result is often a politics of polite non-engagement. The voter is heard, thanked, perhaps emotionally validated, and then quietly returned to the category of people who have not yet understood the issue correctly.

There is a moral reason for some of this discomfort. Not every concern should be indulged. Some are racist, cruel, paranoid, conspiratorial, or based on displaced anger towards people with less power. But it does not follow that every uncomfortable concern is merely bigotry wearing a local accent. The more difficult possibility is that a voter may be both morally wrong in part of their account and politically right that something is failing.

A good politics needs to be able to say both things at once.

Listening as evasion

The Labour Party’s recent difficulty on immigration sits in precisely this space. The party has spent years trying to distinguish reasonable concern about control, pressure and integration from the nastier politics of scapegoating. That distinction is necessary. It is also very hard to maintain if voters think you only discovered the first half of the sentence after Reform started taking votes off you.

Keir Starmer’s 2025 immigration White Paper remarks promised tighter controls across work, family and study routes, tougher enforcement, and a reduction in migration. The speech also linked immigration to pressure on housing and public services. That is, in itself, not an illegitimate argument. The state is allowed to decide who enters and settles. Public consent matters. Immigration policy cannot be detached from housing, wages, infrastructure, language, exploitation, planning, skills, enforcement or local capacity.

But the political risk is obvious. If a party moves from discomfort to panic, it stops sounding like it has thought its way to a position. It sounds as if it has been chased there.

That matters because listening is not the same as discovering where the anger is loudest and standing next to it. When politicians say they are listening, they need to be able to show what they have heard besides the volume. Is the concern about numbers, pace, fairness, illegality, culture, wages, housing, public services, language, national identity, exploitation, visible disorder, or a general sense that the state has lost control? These are related concerns, but they are not identical. Different problems require different answers.

If a person says they are worried about immigration because they cannot get a GP appointment, the serious response is not simply to promise lower migration. It is to ask whether the pressure is caused by population growth, workforce shortages, estate capacity, funding allocation, appointment systems, poor planning, or the fact that the NHS itself depends heavily on migrant labour. If a person says their town has changed beyond recognition, the serious response is not to pretend that social trust is irrelevant, nor to pretend that migrants are the whole story. It is to ask what institutions, rituals, services and shared spaces might help people live together well.

That is slower than a slogan. This is one reason slogans are popular.

Listening as surrender

The Right has a different problem. It is often much better at hearing the emotional content of public concern and much worse at resisting the temptation to sanctify it.

This is the most dangerous use of listening to concerns: the conversion of anxiety into permission. The public are worried about immigration; therefore we should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. The public are angry about small boats; therefore we should detain and deport everyone who arrives irregularly. The public dislike disruptive protests; therefore the state needs more powers to restrict them. The public think welfare is too expensive; therefore disabled people’s support becomes a suitable theatre for fiscal toughness.

This is not democratic humility. It is moral abdication.

Take immigration. Reform UK says it would leave the ECHR, intercept and detain all irregular arrivals, deport them, and withdraw from or disapply every international treaty that prevents its border policy. The Conservative Party has also made leaving the ECHR official policy, arguing that doing so would help secure borders and prevent legal challenges in other areas.

One can acknowledge that the asylum system is a mess, that Channel crossings are dangerous, that enforcement has been weak, and that voters are entitled to expect a functioning border. None of that proves that leaving the ECHR is wise, necessary, proportionate, operationally effective, or compatible with Britain’s longer-term interests. The concern is real. The proposed remedy is another question entirely.

That distinction is the thing political language keeps trying to erase.

The Right’s rhetorical move is often to treat restraint as contempt. If you do not endorse the maximal version of the answer, you have not listened. If you mention courts, treaties, administrative capacity, costs, family life, labour markets, due process, diplomatic agreements, returns arrangements, refugee law, Northern Ireland, or basic decency, you are accused of ignoring ordinary people. Expertise becomes evasion. Law becomes sabotage. Compassion becomes weakness. Complexity becomes betrayal.

But a government is not a comments section with a civil service.

Its job is not to reproduce public anger in statutory form. Its job is to govern through the tension between consent, evidence, principle and consequence. Sometimes that means telling people that a concern is being taken seriously. Sometimes it means telling them that the thing they want cannot be done. Sometimes it means saying, more bluntly, that it should not be done.

The voter is not a policy machine

There is a related mistake here: treating voters as if they possess stable, internally coherent policy programmes.

They usually do not. This is not because voters are stupid. It is because most people are not policy professionals and, frankly, are better adjusted for it. People hold moods, instincts, values, memories, interests, impressions, resentments and fragments of information. They also hold contradictions. They may want lower taxes and better public services; tougher welfare rules and protection for genuinely disabled people; lower immigration and more staff in hospitals and care homes; more police powers and protection from state overreach; cheaper housing and no building near them; more growth and less disruption.

This is not hypocrisy in any simple sense. It is ordinary democratic life.

British Social Attitudes is useful here because it places public opinion in longer context rather than treating every shift in salience as a new national soul. Its 2026 first look covers taxation and spending, welfare, immigration, electoral reform and assisted dying, drawing on time series that in some cases stretch back to 1983. That kind of evidence matters because it reminds us that the public mood is not a single instruction. It is a weather system.

Welfare is a good example. It is very easy to get people to agree that the welfare system should be fair, that people who can work should work, that fraud should be prevented, and that public spending should be controlled. It is much harder to turn those sentiments into humane and administrable policy. The government’s own assessment of its 2025 health and disability benefit reforms projected £4.8 billion of savings by 2029-30 and a reduction in the Personal Independence Payment caseload of 400,000, while still forecasting that the overall caseload would grow substantially. YouGov polling around the same period found that most Britons opposed cuts to disability benefits, especially for those unable to work.

This is the public in all its inconvenient complexity. People can want welfare reform and oppose welfare cuts. They can think the system is abused and still recoil when the person losing support has a degenerative condition, a severe mental illness, chronic pain, or a caring responsibility. They can endorse toughness in the abstract and mercy in the particular.

A politics that genuinely listens has to notice the contradiction rather than exploit whichever half is useful this week.

The protest problem

The same pattern appears around protest.

It is not hard to understand why disruptive protest annoys people. Blocking roads, targeting public events, interrupting commuters or disrupting city centres will generate anger, and not only among reactionaries. People have jobs, hospital appointments, school runs and lives not designed around becoming unwilling participants in someone else’s moral emergency.

But here too the concern does not settle the question. A right to protest that exists only when it inconveniences nobody is not a right to protest. It is permission to hold an outdoor meeting.

Recent legislation has significantly expanded the state’s ability to intervene in disruptive protest. The House of Commons Library notes that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 strengthened police powers to place restrictions on protests, while the Public Order Act 2023 created several protest-related offences and Serious Disruption Prevention Orders. It also notes that the Crime and Policing Bill 2024-26 would introduce further restrictions, including around pyrotechnics, climbing war memorials, concealing identity, protests near places of worship, and cumulative disruption.

There are real balances to strike here. Public order is not imaginary. Nor are intimidation, harassment or targeted disruption. But when governments listen only to irritation, they miss the point of the liberty at stake. Protest is supposed to impose itself on public attention. That does not mean every tactic is justified. It does mean disruption cannot be treated as a self-evident reason for suppression.

A serious politics would ask: what kind of disruption, by whom, against whom, how often, with what risk, under what safeguards, and with what alternative means of democratic expression available? A lazy politics asks whether people are annoyed and then calls that a mandate.

The difficulty of listening without laundering

Trans rights and single-sex services present perhaps the hardest version of this problem, because the language of concern is doing so much work at once.

Some concerns raised in this area are serious and should be taken seriously: privacy, safety, dignity, fairness in sport, safeguarding, the operation of refuges, prisons, schools and healthcare, and the practical duties placed on service providers. Some are not serious at all, except as moral panic. Some are formally about policy but emotionally about disgust. Some are expressed as concern for women while taking obvious pleasure in the humiliation of trans people. Some are expressed as concern for trans people while refusing to acknowledge that women’s rights, spaces and privacy are not trivial.

A politics that cannot tell the difference between these things will fail everyone.

The legal and policy landscape has also shifted. The Equality and Human Rights Commission says the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland held that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, sex means biological sex, and that the EHRC’s updated services code was laid before Parliament in May 2026. In June 2026, the government told the Commons that it would protect single-sex spaces based on biological sex where needed, while also saying that trans people should have access to services in a way that respects dignity and privacy.

That is the sort of sentence governments produce when they are trying to listen in several directions at once. Sometimes that is necessary. Sometimes it is evasive. The test is whether the difficult trade-offs are named clearly enough for anyone to know what is being decided.

On this issue, as on others, listening to concerns can easily become a way of avoiding moral responsibility. Politicians can imply sympathy with women without spelling out what happens to trans people in practice. Or they can imply solidarity with trans people without answering concrete questions about institutions where sex, privacy and vulnerability are central. Either move is easier than governing. Neither is good enough.

Listening should not mean treating every anxiety as prejudice. Nor should it mean treating every anxiety as policy.

The technocrat’s mistake

There is, however, one more failure of listening, and it is not confined to the populist Right or the squeamish Left.

It is the technocratic mistake: assuming that because you understand the evidence better, you understand the concern better.

Sometimes politicians, civil servants, experts and campaigners really do know things that the public does not. That is not an elitist scandal. It is the point of expertise. Most of us do not have time to understand asylum returns agreements, disability assessment criteria, police public order powers, local authority finance, labour market shortages, planning law, energy grids or the case law around the Equality Act. We outsource some of that complexity because otherwise we would all need to become full-time policy analysts and nobody would fix the boiler.

But expertise can become arrogant when it treats public concern merely as a communications problem. The voter is not simply a badly informed version of the expert. They may be describing something the data has missed, or something the data can see only indirectly: humiliation, distrust, fear, local decline, institutional contempt, the cumulative irritation of systems that technically exist but do not work when needed.

There is a reason people often say they want politicians to listen even when they cannot specify the policy answer. What they mean is that they want the political system to recognise the reality of their experience. They want some sign that the people making decisions have encountered the consequences of those decisions in human form.

That is not a small demand. But it is not the same as asking to rule by anecdote.

The task of democratic politics is to hold both truths together. The public may know things government has missed. The public may also be wrong. Expertise may correct prejudice, but it may also miss lived reality. Evidence should shape policy, but it cannot substitute for legitimacy. Listening should inform judgement, not replace it.

What serious listening would require

A serious politics of listening would be less flattering to everyone.

It would be less flattering to voters, because it would refuse to pretend that every concern is wise, fair or usable in the form in which it first appears. It would say: I have heard you, but I do not accept your explanation. Or: I agree this is a problem, but your answer would harm the wrong people. Or: what you are describing is real, but it is caused by housing policy, wage stagnation, service failure, enforcement weakness, planning delay, employer exploitation, institutional neglect, or the simple fact that the state has promised more than it can competently deliver.

It would be less flattering to politicians, because they would no longer be able to use listening as a substitute for courage. They would have to explain why they had accepted some concerns, rejected others, translated others into different policy terms, and drawn moral boundaries around the possible. They would have to stop hiding behind the public when making choices they wanted to make anyway.

It would be less flattering to activists and commentators, because it would deny them the comfort of assuming that everyone outside their moral universe is either wicked or stupid. It would require them to ask why certain arguments have purchase, what social reality they attach to, and whether their own side has avoided questions that do not fit easily into its preferred story.

And it would be less flattering to technocrats, because it would remind them that being right on the evidence does not automatically mean being democratically adequate.

Listening properly means breaking a concern into parts. What is the person afraid of? What have they actually experienced? What have they inferred from that experience? Who are they blaming? What evidence supports or undermines that blame? What would their preferred solution do? Who would carry its costs? Which moral lines are not available to cross, even if the policy would poll well?

That is slow work. It is also what politics is for.

The alternative is the little fraud we have now: listening as theatre, listening as permission, listening as triangulation, listening as focus-group ventriloquism, listening as the soft prelude to a hard policy already chosen.

Listening is not obedience. Nor is it a fig-leaf for contempt. It is the first stage of democratic judgement, not the suspension of judgement altogether.

A serious politics would listen to concerns without worshipping them; challenge prejudice without pretending the underlying anxiety is always invented; and respect voters enough not to treat every doorstep sentence as either sacred wisdom or regrettable ignorance.

The public are not always right. Neither are the people paid to interpret them.

That is exactly why listening has to mean something more than nodding along.

There are few phrases more comforting than being on the right side of history.

It has the satisfying sound of an argument that has already won. It does not merely say that a person is right, or that their cause is just, or that their opponents are mistaken. It says something grander and more convenient: that the future has already agreed with them. History, that vast and impressive abstraction, has supposedly filed its judgement in advance. The present may still be noisy, complicated and resistant, but the verdict is coming. We need only wait for the dust to settle and the statues to be rearranged.

This is, as rhetoric, extremely tempting. It is tempting because it borrows the authority of hindsight while sparing us the inconvenience of not yet having any. It allows a person to speak as if the moral meaning of the present has already been clarified by the future. It gives political argument the flavour of prophecy. It is not just that I am right. It is that one day everyone will see that I was right, and those who failed to see it will look faintly embarrassing in the archive.

The trouble, of course, is that history has not yet turned up to give evidence.

This does not mean that the phrase is always empty. There are moments when it captures something real. Human beings have done things, tolerated things, defended things and built institutions around things that later generations have been right to judge harshly. Slavery, colonial violence, racial segregation, the exclusion of women from political life, the criminalisation of gay people, the maintenance of apartheid: nobody needs to pretend that all historical judgement is presumptuous just because some people use historical judgement badly. Moral progress is not an illusion. There really are victories worth defending, and there really are defeats that, in retrospect, deserve to look like defeats.

But that is not quite the same thing as saying they were inevitable.

This distinction matters. There is a difference between moral confidence and historical inevitability. Moral confidence says: this is right, and I am prepared to defend it. Historical inevitability says: this will win, and therefore opposition to it is not merely wrong but obsolete. The first still accepts the burden of argument. The second quietly tries to escape it.

That escape is the problem.

The phrase being on the right side of history offers people a borrowed certainty. It lets them occupy the posture of retrospective wisdom while the actual work remains unfinished. It turns politics into a queue for vindication, as though justice were not something made through struggle, organisation, persuasion, law, culture, institutional pressure, compromise, conflict, endurance and luck, but something that eventually arrives because the future is embarrassed on our behalf.

That is not only bad history. It is bad ethics. And, more immediately, it is often dreadful politics.

The temptation is understandable.

The phrase appeals most strongly to people who have reason to believe that the present is morally disordered. That should make us careful before mocking it. People do not usually reach for the language of history when they are calmly discussing the decimal places of a budget line. They reach for it when they believe something larger is at stake.

Abolitionists needed more than a careful reading of parliamentary arithmetic. Suffragists needed more than patience with the procedural objections of men who discovered, with remarkable consistency, that the time for women’s equality had not quite arrived. Civil rights campaigners needed to believe that segregation was not merely one legal arrangement among others, but a moral scandal. Anti-apartheid activists needed to insist that a racial caste state could not be made acceptable by calling it stability. Gay rights campaigners, in the face of criminalisation, stigma and state neglect, needed to believe that the moral universe was not exhausted by the prejudices of their own moment.

In these cases, the appeal to history can be sustaining. It says: this present arrangement is not permanent. The normality of injustice is not proof of its legitimacy. What looks settled can be unsettled. What looks natural can be exposed as political. What looks like common sense can, in time, come to look cruel.

There is a generous version of the phrase, then. It is not a sneer but a source of courage. It is the voice that tells people in losing causes that the present distribution of power is not the same thing as moral truth. It refuses the tyranny of the immediate. It says that majorities can be wrong, that laws can be unjust, that social consensus can be rotten, and that people who are despised in one generation may be honoured in another.

That is not a trivial insight. It is one of the reasons politics is possible at all.

But the problem with the phrase is that it so easily slides from courage into complacency. It begins as a refusal to let the present have the final word. It ends as a refusal to do the work of changing the present. The future becomes not a hope, but a guarantee. The person speaking is no longer making an argument; they are announcing the direction of travel.

And once someone believes they know the direction of travel, it becomes remarkably easy to treat anyone standing in the way as less a citizen than a historical inconvenience.

Moral confidence is not historical inevitability

The distinction between moral confidence and historical inevitability is the hinge of the whole problem.

Moral confidence can be necessary. There are issues on which endless neutrality becomes its own form of cowardice. To say that a person should defend their beliefs without any conviction would be absurd. Political and moral life requires commitments. It requires people to say, sometimes against the mood of their age, that something is unjust, degrading, dishonest or cruel.

But moral confidence still has to argue. It still has to explain itself. It still has to persuade, organise and contend with reality. It does not get to assume that the righteousness of its destination has solved the difficulty of the route.

Historical inevitability does something different. It turns a claim about justice into a claim about momentum. It implies that the issue is not simply whether something is right, but whether it is where history is heading. That gives the speaker a useful double advantage. They get to sound morally serious and strategically sophisticated at the same time. Their opponent is not merely wrong; they are behind. Their position is not merely unjust; it is ageing badly. Their arguments do not need to be answered so much as outlived.

This is a powerful form of rhetoric because nobody wants to imagine themselves as the last defender of some doomed stupidity. Most people prefer to think of themselves as decent, modern and reasonably alert to the moral weather. To tell them they are on the wrong side of history is to threaten them not only with defeat but with embarrassment. It asks them to picture their grandchildren wincing at them.

There are times when that threat may be deserved. But as an argumentative habit, it is dangerous. It rewards people for speaking as if history were simpler than it is. It treats the future as a kind of moral audit office. It encourages the thought that the direction of justice is obvious to those with sufficient virtue, and obscure only to the wicked, stupid or self-interested.

This is where the phrase becomes ethically corrosive. It does not merely express confidence. It licenses contempt.

The Whig comfort blanket

There is an old historical temptation here. Herbert Butterfield’s critique of Whig history was, among other things, a critique of stories that turn the past into a procession towards the enlightened present. In the Whig version of history, events are arranged so that they appear to be moving, however bumpily, towards us: our freedoms, our institutions, our moral assumptions, our self-congratulation. The American Historical Association’s discussion of Butterfield describes his concern with abridged historical narratives that achieve drama and apparent moral clarity by interpreting the past through present politics, producing teleological stories that can do violence to the complexity of the past.

The appeal of such stories is obvious. They tidy history up. They sort people into winners and losers, prophets and reactionaries, darkness and light. They allow us to see the past as a series of auditions for the present, with everyone judged by whether they anticipated us.

That does not mean we should suspend moral judgement. There is a lazy misuse of anti-presentism which treats any judgement of the past as an anachronism, as though the people harmed by historical injustice were not themselves present at the time. Enslaved people did not need twenty-first-century theory to understand that enslavement was a horror. Women excluded from public life did not need a modern seminar to notice that the arrangement was convenient for men. Colonised peoples were not waiting for later historians to tell them that coercion had occurred.

So the lesson is not that moral judgement is impossible. It is that moral judgement is not the same as historical neatness.

The past was not a morality play whose central purpose was to produce the opinions we currently hold. It was inhabited by people acting under conditions of uncertainty, constraint, imagination, prejudice, courage, fear, ignorance and interest. Sometimes the people we now admire were wrong about other things. Sometimes the people who defended good causes did so for mixed reasons. Sometimes movements that deserved to win lost for generations. Sometimes victories were partial, compromised or reversed. Sometimes what looked like inevitable progress depended on accidents, alliances, institutional openings and tactical decisions that could easily have gone differently.

This is why the right side of history is such a suspiciously comfortable phrase. It allows us to enjoy the moral clarity of hindsight in advance. It lets us imagine the future as if it were already a school textbook, with our side printed in the chapter heading.

But history is not written in advance. It is not a conveyor belt. It does not carry good causes to victory while their supporters stand around being correct.

The moral arc is not a travelator

The most famous version of this comfort is the line about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. Martin Luther King Jr. used a version of it, but the thought is usually traced back to the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. Parker’s original formulation is more interesting, and more humble, than the slogan it has become. He did not present himself as a man who could see the whole design of history. He said, in effect, that his view was limited; he could not calculate the full curve, but by conscience he believed it bent towards justice.

That humility matters. Parker’s line was not a forecasting model. It was not a graph. It was not a complacent assurance that the future had a departmental commitment to fairness. It was an act of moral faith under conditions of partial sight.

The sloganised version often loses that uncertainty. In public rhetoric, the moral arc becomes less like a discipline and more like infrastructure. It bends towards justice, apparently, because that is what arcs do. The speaker is then relieved of the question of who bends it, how, at what cost, against which resistance, and with what possibility of failure.

But the moral arc is not a travelator. It does not move us while we stand still.

If it bends towards justice at all, it does so because people bend it. They bend it through argument, protest, litigation, writing, organising, voting, bargaining, striking, teaching, risking reputation, losing elections, building institutions, changing norms, and sometimes spending entire lives on causes whose victories they will not personally see. Even then, it does not bend smoothly. It buckles, stalls, snaps back. It can be forced in the other direction. Rights won in one generation can be weakened in another. Taboos can return. Cruelties can be renamed. Bad ideas can acquire new fonts and re-enter polite society as if they had merely been away at finishing school.

The belief that justice is possible is necessary. The belief that justice is inevitable is a narcotic.

What the phrase does to argument

The deeper problem with being on the right side of history is not that it is historically naive, though it often is. The deeper problem is what it does to argument.

First, it makes people lazy. If history is already moving in your direction, persuasion starts to look optional. Why explain yourself carefully to people who will eventually be ashamed of themselves anyway? Why address their fears, objections, confusions or material interests? Why build a majority when history has already seconded the motion?

This is a particular danger for progressive politics, though not only for progressive politics. A movement can be morally right and still politically incompetent. It can diagnose an injustice accurately and still fail to build the coalition needed to remedy it. It can have the better argument and still lose because it mistook moral force for organisational power. The fact that a cause deserves to win does not mean that it will. The universe does not give extra seats for being correct in principle.

Second, the phrase makes people self-righteous. It encourages a flattering distinction between those who understand the age and those who belong to its debris. The opponent becomes not someone to be persuaded, defeated, constrained or answered, but someone already sentenced by the future. This is emotionally satisfying, but satisfaction is not the same thing as seriousness.

There are, plainly, people whose views do not deserve endless gentle handling. Some beliefs are cruel. Some arguments are bad faith. Some political projects are organised around domination, exclusion or contempt. There is no duty to launder prejudice as mere difference of opinion.

But even then, the question remains: what is the task? If the task is moral denunciation, then denunciation may be justified. If the task is political change, then denunciation may not be enough. People do not stop having votes, money, institutional power, social influence or capacity for obstruction merely because history has been informed that they are in the wrong queue.

Third, the phrase makes people strategically stupid. It confuses losing an argument in the future with losing power in the present. This is a dangerous confusion because many unjust arrangements are perfectly capable of lasting a very long time. History contains quite a lot of things that should have ended earlier. Some of them did not end because people were too frightened to challenge them. Some did not end because too many people benefited from them. Some did not end because their opponents were divided, exhausted, excluded, imprisoned, murdered or ignored. Some did not end because nobody had yet built the machinery needed to end them.

To say that an injustice is doomed is not to make it so. Sometimes it is not doomed. Sometimes it is extremely well funded.

Finally, the phrase can make people morally careless. If you believe you are speaking for the future, you may become less attentive to the present. You may stop asking whether your own side has hidden premises, bad incentives, internal cruelties or convenient evasions. You may start treating tactical disagreement as moral betrayal. You may decide that anyone asking about means, trade-offs, implementation or unintended consequences is merely slowing the march of justice.

That is how moral certainty degenerates into moral vanity.

The serious version

There is, however, a serious version of the appeal to history, and it is worth preserving.

Adam Green, in an article for Episteme, argues that appeals to being on the right side of history can be understood not merely as rhetorical flourish but as a kind of higher-order evidence: a claim about how one’s view may stand in relation to broader patterns of moral learning and social judgement. He does not deny that the phrase can be used rhetorically, but he asks whether there is something more substantive going on when people invoke it.

That is a useful complication. We should not pretend that all references to future judgement are automatically stupid. Sometimes people are asking a real question: what will this look like when the panic has passed? What will this policy look like when the people harmed by it are finally heard? What will this compromise look like when its evasions are no longer convenient? How will later generations understand the excuses we currently find so persuasive?

Those are good questions. In fact, they are morally necessary questions. They ask us to step outside the suffocating immediacy of our own moment. They remind us that the present has no monopoly on judgement. They help us see that what feels moderate now may later look cowardly, and what feels extreme now may later look like basic decency arriving late.

The problem is not asking how the future might judge us. The problem is pretending to know.

There is a difference between using imagined future judgement as a discipline and using it as a weapon. As a discipline, it asks us to be less complacent. As a weapon, it allows us to become more so. It can make us more reflective, or it can make us insufferable. The difference lies in whether the thought of history increases our sense of responsibility or decreases it.

A good appeal to history says: I may be trapped inside the assumptions of my age, and I should test them. A bad appeal to history says: my opponents are trapped inside the assumptions of their age, whereas I have somehow escaped into permanent enlightenment.

The first is humility. The second is cosplay as posterity.

History will not do your canvassing

The political danger is clearest when the rhetoric of inevitability meets the ordinary mechanics of power.

History does not knock doors. It does not draft legislation. It does not build unions, parties, campaigns, charities, legal strategies, newspapers, schools, churches, tenants’ groups, mutual aid networks or professional associations. It does not persuade nervous voters, reassure conflicted allies, split opponents, count numbers, secure amendments, survive defeats or return the next morning to try again.

People do that. Institutions do that. Movements do that. And they do it imperfectly.

This is one reason the right side of history is such a seductive phrase for people who enjoy politics at the level of identity but not always at the level of work. It allows the performance of seriousness without the discipline of strategy. It says: we are the future. But the future, as campaign literature, is often overprinted and under-delivered.

The hard truth is that good causes lose. They lose all the time. They lose because they are crushed. They lose because they are divided. They lose because they are early. They lose because they are badly led. They lose because their opponents understand power better. They lose because the public is frightened, tired, misled or unconvinced. They lose because the institutional terrain is hostile. They lose because events intervene. They lose because history is not a referee.

This does not mean politics should become cynical. Quite the opposite. It means politics should become less mystical. If something matters, it deserves better than inevitability. It deserves the seriousness of means.

That means persuasion remains morally important. Not because every opponent is reasonable. Not because all disagreement is innocent. Not because the public must be flattered at all times. Persuasion matters because politics is the art of changing conditions among people who have not yet agreed with you. To abandon persuasion is not a sign of moral courage. It is often a confession that one has mistaken agreement for justice.

There will always be people who cannot be persuaded. There will always be people whose objections are dishonest or whose interests are too deeply tied to the injustice being challenged. But most political change depends on what happens around them: who is mobilised, who is reassured, who is split away, who is made less afraid, who is given language for something they already half-believe, who is shown that a different arrangement is possible without the world ending.

That is slow work. It is much less glamorous than being congratulated by the future. Unfortunately, it has the advantage of being real.

Against prophecy

The answer, then, is not to abandon moral confidence. That would leave politics to the people most comfortable with power as it already exists. The answer is to detach moral confidence from prophecy.

Say that something is right. Say that something is cruel. Say that something must change. Say that the excuses are inadequate, the settlement is unjust, the compromise has curdled, the respectable consensus is hiding something ugly. But do not pretend that history has already done the arguing for you.

The future may judge some of our present arrangements harshly. It may vindicate causes that now look marginal, excessive, naive or inconvenient. It may also expose some of our certainties as shallow, some of our fashions as evasions, some of our moral performances as vanity. That is the trouble with invoking posterity. It does not only judge the people we dislike.

To think historically is not to imagine a future that applauds us. It is to remember that people in the past also thought they were obvious, decent, modern and justified. Some of them were. Many were not. Most were tangled in ways that become clearer only when time has stripped away their excuses.

That should make us morally serious, not paralysed. It should make us willing to judge, but wary of enjoying judgement too much. It should make us suspicious of the rhetorical shortcut that turns our preferred future into destiny.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be vindicated by history. Most of us would prefer not to be remembered, even hypothetically, as the person standing athwart justice asking whether the minutes of the last meeting had been properly approved. But the desire to be vindicated is not evidence that one is right. Nor is confidence in the future a substitute for responsibility in the present.

If a cause is just, it deserves argument. It deserves organisation. It deserves patience, courage, discipline, humility and strategy. It deserves people willing to persuade those who are not yet persuaded, and to defeat those who cannot be persuaded, without pretending that either task has already been completed by time.

History may one day take a side. But it will not spare us the work of taking one now.

Every few years, foreign policy discovers that it’s 1938. Again.

This is a surprisingly adaptable discovery: it can happen in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, or any television studio where two people have been booked to disagree about a conflict that neither of them can easily explain. Sooner or later, someone says Munich. If things are going badly for a great power, maybe they say Suez instead. If the proposed military action looks open-ended, someone could say Vietnam. If it involves the humiliating limits of modern force, Afghanistan. If the speaker is feeling historically adventurous, they may reach for Gallipoli, the Crimean War, or the Peloponnesian War, at which point one begins to suspect they’ve been waiting a respectable span of time to use it.

The problem isn’t that these analogies are always wrong, per se. That would be much too easy. History does not repeat itself, but neither does it sit politely in the archive, refusing all invitations to the present. Politicians and commentators reach for the past because the present is often hard to see while one is standing in it. Analogy is one of the ways human beings think under pressure. It compresses uncertainty into shape, gives unfamiliar events a recognisable form, and lets us ask whether we’ve seen something like this before.

But the phrase something like this is doing a great deal of work.

The trouble with the easy analogy is not that it compares. It is that it often decides before it compares. It does not ask: what, exactly, is similar here? It asks: which famous historical costume can we dress this argument up in?

Munich is the costume of resolve. Suez is the costume of anti-hubris. The first lets the speaker become the person who saw appeasement for what it was. The second lets the speaker become the person who recognised imperial delusion before the empire did. Both can illuminate. Both can also flatter. And flattery, in foreign policy argument, is rarely harmless.

The uses of 1938

Munich survives because it tells a clean story about moral failure.

In September 1938, Britain and France accepted Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, the heavily fortified border region of Czechoslovakia, in an agreement reached with Germany and Italy but without Czechoslovakia itself as an equal participant. Hitler received territory and strategic advantage; Chamberlain returned claiming peace; within months, Germany had occupied the rest of the Czech lands. The later moral meaning of the episode seems brutally clear: give an expansionist aggressor what he wants, and he will not be satisfied. He will be encouraged.

That is why Munich is so powerful. It turns the fog of diplomacy into a moral tableau. The aggressor is insatiable. The victim is abandoned. The statesman of peace is exposed as the midwife of catastrophe. The person warning against compromise is vindicated by history before the argument has even begun.

It is not difficult to see why this appeals. There really are aggressors whose ambitions expand when met with weakness. There really are moments when compromise does not buy peace, but merely rearranges the timetable of war. The Munich analogy has force because there are situations in which refusing to confront an aggressor early makes the eventual confrontation more terrible.

Russia’s war against Ukraine is the obvious modern case where the analogy has real bite. Ukraine has repeatedly warned for over a decade against any settlement that rewards aggression or trades its sovereignty for temporary quiet; in December 2025, its foreign minister said Ukraine wanted real peace, not appeasement with Russia. The analogy is not empty. A sovereign state has been invaded. Territory is at stake. External powers debate the cost of continued support just as they debated the cost of sanctions way back during the initial invasion of Crimea in 2014. A peace that leaves the aggressor stronger may not be peace at all, but an interval.

And yet even here, perhaps especially here, Munich is not enough.

Ukraine is not Czechoslovakia in 1938. It has fought for years. Its government has agency of a kind that Edvard Beneš could only have dreamed of. Its armed forces are not being treated simply as a diplomatic inconvenience by others around a table. And yet Russia is a nuclear-armed state; Nazi Germany in 1938 was not. Almost perversely, the Russo-Ukrainian War could be more dangerous than the build-up to the outbreak of WWII. The structure of alliance politics, the economics of sanctions, the role of drones, the informational battlefield, the problem of escalation, and the status of NATO all make the present conflict different in ways that matter enormously. Using the Munich analogy requires treating the shared features as decisive while treating the differences as secondary.

Munich can sharpen the moral stakes of Ukraine. It can remind us that aggressive war cannot be made acceptable by relabelling conquest as compromise. But if it becomes the whole argument, it starts to crowd out the questions that policy actually needs to answer. What guarantees would make a settlement durable? What level of support is sustainable? What risks of escalation are tolerable? What capacities does Europe need if America becomes unreliable? What outcome is being sought beyond the avoidance of shame?

A historical analogy is useful when it helps us ask better questions. It becomes dangerous when it congratulates us for already knowing the answers.

The Taiwan temptation

The Munich analogy also spins its helicopter-blades over Taiwan.

Here again, the attraction is obvious. China claims Taiwan as its own territory; Taiwan rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claim and says only its people can decide their future. Beijing has increased military pressure around Taiwan in recent years, and Reuters reported again in June 2026 on a standoff between Taiwanese and Chinese coast guards near the Pratas Islands. There is a democratic polity under pressure from an authoritarian great power. There is an anxious question about whether distant allies will act. There is a fear that ambiguity, caution, or commercial self-interest could be misread as weakness.

It is therefore unsurprising that commentators draw lessons from Munich for the Taiwan Strait. Some explicitly argue that Munich offers warnings about deterrence, alliance credibility, and the risks of allowing coercive territorial revisionism to succeed.

Again, not nonsense. But also not enough.

Taiwan is not the Sudetenland. China is not Nazi Germany. The United States is not Britain in 1938. Taiwan’s importance is not only moral or ideological; it is also bound up with global semiconductor supply chains, maritime security, Japanese security, American credibility, and the possibility of catastrophic escalation between nuclear powers. The logic of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is not the same as the logic of appeasement in Central Europe. One can think Beijing is dangerous without needing to pretend Xi Jinping is Hitler. In fact, insisting on that comparison may make it harder to understand what China actually wants, how it calculates risk, and which forms of deterrence might work.

Munich is good at saying: do not abandon a threatened democracy because doing so feels convenient.

It is much less good at saying: how should an allied power combine deterrence, ambiguity, trade, technology controls, diplomacy, domestic resilience, and military readiness in a contested maritime theatre involving nuclear-armed states?

That second question is less satisfying. Unfortunately, it is also the one that matters.

Suez and the pleasure of spotting decline

If Munich is the analogy of moral cowardice, Suez is the analogy of imperial delusion.

In 1956, Britain and France, in collaboration with Israel, invaded Egypt after Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. Militarily, the operation was a success. Politically, it was a disaster. The United States opposed the intervention; the Soviet Union applied pressure; Britain and France were forced into a humiliating withdrawal. Suez became the shorthand for a country discovering, in public, that its memory of power had outlived the thing itself.

Suez is therefore useful whenever a state mistakes possession of weapons for possession of strategy. It is useful whenever a government thinks a dramatic act will restore authority, only to reveal weakness. It is useful whenever leaders confuse nostalgia with capacity. For Britain, the analogy remains especially painful because it says something we half-know and half-resent: that the performance of world power can become the evidence of its absence.

But Suez, too, flatters the speaker. To invoke it is to stand above the action, coolly noting that the empire has no clothes. This is one reason the phrase Suez moment appears so regularly in commentary about American power. If Munich lets one pose as Churchill, Suez lets one pose as the weary realist in the back of the room, watching the map of the world shrink.

The current US-Iran conflict makes the Suez analogy almost irresistible. There are maritime chokepoints, energy markets, coercive diplomacy, alliance entanglements, regional escalation, and a question about whether military force is producing strategy or merely motion. Reuters has reported in recent days on US action against Iranian-linked shipping, tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, and negotiations intended to extend or stabilise a ceasefire. It is hardly surprising that commentators have asked whether Iran is America’s Suez, or whether some other historical analogy (such as Gallipoli) better captures the mixture of overreach, confusion, and strategic frustration.

There is something to this. Suez was, among other things, a crisis of chokepoints, prestige, misjudgement, and alliance management. A great power discovered that a military move could expose political dependence rather than conceal it. If the United States finds that force in the Gulf cannot deliver political settlement, cannot restore maritime confidence, cannot discipline regional allies, and cannot impose a durable outcome on Iran, then the Suez comparison becomes more than journalistic decoration.

But America is not Britain in 1956. That is not a compliment; it is a distinction. The United States is vastly more powerful than Britain was at Suez, but it is also more deeply entangled in the global system it claims to police. Britain’s humiliation in 1956 lay partly in discovering that it could not defy American financial and diplomatic pressure. The United States is unlikely to experience that precise form of subordination. Its vulnerability lies elsewhere: in overextension, domestic polarisation, alliance mistrust, energy shocks, congressional resistance, and the possibility that coercion produces neither capitulation nor credibility.

A lazy Suez analogy says: America is finished, and here is the proof.

A better Suez analogy asks: what kind of power is being revealed by this failure, and what kind of power was only being performed?

Greenland and the return of the map

Then there is Greenland.

At first glance, Greenland belongs less obviously to Munich or Suez. No one sensible thinks Denmark is Czechoslovakia in 1938. Greenland is not the Suez Canal. Yet the recent American pressure over Greenland belongs in this essay because it reveals the same bad historical habit: treating geography as if it were a board-game asset, then looking around for a grand analogy afterwards.

Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that the United States needs Greenland for security reasons, and in March 2025 said he thought US annexation would happen; Denmark has maintained that Greenland is not for sale. By June 2026, Marco Rubio was describing ongoing discussions with Denmark and Greenland over strategic use and strengthened US military presence, framing the issue in terms of collective defence and Arctic security.

The temptation here is not simply to shout imperialism and be done with it, though the word is not exactly hiding in a cupboard. The more interesting point is that Greenland exposes a style of strategic thinking that old analogies struggle to capture. Is this Suez, because a major power is acting as if strategic geography entitles it to override political consent? Is it a Monroe Doctrine revival, because security is being defined through hemispheric control? Is it an Alaska Purchase fantasy, as if land acquisition were still the natural grammar of statecraft? Is it just great-power competition in the Arctic, dressed up in the language of real estate?

The answer may be: partly, but not quite.

That is precisely why the example is useful. Easy analogy wants every case to become an old story. Greenland resists that. It involves climate change, Arctic shipping, rare earths, missile defence, NATO politics, Danish sovereignty, Greenlandic self-government, Chinese and Russian activity, and the strange return of territorial acquisition as a serious-sounding topic in American politics. The point is not that no analogy helps. The point is that several half-help, and none should be allowed to take command.

The curse of casting

The deepest problem with Munich and Suez is not historical inaccuracy. It is moral casting.

Once the analogy is chosen, the roles follow. Someone is Hitler, Chamberlain, Churchill. Someone is Eden, de Gaulle, Nasser, Eisenhower. The present is no longer a problem to be analysed; it is a play to be cast.

This is comforting because it reduces uncertainty. It tells us who deserves contempt and who deserves vindication. It also lets us inherit the moral authority of hindsight without paying the cost of living before the outcome is known.

But foreign policy is made before the archive has sorted everyone into their proper folders. The people in 1938 did not know they were in the preface to 1939. The people in 1956 did not know they were acting out the definitive parable of post-war British decline. They had fears, assumptions, intelligence, prejudices, domestic pressures, imperial memories, economic constraints, bad incentives, worse advice, and partial knowledge. That does not absolve them. It makes them historical actors rather than cardboard warnings.

This matters because easy analogy often smuggles in policy under the cover of memory. Munich usually says: do more, escalate sooner, refuse compromise, treat negotiation as weakness. Suez usually says: do less, beware theatre, distrust prestige, recognise limits. Vietnam says: avoid the quagmire. Afghanistan says: do not try to remake societies at gunpoint. Iraq says: intelligence can be politicised, victory can be declared long before the consequences arrive.

Each of these lessons can be true. Each can also be disastrously misapplied.

The question is never simply: which historical episode does this resemble?

The better questions are more awkward. What feature of the past is actually being compared? What would have to be true for the analogy to hold? What is different enough to break it? What competing analogy would produce a different conclusion? Is the comparison being used to illuminate the present, or to dignify a position the speaker already held?

That last question is usually the most revealing one.

Remembering badly

There is a strange arrogance in the easy analogy. It seems humble because it looks backward. It claims to learn from history. But often it does the opposite. It raids history for moral props, then congratulates itself on seriousness.

Munich and Suez deserve better than that. Munich was not simply a fable about weakness. It was a crisis shaped by military preparedness, trauma from the First World War, imperial assumptions, public opinion, strategic misjudgement, and the abandonment of a smaller state by powers that had persuaded themselves they were buying peace. Suez was not simply a fable about decline. It was a crisis of oil, finance, deception, alliance politics, decolonisation, personal animus, and the gap between imperial memory and actual leverage.

The simplified versions endure because they are useful. Munich gives us courage without complexity. Suez gives us realism without detail. Both allow commentators to sound historically literate while moving very quickly past history.

This does not mean we should stop using analogy. That would be impossible, and probably undesirable. The past is one of the few resources we have for thinking about situations not yet finished. But we should use it more slowly. We should distrust analogies that arrive bearing only one lesson. We should be especially suspicious of analogies that make us feel brave, wise, or vindicated before we have done any real work.

The curse of the easy analogy is not that it remembers the past.

It is that it remembers the past just well enough to stop thinking.

Further Reading

For the general theory of analogy in foreign policy, Yuen Foong Khong’s Analogies at War is my obvious scholarly anchor; it is specifically about Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and Vietnam in US decision-making. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvzxx9b5)

There may never have been an actual god called Moloch.

That claim isn’t settled, I hasten to add. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly condemns the giving of children to Moloch, which generations of readers have understood as the name of a foreign deity who received human sacrifices. John Milton later placed Moloch among the fallen angels of Paradise Lost; Fritz Lang turned the industrial machine of Metropolis into his furnace; Allen Ginsberg found him in the factories, armies, money and loveless machinery of modern America. By the time Scott Alexander published his seminal Meditations on Moloch in 2014, Moloch had become the embodiment of every system that consumes what human beings value while promising them power in return. He even made pop-culture appearances, in Buffy, Stargate, and Supernatural, as a demon or deity of varying kinds.

Yet there’s another interpretation. Beginning particularly with the work of Otto Eissfeldt in 1935, scholars have argued that the Semitic term MLK may originally have referred not to the recipient of a sacrifice, but more properly to the kind of sacrifice performed. Punic inscriptions describe MLK offerings made to named gods such as Baal Hammon and Tanit, and on this reading, the biblical injunction may not have meant that a child was given to a specific god called Moloch, but that the child was given as a moloch: a particular form of offering. Other scholars continue to defend the existence of a deity, perhaps an underworld god or a title applied to several gods. The evidence remains disputed.

I’m highlighting this debate not because it’s an antiquarian curiosity (though that is also true). Far from it: it suggests a different way of understanding Alexander’s Moloch, and perhaps a different way of resisting him.

What if Moloch wasn’t the god above the altar? What if, rather than the gigantic, bronze, bull-headed idol, Moloch was the name of what people did - and do - upon it?

The god who offers power

Alexander begins his now famous essay with a problem which is both simple and profound. Human beings repeatedly produce social arrangements that almost nobody would choose, yet which nobody within the arrangement can safely abandon. Competing businesses degrade working conditions because any firm that pays substantially more may be undercut. States acquire weapons, armies, and the organised capacity for ever-greater violence because unilateral disarmament would leave them vulnerable. Publishers produce sensational material because sober restraint loses attention to less scrupulous competitors. Nobody needs to desire the final outcome - individually defensible actions can still converge upon collective disaster.

Alexander calls these arrangements multipolar traps. From outside the system, cooperation may be obviously preferable, but from within it, the first person to cooperate may simply be exploited. The problem isn’t necessarily ignorance, malice or greed. It’s that restraint carries a cost, while defection is rewarded quickly enough that the more ethical actor may disappear before their example can spread.

This is the great strength of Meditations on Moloch. Political argument frequently assumes that bad conditions must have been produced by bad people. Alexander explains why decent people, following intelligible incentives, may, can, and often do reproduce conditions which they themselves detest. It isn’t enough to tell an employer to be kinder when kindness threatens bankruptcy; nor is it enough to tell a state to trust its rivals when misplaced trust may be fatal. Moral exhortation can’t substitute for institutions which make moral conduct survivable.

In this paradigm, Moloch names the distance between the world that nearly everyone would prefer and the world that competitive pressures allow them to build and live in. And so we’re all trapped in the world where we’re giving ourselves painful electric shocks all the time rather than the entirely-within-our-grasp mini-utopia in which every country spends a lot more on infrastructure and a lot less on defence.

The metaphor is powerful because the ancient bargain is powerfully suited to the mechanism. Alexander’s Moloch always offers the same exchange: surrender what you love, and receive strength enough to defeat those of your opponents who haven’t (yet) made the sacrifice. Once one participant accepts, everyone else is implicitly confronted with the same bargain. Eventually all have surrendered the valuable thing, no-one retains the advantage against their competitors, and the cycle begins again, but from a poorer starting point. What’s the next thing they love, to toss into the flames, to buy just a little bit more strength?

Yet there’s a danger in the metaphor’s very power. The god-image which clarifies the system can also conceal the people who sustain it.

From practice to deity

Alexander knows that Moloch isn’t literally a supernatural being. His examples concern incentives, selection pressures, evolutionary processes and failures of coordination. Nor does he claim that all coordination is impossible; governments, technologies and social institutions can sometimes bind destructive competition, although those coordinating institutions may develop traps of their own.

Nevertheless, the grammar of the essay repeatedly carries him beyond this analytical caution. Moloch ceases to be a name for things people do under particular conditions and becomes the answer to the question of who is doing this to us. Moloch designs traps. Moloch offers bargains. Moloch grinds down human values. Moloch rules the universe.

By the end, Alexander’s analysis has developed into something close to a secular theology. Against Moloch and the uncaring forces of competitive optimisation stands Elua, a tentative Jacqueline Carey-inspired god of love, beauty, art, and civilisation. Between them lies the garden: a protected space within which human beings can cultivate their own values instead of obeying the law of the jungle. Yet because any local garden remains vulnerable to less restrained competitors beyond its walls, Alexander concludes that human values ultimately require a Gardener powerful enough to govern the whole universe. A sufficiently advanced intelligence might finally defeat Moloch by coordinating everything.

It’s an extraordinary conclusion. A compelling description of collective-action problems gradually becomes an eschatology in which fallen humanity must help to lift a new god to heaven, creating the benevolent intelligence that will redeem creation from its inhuman ruler.

The historical ambiguity surrounding Moloch allows us to reverse that movement. What changes when we turn the god back into a sacrifice?

Who is on the altar?

Once Moloch is understood once again as a practice rather than an agent, different questions become foregrounded.

• Who is making the offering?

• What are they sacrificing?

• What advantage do they expect to obtain, and indeed who receives that advantage?

• Most importantly, is the person deciding that the sacrifice is necessary also the person placed upon the altar?

These questions expose a weakness in the general category of the multipolar trap. Some destructive systems are genuinely symmetrical, like our contrived electric-shock-country - every participant would prefer an enforceable agreement, but none can risk acting alone.

But many many other systems contain actors who clearly benefit from the apparent failure… and therefore have little desire to coordinate their way out of it.

Consider an organisation which responds to financial pressure by cutting the pay and increasing the workload of its least powerful employees - much like Alexander’s fifth example. It may be true that senior managers face real competitive constraints and are thus limited in the decisions they can make. They may even feel bad about the decision. But it doesn’t follow that the burden has been allocated impersonally. The organisation could reduce executive remuneration to support its workers, accept lower profits as the cost of doing the right thing (and make that virtue a part of their marketing strategy, as many businesses do), change its business model, seek collective regulation or withdraw from the market. Perhaps none of these alternatives are easy; perhaps some are genuinely unavailable in the specific context. Nevertheless, someone still interprets the constraint and decides whose interests are negotiable; someone chooses the child to place upon the altar, rather than laying themselves down in Moloch’s arms.

In other words, Moloch doesn’t select the victim. People do.

The same is true of institutions which organise themselves around crude performance measures. A university may well discover that publications, grants and student evaluations are easier to count than thoughtfulness, intellectual courage, pastoral care or genuine educational transformation. Nobody needs to believe in their heart of hearts that the metric captures everything valuable. Yet recruitment, promotion and funding decisions begin to reward whatever the metric recognises. Academics adapt rationally; departments encourage them to adapt; the measure becomes increasingly important because everybody behaves as though it is important.

This is recognisably Molochian, in that individual refusal may damage a career without changing the institution. Yet the metric didn’t descend from the heavens. It was selected, implemented, retained, and reinforced over time. The system exerts emergent pressure, but that pressure travels through a socio-material web of meetings, zoom calls, policy documents, regulations, budgets and decisions, decisions, decisions. The rite of Moloch does not perform itself; it has priests, liturgies and an altar.

To describe the outcome only as a coordination failure risks making everyone equally helpless. They clearly aren’t. Some people design the measure; others are measured by it. Some can absorb the cost of dissent; others can’t. Some receive the benefits of the system; others become the raw material it consumes.

The language of sacrifice restores this distributive dimension. It insists that every social order ultimately chooses what it will treat as expendable.

A climate of sacrifice

Climate change may be the clearest example of why it matters whether we imagine Moloch as a god or as a ritual of sacrifice.

In one sense, it fits Alexander’s account almost perfectly. No state can stabilise the climate alone. A government which imposes costly restrictions while others continue emitting may incur immediate economic and political penalties while securing only a fraction of the resulting benefit. Businesses which voluntarily absorb environmental costs may be undercut by competitors willing to transfer those costs elsewhere. Individuals can reduce their own emissions, but the atmosphere won’t distinguish their restraint from another person’s excess. The benefits of defection are often concentrated and immediate, whereas the costs are so widely dispersed across borders and generations that they may even seem completely insignificant.

This is a multipolar trap. And yet… it isn’t just a multipolar trap, is it?

To describe climate change exclusively in those terms risks imagining humanity as a collection of roughly equivalent prisoners, each contributing to and suffering from the same unfortunate equilibrium. In reality, responsibility, power and vulnerability are distributed with extraordinary inequality. Developed economies in North America and Europe produced most of our historical industrial emissions. Within the contemporary world, the wealthiest households and largest businesses account for a vastly disproportionate share of consumption emissions. Meanwhile, many of the communities most exposed to rising seas, extreme heat, food insecurity and destructive weather events have contributed comparatively little to the overall accumulation of greenhouse gases, and possess comparatively few means of resisting or mitigating those effects.

Moloch may grind down human values, but he doesn’t grind everyone down equally.

Consider the position of a low-lying Pacific island state, such as Kiribati. Its people may reduce their already modest emissions, produce ambitious climate plans and advocate powerfully for stronger international agreements. But this may all prove utterly, utterly futile in the face of global inertia, because none of this virtuous effort can prevent seas warmed by emissions produced elsewhere from rising around them. The sacrifice, demanded by others, may encompass homes, freshwater supplies, livelihoods, burial grounds, political sovereignty and the ultimate possibility of humans remaining upon a landmass known as Kiribati at all. What appears from a distant negotiating chamber as an acceptable fraction of a degree can become, at the shoreline, a question of whether a community remains inhabitable.

The people making this sacrifice aren’t those receiving the bargain’s rewards. The historical benefits of fossil-fuelled development accrued disproportionately to richer industrial societies; the profits of continued extraction flow through particular companies, investors and states; the convenience of delay is enjoyed principally by governments and populations that possess the resources to protect themselves from at least the worst of its consequences. The altar is global, but the victims have addresses.

In the Moloch-as-deity model, the offering is something the supplicant loves - a child, usually. But do any of the most polluting nations, companies, or households love Kiribati? I doubt most could reliably point to it on a map.

Even within wealthy countries, the distribution of sacrifice remains political. Climate policy is often narrated as a demand that ordinary people consume or behave differently: drive less, fly less, replace the boiler, alter the diet, pick up your litter, remember the correct bin. Some of these changes are necessary, particularly among affluent people whose consumption produces far more emissions than the global norm. Yet exhortation to individuals can’t substitute for infrastructure. A person can’t reliably abandon the car where public transport is absent; a tenant can’t insulate a property their landlord won’t improve; a family can’t purchase technologies they can’t afford.

The language of personal responsibility becomes Molochian when it treats constrained choices as moral failures, while leaving the social and cultural institutions producing those constraints untouched.

That doesn’t mean transferring every responsibility from individuals to corporations, as though production and consumption occupied separate worlds. Businesses produce goods which people use; voters resist policies whose costs they fear; prosperous consumers possess choices unavailable to poorer households. The point is that neither responsibility nor power is evenly shared. Energy companies, property owners, vehicle manufacturers, investors and governments make decisions which structure the choices subsequently offered to millions upon millions of individuals. Some actors choose from the menu presented to them; others decide what may appear upon it. We should not pretend the two are equal.

Climate policy can itself reproduce the sacrificial logic it seeks to overcome. A transition funded through regressive household charges, insecure employment or the abandonment of industrial communities may tell those with the least power that their livelihoods are the price of decarbonisation. Political leaders then confront a predictable backlash and declare ambitious policy impossible. Once again, the supposed demand of an impersonal system conceals a prior distributive choice. The transition had to be paid for; it didn’t have to be paid for in that way.

The alternative isn’t to pretend that climate action requires no costs. Every serious response entails investment, disruption and the closure or transformation of carbon-intensive activities. The relevant question is who possesses the resources to absorb those costs, who has already benefited from the activities being curtailed, and who gets to decide what a just distribution would look like.

This is where understanding Moloch as a sacrifice becomes more useful than treating him as a god. The divine Moloch tells us that competition demands continued emissions and that only a universal coordinator could finally compel everyone to stop - another god to fight a great war in heaven. The sacrificial Moloch directs our attention towards the institutions through which particular people translate competitive pressures into political choices. It asks who licenses extraction, subsidises infrastructure, sets energy prices, writes trade rules, finances adaptation and determines whether communities facing irreversible loss will receive meaningful assistance or empty sympathy.

Climate change is sustained by collective-action problems, but it’s also sustained by power. Its victims aren’t selected by an invisible deity. They’re selected through decisions about which risks are tolerable, which interests are protected and which places may be surrendered.

The theology of helplessness

Personification is useful because systems really can acquire a quasi-independent force. A market, bureaucracy or convention can constrain every participant without being controlled by any one of them. The fact that an institution is socially constructed doesn’t make it imaginary, voluntary or easy to escape. Borders are constructed; so are currencies, property rights and states themselves. They all nevertheless remain capable of shaping lives with brutal material force.

It would therefore be facile to say that, because human beings created Moloch, human beings can simply choose to stop believing in him. Alexander’s opening problem remains. Nobody can dismantle a collective practice through private virtue alone when everyone else retains an incentive to continue it.

The more defensible conclusion is that Moloch isn’t unreal because people made him. He’s alterable because human practices sustain him.

This is where Alexander’s theological framing becomes, in my humble view, politically disabling. If Moloch represents the universal logic of competition, then ordinary reforms can appear as temporary walls around small gardens, forever threatened by the wild primordial jungle outside. The only final answer is an intelligence capable of coordination from a god’s-eye view.

Yet there may be no final answer, and the desire for one may itself be dangerous. A universal Gardener would need both the capacity to suppress defection and the authority to decide which human values should be cultivated. The abolition of multipolar competition could therefore require a concentration of power before which every existing state would appear embarrassingly modest. Alexander acknowledges the danger of tyranny, but the structure of his argument makes that sort of supreme coordination increasingly difficult to avoid.

Politics offers a less complete but more humane answer. Trade unions prevent employers from competing solely through the degradation of labour. Environmental regulations prevent firms from gaining advantage by solely transferring costs to the public. Arms-control agreements reduce the penalty attached to mutual restraint. Welfare states make refusal or inability less personally ruinous. Professional norms protect goods which markets and metrics struggle to value. Democratic organisation allows those designated for sacrifice to contest the terms upon which decisions are made.

None of these institutions destroys Moloch everywhere and for all time. Each closes one altar, for a while, by changing the bargain offered to those gathered around it.

They can fail. They can be captured, weakened or turned into new sources of domination. Nevertheless, their existence demonstrates that competitive pressures aren’t natural laws operating independently of politics. They’re channelled through rules, ownership structures, legal rights, cultural expectations and distributions of power. Change those arrangements, and the supposed demands of the god change with them.

Dismantling the altar

Alexander is right that nobody needs to want a catastrophe for everyone to help produce one. He’s right that moral appeals will usually fail when the sacrifice continues to purchase comparative power. He’s right, above all, that people require the security to act well; virtue which guarantees defeat won’t organise a humane society.

Yet the historical Moloch presents another possibility. Perhaps there was no single god making these demands. Perhaps there were people performing a recognised sacrifice to different gods, for different purposes, because their society had taught them that the offering was necessary.

The modern parallel isn’t that our destructive systems are illusions. It’s that we mistake practices for powers, decisions for necessities and inherited institutions for permanent features of reality. We personify the system, then absolve the people who administer it. We speak as though Moloch has chosen the sacrifice, when the knife remains in human hands.

The question, then, isn’t how humanity can kill an implacable god. Nor is it whether each of us can preserve our innocence by refusing to participate. Individual purity won’t dismantle a collective system.

The question is why we keep rebuilding the altar in the first place; who is permitted to call the sacrifice necessary; whose children are placed upon it; and what kind of reformation might allow us to stop.

Moloch may never have been a god, even if the sacrifices were real all the same. That should not make us less afraid of Moloch. But it might make us a little less fatalistic.

ADDENDUM: The machine’s average

There’s one final altar, rather closer to the desk upon which I’m writing this.

Generative AI presents an unusually clean version of Moloch’s bargain. A general-purpose language model has absorbed such an enormous portion of digitised textual culture that, from the perspective of an ordinary user, it can feel close enough to a compression of everything we’ve ever written. Ask it for an argument, a summary, an email, a press release, or the opening of an essay, and it produces something which is usually coherent, competent and remarkably quick.

Its average is high. That needs saying plainly, because much criticism of AI depends upon pretending that the machine produces nothing but malformed multi-digited hands, sentences full of extended em-dashes, and trite phrases like “in today’s rapidly changing world.” The machine’s average would beat most of us on most days. It doesn’t get tired, lose concentration, forget the structure halfway through, or decide that doom-scrolling through Bluesky is a necessary preliminary stage in revising paragraph four.

Full disclosure: I use AI fairly regularly. I use it to make initial stress-tests of arguments, reorganise my sometimes chaotic notes, transcribe my spoken-out-loud thoughts, locate gaps in my underlying research literature, and turn a loose sequence of thoughts into something resembling a first draft. The result is generally quicker and cleaner than the unaided version would have been, which is presumably why I continue paying for it.

The strategic difficulty is that this barely gives me an advantage. The machine is brilliant for everybody, all the time, provided they can secure access to it and learn at least a basic level of competency in writing decent prompts. You can see how this specific example becomes a general problem:

• A writer adopts AI and becomes faster; their competitors adopt it and become faster too.

• An office uses it to produce more polished correspondence; every comparable office follows, and suddenly the new baseline standard is so high that unaided humans would have to put in an inordinate amount of effort to match it.

• A student (if they’re good at prompting, which isn’t always the case) uses it to raise the baseline quality of an assignment; the expected baseline rises accordingly.

In all cases, the initial gain becomes the minimum standard required to remain competitive.

Doshi and Hauser captured part of this dynamic in a 2024 experiment on creative writing. Participants wrote short stories either without assistance or with access to one or several ideas produced by a generative model. The AI-assisted stories were judged more creative, better written and more enjoyable, particularly when their authors had scored lower on an earlier measure of creativity. Individually, the writers improved.

Collectively, however, their stories became more alike - likely because they were all drawing on the same corpus of training data.

This is almost too perfect an example of Moloch. Each individual has a rational incentive to use the machine because the machine makes their individual work better. Yet, when everyone draws upon the same underlying system, the collective result narrows around its preferred structures, associations and rhythms. We’re each pulled upwards, but towards approximately the same place. And as a consequence, everyone’s work is relatively no better or worse or even that much different than anyone else’s was, except we’re all a bit poorer for it.

The danger isn’t exactly consensus. A language model can generate eccentricity on command, imitate conflicting styles, and propose stranger ideas than many users would reach unaided. The danger is that in using AI, we all drift towards a statistical central tendency disguised as frictionless competence. Left to its defaults, the machine has an extraordinary capacity to make prose reasonable, balanced, clear, and vaguely inhuman. It knows how an essay of this kind is normally shaped; it doesn’t necessarily know which of its well-formed sentences Tom J. Elston would find irritating enough to delete.

I notice this in my own writing. In terms of the effort-to-output cost-benefit calculation, AI generally makes me more readable for the slight amount of effort it takes, but I think it takes a certain edge off; sometimes it makes me slightly less feisty. It removes repetition, repairs transitions, and replaces clumsy formulations with cleaner ones; occasionally, it also reduces an intentionally-placed hyperbole, over-clarifies an argument, or removes the odd Dutch-angle of a sentence which made the paragraph mine. This is why I copy-edit quite violently after using it. The final revision isn’t quality control per se, in that I’m often actively making the work worse in an objective sense - if anything, it’s an attempt to put the human splinters back into an overly smooth intermediate-stage product.

Nick Cave made a much more severe version of this argument when asked about songwriters using ChatGPT because it was faster and easier. For Cave, creative struggle wasn’t an inefficient route to the finished work; it was part of what gave the work its value. By mechanising imagination, he argued, AI threatened to turn the process of creation into an unnecessary inconvenience standing between the consumer and the commodity.

I don’t quite share Cave’s absolutism, and neither, apparently, does Cave any longer. After seeing Andrew Dominik’s AI-assisted accompanying film for Tupelo, he later described his own view as having softened: the result struck him as original, affecting and evidence that AI might indeed operate as an artistic tool rather than merely as a substitute for art.

That distinction is, I think, more useful than either the uncomplicated enthusiasm of the typical neck-bearded tech bro or the luddite-ish total refusal of the anti-AI puritan.

It tells us that the relevant question isn’t whether AI touched the work or not, but what part of the work has been surrendered to it, under what pressure, and with what consequence. There’s a qualitative difference between asking a model to challenge an argument and asking it to decide what you believe; between using it to remove the hasty accidental clumsiness of a human-in-a-hurry and allowing it to remove every trace of productive awkwardness characteristic of such mere mortals as ourselves; between treating speed as a convenience and accepting speed as the governing measure of intellectual labour.

The sacrifice may be literal capital: an individual’s monthly subscription, an institutional licence, an ever-growing infrastructure bill for a nation or for the planet. It may be professional skill, as tasks once used to develop judgement are delegated before that judgement has formed. It may be the private experience Cave describes as creative struggle, the very effort exerted to create (and I don’t think he’s wrong, by the way, plenty of things are made valuable by the time and effort required to do them; if a string quartet bashed out a 27-minute piece in nine minutes, would you say their productivity had trebled?) Or it may be collective distinctiveness: thousands of individual pieces becoming better composed, more immediately useful and, fraction by fraction, less like the person who set out to write them.

None of this is inevitable. Current research suggests that different prompts, deliberately varied AI personas, and incentives which reward originality can preserve much more diversity. People who use the model selectively, rather than treating its first suggestion as an answer, needn’t be pulled towards precisely the same centre.

Once again, Moloch isn’t the machine. Moloch is the bargain made around it.

The bargain says that we must use the tool because everyone else will; that we must become faster because speed has become more available; that we must surrender whatever slows production because our competitors may surrender it first. Eventually everyone has gained the same brilliance, paid the same entrance fee… and abandoned some small portion of whatever they once valued about doing the work themselves.

There is an old anecdote from Neil Gaiman’s blog (from 2009, I hasten to add, well before the allegations made against him came to light) that has lodged itself somewhere in the moral compost heap of my brain.

Gaiman remembers hearing a comics editor complain about an artist who had taken a few weeks off to paint his house. The editor’s objection was not that the house looked bad, or that the artist had climbed a ladder in a high wind while wearing novelty slippers, or that he had accidentally chosen a shade called Tuscan Persimmon and condemned the neighbours to live beside it. The objection was financial. For the money the artist could have earned during those weeks, he could have hired somebody else to paint the house and still come out ahead.

Gaiman’s unspoken reply was wonderfully simple: “But what if he wanted to paint his house?”

This is one of those lines that feels almost too small to contain the thing it contains. It is not a grand manifesto. It does not come with a twelve-point programme, a subscription model, or a downloadable worksheet called Reclaiming Your Paint-Based Agency. It is merely the thought that a person might do something because he wanted to do it.

How quaint. How inefficient. How magnificently suspicious.

The point, of course, is not that everyone should paint their own house. I am not proposing a moral hierarchy in which the righteous scrape skirting boards while the damned outsource the glossing. If you hate painting, are bad at painting, cannot safely paint, or simply have better things to do, then by all means pay someone who knows which end of the brush to hold. There is no dignity in making yourself miserable for the sake of pretending that the middle classes have been corrupted by tradespeople.

The point is smaller and larger than that. Smaller, because it is just about a man painting his house. Larger, because it exposes one of the stranger habits of modern life: the assumption that every choice must be defended as an efficiency calculation.

Under this logic, the question is never simply, did you enjoy it? The question is, did it make sense? Did it maximise your hourly value? Did it support your long-term goals? Did it contribute to your physical health, mental resilience, professional development, personal brand, side-hustle potential, creative practice, networking capacity, domestic optimisation strategy, or at least your ability to return refreshed to the sacred inbox?

To which the only civilised answer is sometimes: no. I just fancied it.

The Case for Getting Things Done

There is, annoyingly, a serious concession to make here.

Efficiency is not wicked. Planning is not a moral failure. It is good to get things done. Some tasks genuinely do need doing; some deadlines matter; some responsibilities become worse if left to fester in the dark like potatoes at the back of a cupboard. A person who refuses all structure in the name of authenticity will, quite quickly, discover that the gas bill has not been moved by their commitment to spiritual freedom.

Nor is self-improvement obviously bad. There are habits worth building, skills worth learning, bodies worth looking after, finances worth managing, relationships worth repairing, and homes worth making less actively hostile to human life. There is nothing noble about avoidable chaos. There is no romance in missing every deadline, losing every document, eating cereal from a mug because all the bowls have achieved archaeological significance in the sink, and calling the whole arrangement a resistance practice.

The serious version of productivity culture appeals because life is genuinely difficult to manage. Work expands. Administration multiplies. Notifications breed in captivity. Every institution, from the bank to the GP surgery to the local council website, appears to have entered into a secret pact to make ordinary life slightly more like filing taxes in a haunted airport.

So yes, we need systems. We need calendars, reminders, routines, lists, limits and the occasional grim afternoon in which we sort out the thing we have been avoiding for six months and discover that it took seventeen minutes. A good productivity method can be an act of mercy. It can reduce friction. It can help us keep promises. It can create enough order that life becomes less exhausting.

The problem is not doing things well.

The problem is when doing things well becomes indistinguishable from optimising the self.

That distinction matters because one is practical and the other is metaphysical. It is one thing to say, I need a better way of managing my time. It is another to say, I am a badly designed human product whose every feature requires upgrading. The first can help you answer emails. The second can turn existence into a permanent performance review.

When Everything Becomes a Metric

The most exhausting thing about productivity culture is not even the advice itself. Much of the advice is fine. Sleep more. Move about. Write things down. Do the difficult task first. Do the easy task first. Batch similar tasks. Do not batch similar tasks. Use your phone. Throw your phone into the sea. Wake at five. Respect your chronotype. Drink water. Do deep work. Touch grass. Put the grass into Notion.

The advice contradicts itself, but that is not the deepest problem. Human beings are contradictory, and any advice that survives contact with actual life will need exceptions, caveats and a certain amount of shrugging.

The deeper problem is the moral atmosphere. The language of optimisation smuggles in a whole theory of the person. You are no longer someone with finite time, strange moods, bodily needs, obligations, pleasures, griefs, friendships, distractions, appetites and occasional inexplicable desires to reorganise a drawer. You are a project. Your attention is capital. Your leisure is recovery. Your recovery is performance maintenance. Your hobbies are skill stacks. Your books are inputs. Your walks are steps. Your meals are fuel. Your friendships are networks. Your personality is content. Your sadness is friction. Your body is an asset. Your life is a portfolio of under-exploited efficiencies.

At that point, even rest becomes suspicious unless it can produce evidence of usefulness. You may nap, but ideally only because sleep improves cognitive performance. You may walk, but ideally while listening to a podcast about leadership. You may cook, but it should support gut health, reduce delivery costs, increase domestic competence, photograph well, and produce enough leftovers to make Thursday less pathetic. You may read a novel, but only if it expands empathy, sharpens prose style, deepens cultural literacy or provides a useful analogy for a future essay. I am not saying I have never done this. I am saying I object to being seen.

This is why the phrase self-care so often has a faintly managerial smell. In its better form, self-care is a humane recognition that people have needs and limits. In its worse form, it means servicing the machine so it can return to work on Monday without making a noise.

There is something bleakly comic about a culture that has learned to defend rest on the grounds that it improves output. It is like defending friendship because it lowers blood pressure, or defending beauty because it may improve regional footfall. The defence is not false, exactly. It is just spiritually deranged.

Rest may well make us more productive. Exercise may well sharpen concentration. A holiday may well prevent burnout. A lunch break may well improve afternoon performance. These are useful arguments in workplaces and policy documents because institutions often require a business case before they will allow human beings to behave like mammals.

But it should worry us if the only acceptable defence of rest is that it eventually pays productivity rent.

Rest Is Not Performance Maintenance

Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks is useful here because it attacks one of the great fantasies beneath modern productivity advice: the idea that, with the right system, we might one day get everything done. Burkeman frames much productivity advice as encouraging a limit-denying dream in which we become fully optimised masters of our time; his alternative is to accept finitude, choose what to neglect, and organise life around what matters rather than what can be endlessly processed.

This is not a glamorous thought. Nobody wants to buy a productivity book called Some Things Will Remain Unanswered and Eventually You Will Die. It lacks airport appeal. But it has the advantage of being true.

A great deal of productivity culture depends on denying limits while pretending to manage them. It tells us that the problem is not the impossible volume of demands, but our inadequate system. We have not found the correct app. We have not blocked our calendar with sufficient aggression. We have not learned to say no in a tone of voice that suggests both emotional maturity and excellent core strength.

Yet the truth is that a finite life cannot be made infinite by better sorting. There will always be unread books, unanswered messages, unvisited places, unmastered skills, unwritten essays, unstarted projects and people with whom we should probably have been more patient. The human problem is not how to clear the decks. The human problem is how to live on a deck that will never be clear.

That sounds miserable, but it is also a relief. If the fantasy of total completion is false, then the failure to complete everything is not a personal defect. It is a condition of being alive. You are not behind because you have failed to catch up with the universe. The universe was never offering inbox zero.

This changes the moral status of rest. Rest is not a tactic by which you trick yourself into becoming a more efficient worker. Rest is part of life. It is not justified only by what it repairs, improves or enables. Sometimes you are tired because you are tired. Sometimes you should stop because continuing would make you unpleasant, inaccurate, brittle or weirdly emotional about printer settings. Sometimes the correct response to being a person with a body is to lie down.

This should not be radical. It should barely be an argument. Yet here we are, bravely asserting that human beings may sit quietly without first producing a theory of impact.

The Proper Uses of Pointlessness

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing helps because it refuses the lazy caricature of anti-productivity as mere passivity. Odell is not arguing for sloth, ignorance or a permanent state of decorative collapse. Her argument is about refusing the attention economy’s terms: reclaiming attention, listening, observing, remaining in the world while declining to treat every moment as raw material for extraction. The LSE Review of Books summarises the book as a case for refusing productivity and redirecting attention towards active listening and contemplation, rather than simply doing less.

That is an important distinction. Doing nothing properly is not the same as doing nothing badly.

Doing nothing badly is the grey mush of semi-conscious scrolling; the kind where you look up after forty minutes with the spiritual texture of wet cardboard and a working knowledge of three controversies involving people you do not know. Doing nothing badly is not leisure so much as leakage. Time has passed, but it has not been inhabited.

Doing nothing properly is different. It may look inefficient from the outside because it does not always produce a visible object. But it is not empty. It is the walk where nothing happens except that you notice the angle of the light on a brick wall. It is the conversation that does not advance the plot. It is cooking something slightly too elaborate because the chopping is pleasant. It is reading about a topic you have no intention of monetising. It is sitting in a garden and slowly becoming aware that at least three birds are conducting complicated personal business in the hedge.

These things are not valuable because they secretly make you better at email. They may, incidentally, make you a calmer or more attentive person. Good. Lovely. Put that on the leaflet if necessary. But their first defence is that they are part of being alive.

Kieran Setiya’s distinction between telic and atelic activities gives a useful philosophical backbone to this without requiring us to say the word Aristotle too loudly in a light essay. Telic activities are directed towards completion: finish the article, buy the house, get the promotion, run the race. Atelic activities are valuable in the doing: listening to music, spending time with a friend, walking, thinking, living well. Setiya’s point is not that achievement is worthless, but that achievements are not all that matter; atelic activities locate value in the present rather than postponing fulfilment until the goal has been reached.

This is exactly what optimisation culture struggles to understand. It can cope with painting the house if the goal is a painted house. It struggles with painting the house because painting the house is how you wanted to spend the afternoon. It can cope with running if you are training for a marathon, lowering your resting heart rate or constructing a personal narrative of discipline. It struggles with running because the weather was good and your legs felt like being used. It can cope with reading if the book is improving you. It struggles with reading because the book is there, and you are there, and for once nobody needs to be improved.

The optimised life is embarrassed by activities that do not terminate in a result. It wants everything to point beyond itself. But much of what makes life bearable, and sometimes beautiful, does not point beyond itself. It is not a corridor to something else. It is a room.

Wasting Time Properly

This is where the phrase wasting time needs rescuing.

There is such a thing as wasting time badly. We all know this. There are forms of waste that leave you diminished, not restored; numbed, not rested; irritated, not amused. There are evenings that vanish into the algorithmic sinkhole and leave behind only the faint impression that everyone is angry, everything is discourse, and you have somehow developed an opinion about a minor American podcast host.

But there is also such a thing as wasting time properly.

To waste time properly is to spend it without demanding that it become something else. It is to accept that not every activity needs to justify itself before the tribunal of future usefulness. It is to do something absorbing, pleasurable, restful, social, strange or beautiful without immediately converting it into a lesson, asset or productivity hack.

This is harder than it sounds, because optimisation culture follows us even into our escape routes. The hobby becomes a side hustle. The walk becomes a streak. The book becomes a content plan. The meal becomes a macro balance. The notebook becomes a system. The system becomes a lifestyle. The lifestyle becomes a brand. The brand becomes a tiny exhausting god that must be fed every morning before breakfast.

Even our pleasures are asked to professionalise. A person cannot merely enjoy coffee; they must develop a coffee practice. They cannot merely go to the gym; they must enter a transformative arc. They cannot merely take up pottery; they must open an online shop selling small irregular bowls to people who describe objects as intentional. They cannot merely enjoy a video game; they must be building transferable strategic capacities, unless they are writing an essay about how difficulty functions as atmosphere and world design, in which case apparently it is fine and intellectually important.

Again: I object to being seen.

The point is not that seriousness ruins pleasure. Hobbies can deepen. Skills can improve. Amateur interests can become crafts, and crafts can become vocations. There is nothing wrong with caring about doing something well. In fact, doing something well is often one of the great pleasures of life.

But doing something well is not the same as optimising yourself.

A person who bakes bread because they love baking bread is not the same as a person who has folded bread into a comprehensive programme of disciplined domestic excellence. A person who learns guitar because it is satisfying to make noise in a room is not the same as a person who treats every chord as an investment in personal complexity. A person who paints their house because they want to paint their house is not making a claim about efficiency. They are painting the house.

There is a kind of freedom in allowing an action to remain itself.

Conclusion: A Life Is Not a Workflow

The real objection to optimisation culture is not that it makes us work too hard, although it often does. Nor is it that it makes us feel guilty, although it certainly has a talent for that. The deeper objection is that it narrows the imagination of what a life is for.

It teaches us to see ourselves as bundles of capacity awaiting better management. It turns moral language into managerial language. It makes every limit look like a flaw, every pleasure look like an indulgence, every pause look like a failure to prepare. It tells us that the good life is the streamlined life: frictionless, measurable, disciplined, upgraded, efficient.

But a life is not a workflow.

A life contains work, and work matters. It contains duties, and duties matter. It contains goals, and goals matter too. There are things we owe to other people, things we owe to ourselves, and things that will not be done unless we do them. Nobody sensible is against calendars. Nobody humane is against trying.

But there must be room for forms of value that do not arrive wearing a lanyard.

There must be room for the pointless walk, the unmonetised hobby, the nap that is not a cognitive enhancement strategy, the conversation that solves nothing, the meal cooked slowly for no audience, the book read badly and happily, the afternoon lost to weather, the song played again, the garden stared at, the house painted by hand.

Not because these things make us better products.

Because they are among the reasons being a person is preferable to being a product.

So by all means improve yourself where improvement would help. Learn the skill. Keep the promise. Write the list. Answer the email. Fix the shelf. Make the plan. Paint the house efficiently if efficiency is what the moment requires.

But do not let anyone convince you that every hour must submit a business case.

Some things are worth doing because they are useful. Some things are worth doing because they are good. Some things are worth doing because they are yours. And occasionally, with a brush in one hand and paint on a sleeve you quite liked, you may discover that the correct answer to why are you doing this yourself? is simply:

Because I wanted to.

There is a particular kind of online sentence which ought, by rights, to be harmless, but which has started to fill me with a faint, weary dread.

It usually begins: ‘Can someone explain the lore?’

This is not, in itself, an unreasonable question. Games are strange now. Films are strange now. Television is strange now. Franchises sprawl across novels, comics, codices, item descriptions, prequels, sequel trilogies, campaign books, sourcebooks, developer interviews, wiki pages, convention panels, half-canon spin-offs and YouTube videos narrated over footage of someone walking very slowly through a ruined cathedral. If you feel that you have entered a story through the wrong door, it is natural to ask where the hallway begins.

Nor is the desire for lore a shallow desire. Quite the opposite. People ask for lore because they want fictional worlds to matter. They want the castle to have foundations, the monsters to have origins, the gods to have names, the map to continue beyond the playable area. They want to know that what they have just seen was not merely placed there for decoration. Somewhere, in some lost age, some king built that tower, some war broke that bridge, some priest wrote that heresy, some idiot opened the ancient door marked quite plainly ‘Do Not Open, Probably Full of Cosmic Misery.’

I sympathise with this. I own fantasy maps. I have lost time to invented genealogies. I have read paragraphs about fictional moons with a seriousness I cannot always extend to my own work emails. This is not an argument against lore. A world without any sense of depth can feel thin, stagey and disposable. Lore is one of the ways fiction suggests that the visible story is only the exposed edge of something larger.

The problem begins when that larger thing stops supporting the story and starts replacing it.

The problem with lore is not that fictional worlds have histories. It is that we increasingly talk as if those histories are the point. Story becomes backstory. Meaning becomes explanation. Mystery becomes missing information. A scene has not succeeded because it moved us, unsettled us, changed our understanding of a character, or left an image lodged somewhere unpleasant in the mind. It has succeeded because it connects to a thing we already know, or can be made to connect to a thing somebody else knows, or can be explained in a ninety-minute video called something like The Complete Timeline of the Sad Wizard War.

At that point, we are no longer encountering fiction. We are revising for it.

The poetry of not knowing

The first Alan Wake opens with a line attributed to Stephen King about nightmares existing outside logic, and there being ‘little fun’ in explanations. The fuller thought, developed by the game’s narrator, is that in horror the victim keeps asking why, but the unanswered mystery is what remains with us. Remedy reportedly secured King’s permission to use the opening quotation for a token fee; it is a neat little piece of literary inheritance for a game obsessed with writers, horror, repetition and the danger of mistaking narration for control.

It is also a useful doorway into the problem with lore.

Horror understands, at least when it is working properly, that explanation can be corrosive. This does not mean horror should never explain anything. A story made entirely from ambiguity can be as lazy as one made entirely from exposition. But fear often depends on an imbalance between encounter and comprehension. Something is in the house. Something is wrong with the lake. Something has happened in the old village, or will happen again, or perhaps has always been happening and you have simply arrived during one of its more photogenic recurrences.

The demand for lore often reverses that imbalance. It asks the story to account for itself. What is the monster? Where did it come from? What are its rules? Who built the ritual site? Is the cult connected to the entity mentioned in the second DLC? Does the deer-headed thing represent grief, colonial guilt, lunar fertility, the developer’s divorce, or a datamined boss cut from version 1.03?

Some of those questions can be interesting. Some of them can deepen the work. But there is a point at which the question ‘what does this mean?’ quietly becomes ‘what is the in-universe explanation for this object?’ They are not the same question.

That distinction matters because the unanswered mystery is not always a gap waiting to be filled. Sometimes it is the shape the work has deliberately taken. Sometimes the lack of explanation is not a failure of worldbuilding, but the means by which the story produces wonder, dread, melancholy or awe. To explain too much is not merely to add information. It can be to change the genre of the experience.

A ghost story with a complete metaphysical rulebook is not necessarily richer than one without it. A ruined kingdom whose every dynasty is exhaustively documented is not necessarily more tragic than one whose surviving records contradict each other. A god whose motives can be summarised in a wiki sidebar may be less powerful than one whose motives are half-lost, half-lied-about, and partly unknowable.

Lore can deepen mystery. It can also domesticate it.

Lore is not story

The simplest version of the argument is this: lore is what has already happened. Story is what is happening under pressure.

That is not a perfect definition, but it is a useful one. Lore gives us histories, cosmologies, factions, lineages, catastrophes, prophecies, rules, institutions and buried causes. Story gives us desire, action, conflict, reversal, consequence, recognition, failure and change. Lore is the sediment beneath the road. Story is the person walking it, bleeding slightly, trying to decide whether to turn back.

The two are not enemies. Often they need each other. A character’s choice may only make sense because of the world’s history. A war may only feel tragic because we understand the myth that sustains it. A city may only feel alive because its streets imply layers of use, conquest, trade, worship and neglect. Lore is often the material from which story is built.

But material is not architecture. A pile of bricks is not a house. A thousand years of invented history is not, by itself, drama.

This is where some fantasy franchises, games and fandoms get into trouble. They confuse density with depth. They assume that because a world contains a large quantity of information, it must therefore be rich. But richness is not the same as volume. A fictional world can be enormous and shallow. It can have twelve empires, seven ages, five magic systems, three dead creator gods and a downloadable glossary, and still fail to produce a single human moment worth remembering.

Conversely, a world can be relatively spare and feel immense. A half-seen ritual. A name nobody wants to say. A monument without an inscription. A character who flinches at a song. These can imply more than an appendix.

The question is not ‘how much lore is there?’ The question is ‘what does the lore do?’

Does it thicken the atmosphere? Does it sharpen the conflict? Does it make the character’s choice more painful? Does it give the landscape moral or historical weight? Does it complicate what we thought we knew? Does it make the world feel old, contested, wounded or alive?

Or does it merely answer a question nobody needed answered?

FromSoftware and the lure of the incomplete

This is why Dark Souls and Elden Ring are not straightforward examples of the problem. In some ways, they are the best defence against it.

They are, obviously, lore-heavy games. The player moves through worlds of dead gods, ruined dynasties, cryptic factions, half-remembered wars and proper nouns arranged with the calm hostility of a medieval theology exam. Much of the explicit backstory is scattered through item descriptions, environmental cues, enemy placement, architecture, boss names and fragments of dialogue. George R. R. Martin has described his contribution to Elden Ring in terms of worldbuilding, backstory and imaginary history; FromSoftware then took that inherited material and made a game out of its aftermath.

Yet the reason these games work is not simply that they have lore. They work because the lore is fused to the act of play.

In Dark Souls, you do not merely learn that the world is exhausted. You feel exhaustion in the loop of death and return, in the hostile indifference of the architecture, in the way triumph is always provisional, in the grotesque comedy of dragging one’s battered little body through another cathedral full of historical consequences. In Elden Ring, the shattered order of the world is not just a premise. It is a geography. The Lands Between feel like a place where cosmic law has broken into regional weather.

This is lore as atmosphere, not lore as lecture. It does not stand outside the experience, waiting to be consumed later. It presses in from every side.

Of course, the fandom around these games can still produce the more exhausting form of lore culture. There is a familiar ritual now: the game releases; players discover a sad knight, a suspicious tree and a corpse wearing someone else’s hat; the internet assembles; three weeks later, somebody has produced a diagram proving that every woman in the setting is either an aspect of the same goddess, a jar, or both.

I am not sneering at this. Some of that work is genuinely impressive. It can be a form of collaborative criticism, close reading by other means. But it does subtly alter the relationship between mystery and answer. The game says: here are ruins, traces, echoes, contradictions. The lore machine says: here is what happened.

Sometimes that is satisfying. Sometimes it is like pinning a moth.

The best FromSoftware lore remains powerful because it resists final settlement. Not because there are no answers, but because the answers do not exhaust the experience. You can know more about Lordran or the Lands Between and still feel that knowledge is inadequate. The past has not been explained away. It continues to rot beautifully underfoot.

The wiki is not the work

The more general problem is not really lore itself, but wiki-fication: the habit of treating a fictional world as a database whose highest purpose is completion.

The wiki is an extraordinary tool. It is also, as a model of reading, a dangerous temptation. It encourages a particular kind of attention: classificatory, connective, chronological, hierarchical. Who is related to whom? Which events are canon? Which source supersedes which other source? What is the official name of the war? Was this character present at the battle? Is this helmet the same helmet? Did the prophecy refer to the moon, the false moon, the dead moon, or the moon that was technically a metaphor until the tie-in comic made it literal?

Again, none of this is inherently bad. Continuity is part of the pleasure of large fictional worlds. The problem is when continuity becomes the substitute for judgement. The first question becomes not ‘is this scene good?’ but ‘does this scene fit?’ The audience is trained to experience recognition as meaning. A character appears, a musical cue returns, a planet is named, a helmet is lifted from a box, and the work receives applause for connecting to itself.

This is one of the besetting sins of modern franchise storytelling. It is particularly visible in Star Wars, a universe now so heavily shaped by canon management that some arguments about it feel less like criticism than property law. Lucasfilm’s 2014 decision to rebrand much of the old Expanded Universe as ‘Legends’, while establishing a new continuity for future films, books, comics and games, was commercially understandable and probably inevitable. It was also a perfect illustration of how franchise worlds become administrative structures.

The interesting question about Star Wars should not be whether every story ‘counts’ in the same official ledger. It should be why this mythic space opera, whose original power lay partly in its speed, archetypal clarity and sense of glimpsed vastness, has become so dependent on filling its own gaps.

The Clone Wars are more interesting before we know exactly what happened in them. Boba Fett is more interesting before we have been asked to care about his administrative style. The Force is more interesting when it is mystical, ethical and dramatic, rather than an inheritance dispute with glowsticks. This does not mean later stories cannot work. Some do. But they work when they find drama inside the world, not when they merely convert implication into content.

There is a difference between expanding a world and explaining it down.

Warhammer and the honest excess of setting

Warhammer is a slightly different case, because it has always been excessive. Its scale is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the product.

To complain that Warhammer 40,000 has too much lore is a little like complaining that a cathedral has too much stone. The whole thing is built from impossible accumulation: ten thousand years of decay, corpse-emperors, fallen primarchs, machine cults, fungal hooligans, space elves, bureaucratic theocracy, Latin-ish nonsense, skulls on everything, and an entire aesthetic apparently generated by asking what would happen if a medieval reliquary developed a cocaine problem.

Its lore is also inseparable from its function as a tabletop setting. Warhammer is not only a story; it is a playground, product line, miniatures range, wargame, art style, publishing ecosystem and identity machine. The point is not simply to follow a plot. It is to choose an army, paint it, name things, fight battles, argue about rules, read novels, watch lore videos, and develop strong opinions about fictional logistics.

In that sense, Warhammer may be the most honest lore franchise. It does not pretend that the lore is merely serving a single story. The lore is infrastructure. It gives players reasons to care about factions, colours, battles and models. It creates a shared imaginative field in which other stories can happen.

But even here, the problem can appear. The Horus Heresy began as mythic backstory: the great founding wound of the setting, the half-remembered civil war that explained why the Imperium was so broken. Over time it became a vast narrative enterprise in its own right, with dozens of novels and a continuing apparatus of guides, curated collections and follow-up material. Recent official material describes curated routes through the saga and pivotal events across the Age of Darkness, which is entirely reasonable for a body of fiction that has become too large for casual entry.

There is a real achievement here. Many of those books are loved. Some are very good. But the transformation is still revealing. A mythic past becomes a documented past. A legendary betrayal becomes a shelf. The half-seen tragedy is made narratively available.

That is not automatically a loss. But it is a change. Some forms of grandeur depend on distance. Bring the ancient catastrophe too close, give every demigod a speaking part, every faction a trilogy, every mystery a campaign supplement, and the scale can oddly diminish. The mountain becomes a guided tour.

The Elder Scrolls and lore as literature

If Star Wars shows lore as continuity management, and Warhammer shows lore as infrastructure, The Elder Scrolls at its best shows lore as literature.

This is especially true of Morrowind, whose strangest texts do not simply provide background information. They perform the world’s instability. The 36 Lessons of Vivec are not valuable because they straightforwardly explain what happened. They are valuable because they sit somewhere between scripture, propaganda, metaphysics, confession, joke, spell and textual fever dream. UESP’s collected versions of the Lessons give some sense of their density and strangeness, but their real effect comes from encountering them inside a game world where religion, politics and history are already entangled.

This is lore doing something more interesting than filling a database. It does not merely say: here are the facts of the Tribunal. It asks: what is a fact inside a world where gods are political rulers, myths may be retroactive, official histories are compromised, and metaphysics has a worrying tendency to behave like rhetoric?

That kind of lore does not close interpretation. It opens it. It gives the player not a settled account, but a field of competing accounts. It makes the world feel old because the past has been fought over, rewritten, sanctified, buried and lied about. In other words, it understands something real history also teaches: the past is not simply what happened. It is what survives, who records it, who benefits from the record, and what cannot quite be made to fit.

The weaker form of lore is the opposite. It takes strangeness and renders it as bullet points. It turns theology into mechanics, myth into chronology, contradiction into error, mystery into ‘deepest lore’. It approaches a religious text from a fictional culture and asks which parts are canonically true, as if that were the only interesting question.

But the best question is often not ‘what really happened?’ It is ‘why does this world need to tell the story this way?’

Why fans love lore

It is worth being fair about this, because the appetite for lore is not simply a failure of taste. Lore gives people several genuine pleasures.

First, it gives scale. A good fictional world feels larger than the story currently occupying it. Lore extends the horizon.

Second, it gives continuity. To follow a franchise over years is to develop a relationship not only with characters, but with accumulated places, events, objects and references. Lore rewards memory.

Third, it gives community. Lore is something fans can discuss, assemble, dispute and teach. It turns solitary consumption into shared excavation.

Fourth, it gives control. Stories are often ambiguous, emotional and unresolved. Lore seems firmer. It can be organised. It can be mastered. It can be put in order.

Finally, it gives a way to remain inside the work after the work is over. This may be the most important point. When a game ends, when a trilogy disappoints, when a favourite character dies, lore offers continuation. There is always another source, another fragment, another theory. The world does not have to end just because the story has.

That is not contemptible. It is touching, really. A fandom’s obsession with lore often comes from love. It is what happens when people do not want the lights to come up.

But love can be bad at criticism. It can mistake more for better. It can treat every blank space as an insult. It can demand that the work explain itself until the original sensation has been replaced by a dossier.

The problem with answers

The deepest problem with lore culture is that it often misunderstands what mystery is for.

A mystery is not always a puzzle. Sometimes it is a mood. Sometimes it is a wound. Sometimes it is the means by which a work gestures beyond its own edges. In horror, the unexplained can preserve fear. In fantasy, it can preserve wonder. In science fiction, it can preserve sublimity. In myth, it can preserve sacred distance. In games, it can preserve the feeling that the world was not built solely for you.

This last point matters especially in games. Players are trained to interact, solve, optimise, complete. The form itself encourages mastery. Good game worlds often have to resist that mastery. They have to make us feel not merely that there is content we have not yet found, but that the world exceeds us in principle.

That is why environmental storytelling can be so powerful. A ruined village does not need to explain everything to make us feel that something happened there. A locked door is not always an invitation to return with the right key. Sometimes it is a statement that the world contains interiors we will never enter.

Lore can support that feeling. It can place suggestive pressure on the world. It can make the visible surface tremble with invisible history. But when lore becomes too available, too complete, too taxonomic, it can flatten the very sensation it was meant to produce.

The answer is not always more explanation. Sometimes the answer is better silence.

What lore is for

So what is lore for?

Lore is for texture. It is for pressure. It is for making a world feel as if it did not begin when the protagonist arrived and will not end when the credits roll. It is for giving places memory, objects significance, institutions inertia, conflicts ancestry and choices consequence.

Lore is for the half-buried statue whose face has been scratched away.

It is for the song everyone knows but nobody explains.

It is for the holy book with three incompatible translations.

It is for the battlefield that is now a marketplace.

It is for the character who lies about the past because the truth would destroy the present.

It is for the sense that the world is not a level select screen but a living accumulation of error, reverence, violence, boredom, weather and time.

What lore is not for, or should not be for, is replacing the need to tell a story.

A fictional world does not become meaningful because we can name all its emperors. It becomes meaningful because something happens within it that could not happen in quite the same way anywhere else. A character changes, or fails to change. A choice reveals its cost. A myth collapses. A city falls. A god is exposed as a fraud, or worse, as real. The lore matters because it makes that movement heavier.

When lore is good, it behaves like geology. It sits beneath the surface, shaping the ground on which the story walks. When lore is bad, it behaves like homework. It asks to be admired for how much there is to know.

That is the problem with lore. Not that there is too much of it. Not that fans care about it. Not that fictional worlds should be smaller, thinner, simpler or less strange. The problem is that lore is increasingly treated as the proof that a story has depth, when often it is only proof that a story has appendices.

The unanswered mystery is not always a defect. The gap is not always waiting for a sourcebook. The shadow at the edge of the map is not always improved by naming the kingdom beyond it.

Sometimes the dragon does not need a family tree.

Sometimes it is enough that the bones are old, the villagers will not go near them, and something under the hill is still warm.

There is a familiar little pantomime in public life. A person with a newspaper column, a parliamentary platform, a large social media following, an endowed chair, a podcast studio, a publishing contract, or some other obvious means of communication says something provocative. People object. Some of them are rude. Some of them are tedious. A few are probably deranged, because it is the internet, and the internet’s main contribution to civilisation is making every village idiot discoverable by keyword search.

Then comes the solemn announcement: they have been silenced.

This is now one of the dullest rituals in public argument. A public figure says something in public, is publicly criticised, and then behaves as if criticism were a form of censorship. Disagreement becomes an attack. Rebuttal becomes intimidation. A lost booking becomes cancellation. A hostile review becomes persecution. A reply underneath a post becomes evidence that free speech itself has entered hospice care.

The problem is not that these people are always lying. Sometimes criticism is ugly. Sometimes it is excessive. Sometimes it is coordinated, malicious, dishonest, or frightening. Public argument can turn into public punishment with alarming speed. The problem is that we have become remarkably bad at distinguishing the different things that can happen after someone says something objectionable.

Criticism, discomfort, reputational consequence, harassment, exclusion, censorship and abuse are all real things. They are not the same thing.

That distinction matters because public life increasingly rewards us for collapsing them. To call disagreement persecution is to claim the moral status of the injured without accepting the intellectual burden of being answered. To call every consequence accountability is to claim the moral status of justice without accepting the ethical burden of proportion. In both cases, the argument is degraded by the same temptation: the wish to be the victim in a story where victimhood settles the question.

The strange comfort of being attacked

It is not hard to see why the language of persecution is appealing. It simplifies everything. If I am being persecuted, I do not need to ask whether the criticism has merit. I do not need to consider whether I was careless, arrogant, ignorant, cruel, or simply wrong. I do not need to distinguish between the weak version of the criticism and the strong one. I do not even need to answer the argument. I can answer the fact that the argument is being made.

This is especially useful for powerful people. A politician with a press office, a columnist with a weekly national platform, or an academic with institutional security can turn a few hostile replies into a morality play about courage. The posture is almost always the same. They are not merely being disagreed with; they are being silenced. They are not being asked to defend a claim; they are being punished for thinking. They are not encountering opposition; they are standing bravely against an orthodoxy.

Sometimes there is a real orthodoxy. Sometimes institutions do punish dissent. Sometimes social and professional circles become narrow, self-protective and vindictive. I do not want to pretend otherwise. But there is a difference between being unable to speak and being unable to speak without reply. A great deal of contemporary free speech panic depends on pretending those are the same thing.

Being criticised is not censorship. Losing an argument is not being silenced. Being thought badly of is not persecution. Even being treated unfairly is not, automatically, proof of a totalitarian culture closing in around you. Sometimes it means you said something poor and people noticed. Sometimes it means you said something defensible, but clumsily. Sometimes it means your audience is less indulgent than you had hoped. Sometimes, yes, it means the crowd is behaving badly. The point is that these possibilities have to be distinguished, not bundled together into one grand theory of martyrdom.

There is a particular kind of public figure who seems to experience all criticism as an existential violation. Their belief in free speech is so absolute that it apparently includes the right to speak without anyone forming a low opinion of them afterwards. They do not want censorship, certainly. But they also do not want contradiction, reputational risk, institutional judgement, social disapproval, or the ordinary unpleasantness of being held to one’s words.

This is not a free speech position. It is a demand for emotional immunity.

But the crowd is not innocent either

The difficulty, of course, is that some people really are treated with disproportionate cruelty.

This is where the lazy anti-woke version of the argument fails. Nobody is forbidden from saying anything any more is a bad argument not because every public shaming is justified, but because it treats all criticism of public speech as hysteria. It collapses in one direction exactly as its opponents collapse in the other. It cannot distinguish between legitimate accountability and mob cruelty because, at some level, it does not want to. It wants a simple story in which the speaker is brave, the critic is censorious, and the content of what was said barely matters.

That story is too neat. Public criticism can be necessary and still become abusive. A person can have said something genuinely harmful and still be treated unjustly. A complaint can begin from a real injury and become an excuse for ritual humiliation. A demand for accountability can become a demand that someone be made permanently socially, morally, and professionally untouchable.

ContraPoints’ Canceling is useful here precisely because Natalie Wynn is not making the standard lazy complaint that accountability has gone too far. Her argument is more careful than that. She distinguishes criticism of actions and beliefs from the construction of a totalising case against the person. The danger is not that people object; it is that objection becomes a machine for producing certainty, abstraction, essentialism, unforgivability, guilt by association and moral dualism. Her account identifies recurring tropes such as presumption of guilt, abstraction, essentialism, pseudo-moralism, no forgiveness, the transitive property of cancellation and dualism.

That list remains useful because it describes a recognisable emotional process. Something specific happens: a sentence, a joke, a association, a clumsy comment, a bad argument, an omission, a silence. Then the specific thing is abstracted into a pattern. The pattern becomes evidence of character. The character becomes essence. The essence becomes destiny. At that point, nothing the person says can really matter, because the conclusion has moved beyond conduct into ontology. They did not merely do something wrong. They are wrong. They are the kind of person to whom wrongness permanently belongs.

This is where accountability becomes theatre. The aim is no longer to correct, repair, deter, educate, protect, or understand. The aim is to establish a moral order in which everyone knows where to stand. The accused must become a symbol. The crowd must become righteous. The bystander must participate or risk suspicion. The original issue may remain somewhere in the background, but the real drama has shifted. It is no longer about what happened. It is about who may be seen to condemn it with sufficient force.

There is a brutal comfort in this too. If the public figure enjoys imagining themselves as persecuted, the crowd enjoys imagining itself as justice. Both positions are morally flattering. Both avoid the harder work of judgement.

Conflict is not abuse

Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse gives this problem a deeper ethical frame. Schulman’s central concern is not that abuse is imaginary. Quite the opposite. Her argument depends on the need to distinguish abuse, involving domination or power over another person, from conflict, which involves struggle, disagreement, discomfort, fear, hurt, projection, misrecognition and responsibility on more than one side. The danger is that overstating harm can justify escalation, shunning and cruelty. A 2024 Heterodox Academy essay summarises the point as a critique of the tendency to misrepresent disagreement as abuse, while noting that Schulman writes from within traditions concerned with inclusion, safety and equity rather than from a reactionary rejection of them.

That matters because the phrase conflict is not abuse is easily misused. In the wrong hands, it can become a slogan for minimising real harm. It can be made to sound as if people should simply toughen up, stop complaining, and accept mistreatment as the price of adulthood. That is not the serious version of the argument. The serious version is more demanding.

It asks us to notice when the language of harm becomes a way of avoiding conflict rather than addressing it. It asks whether the claim I feel unsafe is sometimes being used to mean I feel criticised, I feel ashamed, I feel exposed, I feel socially at risk, or I do not want to remain in a relationship of mutual obligation with this person. Those feelings may be real. They may be painful. They may deserve care. But they are not all the same as danger.

This is a hard distinction to make because feelings do not arrive pre-sorted into ethically convenient categories. Discomfort can be a warning sign. Fear can be rational. Anger can indicate that a boundary has been crossed. But feelings can also be distorted by pride, shame, trauma, status anxiety, political identity, group loyalty, envy, projection, embarrassment and the ordinary human inability to bear being wrong in public.

We should be cautious here. There are many contexts in which people understate harm because naming it is costly. Abuse is often minimised by abusers, institutions and bystanders. Victims are routinely pressured to interpret coercion as misunderstanding, violation as awkwardness, discrimination as banter, and cruelty as mere difference of opinion. Any argument about harm inflation that ignores this becomes morally useless.

But the reverse error also exists. People can overstate harm because doing so grants moral clarity. If I am unsafe, I need not negotiate. If I am abused, I need not repair. If I am persecuted, I need not listen. If the other person is dangerous in essence rather than wrong in conduct, then cruelty towards them can be redescribed as protection from them.

This is one of the most unpleasant truths about public argument: people can use the language of vulnerability to dominate other people. Not always. Not even mostly, perhaps. But often enough that any serious ethics of argument must account for it.

Criticism, consequence, punishment

The distinction we need is not between speech and censorship, or between accountability and impunity. Those binaries are too blunt. The better distinction is between criticism, consequence and punishment.

Criticism is the ordinary process of being answered. It can be sharp, moral, emotional, public and unpleasant. It can include mockery. It can include anger. It can include the judgement that someone’s view is cruel, foolish, dishonest or beneath consideration. No serious account of free expression can require people to listen politely to every claim as if the world were a seminar room and all participants had done the reading.

Consequence is what happens when speech changes how people relate to the speaker. If you say something, others may trust you less. They may not want to buy your book, invite you onto a panel, vote for you, collaborate with you, date you, hire you, or keep pretending that they do not know what you think. This is not automatically censorship. It is part of living among other people, who also have agency, judgement and freedom of association.

Punishment is different. Punishment is organised deprivation. It seeks to impose a cost. It may be formal or informal, institutional or social, proportionate or wildly excessive. Sometimes punishment is justified. A person who abuses power, harasses colleagues, fabricates evidence, incites hatred, or uses a platform to make others materially less safe may deserve more than disagreement. But punishment needs standards. It needs evidence, proportionality, process, limits and some imaginable route back, unless the offence is so severe that exclusion really is the point.

Much of our confusion comes from calling all three things by the same names. The person criticised calls it persecution. The crowd calls punishment accountability. The institution calls panic safeguarding. The audience calls spectacle justice. Everyone reaches for the word that gives their side moral advantage.

A healthier culture of argument would not abolish consequences. That would be impossible and undesirable. It would ask more precise questions. What exactly was said or done? What is being criticised: the claim, the conduct, the pattern, the institutional role, or the person’s entire character? Who has power here? What harm is being alleged, and what evidence supports it? What response would be proportionate? What would repair look like? Is the aim to protect others, correct the record, change behaviour, deter repetition, or simply enjoy seeing someone suffer?

That last question is worth asking more often than we do.

The appetite for moral theatre

One reason public argument has become so deformed is that social media makes bystanders feel like participants. Most of us are not resolving the issue. We are not investigating, mediating, repairing, apologising, forgiving, compensating, changing institutions, or doing any of the patient work that justice usually requires. We are watching, reacting, sorting ourselves into position, and calling that politics.

This creates a strange economy of display. The public figure displays injury. The critics display righteousness. The institution displays seriousness. The audience displays discernment. Everyone performs the part most likely to protect their standing among the people whose opinion they care about.

The cruelest part of this is that it often does little for the people actually harmed. A person who has been mistreated may need acknowledgement, apology, changed behaviour, material redress, privacy, protection, time, or the restoration of trust. What they often get instead is a crowd using their injury as raw material for its own self-expression. The harm becomes content. The victim becomes evidence. The accused becomes symbol. The bystanders become morally entertained.

This is not accountability. It is punishment as community bonding.

Nor is it confined to any one political tribe. The style differs, but the structure recurs. The right has its own cancellation rituals, its own inflated victimhood, its own appetite for shunning, its own habit of treating criticism as persecution and difference as civilisational threat. The liberal-left has its own weakness for moral sorting, purity spirals and the transformation of conflict into harm. Centrists have their own melodrama too, usually involving the tragic silencing of very well-paid people who appear to be expressing their silenced views on every available platform.

The point is not that everyone is equally guilty in every case. They are not. The point is that the underlying temptation is widely distributed. We want the status of the victim because it makes our aggression feel defensive. We want the language of justice because it makes our punishment feel clean. We want the drama of moral clarity because the ordinary work of judgement is slow, compromised and unsatisfying.

The duties of being hurt

None of this means that people should be calm in the face of cruelty. Anger is not a failure of reason. Sometimes anger notices what politeness has been trained to conceal. There are situations where civility is used to protect the powerful from the emotional consequences of what they have done. There are arguments so degrading that treating them as respectable contributions to debate becomes its own form of complicity.

But being hurt does not make every response ethical. Being right does not make every tactic just. Being vulnerable does not remove all responsibility for what one does with the power that vulnerability can generate.

This is the part we tend to avoid. Victimhood has moral significance, but it is not moral infallibility. To have been harmed is to deserve care, not to acquire unlimited authority over the truth. To be angry is understandable, but anger can still mislead. To demand accountability may be necessary, but accountability without proportion becomes revenge with better branding.

The same applies to those criticised unfairly. If someone misrepresents you, you may defend yourself. If a crowd lies about you, you may object. If an institution panics and throws you under the nearest reputational bus, you may call that cowardice. But none of this proves that all criticism is bad faith, that all offence is manufactured, or that you have been persecuted merely because people no longer admire you as effortlessly as before.

There is no escape from judgement. That is the annoying thing about living with other people.

What repair would require

A better public culture would need to recover some unfashionable habits: specificity, proportion, patience, distinction and repair.

Specificity means saying what the offence actually was. Not the worst possible abstraction of it; the thing itself. The sentence, the action, the decision, the pattern, the failure. Without specificity, criticism becomes atmosphere. Once criticism becomes atmosphere, the accused cannot answer it and the crowd cannot assess it. Everyone is left arguing over vibes, which is among the least dignified ways to spend a human life.

Proportion means asking what response fits the wrong. Some errors require correction. Some require apology. Some require changed conduct. Some require institutional sanction. Some require exclusion. Some require nothing more than public disagreement. A culture that cannot distinguish these will oscillate between impunity and overkill.

Patience means resisting the demand to decide instantly. This is difficult because online argument punishes hesitation. Silence is treated as complicity; uncertainty as cowardice; nuance as laundering harm. But speed is not the same as moral seriousness. Often it is the opposite. The faster a crowd demands judgement, the more likely it is that people are being asked to perform certainty rather than reach it.

Distinction means refusing the cheap inflation of categories. Disagreement is not persecution. Discomfort is not abuse. Criticism is not censorship. Consequence is not always cancellation. Punishment is not always accountability. But the reverse matters too. Harassment is not debate. Institutional cowardice is not neutrality. Public humiliation is not education. Shunning is not repair.

Repair means believing that people can sometimes do better. Not always. Not cheaply. Not without responsibility. But sometimes. A moral culture with no route to repair is not serious about improvement. It is serious about disposal.

This is one of the contradictions in punitive public argument. It speaks constantly in the language of harm reduction, education and accountability, but often behaves as if people are fixed moral objects. Once named, they are known. Once known, they are finished. That is not an ethic of transformation. It is an ethic of contamination.

Nobody wants to be powerful

Perhaps the deepest problem is that everyone in public argument wants the moral status of the victim and almost nobody wants the moral duties that come with power.

Public figures with large platforms describe criticism as silencing because it is more flattering than admitting they are powerful people being answered by less powerful ones. Crowds describe punishment as accountability because it is more flattering than admitting that a large number of people can become powerful precisely by acting together against one person. Institutions describe evasive risk management as care because it is more flattering than admitting they are frightened of bad publicity. Bystanders describe participation as solidarity because it is more flattering than admitting that they may be enjoying the spectacle.

Power is not a stable possession. It moves. A person may be powerful in one context and vulnerable in another. A columnist may have institutional reach and still be subject to racist abuse. An activist may be marginalised in society and still be capable of cruelty within a community. A crowd may include many powerless people and still, as a crowd, wield terrifying force. Any serious ethics of argument has to follow power as it moves rather than assigning it permanently to whichever side has the better slogan.

That is why the central claim has to be double-edged.

Being criticised is not persecution. Being disagreed with is not silencing. But being publicly punished without proportion, process or repair is also not accountability.

Hold only the first half and you become smug about cruelty. Hold only the second and you become indulgent towards self-pity. Hold both and you have to do the harder work: distinguishing conflict from abuse, criticism from censorship, consequence from punishment, and justice from the pleasures of moral theatre.

This will not make public argument pleasant. It probably should not be pleasant all the time. Some disagreements matter because real things are at stake: rights, dignity, safety, truth, institutions, livelihoods, reputations, and the terms on which people can live together. But it might make argument more honest.

Disagreement is not persecution. Nor is every punishment justice. The beginning of moral seriousness is knowing the difference.

The sentence that does too much work

There are few sentences in British public life more quietly overworked than things were simpler then.

It appears almost everywhere. In arguments about monarchy, empire, childhood, manners, policing, postwar Britain, the lost high street, Sunday trading, social media, national service, school discipline, public order, community, neighbourliness, and the apparently vanished art of people knowing how to behave themselves in public.

Often it is not even offered as an argument. It arrives as a sigh. A photograph of a high street. A memory of children playing outside. A complaint about the price of a pint. A clip of an old royal procession. A story about a grandparent who left school at fourteen, worked hard, bought a house, raised a family, and did not need a sociology seminar to explain the meaning of life.

The sentence has force because it is not wholly false. Some things have been lost. Some institutions have decayed. Some communities have been made more fragile. Some forms of work, family, faith, leisure and civic life have changed so sharply that people are not imagining the rupture. The present can be isolating, bureaucratic, expensive, insecure, over-mediated and strangely airless. It is not irrational to miss a world with more stable rhythms, more legible institutions, and more shared assumptions.

The problem is not that nostalgia notices nothing real. It is that it notices selectively, then mistakes the feeling of loss for a reliable account of history.

The past was not simpler. It is simpler now because memory has edited it.

Nostalgia is not stupidity

It is tempting, especially for people who enjoy being correct in public (a regrettable tendency in which I have no doubt occasionally participated), to treat nostalgia as mere error. The nostalgic person has misremembered the past. They have watched too many period dramas. They have mistaken old photographs for evidence. They have forgotten the racism, sexism, poverty, violence, disease, class deference, bad dentistry, corporal punishment and unspeakable food.

There is truth in that critique, but it is also too easy. Nostalgia is not simply bad history. It is a human response to time.

Psychologists tend to describe nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion: a way of connecting past, present and future, often through memory, identity and belonging. It can comfort people. It can remind them who they are. It can hold together experiences that otherwise feel scattered. The danger begins when that emotional work is promoted into public analysis. Nostalgia can tell us what people miss. It is much less good at telling us how the thing they miss actually worked.

That distinction matters. A nostalgic memory may be emotionally true and historically misleading at the same time.

A person may genuinely remember the high street as warmer, busier and more socially coherent than the out-of-town retail park or the algorithmic convenience of online shopping. But the high street was never just a moral ecology of butchers, bakers and knowing the name of the person behind the counter. It was also shaped by rent, wages, planning rules, bus routes, car ownership, women’s labour, credit, supermarkets, economic geography, and the simple fact that people often shopped locally because they had fewer alternatives.

A person may remember childhood as freer before smartphones. That does not mean they are wrong to notice something degraded in the present. But childhood before smartphones also contained boredom, bullying, isolation, homework, arbitrary adult authority, social humiliations and long afternoons of having very little control over what happened next.

The point is not that the remembered joy was fake. The point is that nostalgia is a ruthless editor. It preserves the freedom and cuts the helplessness.

Not everything that has gone was taken

This is where the argument has to become more precise. Nostalgia often muddles together three different things: loss, change and finitude.

Some things really are lost. A library closes. A youth club shuts. A factory goes. A local newspaper becomes a hollowed-out content mill. A pub becomes flats. A bus route disappears. A community loses the shared institutions through which people once encountered each other.

Some things have not so much been lost as changed. The high street becomes less retail-centred and more service-led. Children socialise through different infrastructures. Work moves from one kind of insecurity to another. Families become more varied. Religion declines in some places and reappears in others. Public manners alter. Technologies reorganise daily life.

And some things are neither exactly loss nor change in the public-historical sense. They are the ordinary irreversibility of being alive.

This is the part nostalgia is worst at naming. Sometimes the thing that cannot be recovered is not the classroom, the summer holiday, the country, the shop, the street or the television programme. Sometimes it is the person you were when you encountered them.

In my family, there’s an old long-running argument about whether Wagon Wheels were bigger in my parents’ childhoods than they were in mine, or in the present day. This is almost perfect here because it is so trivial, and therefore so revealing. Perhaps they were. Perhaps they were not. The empirical question can in theory be answered, or at least investigated. But it will never quite answer the emotional question, because the hand holding the biscuit has changed. The scale of the world has changed. The stakes of the afternoon have changed. The child is gone.

That is not a small thing. Childhood really is unrecoverable, and that is part of its power. Its pleasures are sharpened by their finitude. But if we confuse that finitude with some kind of surrounding public decline, we turn the basic sadness of time passing into a political theory.

This is how nostalgia can become dangerous. It does not merely mourn. It misidentifies the object of grief.

It says the country has been stolen when perhaps the deeper truth is that time has passed. It says the world has become uniquely cruel when perhaps we are now old enough to see cruelties from which we were once shielded. It says the past was coherent when the actual experience was often ignorance, dependence, selective attention, or someone else quietly doing the work.

Childhood was not simpler. You were a child.

There is a particular type of childhood nostalgia that depends on forgetting the conditions that made childhood feel light.

Children experience the world intensely, but not completely; they are not, for the most part, reading bank statements, arranging care for elderly relatives, understanding local government finance, absorbing the full emotional consequences of unemployment, or watching the roofline of the family home and wondering how expensive the damp patch will become.

This does not make childhood happiness false. It may make it more precious. A child’s delight in a summer evening, a packet of sweets, a den in the woods, a favourite programme, or a walk to the shop with a grandparent is real. But much of that delight rests on partial knowledge of the world. Someone else is carrying the risks. Someone else is making the decisions. Someone else is turning the chaos of the adult world into something that can be, with some regularity, a source of joy.

So when people say childhood was simpler, they are often right in the least useful way. It was simpler for them. That is not the same as saying the world was simpler.

The same pattern applies more widely. Every age has its hidden labour. The apparent stability of one period often depended on people whose constraints have been pushed out of the nostalgic frame: women doing unpaid domestic work; migrants doing difficult and badly rewarded labour; colonised people supplying wealth and status to the imperial centre; children absorbing adult authority without meaningful recourse; queer people remaining closeted; working-class communities living with industrial injury, pollution and premature death; families maintaining respectability by not speaking about what it cost them.

A society can look beautifully ordered when one does not have to ask who was ordered into silence.

The high street in the snow globe

The lost high street is one of the great nostalgic objects of British life. It has everything nostalgia likes: visible decline, local texture, personal memory, economic anxiety, architectural melancholy, and just enough truth to make easy dismissal impossible.

People are not wrong to miss high streets that felt useful and busy. The movement from everyday local shopping to out-of-town retail, supermarket dominance, online purchasing and hospitality-led town centres has changed the social meaning of local places. Something has been lost when streets stop being part of the ordinary practical choreography of life and become either leisure destinations or managed decline.

But the nostalgic high street is often a snow globe. It preserves the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the hardware shop, the library, the bank branch, the post office, the pub and the market stall in a permanent, walkable, socially warm arrangement. Shake it and community appears.

Real high streets were never that simple. They were economic systems, not just moral ones. They depended on household routines, transport patterns, property ownership, employment structures, gendered divisions of labour, and the limited alternatives available to consumers. They were also not universally loved. People welcomed supermarkets, cars, retail parks and later online shopping because convenience is not a conspiracy against virtue. It is something people choose when they are tired.

That is the boring-but-true difficulty. Many of the changes people lament were not imposed on a population that unanimously preferred the old ways. They were produced by millions of individual decisions that made sense at the time. Cheaper goods. Easier parking. Longer opening hours. More choice. Less time spent moving between shops. Fewer awkward conversations. Less dependence on what happened to be nearby.

The old high street may have been more communal. It was also less convenient. The new settlement may be more convenient. It is also lonelier. It would be unfair to call the grief over the death of the high street a luxury belief completely, but it’s certainly true that in this case, nostalgia wants the communal texture without the constraints that produced it.

Empire, monarchy and the uses of amnesia

The same compression operates in grander historical arguments, though with higher stakes.

Monarchy is often presented through continuity. The ceremony, the uniforms, the oaths, the processions, the architecture, the sheer visual grammar of it all suggest an institution floating serenely above ordinary politics. But the monarchy only looks simple when its conflicts, improvisations, dynastic accidents, constitutional crises, religious convulsions, imperial entanglements and public relations reinventions have been softened into pageantry.

Empire works similarly, though more dangerously. Nostalgia for the empire often depends less on direct longing than on amnesia. The empire becomes a mood,a vibe: maps, ships, ceremony, commerce, Englishness projected across the world, a national confidence borne of preeminence. What disappears is the extraction, the racial hierarchy, the engineered famine, the coercion, the violence, and the basic fact that Britain’s old global status was not generated by national character alone. It rested on an unequal, oppressive, and immoral exercise of hard power.

This is why arguments about imperial nostalgia can become too crude if they suggest people are simply wandering around yearning for pith helmets. Often the problem is subtler. It is not always nostalgia in the sense of explicit desire for restoration. It is a national memory that has kept the prestige and mislaid the horrific details of the machinery by which that prestige was constructed.

That matters because amnesia is politically useful. If the past was simply a story of pluck, decency and natural greatness, then present decline must be the fault of betrayal, bureaucracy, softness, immigration, metropolitan disdain, or insufficient belief. If the past was instead contingent, violent, compromised, lucky, inventive, exploitative and unstable, then there is no simple restoration available. One cannot solve the future by re-enacting a past one has not understood.

Public order and the golden age of people behaving themselves

Public order nostalgia is another case where the feeling should be taken seriously but the story should not be swallowed whole.

Many people do experience the present as more disorderly. They see shoplifting, antisocial behaviour, online abuse, street harassment, fraud, visible drug use, aggressive driving, vandalism, and a general weakening of the everyday expectation that rules will be enforced. They encounter institutions that feel slow, absent or evasive. Even where many forms of crime have fallen over the long term, perceived disorder can still shape daily life.

It is not enough to respond with a graph and declare the matter closed. People do not live inside national trend lines. They live on streets, buses, estates, shopping parades and school routes.

But the nostalgic answer is still too neat. The claim that people simply used to behave better usually depends on a highly selective memory of what counted as disorder and whose suffering was visible. Domestic violence was easier to hide because the status of women was still lesser. Racist abuse was normalised (my grandfather, an Irishman who came to Britain in the late 1950s, thought nothing of being told “Paddy go home”). Child abuse was less likely to be believed because children were to be seen and not heard. Even after decriminalisation in the 1960s, queer people were still largely expected to manage their own vulnerability by disappearing. Police misconduct was often harder to challenge. School discipline could shade into humiliation and violence. Public order has always depended partly on whose disorder mattered.

This does not mean nothing has worsened - maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. It means we should be careful about confusing lower visibility with better conduct.

The past often seems orderly because many conflicts were suppressed, privatised, normalised or ignored. The present can feel disorderly because more claims are public, more harms are nameable, more people expect redress, and more institutions are failing to meet those expectations. That is a different problem from simple moral collapse. It may be worse in some ways, but it is not simpler.

The political temptation

The political danger of nostalgia is that it turns a real ache into an easy programme.

If people miss community, promise them tradition. If they miss security, promise them discipline. If they miss status, promise them greatness. If they miss childhood, promise them the country they grew up in. If they miss being shielded from complexity, promise them someone to blame.

This works because nostalgia is emotionally efficient. It compresses the mess of present dissatisfaction into an image of prior wholeness. It does not have to explain how that wholeness functioned, what it cost, who was excluded from it, or whether it can even be recovered under modern conditions. It only has to make the present feel like a fall.

The answer is not to sneer at people for feeling the fall. That is politically useless and morally thin. People often know, with great accuracy, when their lives have become less secure, less respected, less rooted, less sociable or less hopeful. The question is whether nostalgia helps them identify the cause.

Often it does not. It confuses adulthood with decline, complexity with decadence, visibility with novelty, change with theft, and loss with betrayal.

This is where the phrase the past was not simpler needs its second half. The past was not simpler. You just know less about it. You know less because you were younger. You know less because memory has softened the edges. You know less because the photograph excludes the sewage works, the unpaid labour, the family secret, the slur, the debt, the boredom, the fear, the person who had to leave town, the person who was never allowed into the room.

And sometimes, most painfully, you know less because not knowing was part of what you miss.

What nostalgia can still tell us

None of this means nostalgia should be discarded. A society without nostalgia would be unbearable: all acceleration, no gratitude; all novelty, no attachment. There are things worth preserving precisely because they carry memory. Buildings, rituals, phrases, songs, public spaces, local institutions, seasonal habits, family stories, civic ceremonies, old skills, inherited obligations. Not everything old is oppressive. Not everything new is liberation.

Nostalgia becomes useful when treated as evidence of longing rather than evidence of history.

It can tell us that people miss social trust. It can tell us that high streets once did more than process consumption. It can tell us that childhood needs spaces of unsupervised freedom. It can tell us that public institutions should feel present in people’s lives. It can tell us that human beings need continuity, not just efficiency. It can tell us that convenience has costs, and that a life optimised for individual choice may leave people strangely alone.

But nostalgia cannot, by itself, tell us what to rebuild. For that, we need history, politics and a little humility. We need to ask what actually existed, who benefited, who paid, which conditions made it possible, and whether those conditions were desirable or recoverable.

The better question is not how do we go back? It is what did the old world provide that the new world has failed to replace?

That question is harder. It is also more honest.

The past after the missing evidence returns

The past was not simpler. It has merely been relieved of its uncertainty.

We know which panics passed, which institutions survived, which scandals were forgotten, which cruelties were normalised, which compromises held, and which costs were borne by people absent from the photograph. We have turned lived confusion into narrative. Then we mistake the narrative for the time itself.

This is why nostalgia is so powerful and so treacherous. It begins with love. Love for a place, a person, a childhood, a country, a ritual, a street, a lost rhythm of life. But love is not the same as understanding. One can love the past and still be wrong about it.

The task is not to cure people of longing. That would be inhuman. The task is to stop longing from becoming a substitute for thought.

Some things have been lost. Some things have changed. Some things were never as good as we remember. And some things were good precisely because they could not last.

That is the hard truth nostalgia keeps trying to evade. You cannot pass this way again. Not because someone stole the road, necessarily. Because roads are for travelling, and time only moves in one direction.

This complaint is not wrong. It is just incomplete.

The problem with our society is not that we care too much about material things. In many ways, we do not care about them nearly enough. We acquire them, use them, photograph them, compare them, discard them, replace them, and occasionally store them in cupboards until they become archaeological evidence of some previous version of ourselves. But we rarely look at them for long. We rarely ask what they are, how they were made, what they do to us, what kind of attention they deserve, or what kind of life they imply.

We are not too materialistic. We are not materialistic enough.

Or, more precisely, we are hasty materialists. We move through the material world with the appetite of collectors and the attention span of browsers. The object is not allowed to be itself for long. It becomes a purchase, a signal, a lifestyle choice, a productivity aid, a prop, a guilty pleasure, a status anxiety, a regret, a replacement, an item in the basket. Then the basket empties, and we begin again.

This is not an argument for buying more things. Heaven knows the economy has enough people making that case already, often with suspiciously good lighting and a discount code. It is almost the opposite. If we paid better attention to material things, we might become less desperate for the next one. We might notice the difference between value and price, between pleasure and novelty, between use and accumulation. We might begin to see that the world is not more fully possessed when it is consumed quickly.

The question is not whether material things matter. Of course they matter. We are material beings. We live in bodies. We eat, wear clothes, use tools, inhabit rooms, travel through streets, play games, read books, break mugs, repair tables, keep old jumpers for reasons we cannot quite justify and would slightly resent having to explain. Human life is not a concept floating above the world. It is lived through surfaces, textures, weights, smells, tools, habits, landscapes and objects.

The better question is what kind of attention those things receive.

A Basket of Fruit Against the Feed

Still life is an odd phrase. Life, notoriously, does not sit still. It grows, bruises, rots, ripens, leaks, wrinkles, blooms, splits, collapses, gathers dust, stains the tablecloth and attracts flies. To call it still is almost a contradiction. Yet that contradiction is part of the point. Still life is not life without movement. It is life arrested long enough to be seen.

This is why Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit remains such a useful image for thinking about material attention. Painted around the turn of the seventeenth century and now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan, it is often described as a prototype of the still-life genre - often considered to be the first genuine western still-life painting since the fall of Rome. It gives us a wicker basket, fruit and leaves rendered with extraordinary realism, placed against a plain background. Nothing much is happening. And that’s kind of huge for the time - this is the first painting in the western world, anno domini, which abandons every obvious figure of grand religious narrative and places the sole focus on a mere object. There is no martyrdom, no annunciation, no king, no saint, no hero pointing nobly towards the middle distance. Just fruit. Just leaves. Just a basket.

But ‘just’ is doing an enormous amount of work there.

A basket of fruit sounds humble until one actually looks at it. The fruit is not a stock symbol of abundance. It is blemished. Leaves curl and brown. Some of the produce looks heavy with ripeness, some already carrying signs of damage and decay. The painting is not merely saying that fruit exists, which would be a fairly limited achievement even by the standards of art criticism. It is asking the viewer to attend to the fact that material pleasure is never separate from time. Ripeness is already on the way to rot. Abundance already contains loss. The beautiful thing is beautiful partly because it cannot remain as it is.

That is one reason still life is so often misunderstood as minor art. It can look modest because its subject matter is modest. Fruit, glassware, flowers, bread, fish, books, a skull, a jug, a peeled lemon, a half-empty cup. Yet the modesty is deceptive. Still life takes the objects that usually sit at the edge of attention and moves them to the centre. It does not need to invent grandeur because it has discovered that grandeur was already there, waiting in the bowl.

There is something quietly defiant about this. The world is always trying to organise our attention hierarchically. Look at the spectacle. Look at the grand event. Look at the famous person. Look at the newest thing, the latest thing, the next thing, the thing everyone is currently pretending not to be tired of. Still life refuses the hierarchy. It says: look here. Look at the apple. Look at the knife. Look at the vase. Look at the bruise.

This is not escapism. It is a discipline.

Tate’s description of still life captures the tension neatly: the genre can celebrate material pleasures such as food and wine, but it can also warn of the brevity of those pleasures and of life itself. That is exactly what makes it so useful against our own culture of consumption. It neither rejects material pleasure nor surrenders to it. It pays attention to it.

And attention, properly given, changes the moral texture of pleasure.

The World Is Not Content

The modern problem is not that we enjoy things. Enjoying things is one of the more defensible human activities. The problem is that we are increasingly encouraged to process things before we experience them.

A meal becomes a photograph. A book becomes an aesthetic accessory. A holiday becomes evidence of having been on holiday. A concert becomes a clip. A walk becomes a route map. A conversation becomes a post. A hobby becomes a personal brand. A private enthusiasm becomes, with alarming speed, a content strategy.

This does not mean every photograph is shallow, every post is fake, or every attempt to share pleasure is secretly a moral collapse. That would be silly, and worse, it would be the sort of joyless argument that makes people quite reasonably suspect that the critic’s real objection is other people having fun.

There is pleasure in sharing things. There is pleasure in saying look at this, I saw it and thought of you. There is pleasure in recording a meal, a place, a game, a view, a joke, a stupidly expensive coffee that came in a cup apparently designed by someone who has heard rumours of handles but remains ideologically opposed to them.

The trouble begins when the record of the experience becomes the purpose of the experience. The object is then no longer encountered. It is harvested. Its value lies not in its presence, but in its usefulness as evidence. The world becomes a set of prompts: document this, optimise this, display this, monetise this, archive this, move on.

This is hasty materialism at its purest. It is not the love of things. It is impatience with them.

A society that truly loved material things would not treat them as disposable at the first sign of inconvenience. It would not design objects to fail, furniture to be replaced, clothes to be worn twice, phones to become socially obsolete before they are technically useless. It would not reduce food to fuel one moment and lifestyle performance the next. It would not teach people to think of every object as either an upgrade or clutter.

Our culture does not value the material world too highly. It values possession, novelty and signalling too highly. Those are not the same thing.

To value the material world is to notice dependence. It is to understand that objects come from labour, extraction, craft, transport, design, repair, maintenance and waste. It is to see that the cheap thing is not cheap because it cost little to make, but because the cost has been displaced somewhere else. It is to recognise that a £10 object and a £1,000 object are not simply different quantities of worth. They are different stories about desire, status, scarcity, labour, branding, utility and power.

The market is very good at pricing things. It is much less good at teaching us how to value them.

That distinction matters because the moral critique of consumerism often sounds as though the virtuous person should float above material life altogether. Do not want things. Do not take pleasure in things. Do not be seduced by surfaces. Seek higher things. This is sometimes useful advice, particularly if the thing in question is a £600 air fryer with Bluetooth capability, but as a general philosophy it will not do.

We do not become better by pretending we are not embodied. We do not escape materialism by despising the material world. We escape bad materialism by practising better materialism: slower, more attentive, more grateful, more sceptical of novelty, more aware of cost, more capable of pleasure because less desperate to convert pleasure into proof.

Loot, Clutter and the Art of Looking

This is where games become unexpectedly useful.

Games are full of things. They may be digital things, but they are things all the same within the logic of play: weapons, armour, food, potions, books, keys, coins, crafting materials, furniture, letters, bottles, rugs, statues, bones, flowers, pointless decorative plates, mysterious glowing rocks, and approximately nine thousand red explosive barrels. If games have taught me anything, it is that digital civilisation would collapse without barrels.

Yet games often train us to treat things instrumentally. The object is loot. It has stats. It can be equipped, sold, scrapped, upgraded, combined, consumed, socketed, enchanted, dismantled, stored, or ignored because it is grey-tier rubbish and we have become, in that moment, little digital aristocrats. A world that may have taken artists hundreds of hours to assemble rapidly becomes a series of lightning-fast interactions: take, sell, improve, complete.

This is not a complaint about mechanics as such. Games need systems. Loot can be fun. Progression can be satisfying. There is an ancient and noble pleasure in finding a sword with bigger numbers than the previous sword, especially if the new sword is also on fire. The issue is not that games offer instrumental relationships with objects. The issue is that instrumental attention can crowd out every other kind.

There are games, and moments within games, that resist this.

Think of the domestic interiors in Red Dead Redemption 2, cluttered with the textures of a life nobody will explain to you because the explanation is not the point. Think of the melancholy accumulation of objects in Disco Elysium, where the world feels stained by politics, memory, poverty and failed grandeur. Think of the item descriptions in Dark Souls, where a ring or scrap of armour can feel like a fragment of a ruined civilisation rather than a stat adjustment wearing a hat. Think of the lovingly arranged nonsense in any Bethesda game: walk into a room and you’ll find books, plates, tankards, cheese wheels, all useless and yet somehow essential to the feeling that the place existed before you arrived to rob it.

The best environmental storytelling often works like still life. It does not merely decorate the world. It asks us to infer life from arrangement. The cup beside the bed, the chair angled towards the window, the bloodstain near the door, the child’s toy in the ruin, the meal abandoned halfway through. These things are not important because the quest marker says so. They are important because they produce the sensation of a world with weight.

But games also reveal how fragile this kind of attention is. Place a beautifully rendered apple on a table, and half the players will ignore it. Give it a minor healing effect, and they will strip the orchard bare like locusts with inventory management issues.

Again, this is not a moral failing. It is a design question. Games tell players how to look. If the world rewards only extraction, players will learn to extract. If every object is either useful or useless, players will divide the world accordingly. If every location is a checklist, players will develop checklist vision. The eye goes where the system sends it.

This is why the most interesting games often create moments where usefulness falters. A view that offers no reward. A room whose meaning is atmospheric rather than mechanical. A piece of clutter that cannot be picked up. A meal that exists only to imply ordinary life. A landscape that does not lead efficiently to the next objective. These moments can frustrate the completionist part of the brain, which is frankly good for it. That part of the brain has had things its own way for too long.

The point is not that every game should become a contemplative art installation in which the player spends forty minutes appreciating a spoon. There are limits, and one of them is probably the spoon. The point is that games, like still life, can remind us that attention is a form of relation. To see an object only as a means is to miss some part of its reality. To see a world only as content is to become incapable of inhabiting it.

Better Materialism

There is a social politics here, though it is not quite the one we usually reach for.

The obvious critique says: we consume too much, therefore we should consume less. This is true, or at least true enough to be getting on with. But it is also too thin. People do not only consume because they are greedy. They consume because they are anxious, bored, lonely, tired, pressured, rewarded, targeted, habituated and occasionally because the old kettle has started making a noise like a haunted tractor. A serious critique of consumption has to understand desire rather than simply denounce it.

Still life helps because it does not begin by denouncing pleasure. It begins by looking at it. It lets the peach be desirable, the glass shine, the flower bloom, the tablecloth fold. Then it lets time enter the picture. The fruit bruises. The flower wilts. The skull waits. The candle gutters. The object is not condemned; it is placed back inside mortality.

That is a better model for thinking about material life than either consumerism or puritanism. Consumerism says the thing will complete you, at least until the next thing arrives. Puritanism says the thing is a trap, and you would be better off wanting nothing. Still life says: the thing is real, the pleasure is real, the decay is real, and your attention is part of what gives the encounter its meaning.

This matters because attention is one of the few forms of resistance still available in ordinary life. Not resistance in the grandiose sense. Looking closely at a mug is not going to overthrow capitalism, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably about to sell you a course. But attention can interrupt the habits on which bad materialism depends. It can make us slower to replace, quicker to repair, less impressed by branding, more grateful for use, more alert to waste, more interested in craft, less easily bullied by novelty.

The more closely you look at things, the harder it becomes to treat them as disposable.

That does not mean becoming precious about every object. Some things are badly made. Some things break. Some things deserve the bin, including every novelty kitchen gadget designed to solve a problem that could be addressed with a knife and a modest amount of courage. But the general habit matters. A person who pays attention to material life may own fewer things, not because they have transcended desire, but because they have learned to desire more carefully.

There is a politics in that, but also an ethics, and perhaps an aesthetics too. The point is not to moralise the contents of the cupboard. It is to recover the possibility that ordinary things might be worth sustained attention before they are replaced by ordinary things in a different colour.

Going Nowhere in Particular

Near the end of my old first-draft attempt at this argument, in the comments section somewhere, I reached for Nan Shepherd, which I think was one of the better instincts of the comment. In The Living Mountain, Shepherd writes about the Cairngorms not as scenery to be consumed or conquered, but as a place to be known through repeated, bodily, attentive presence.

‘Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’

That is a profoundly unfashionable way of approaching anything.

We are trained to prefer destinations. Achievements. Views. Summits. Posts. Purchases. Completions. The startling pinnacle, the scenic payoff, the thing one can point to afterwards as proof that the experience was successfully checked off the bucket list. Shepherd’s point is not that destinations are bad. It is that a destination can become a way of not seeing the path.

The same is true of objects. We can own without attending, consume without enjoying, collect without caring, play without inhabiting, travel without arriving. We can move through a world thick with material presence and barely touch it.

Still life asks something slower of us. So do the best games, the best walks, the best meals, the best rooms, the best books, the best conversations with objects whose usefulness is not immediately obvious. They ask us not merely to acquire the world, but to notice it.

Contemplate the hum of the car engine the next time you hurtle down the road, late to pick up the kids. Notice the chatter of passers-by as you walk through a crowd on your way to work. Breathe in the still night air and look up at the silent stars as you walk home after a night out on the town. Look again at the fruit in the fruit bowl. Look at the object on your desk, the worn edge of the table, the controller in your hand, the book you keep meaning to read, the cheap pen that somehow writes better than the expensive one, the jumper you should probably throw away but do not, because it has become part of the private museum of yourself. Consider what it is, how it came to be there, the detail of how it was put together, and try to appreciate the effort, the beauty, the complexity of the object.

The details are not always easy to see. That is half the point.

And if you miss them, you are not rising above the material world.

You are missing the world.

The Memory Everyone Wants a Share Of

There are some historical governments that belong to a party, and some that escape it. Clement Attlee’s government belongs, in the formal sense, to Labour. It was a Labour government, elected on a Labour manifesto, sustained by a Labour majority, and remembered for institutions that still sit at the emotional centre of Labour’s idea of itself: the NHS, social security, council housing, public ownership, full employment, the welfare state.

And yet Attlee no longer quite belongs to Labour, or at least not only to Labour. He has become one of those figures everyone wants to inherit, usually with the inconvenient parts carefully sanded down first. The socialist left sees in him proof that an unapologetically transformative Labour programme can win a majority. The soft left sees a government that fused moral seriousness with practical reform. The Labour right sees moderation, patriotism, Cabinet discipline, NATO, nuclear weapons, and a Prime Minister who kept the party’s more excitable tendencies on a short leash. One-nation conservatives admire his seriousness (and quietly co-opted his grandson, the 3rd Earl Attlee, who was until recently a Tory peer in the Lords) while hoping nobody notices quite how much of the economy his government took into public ownership.

This is a clue. When everyone claims the same past, they are usually not claiming the whole thing.

The problem is not that the post-war settlement is remembered too fondly. It deserves much of its fondness. The Attlee government was one of the most consequential democratic governments in modern British history. It built institutions that changed the material conditions of life for millions of people. It helped turn insecurity, sickness, unemployment and bad housing from private misfortunes into public responsibilities. It did so through Parliament, not insurrection; through legislation, budgets, administration, compromise and the dreary machinery by which, if we are lucky, civilisation occasionally improves itself.

But the memory has become too neat. The real post-war settlement was not a soft-focus photograph of a grateful nation deciding, as one, to build socialism over tea. It was radical, but not romantic. It was idealistic, but not sentimental. It was collectivist, but also austere, bureaucratic, patriotic, centralising, imperial, military, technocratic, moralistic and, at times, frankly rather bossy. The New Jerusalem was not built in a burst of warm national feeling. It was built with ration books, shortages, wage restraint, bomb damage, Treasury anxiety, professional resistance, American loans, cold houses, tired ministers and queues, queues, queues.

That does not make the achievement smaller. It makes it stranger, harder and more impressive.

The Myth of the Clean Mandate

The 1945 election result is the easiest part of the story to mythologise, because it really was extraordinary. Labour won 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 213, securing its first majority government and ending Winston Churchill’s wartime premiership with a brutality that still seems faintly indecent if the story is told only as a morality play about gratitude.

That is a mandate by any sensible definition. But it was not quite the clean mandate later memory often requires it to be. Britain did not simply wake up in July 1945 as a socialist country. It had been changed by war, by class memory, by the failures of the 1930s, by the experience of evacuation, conscription, rationing, bombing, mobilisation, and by the practical discovery that the state, when forced to do so, could organise the country on a scale previously dismissed as impossible.

Let’s not overstate things. The war did not make everyone socialist, but it did alter the boundaries of the politically plausible for all parties. A state that had directed labour, managed supply, planned production, rationed food and mobilised whole populations could hardly return, without argument, to the comforting fiction that social misery was merely an aggregation of private failures. The Beveridge Report did not arrive from nowhere. It spoke to a country already living inside a vast, improvised experiment in collective provision and national discipline. If it could win the war, could the mechanisms of government also win the peace?

Nor was the vote simply an embrace of public ownership in the abstract. It was a verdict on unemployment, poverty, interwar failure, Tory association with the hungry thirties, and the fear that victory in war might be followed by betrayal in peace. The promise of Labour in 1945 was not merely that it would nationalise industries, but that it would not allow the country to return to the conditions that had made the war’s sacrifices feel, in retrospect, like a pause rather than a transformation.

This is where modern factional memory starts to go wrong. The left is right that Labour won with a programme of enormous ambition. The moderates are right that this ambition was made credible by patriotism, discipline and administrative seriousness. Both are wrong when they turn one half of that truth into the whole thing.

Attlee did not win because Britain had suddenly acquired a taste for abstract ideological maximalism. Nor did he win because he was a cautious manager who kept the Labour party’s more radical impulses in check. He won because Labour had earned the right, through the war and before it, to be trusted with reconstruction, just at a point where the lived experience of being a British citizen made their vision of reconstruction seem both credible and plausible.

The Settlement Was Radical, But Not Romantic

There is a dulling effect that comes with reverence. Institutions become so familiar that their original strangeness disappears. The NHS now sits in British political culture as a kind of civic religion, invoked by people who would not dream of defending the wider assumptions that made it possible. Council housing is remembered either as lost social solidarity or as failed municipalism, depending on one’s chosen polemic. Nationalisation is flattened into a word people either cheer or boo, as though coal, rail, steel, electricity and long-distance haulage were all the same kind of object requiring the same kind of argument.

The Attlee government deserves better than this. Its radicalism was not mainly a mood. It was an institutional programme: The National Health Service Act 1946; the National Insurance Act 1946; nationalisation of coal, electricity, transport, railways and long-distance haulage; the Town and Country Planning Act 1947; the Children Act 1948; and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949.

This was not tinkering. It was a deliberate remaking of the relationship between citizen and state. Attlee’s government nationalised roughly one fifth of the British economy. Health care would be provided according to need rather than ability to pay. Working-age people would contribute to a system of social insurance that would support them when they could no longer work. Major utilities and industries would be brought under public control. Land development would become a matter of public permission, not merely private ownership. Children deprived of care would become a public responsibility. Access to countryside would be protected and widened.

It is worth dwelling on this because one kind of revisionism tries to turn Attlee into a moderate whose main virtue was that he kept the left quiet. He did do that, often with some relish - look at how the likes of Harold Laski were kept in their box. But if this is moderation, it is a peculiar form of moderation that creates the National Health Service, rewires social security, nationalises major industries and changes the legal basis of land development.

The better word is not moderate. It is serious.

Seriousness is not the opposite of radicalism. Often it is the condition that makes radicalism matter. The Attlee government was radical because it built things capable of outlasting the rhetoric used to justify them. Its achievements were not merely declarative. They involved structures, budgets, staffing, professional negotiation, local authorities, administrative systems, eligibility rules and all the other unromantic components of real power.

This is why the NHS is such a useful corrective to the myth. It was a moral project, certainly. It was also a political battle with doctors, the British Medical Association, Cabinet colleagues, financial constraints and public expectation. The National Archives notes that while there was broad agreement on the goal of universal healthcare, there were serious disagreements over method; the BMA opposed key elements, and as late as January 1948 described the proposed service as fundamentally unacceptable.

Bevan won, but not by floating above politics. He won through pressure, persuasion, publicity, compromise institutional design, and famously stuffing the mouths of consultants with gold. The NHS launched on 5 July 1948, and 95 per cent of the population had registered before it began. Demand surged. Doctor prescriptions rose from 7 million per month in 1947 to 19 million per month by 1951. The moral breakthrough immediately became an administrative and financial problem, because that is what happens when a right becomes real.

This is not a criticism of the NHS. It is almost the opposite. A utopian promise that never has to survive contact with appointment books, staff shortages and invoices is not yet a public service. The NHS mattered because it translated moral principle into actual use. People got the glasses, the dentures, the consultations and the care they had previously needed but could not afford. That was the point. It was also the cost.

The New Jerusalem Had Queues

If the left sometimes remembers 1945 as an uncomplicated burst of popular socialism, the right sometimes remembers post-war Britain as a grey prison of queues, ration books and dreary collectivist self-denial. The inconvenient truth is that both pictures contain something real. The trick is not to choose one, but to understand why they belonged to the same world.

Post-war Britain was exhausted. It had won the war, but it had not escaped the war’s consequences. Cities had been bombed. Exports had been disrupted. Debt was enormous. The country was short of dollars, short of materials, short of housing, short of food, short of labour in some places and overloaded with expectations almost everywhere. Britain was effectively bankrupt after the war, and the government faced recurring currency crises and shortages of food and resources severe enough that rationing continued long after the fighting stopped.

This is the part that tends to vanish from the commemorative version. The post-war settlement was not only a settlement of rights. It was a settlement of restraint. Food rationing did not end with VE Day. It continued into the 1950s; meat was the last item to be derationed, and food rationing ended completely in 1954. Attlee’s government was notorious for price controls, rationing and austerity, and the Trades Union Congress – the Labour party’s effective founder – agreed to a freeze on wages for most of the government’s existence.

That fact alone should complicate the sloganising. The government that created the NHS also presided over austerity. The government that expanded social rights also demanded discipline. The government that promised a better life also had to tell people, repeatedly, that the better life was not yet available in the quantities they wanted, and that they had to wait.

There was no contradiction here, or at least not a simple one. Solidarity in post-war Britain meant provision, but it also meant limits. The ration book was not outside the moral world of the welfare state. It was part of it. It said, in effect, that scarcity would be managed publicly rather than left to purchasing power alone. It was not freedom in the consumer sense. It was fairness under constraint.

This is one of the hardest things for later politics to inherit, because almost everyone wants the generous half of the settlement without the disciplinary half. The contemporary left often wants the universalism, investment and public provision, but is less comfortable with the moral language of duty, restraint and contribution. The right often admires the duty and restraint while resenting the institutions that gave them egalitarian force. The centre admires the seriousness but prefers not to ask what serious reconstruction would require now.

The New Jerusalem had queues because real social democracy is not a vending machine. It is a covenant. It asks what citizens owe one to another, what the state can reasonably coordinate of that, how scarcity should be shared, and what must be built before people can live the lives politics promises them.

This is the part of 1945 that feels most alien now. We are very good at the language of entitlement and very bad at the language of shared limitation. We know how to demand better services, and often we are right to. We know how to denounce waste, bureaucracy and inefficiency, and often we are right about that too. But we struggle to speak honestly about the fact that serious public goods require trade-offs: tax, planning, administration, prioritisation, patience, institutional competence and, sometimes, the political courage to say not yet.

The Attlee government did not solve that problem. No government solves it permanently. But it faced it more squarely than most.

The State Was Not Just Kind

There is another way in which the memory of 1945 becomes too gentle. The post-war state is often remembered as a caring state: the state of hospitals, houses, family allowances, school milk, social insurance and the promise of cradle-to-grave security. That picture is not false. It is incomplete.

The Attlee state was not just kind. It was powerful.

It planned, taxed, rationed, owned, regulated and directed. It extended care, but it also extended authority. It could be emancipatory and paternalistic in the same gesture. It gave people rights they had never had before, but it also assumed a model of citizenship shaped by work, family, nation, discipline and deference to institutions. It was universalist in ambition, but not especially liberal in temperament.

Again, this does not make it bad. It makes it historical.

The domestic welfare state also sat within a much larger imperial and geopolitical state. Attlee’s government presided over Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan, over Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine and the creation of Israel, over decolonisation in Burma, Ceylon and Jordan, over American loans, Marshall Aid, the Berlin airlift and Britain’s commitment to the United Nations.

This matters because the sentimental domestic memory of 1945 often detaches council houses and hospitals from the world in which they were built. Britain was not merely a plucky social democracy deciding to be nicer to itself. It was a declining imperial power trying to manage exhaustion without admitting too much decline. It was building the welfare state while trying to remain a great power. It was creating the NHS while maintaining global commitments. It was nationalising industries while entering the Cold War security architecture. It was, in other words, not a Sweden with worse weather and better war films.

This is particularly awkward for later inheritances of Attlee. The left likes the NHS but is often less keen on Ernest Bevin’s foreign policy, NATO, nuclear weapons and the anti-communist labour tradition. The Labour right likes Bevin, NATO and Cabinet discipline, but can become strangely hazy about the economic scale of the government’s domestic programme. Conservatives may praise Attlee’s patriotism and seriousness, but rarely dwell on the fact that his patriotism was compatible with very large-scale public ownership and a permanent shift in social rights.

Everyone gets a piece. Nobody gets the whole man.

There is also a deeper point here about the nature of the state. The British left has often remembered the post-war state as though public provision were naturally humane because it was public. But anyone who has dealt with the state in its less inspiring forms knows this is not true. A state can provide care, but it can also humiliate, delay, ration, confuse and command. It can build hospitals and trap disabled people in them. It can house families and demolish neighbourhoods. It can protect workers and ignore citizens. It can be the only institution capable of creating equality at scale, and still be experienced by many people as remote, cold or arbitrary.

That is why simply invoking 1945 is not enough. The post-war settlement was not an argument for big government as such. It was an argument for a capable, legitimate, solidaristic state that could convert collective sacrifice into shared security. That is a much harder thing to build than a larger public sector.

Why the Memory Keeps Being Useful

So why do we keep misremembering it?

Partly because all political traditions need ancestors. Nobody wants to admit that they are making everything up as they go along, even when this would be a refreshingly honest campaign slogan. The past supplies authority. It gives arguments a family tree. It turns preferences into inheritances.

The post-war settlement is especially useful because it has the rare quality of being both morally elevated and institutionally concrete. It is not just a mood or an aspiration. You can point to things: hospitals, houses, benefits, national parks, public industries, planning law. The story offers the comfort of proof. Once, it says, Britain was able to do big things.

And that is true. It was.

But the usefulness of the memory encourages selectivity. Each faction takes from 1945 the parts that flatter its current instincts. The socialist left remembers public ownership and the welfare state, but sometimes forgets austerity, patriotism, wage restraint, anti-communism and the administrative conservatism of many Labour ministers. The Labour right remembers discipline, respectability and patriotism, but sometimes downplays just how materially redistributive and structurally interventionist the government was. Conservatives remember national unity and civic seriousness, but prefer to forget that the settlement they often claim to admire was built through precisely the kind of state power they now tend to distrust.

This is not simply hypocrisy. It is how memory works. We do not inherit the past as a complete archive. We inherit fragments, symbols, family stories, images, anniversaries and usable myths. The danger comes when the myth stops being a doorway into history and becomes a substitute for it.

1945 is particularly vulnerable to this because it has acquired a liturgical quality in British politics. The words themselves now do half the work: Attlee, Bevan, Beveridge, blitz spirit, New Jerusalem, cradle to grave, spirit of ‘45. They carry emotional weight before the argument begins. The danger is that invocation replaces thought.

This is visible whenever modern politics tries to borrow the authority of 1945 without confronting the differences. Britain today is not the Britain of 1945. Its class structure is different. Its economy is different. Its housing market is different. Its media ecology is different. Its family forms, working lives, unions, local government, empire, public expectations and experiences of bureaucracy are different. Citizens are less deferential, more individualised, more vocal, more sceptical of institutions and, in many cases, more accustomed to experiencing the state as something that obstructs or processes them rather than mobilises them.

That does not make 1945 irrelevant. It makes lazy analogy dangerous.

The old settlement was built in a society where the legitimacy of collective discipline had been reinforced by war. Our society has plenty of insecurity, but far less shared discipline. It has plenty of demand for public goods, but much weaker trust in the institutions that deliver them. It has deep nostalgia for competence, but much less patience with the compromises competence requires.

This is why both nostalgic revivalism and smug dismissal miss the point. The question is not whether we can return to 1945. We cannot, and should not pretend otherwise. The question is whether we can recover the habits that made 1945 politically creative: seriousness about institutions, moral clarity about social insecurity, patience with administration, willingness to use the state, willingness to reform the state, and a national story capacious enough to make solidarity feel like common purpose rather than sectional demand.

The point is not to dress up in Attlee’s old suit. It probably would not fit, and in any case there is something faintly tragic about political cosplay after a certain age. The point is to ask what kind of politics can build durable institutions under the conditions we actually inhabit.

What 1945 Can Still Teach Us

The most useful lesson of 1945 is not that Labour should nationalise more things, or that it should be more moderate, or that it should say British more often, or that every political problem can be solved by finding the nearest available grandparent and asking what they thought of Nye Bevan.

The useful lesson is that democratic politics can build. It can do more than signal virtue, manage decline, distribute blame or triangulate around polling. It can create institutions that alter the basic texture of life. It can take experiences previously treated as private misfortune and make them matters of public justice. It can enlarge freedom not by leaving people alone in insecurity, but by giving them the material foundations on which a freer life can be lived.

But the second lesson is just as important: building is hard. It is not enough to want humane outcomes. The Attlee government was not great because it had good intentions. Plenty of governments have those, or at least have press releases claiming them. It was great because it joined moral purpose to machinery.

That is the part worth recovering. Not the exact machinery, necessarily. Some of it belonged to its time. Some of it failed. Some of it became rigid. Some of it produced new problems. Nationalisation was not a magic spell. Council housing could be liberating, but it could also become bureaucratic, stigmatised or badly maintained when the political economy around it changed. The NHS remains the greatest institutional achievement of post-war Britain, but even at its birth it had to balance universal aspiration with cost, workforce and demand. The National Archives’ account of the NHS is striking precisely because it shows the institution’s creation as both visionary and embattled, with Bevan’s idealism constantly rubbing against professional power and financial anxiety.

That is what adult admiration looks like. Not worship. Not debunking. Gratitude with the lights on.

If 1945 still has a claim on us, it is because it reminds us that the state can be an instrument of common life rather than merely a referee between private interests. It also reminds us that the state must earn that role. People will not trust public power simply because it calls itself public. They will trust it when it works, when it is intelligible, when it treats them with dignity, when it gives them some meaningful stake in the institutions that govern their lives.

That may be where a modern post-war memory needs to move beyond the old argument between statism and market liberalism. The central issue is not whether the state should be big or small, but whether it is capable, democratic, responsive and legitimate. A bad state can make social democracy feel like a queue with a logo. A hollowed-out state can make freedom feel like abandonment. A serious state has to avoid both.

The post-war settlement is misremembered because we want its authority without its difficulty. We want the NHS without the Cabinet fights, the council houses without the bomb damage and material shortages, the national story without the empire, the solidarity without the ration book, the radicalism without the restraint, the moral clarity without the compromises, and the nostalgia without the actual past.

But the real 1945 is more useful than the myth. It tells us that the welfare state was not inevitable. It was made. It tells us that institutions do not descend from moral feeling. They have to be argued for, designed, staffed, funded, defended and revised. It tells us that serious reform requires both imagination and discipline. It tells us that a government can be radical without being theatrical, patriotic without being kitsch, practical without being bloodless, and democratic without being timid.

The New Jerusalem was not built by people who thought history had ended in their favour. It was built by people who knew the country was exhausted, damaged, indebted and impatient, and decided that this was not an argument against reconstruction but the reason for it.

That is the inheritance worth keeping. Not the postcard version. Not Attlee as factional mascot. Not 1945 as a magic year in which Britain briefly became morally uncomplicated.

The real thing was harder than that.

Which is why it mattered.

I do not say this with pride, exactly, but nor do I say it with shame. Some people climb mountains, some people learn dead languages, some people spend their evenings parrying demigods with the timing of a concert pianist. I usually play games on easy. Or story mode. Or whatever phrase the games industry now uses to avoid admitting that some of us would quite like to see the ending before our wrists seize up and our self-esteem leaves the room.

I bought Elden Ring largely because George R. R. Martin’s name was attached to it, which, in retrospect, is a bit like buying a horse because you liked War Horse and then discovering you have entered the Grand National.

My first hours in the Lands Between were not triumphant. I was killed almost immediately by the Grafted Scion, but because the game carried on, I assumed this was probably meant to happen. Then I made it through the tutorial and defeated the Godrick Soldier without dying, which gave me the dangerous impression that I had understood something. Then I reached Limgrave.

I had not yet seen a non-ghost, non-cutscene NPC. So when I saw White Mask Varré standing there, looking suspicious in the way that almost everyone in Elden Ring looks suspicious, I hit him. This was not, it turned out, the intended social protocol. By the time I realised he was speaking to me rather than preparing to murder me, it was too late. He became extremely committed to the bit. What followed was a long, humiliating cycle in which he killed me, I respawned, and he killed me again. Eventually, through perseverance, luck, and the kind of grim stubbornness that has caused many avoidable disasters throughout human history, I killed him.

Then I met the Tree Sentinel.

This, I thought, was absurd. Why would you put a boss like that at the very beginning of the game? Why give a new player a beautiful open field, a dazzling golden horseman, and then have him flatten them into paste every time they tried to make progress? I put the game down for a few days and considered writing the whole thing off as a bad investment.

Then I discovered something important. You can just go around him.

This sounds embarrassingly obvious now. At the time, it felt like a design revelation. Elden Ring was not asking me to beat everything in front of me. It was asking me to notice what kind of obstacle I was looking at. Some enemies were challenges. Some were warnings. Some were environmental hazards with a health bar. The Tree Sentinel was not a test I had to pass before entering the game. He was part of the game’s grammar.

That distinction matters, because much of the argument about difficulty in Elden Ring collapses several different questions into one.

There is the accessibility question, which is serious and should not be waved away by people whose main contribution to cultural criticism is typing git gud under strangers’ comments. There is the question of whether certain quality-of-life features would make the game more legible without making it less meaningful. I still think the absence of anything resembling a quest log is, at times, less an artistic decision than a practical joke being played on people with jobs. There is the genre question: whether every game should be designed for every player, or whether some games are entitled to a narrower and more demanding form. And then there is the artistic question: what is the difficulty actually doing?

The problem with the difficulty debate is not that one side cares about accessibility and the other cares about artistic integrity. That is too flattering to everyone involved. The problem is that difficulty is often treated as a single substance: either a virtue, proving the game’s seriousness, or a vice, proving its hostility. But difficulty can be many different things. It can be a gatekeeping device. It can be bad tuning. It can be a lack of accessibility options. It can be nostalgia for a more punitive era of game design. It can also be atmosphere, pacing, narrative pressure and worldbuilding.

In Elden Ring, difficulty is not incidental to the experience. It is one of the main ways the world tells you what it is.

The Lands Between are not arranged like a theme park, with appropriately levelled attractions and helpful signs telling you which ride to queue for next. They are broken, ancient, hostile and indifferent. You arrive late, ignorant and underpowered, surrounded by the remains of conflicts you do not understand. The world does not explain itself because, in narrative terms, it has no reason to care whether you understand it. You are not the chosen one arriving at the start of history. You are a Tarnished wandering through the wreckage after the catastrophe has already happened.

A friendlier version of the same game might have preserved the lore, the bosses, the map, the gorgeous melancholy of the setting. It might even have been a very good game. But it would have meant something different. If the Lands Between were scaled around my comfort, if every enemy politely registered my level and adjusted itself accordingly, the world would cease to feel like a place that existed before me and beyond me. It would become a sequence of content.

That is the dullest possible word for what Elden Ring is doing.

Its difficulty forces a different rhythm of attention. You cannot always sprint towards the golden arrow. You cannot assume that the next thing in front of you is the next thing you are meant to defeat. You learn to read terrain. You learn to retreat. You learn that a cave, a ruin, a graveyard or a suspiciously empty patch of land may contain the one weapon, spell, flask upgrade or scrap of knowledge that makes the impossible merely dreadful.

This is why the open world matters. In a more linear game, an early overpowered boss can feel like a brick wall. In Elden Ring, the Tree Sentinel is not a brick wall. He is weather. He is topography. He is a visible statement of principle: this world is not arranged around your entitlement to progress.

That does not mean the game wants you to suffer for suffering’s sake. It is not simply difficult in the manner of an old arcade machine designed to extract another coin from a child with poor impulse control. It is difficult in a way that teaches caution, curiosity and humility. It makes ignorance dangerous, which is thematically appropriate for a game so invested in fragments, ruins, half-truths and buried histories.

This is where the difficulty becomes narrative.

When you spend an hour being murdered by the same boss, you start to notice things. You listen to the same lines of dialogue. You look properly at the arena. You read the item descriptions because, frankly, anything might help. You start asking why an enemy is where they are, what they are guarding, what their design suggests about their place in the world. A sword is not just a sword; it is a clue. A spell is not just a spell; it is a remnant of a school, a faction, a catastrophe. A boss is not just a test of reflexes; it is a piece of environmental storytelling with a murderously large health bar.

This is not unique to Elden Ring, but Elden Ring makes unusually good use of it. Its story is not delivered as a tidy sequence of cutscenes in which characters explain the plot with the patience of museum audio guides. It is scattered. It is half-buried. It is overheard, excavated, inferred. The game’s opacity and its difficulty reinforce each other. You are not just told that the world is ruined and unknowable. You experience it as ruined and unknowable.

There is a risk, of course, of overstating this. Not every frustrating thing in a difficult game is secretly profound. Sometimes a camera is bad. Sometimes a runback is tedious. Sometimes an interface is obscure in the way that an unlabelled fuse box is obscure. The defence of difficulty should not become a theology in which every irritation is revealed as grace.

Nor does defending Elden Ring’s difficulty mean endorsing the tedious machismo that clings to these games. The worst version of Souls fandom talks as if the highest purpose of art is to sort the worthy from the unworthy, preferably while being insufferable to strangers online. That is not an argument. It is a social performance with a dodge-roll button.

A serious defence of difficulty has to be more careful than that. It has to admit that exclusion can be real. It has to distinguish between challenge and inaccessibility, between opacity and carelessness, between meaningful friction and needless inconvenience. It also has to accept that some people will not enjoy this kind of experience, and that their dislike is not a moral failure. A game can be excellent without being hospitable to everyone. A player can bounce off an excellent game without being wrong.

But once those concessions are made, the point still stands. The difficulty of Elden Ring is not just a badge of identity. It is not merely there so that people who completed it can feel superior to people who did not. At its best, it is a form of atmosphere. It gives weight to the world. It makes exploration feel earned. It turns progress into comprehension. It slows the player down enough to notice the story that would otherwise be missed.

I do not think this argument holds for every game. I would not want every RPG to become Elden Ring. There are many games where an easy mode is not only desirable but obviously harmless. There are games where difficulty settings broaden the audience without compromising the work. There are games where the appeal is the story, the characters, the choices, the spectacle, the mood, and the combat is mostly there to give everyone something to do between conversations.

But Elden Ring is not one of those games.

Its difficulty is part of its fiction. It makes the Lands Between feel ancient, dangerous and indifferent. It makes victory feel less like consumption and more like survival. It makes the player inhabit the world’s brokenness, not merely observe it. To make the game easy in the wrong way would not simply lower the challenge. It would change the texture of the place.

That is why my most satisfying moment in Elden Ring was not becoming Elden Lord. It was going back to Limgrave, over-levelled and over-equipped, and reducing the Tree Sentinel to crimson finger-paint with a large hammer.

Petty? Yes. Spiritually limited? Almost certainly. But it meant something because the game had first made him mean something. He was not just the first hard enemy I found. He was the point at which I started to understand what kind of game I was playing.

Elden Ring is not easy. But the point is not that hard games are inherently better, or that players who struggle should be mocked, or that inconvenience is always artistic integrity wearing a funny hat. The point is that, in this particular game, difficulty is one of the ways the world speaks.

It says: you are small.

It says: you do not understand this place yet.

It says: come back later.

And, eventually, if you are patient enough, it lets you answer.

There is a comforting way to think about voting, particularly among people who care quite a lot about politics. You vote for the party that most closely expresses your values. You vote with your conscience. You vote for the kind of politics you want to see in the world. You walk into the polling station, make your small democratic mark, and emerge, if not quite morally cleansed, then at least politically legible.

This is not a ridiculous instinct. In many ways, it is a noble one. There is something grim about reducing democracy to a permanent spreadsheet of lesser evils, tactical squeezes, marginal wards and grim-faced calculations about which candidate is least likely to produce the worst available outcome. Nobody joins a political party because they are excited by the phrase ‘locally best-placed alternative’. Nobody campaigns in the rain because their soul is stirred by efficient anti-opponent vote consolidation. At least, if they do, they should probably get out more.

But there is a problem with treating a vote as though it were primarily an expression of personal identity. The problem is not that values do not matter. The problem is that electoral systems matter more.

In a proportional system, voting for the party that most closely represents your views is, broadly speaking, a reasonable way of building political representation. The votes stack up; the seats follow, more or less; coalition-building then happens in the open. But in first-past-the-post, the meaning of your vote is not exhausted by what you intended it to mean. You may think you’re registering a protest, rewarding courage, punishing timidity, expressing frustration, or refusing to compromise. The counting system does not care. It asks one brutally simple question: who got more votes than the next person?

That distinction matters because, in May 2026, a large number of progressive voters appear to have voted as though they lived in one system, while their votes were counted under another.

The Green surge was real

I’m going to use the city of Sheffield, in South Yorkshire, as an example here, for reasons which I will explain later. And before I get too far, it’s very important to start by saying this clearly: the Green Party’s rise in Sheffield was not bad, stupid or illegitimate.

The Greens had an excellent election. They won six additional council seats, took 47,886 votes across the city, reached 27.5% of the vote share, and could plausibly describe themselves as the most popular party in Sheffield by votes cast. That is not a rounding error or a protest vote in the old dismissive sense. It is a serious political event.

Nor did it come from nowhere. The national context mattered. Labour entered the 2026 local elections as an unpopular government, facing disillusionment from parts of the coalition that had delivered its landslide only two years earlier. YouGov’s post-election polling found that only 46% of 2024 Labour voters who voted in the 2026 local elections stayed with Labour, while 22% switched to the Greens and 16% to the Liberal Democrats. It also, tellingly, found that voters were more likely to say their choice was driven by which party best represented their values than by local issues, and that Green voters were particularly likely to frame their decision in values terms.

There was also a new national Green story. Zack Polanski’s leadership had given the party greater visibility, a sharper populist edge, and a narrative of class politics which has been lacking from the Green offer for decades; by late 2025, the Guardian was already reporting a major membership surge under his leadership. Then came Gorton and Denton. On 26 February 2026, Hannah Spencer won the by-election for the Greens with 14,980 votes, ahead of Reform on 10,578 and Labour on 9,364. For Green supporters, and for many Labour voters looking for permission to defect leftwards, that result seemed to show something important: Greens could win in unexpected places. They were not merely a repository for nice opinions in safe middle-class neighbourhoods, as they had been in the Caroline Lucas era. Maybe they could beat Labour and Reform at the same time?

That was the story many progressive voters took into May.

The difficulty is that Sheffield is not one political place. It is several.

Sheffield is not one election

Sheffield is a useful city through which to think about this problem because its political geography is unusually stark.

Unlike many other cities in the UK, the city’s social divides are not remotely evenly scattered. University of Sheffield public health mapping describes a clear east-west gradient in life expectancy, with people west of the city centre tending to live longer than those in the east. It also notes that Sheffield’s more affluent areas tend to lie west of the city centre, while the east is shaped more heavily by former industrial areas. This is not just a sociological curiosity. It matters electorally because the same political gesture does not have the same effect in different parts of the city.

In parts of central, western and south-western Sheffield, a Green vote in 2026 often helped elect or re-elect a Green councillor. In Ecclesall, Graves Park, Nether Edge and Sharrow, Walkley, Manor Castle, Burngreave, City, Hillsborough, Gleadless Valley and Broomhill and Sharrow Vale, Green votes translated into Green representation. In those places, whether one welcomes or regrets the outcome, the vote did what its voters probably intended it to do.

But in many of the wards where Reform won, the Green surge did something very different. It did not build Green representation. It helped fragment the anti-Reform vote.

That is not a moral judgement on every individual voter. No voter can be expected to run a full ward-level model in their head while standing in a school hall with a pencil. Parties have responsibilities too: to campaign properly, to make tactical realities clear, and to earn the votes they ask for. But once the votes are counted, the arithmetic is not subtle.

In Stocksbridge and Upper Don, in the northern edge of the city, Reform won with 2,554 votes. The Liberal Democrats came second with 2,208. Labour took 1,160 and the Greens 638. A clear majority of voters did not vote Reform. But the non-Reform vote was divided in a way that allowed Reform to win.

In Park and Arbourthorne, in the south of the city, Reform won with 1,740 votes. Labour came second with 1,287. The Greens took 1,009, the Liberal Democrats 193, and the Conservatives 210. Again, Reform did not need to persuade most people. It only needed its opponents to disperse.

In Shiregreen and Brightside in the post-industrial northeast, Reform won with 1,671 votes. Labour took 951, the Greens 707, and the Liberal Democrats 192. The combined Labour-Green-Lib Dem vote was higher than Reform’s total. It just did not belong to one candidate.

In East Ecclesfield (northeast) Reform won with 2,365 votes. The Liberal Democrats took 1,850, Labour 1,203, and the Greens 442. In Mosborough (southeast), Reform won with 2,114, while the Liberal Democrats, Labour and Greens together polled 2,730. In the southeastern Woodhouse ward, Reform won with 1,987; Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens together reached 2,019.

Beighton (also southeast) is especially instructive because it shows why this is not simply a complaint about Green voters. Reform took both seats up there. The two Reform candidates received 2,197 and 1,989 votes; the two Liberal Democrats received 1,701 and 1,636; Labour’s two candidates received 683 and 655; and the Greens received 436 and 371. The point is not that Green voters alone handed the ward to Reform. It is that Labour and Green voters in that ward were participating in a contest their preferred parties were not in a position to win.

That may feel unfair. It may even be unfair. But unfairness is quite a large part of the point.

The fantasy of expressive voting

The fantasy exposed by these results is not that Green voters are uniquely vain, or that Labour voters are uniquely entitled, or that Liberal Democrats are uniquely convinced that every ward is secretly a Lib Dem target if you only deliver enough Focus leaflets.

The fantasy is that voting for a progressive party is primarily an expression of personal virtue, rather than a decision with institutional consequences.

For a certain kind of voter, ‘I voted Green’ does not simply mean ‘I thought the Green candidate was best placed to win here’. It can mean: I care about climate change; I opposed Labour’s position on Gaza; I want politics to be bolder; I refused to reward triangulation; I did not let myself get blackmailed by lesser-evilism. For another kind of voter, ‘I voted Labour’ can mean: I am on the side of working people; I want to stop the far right; I believe in public services; I am not indulging protest politics. For some Liberal Democrat voters, especially in wards where they are the established anti-Reform or anti-Conservative force, the vote carries its own localised version of civic seriousness: we know how to win here; we do the ward work; we are not playing at politics.

All of those identities may contain some truth. None of them changes the arithmetic.

This is the uncomfortable thing about first-past-the-post. It strips votes of their intended emotional complexity. It does not ask whether your Green vote was anti-Reform in spirit. It does not ask whether your Labour vote was cast by someone who would have preferred the Lib Dems to Reform. It does not ask whether your Lib Dem vote was a small-l liberal protest against both Labour complacency and Reform populism. It simply counts.

And if the anti-Reform vote is split three ways, Reform can win with a minority.

This is why ‘vote with your conscience’ is not quite the innocent phrase it appears to be. Conscience is not irrelevant. It is one of the reasons people enter politics in the first place. But conscience without strategy can become self-indulgence, particularly when the cost is paid by someone else.

The Green vote in Broomhill and Sharrow Vale did not carry the same consequences as the Green vote in Park and Arbourthorne. A Labour vote in Darnall (narrowly won) did not mean the same thing as a Labour vote in Beighton (distantly lost). A Lib Dem vote in Dore and Totley did not mean the same thing as a Lib Dem vote in Shiregreen and Brightside. The same party label, placed in a different local contest, performed a different political function.

This is why voting cannot simply be treated as a personality trait. A ballot paper is not a mirror. It is a lever.

Sheffield’s progressive alliance problem

There is an additional irony in Sheffield, because this is not a city that has been obviously incapable of plural progressive politics.

For the five years before the 2026 election, Sheffield City Council was run by a coalition government - first of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and later adding the Greens. And under their committee system, all political groups are represented on committees in proportion to their seats. After the 2026 election, the rotating cast of the progressive alliance rotated again; Labour and the Greens formed a joint administration, with the Liberal Democrats moving into opposition, while the council again emphasised proportional committee representation and cross-party involvement in decision-making.

In other words, Sheffield is not an example of a city where Labour, Greens and Liberal Democrats cannot work together. Quite the opposite. It is one of the better examples of grown-up pluralism in local government.

That makes the election result more revealing, not less.

Supporters of proportional representation often argue that British politics would become more mature if voters were allowed to express their genuine preferences and parties were then required to negotiate. Sheffield’s recent council history gives some strong support to that view. The city has already lived with coalition, committee governance and cross-party decision-making. It has not collapsed into the sea, though given the state of local government finance, one should not tempt fate.

But the voting system has not caught up with the political reality. Sheffield voters are behaving in an increasingly plural political culture while still voting under a system that punishes pluralism. That is the problem. A Labour-Green-Lib Dem council chamber may be capable of cooperation after the election. But in ward after ward, Labour, Green and Lib Dem candidates still have to fight one another before the election, even where the obvious beneficiary of that fight is Reform.

So Sheffield becomes a kind of democratic contradiction. In the Town Hall, progressive parties can share power. On the ballot paper, their voters can split the vote and hand seats to a party most of them did not want.

That is not a sign that voters are stupid. It is a sign that the system is stupid. But knowing that the system is stupid does not exempt voters or parties from having to understand it.

Tactical voting is not betrayal

One of the reasons tactical voting is so emotionally difficult is that it feels like a kind of disloyalty.

For party members, this is obvious. Asking a Labour member to vote Liberal Democrat, or a Green member to vote Labour, or a Liberal Democrat member to vote Green, feels like asking them to suspend a part of their political identity. Parties are not merely administrative vehicles. They are communities, histories, habits, friendships, grudges, WhatsApp groups, grudges about WhatsApp groups, and a surprisingly large number of people who know exactly which clipboard belongs to which campaign group.

But most voters are not party members. Their attachments are looser, less procedural, and often more values-based. For them, tactical voting can feel less like organisational betrayal and more like moral compromise. Why should they vote for a party they do not especially like? Why should Labour be rewarded for disappointing them? Why should the Lib Dems inherit votes from people who do not share their politics? Why should the Greens be treated as a safe protest in some places and a dangerous indulgence in others?

These are not silly questions. Parties that want tactical support have to earn it. Labour cannot assume that left-leaning voters will come home because the alternative is worse. The Liberal Democrats cannot assume that being locally best placed absolves them of the need to make a genuinely positive case. The Greens cannot claim the moral energy of progressive protest while ignoring the wards where they are not realistically in contention.

But tactical voting is not the abandonment of principle. It is the application of that principle under the constraints that reality places in front of you.

If your principle is to increase Green representation, then voting Green in a winnable Green ward makes sense. If your principle is to keep Reform out, then voting Green in a ward where the contest is Labour versus Reform, or Lib Dem versus Reform, does not serve that principle at all. The same is true in reverse. A Labour voter who wants to stop Reform in a Lib Dem-facing ward is not being more principled by voting Labour anyway. They are confusing the party they prefer nationally with the electoral instrument available locally.

This is the boring-but-true answer at the heart of the argument: local viability matters.

Not because it is inspiring. Not because it looks good on a poster. Not because anyone dreams of building a politics around the phrase “please check the previous ward result before making a symbolic point”. But because first-past-the-post makes it matter.

The cost of getting it wrong

The consequences of this are not abstract.

When Reform wins council seats on a minority of the vote, it gains councillors, resources, visibility, casework operations, local legitimacy, committee places, data, social media content, and proof of momentum. It gains the ability to say: we are not merely a national protest vehicle; we are winning here. In local politics, that matters. Parties become real by occupying institutions.

This is one of the great asymmetries of protest politics. A voter may experience their ballot as a message sent to Labour, or to the Greens, or to the political class in general. But the institution receives it as a seat for somebody else.

That is why the phrase ‘sending a message’ is so often inadequate. Electoral systems do not send messages with much precision. They allocate power. A voter may believe they have sent Labour a warning about Gaza, or climate, or public services, or the government’s timidity. But if the local result is a Reform councillor, then the message arrives with a councillor attached.

This is not an argument for shutting down dissent. It is an argument for taking consequences seriously.

The progressive vote is not one thing. It is a bundle of competing instincts: environmental urgency, social democracy, liberal constitutionalism, anti-racism, local competence, anti-austerity politics, public service reform, anger about Gaza, anger about Westminster, anger about potholes, anger about the price of everything, and, in some cases, anger at being asked yet again to vote for a party that has disappointed you.

But first-past-the-post does not reward the richness of that bundle. It rewards concentration.

That means progressive politics has to learn a discipline that does not always come naturally to it. It has to distinguish between a party being right, a party being preferable, and a party being viable. It has to distinguish between a vote that expresses a value and a vote that advances it. It has to stop treating tactical intelligence as moral cowardice.

The progressive vote is not a personality trait

There is a case, after Sheffield, for humility from everyone.

Labour should not look at Reform gains in its former heartlands and conclude that the only problem was irresponsible Green voters. That would be far too convenient. If Labour loses enough trust that its previous voters are willing to take risks with the local consequences, that is Labour’s problem too.

The Greens should not look at their citywide vote share and conclude that every Green vote was equally productive. Their surge produced councillors in some places. In others, it helped create the conditions for Reform to win.

The Liberal Democrats should not imagine themselves outside the story. In several wards, they were either the best-placed anti-Reform alternative or part of the fragmentation that allowed Reform through. Their local strength can make them essential in some contests and irrelevant in others. The trick is knowing which is which.

And voters, too, have to give up a comforting fiction. A vote is not a little autobiography. It is not a certificate of virtue. It is not a consumer preference, or a dating profile for your political soul.

It is an intervention in an electoral system.

Sometimes that intervention says exactly what you meant it to say. Sometimes it says something else entirely. Sometimes it lets you elect the person you wanted. But only sometimes.

That is the hard lesson of Sheffield in 2026. Reform won the most seats, but the city did not suddenly become a Reform city. In ward after ward, most voters did not vote Reform. But Reform did not need Sheffield to become a Reform city. It needed progressive voters to behave as though their private meaning mattered more than the public count.

The progressive vote is not a personality trait. It is not proof of inner cleanliness. It is not a reusable badge of moral distinction. In the system we actually have, it is a lever. Sometimes it opens the door to the politics you want. Sometimes it opens the door to the politics you most fear.

The trick is learning the difference before the count, not afterwards.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to panic about Doctor Who right now.

A Christmas special disappears, a showrunner leaves, the familiar machinery of production goes quiet - and a certain part of the audience immediately hears the hollow tolling of 1989. Somewhere, in the deeper recesses of British television memory, Sylvester McCoy is wandering away from the TARDIS again, the lights are going out, and a generation of fans are being quietly advised to make do with novels, audio dramas, fanzines, rumours, VHS tapes and increasingly elaborate grief.

It’s not difficult to understand why that anxiety has resurfaced. Doctor Who has form here. The show has been cancelled before, or at least allowed to die in the particular institutional way large organisations sometimes prefer: slowly, awkwardly, with everyone insisting that no final decision has been made until the final decision has somehow already happened. For fans with a long enough memory, the language of pauses, futures, reassessments and new directions can sound less like renewal than a polite letter from the undertaker.

But I don’t think that is quite what is happening now.

The boring-but-true answer is that Doctor Who is almost certainly coming back. It is too valuable, too recognisable, too internationally marketable, and too deeply embedded in the BBC’s own story of itself to be casually abandoned. There is a brand architecture, to use the sort of phrase that ought to be kept several rooms away from Doctor Who but, regrettably, explains quite a lot.

Doctor Who is not a fragile cult object in the way it was in the early 1990s. It is not merely an old programme with a loyal audience and a questionable place in the schedules. It is one of the BBC’s few genuinely global pieces of television mythology. You do not need to be especially sentimental to see why the corporation would want to keep hold of it. You only need a spreadsheet.

So the interesting question is not: will Doctor Who survive?

The interesting question is: what does survival mean?

Because there is a version of survival that is not very reassuring at all. Doctor Who could return with a healthy budget, an international production partner, a fresh visual identity, a new Doctor, a new format, and a press release full of all the correct nouns. It could be glossy, expensive, technically competent, and broadly intelligible to a global streaming audience. It could look much more impressive than several eras of Doctor Who have ever looked. It could have convincing aliens, coherent action sequences, a cinematic colour grade and a season-long mythology leading to a fulfilling ending.

And it could still not feel like Doctor Who.

That is the concern worth taking seriously. Not that the BBC will bury the show in a filing cabinet and pretend it’s gone to live on a farm. Rather, that in the process of securing the programme as a valuable piece of intellectual property, it may become less clear who is responsible for understanding what the property actually is.

Doctor Who is very easy to describe badly. It is a science-fiction series about a time-travelling alien who changes face and travels around in a police box. This is true in the same sense that Hamlet is a play about a student with family problems. The description is not false, exactly. It is just so thin that it misses nearly everything that matters.

Doctor Who is not simply science fiction. It is ‘family show’ 1960s-era children’s television that grew up without ever entirely ceasing to be children’s television. It is gothic horror in municipal corridors. It is satire with monsters in it. It is an adventure serial, a morality play, a theatrical contraption, a fairytale about curiosity, a weekly argument against cruelty, and a machine for turning budgetary inadequacy into imaginative force. Its cheapness was never merely cheapness; at its best, it became a kind of expressive grammar. A quarry somewhere in South Wales could be an alien world because the programme had already trained you to meet it halfway. A corridor could be frightening because the camera, the music and the idea had decided it was. A sink plunger stuck on a pepper-pot could become an icon because Doctor Who, at some fundamental level, has always understood that terror is not the same thing as realism.

That is why the tender matters.

Not because independent production is inherently bad. It plainly isn’t. Doctor Who has already been made through various production arrangements, and the modern revival has itself depended on partnerships, outside companies, complex rights structures and the ordinary practical machinery of television. Nor is the point that only British writers, or only lifelong fans, or only people who can identify The Sensorites from a blurred production still should be allowed near it. That way lies smallness, gatekeeping and the sort of fan culture that mistakes possession for love.

The point is more precise than that. Doctor Who needs creative custodians who understand which parts of the format are flexible and which parts are load-bearing.

That distinction is everything.

The show is built for change. It has a lead actor whose departure is written into the premise. Its tone can shift from horror to comedy to tragedy to nonsense before the credits have finished cooling. It can be made for children, families, students, nostalgics, newcomers, casual viewers and people who own replicas of the Key to Time (like my dad!). It can tell a story about existential grief one week (“The End of the World“) and farting aliens the next (“Aliens of London“). It can survive absurdity. In fact, absurdity is one of its natural habitats.

But because Doctor Who can change almost anything, people sometimes mistake it for a format with no essential shape. That is where the danger lies. Reinvention is not the same as replacement. You can rearrange the theme tune, but the opening titles still need to feel as if they are pulling you through time itself. You can redesign the TARDIS, but it still needs to feel like a home, a stage, a haunted machine and a joke about British public infrastructure. You can reimagine the Daleks, but they still need to carry the awful simplicity of hatred trapped inside a metal tank. You can make the Doctor darker, stranger, angrier, sadder or more vulnerable, but the character cannot simply become another chosen-one action hero with a tragic family destiny and a marketable silhouette.

This is where the history of the revival matters.

Before I go on too far, let’s just get it said, clearly and upfront: the modern Doctor Who did not work only because it was made by fans. That would be much too neat. Plenty of fans have bad ideas. Some fans have catastrophic ideas. There are fan theories that should be sealed in concrete and lowered gently into the Mariana Trench. Nor was every great figure in the revival a lifelong obsessive. Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor works precisely because he does not feel like a fan auditioning for ownership of the toybox. He brings seriousness, damage, class anger, danger and emotional credibility. He makes the revival possible because he treats the Doctor as a dramatic role rather than a sacred relic.

Still, it is striking how much of the 2005 revival was shaped by people for whom Doctor Who was not merely an assignment but a beloved passion project.

Russell T Davies did not revive Doctor Who as a lucrative genre format he had identified after an IP audit. He revived the programme as someone who had carried it in his head since childhood. His great achievement in 2005 was that he understood Doctor Who well enough to change it. He made it faster, more emotionally direct, more working-class, more contemporary, more romantically charged, more comfortable with soap, grief and domestic consequence. He rebuilt it for a post-Buffy, post-reality-TV, post-New Labour BBC One audience.

But he also knew what not to remove. The Doctor remained an eccentric moral intelligence rather than a conventional hero. The TARDIS remained impossible, intimate and daft. The monsters mattered, but so did the ordinary people facing them. The show could go to the end of the world, but it also had to come home to a council estate. Davies did not save Doctor Who by embalming it. He saved it by knowing where the pulse was.

Steven Moffat - who took that revived show and turned it into an international IP - understood a different part of the machine. His Doctor Who is more puzzle-box, more fairytale, more verbal, more structurally elaborate, sometimes to a fault. But again, the point is not that Moffat merely liked Doctor Who. The point is that he had absorbed some of its deepest operating principles. The show, for him, is not a space opera. It is a system for making children frightened of statues, shadows, cracks in walls, gas masks, ticking clocks and the empty spaces under the bed. His best Doctor Who stories do not ask what would make a plausible science-fiction threat. They ask what ordinary thing could become unbearable if looked at from the right angle.

Chris Chibnall complicates the argument, usefully. He was plainly a fan. His teenage appearance criticising the Colin Baker era has become part of Doctor Who folklore; not because it proves anything especially profound about his later work, but because it places him unmistakably inside fan culture. And yet his era remains divisive - the day-to-day storytelling too linear and too much like a police procedural, the cast too overloaded, the narrative arcs too grand and fundamental. That should prevent any lazy conclusion that fandom is enough. Love of the show can produce care, attention and knowledge. It can also produce overcorrection, lore congestion, piety, defensiveness or the urge to settle arguments that were more interesting when left unsettled.

So the claim cannot be that Doctor Who must be made by fans. The claim is that it must be made by people who understand the programme as an inherited form, with a peculiar moral, tonal and imaginative grammar.

That is why figures like Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, and Pete McTighe are all useful examples. They are not identical writers, and they have not all contributed equally to the television series, but they represent something important in the ecology around modern Doctor Who. They belong to a generation, or a set of overlapping generations, for whom Doctor Who was not dead during the so-called wilderness years. It had migrated. It lived in novels, audios, conventions, magazines, arguments, private obsessions, professional apprenticeships and fan memory. It became a place where viewers learned not only to consume television, but to imagine making it.

That matters because Doctor Who has always depended on more than production. It depends on continuity of sensibility. Not continuity in the narrow sense of whether someone has correctly remembered a Time Lord collar from 1978, but continuity as craft knowledge: an understanding of how the show can be silly without becoming weightless, scary without becoming cruel, moral without becoming sanctimonious, nostalgic without becoming taxidermy.

The best modern Doctor Who often came from that place. David Tennant and Peter Capaldi are the obvious on-screen examples: actors who grew up with the role before eventually inhabiting it. Capaldi, especially, makes the recursive strangeness of Doctor Who almost too perfect. The child who wrote letters about the programme became the man standing in the TARDIS. This could have been unbearable if it had turned into cosplay. Instead, at its best, his Doctor feels like someone wrestling with the burden of an idea he has loved for too long.

That is the real value of fans in the room. Not that they produce references. References are cheap. Any competent writer’s room can generate a list of monsters, planets, costumes, old companions and phrases to reactivate. The question is whether those references mean anything. The danger of bad fan service is that it treats memory as confetti. The danger of bad reinvention is that it treats memory as clutter. Doctor Who needs something better than either: an active, argumentative relationship with its own past.

The cautionary example here is not the 2005 revival, but the strange prehistory of the 1996 TV movie. Before Paul McGann’s Doctor arrived on screen, various development ideas circled around a much more radically reconfigured version of the programme. There were plans involving the Doctor searching for his father, Ulysses; the Doctor and the Master as half-brothers; Borusa as the Master’s father; a grand Gallifreyan backstory; spider-like Daleks; nautical Cybermen renamed as Cybs. Some of this is fascinating. Most of it is cursed.

The issue is not that every one of these ideas is automatically wrong. Doctor Who can absorb almost anything. It survived Kamelion, the Kandyman, Adric, the Myrka, the in my view unfairly maligned “Love & Monsters”, and whatever emotional category we’re supposed to place The Timeless Child in. A spider-Dalek proposed for an abandoned development document is not, in itself, automatically beyond the pale.

The problem is the direction of travel. What is interesting about those specific TV movie-era proposals is not their individual weirdness, but the pattern they reveal. The mythology being developed around the 1996 film points toward a recurring temptation: to make Doctor Who more legible as a conventional franchise by giving it family secrets, origin mysteries, grand destiny arcs, redesigned monsters and a more standard heroic structure. This is what franchises often do when they become anxious about their own strangeness, and kind of what Chibnall’s era was guilty of to some extent. They explain. They systematise. They intensify. They provide lore where there used to be mystery, spectacle where there used to be suggestion.

And Doctor Who can bear some of that. But only some.

Because the Doctor is not interesting because of who his father was. The point is not that every attempt to explore Gallifreyan history or expand the mythology is misguided; Doctor Who has always added layers to its own backstory. The caution comes from the assumption that the way to strengthen the programme was to make it more like other franchises. But the core identifiers of the show work because they carry an atmosphere that is almost entirely apart from other Sci-Fi. They are conceptual shapes as much as narrative devices. Alter them too casually, and the show may retain its trademarks while losing its grammar.

That, I think, is my real fear behind the tender.

It is not that a new production company will necessarily be bad. A new creative team could be exactly what the programme needs. Both Chibnall’s run and Davies’ second era had wonderful moments and beautiful standalone stories, but they each also ended in a muddle of unresolved gestures, inflated stakes and institutional uncertainty, after both showrunners took time to detach their stories from the show’s established history (either via the Flux/Timeless Child arc or Davies’ whimsical Gods narrative). A pause may be healthy. A new showrunner may bring discipline. A new producer may look at the franchise and see possibilities that have been obscured by decades of familiar argument. Doctor Who should not be treated as the hereditary property of the same small circle of British television-folk, however talented, affectionate or foundational they have been.

But the next custodians need to understand what kind of freedom they’re inheriting. Because underneath the variation is a particular rhythm. Doctor Who is anti-authoritarian without being adolescent. It distrusts uniforms, empires, corporations, generals, priests, bureaucrats, tyrants and gods. It is suspicious of violence not because violence never appears, but because violence is usually what unimaginative people do when they have run out of better ideas. The Doctor wins, when the character is written well, not because he is the strongest person in the room, but because he can see the room differently.

That is a difficult thing to tender.

You can tender production capacity. You can tender budgets, schedules, studios, post-production pipelines, sustainability commitments, regional investment, skills development and delivery timelines. You can ask who has made large-scale drama before. You can ask who can handle effects, overseas partners, unions, secrecy, casting and publicity. All of that matters. Television is an industrial art form, and the industrial bit is not optional.

But Doctor Who also needs someone who can answer a less procurement-friendly question: do you know what this thing is?

Not in the trivia-night sense. Not in the sense of being able to name all six actors to have played Borusa. I mean: do you understand why the show’s ridiculousness is part of its seriousness? Do you understand why its Britishness matters, even when it travels everywhere? Do you understand why the Doctor should not simply be cool? Do you understand why fear in Doctor Who is often strongest when it brushes against childhood logic? Do you understand why the programme can be cosmic without becoming pompous, political without becoming a lecture, sentimental without becoming soft, and silly without becoming contemptible?

This is where J. Michael Straczynski’s public interest is revealing, whether or not he is remotely likely to be involved. The significance is not that an American writer with a major science-fiction pedigree has raised his hand. In fact, the more interesting thing is his awareness that Doctor Who is not just another science-fiction show. His pitch begin from admiration for Doctor Who’s existing identity rather than from the assumption that it needs to be rebuilt into something more normal. That does not make him the answer. But it clarifies the question.

The right person for Doctor Who does not have to be British… but the show’s Britishness cannot be incidental. They do not have to be a lifelong fan… but indifference to the programme’s history would be alarming. They do not have to preserve every old habit… but contempt for those habits would be fatal.

What they need is not ownership, but custody. Ownership asks what can be extracted from a property. Custody asks what must be carried forward so that change remains meaningful. Ownership sees the TARDIS as a brand asset. Custody sees it as a promise: that the universe is stranger, funnier, scarier and more morally urgent than the people in charge insist; that the small and disregarded matter; that cleverness is better than conquest; that monsters can be defeated without becoming one.

Doctor Who will survive. I am fairly sure of that. The BBC has every reason to bring it back, and almost no good reason to let one of its most recognisable creations dissolve into folklore and Blu-ray box sets. The more interesting question is whether the next version will understand survival as more than continuation.

Because the TARDIS can land almost anywhere. That has always been the point. It can land in a quarry, a council estate, a spaceship, a school, a battlefield, a library, a nightmare, a joke, a Christmas special, or the middle of some future tender document nobody should have to read unless professionally required.

But wherever it lands next, someone has to know why it is bigger on the inside.