Television historian Lucy Worsley recently said that she has “been educated out of the natural reproductive function” and that as a result “I get to spend my time doing things I enjoy”.

Worsley, who has a degree from Oxford and has written several books on the aristocracy, said that she had “become the poster girl for opting out of reproduction”.
She is certainly not the only woman too bright to breed. In Germany up to 50 per cent of women with degrees remain childless, and the figures in Britain and the United States are not far behind. This is not entirely new; among the first generation of women allowed to study at Oxbridge up to a third remained unmarried, but today it is far more widespread.

A huge cultural shift has occurred in just one generation, with very large numbers of men and women now feeling that their lives are complete without children. This is, historically, an unprecedented state of affairs marking out educated westerners as unique among mankind.

And taking aside the economic, cultural or even biological impact on future generations, childlessness may have changed the political culture of the country. People’s attitudes and priorities change – drastically – when they have children, and their political priorities change too. Having spent a great deal of time researching the impact of mass immigration on British society for an upcoming book, I have noticed how many advocates are childless (or if not, wealthy); when one has children what seems “vibrant” suddenly appears frightening, and the presence of alien languages around not only gives the area a colourful, holiday-like feel but also bodes ill for your child’s school.

I’ve noticed that many anti-faith school campaigners are childless, too, a point that those who think men should be locked out of the abortion debate fail to comment on. Becoming a parent makes one more concerned about the long term and in what academics call “moral capital”, the extent to which people in any society trust each other. If child-rearing becomes a minority activity among the politically active classes, then politics starts to gain a somewhat adolescent air.

It is not a coincidence, in my view, that the 1960s generation for whom “life is not a dress rehearsal” saddled their successors with the biggest debt in peace-time history. In the long term we’re all dead, as they say.

***

Religion, of course, is a major factor in demography, and as we have become less religious political morality has taken on roles previously performed by faith.
In his recently published The Righteous Mind evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt looked at the importance of religion in creating communities with high moral capital. One of the arguments of Haidt’s fascinating book is that so many secular viewpoints depend on the same “irrational” instincts that drive religious belief. Haidt, a pro-choice atheist, suggests abortion as an area where people fool themselves into thinking themselves rational. “Once you sacralise women as victims,” as campaigners in the 1960s did, and he suggests it was right at the time, then “you have to take a position on abortion and so become blind to the development of the foetus. So you have to say an abortion in the sixth month is not a moral issue, there’s nothing there. That is crazy.”

Haidt admits that he was once hostile to religion but has developed a great respect for believers, not the least because, as his own research at the University of Virginia has shown, people who claim that their politics and morals are based on “reason” are suffering from the biggest delusion of all.

***

It must have come as little surprise to most people to learn last week that children were leaving school with almost no knowledge of British history.
Think-tank Politeia found that Britain was unique in Europe in allowing its pupils to be entirely ignorant of national history, with children typically learning only little chunks of Tudor history, the industrial revolution and (of course) Nazi Germany.

The root of the problem is that some time ago history began to be taught in a more critical manner, the aim being to teach children that history is full of myths and political narratives. The result was that by the time I went to school the subject was unimaginably dull. It is also impossible to teach without a narrative because history is by definition a story.

This illustrates the problem England has dealing with post-Protestantism. All countries have a national narrative, and England’s was a Whiggish Protestant one: shorn of that it has lost the plot; or the country’s history becomes one long march towards multiculturalism, gender equality or European unity.

***

Politeia suggested a list of 37 events that everybody should be taught, most of which are obvious and necessary. Missing, unsurprisingly, is the Battle of Towton (1461), yet having read George Goodwin’s recently published Fatal Colours, I wonder if it should be included. The largest battle fought on English soil, Towton dwarfed Hastings and resulted in 28,000 deaths, yet it has disappeared down a historical wormhole.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
ALLEN LANE, £20
Ed West hails a rare book that will frame our thinking on human nature for years to come 

A few weeks ago hundreds of Afghans went on a violent rampage after some American troops accidentally burned a copy of the Koran. These protests dwarfed those that followed the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians two weeks later. To educated westerners this behaviour seemed primitive, to atheist ones positively bizarre. Yet as evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in this fascinating study of morals, politics and religion, this appeal to sanctity is innate, normal human behaviour.

Humans, Haidt says, are “90 per cent chimp and 10 per cent bee”. Unlike other large primates we have evolved a hive mentality that allows us to work in very large, non-kin-related groups, and this partly explains our instinct towards tribalism, whether to our countries, ethnic groups, religious communities, political parties or sports teams. We have deep-rooted instincts towards defending our group, and have evolved morality to protect it and to look out for freeloaders within.

This hive mentality influences our moral compasses, which evolved to deal with certain adaptive challenges: caring for vulnerable children, forming partnerships with non-kin, standing up to oppressors within a group, building coalitions to compete with other groups, negotiating hierarchies and keeping free from parasites. This gives human beings six “moral foundations”, Haidt says: a desire for care over harm, fairness, liberty over oppression, loyalty, authority and sanctity. He suggests that these govern our politics and religions.

But not everyone possesses these foundations in equal measures. Surveying tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives with a series of ethical questions, Haidt and colleagues concluded that liberals were primarily motivated by care, liberty and, to a lesser extent, fairness (equity, not equality), while conservatives cared about all six, roughly equally.

And because they only appeal to three of our moral flavours, liberals have a disadvantage appealing to people outside particular middleclass, metropolitan cliques. It also makes it more difficult for them to understand conservatives. Haidt’s studies of how people perceived others’ beliefs suggested that liberals were far less informed about what conservatives thought than vice versa. What unites all people is their irrationality. Haidt’s research has come out strongly in favour of David Hume’s theory that emotional and intuitive processes run the brain, “only putting in a call to reasoning when its services are needed to justify a desired conclusion”.

Haidt says: “The worship of reason is itself an illustration of one of the most long-lived delusions in Western history… Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.” Neither are welleducated, intelligent people more rational; they are simply better at justifying their choices.

This is backed up by studies of the brains of people debating partisan politics, which showed they were using areas associated with threat, not the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with reasoning.

And our brains influence our politics. While conservatives react more strongly to signs of danger, including the threat of germs and contamination, and even white noise, liberals have genes implicated in receptors for dopamine, which is associated with sensationseeking and openness to experience, the best-established correlates of liberalism.

So why did morals evolve? There is, as Haidt admits, disagreement among evolutionists, namely about whether evolution of moral behaviour happened at the level of the group or the individual. Haidt falls into the former category and sees group theory as crucial to the understanding of religion.

New atheists argue that religious belief is irrational and harmful, “an extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims”. But, Haidt writes, that ignores the fact that religion is about shared values and a sense of solidarity. It is a “team sport”, and “trying to understand the persistence and passion of religion by studying beliefs about God is like trying to understand the persistence and passion of football by studying the movement of the ball”.

In evolutionary terms the strength of religion is that it creates a moral community. People in religiously cohesive societies may have been more likely to survive and reproduce, as is shown by the success of religious-based communes and the dismal failure of most secular ones.

Haidt started out a liberal. Indeed, he began looking at this subject because, as a Democrat, he saw that his party failed to connect with most ordinary Americans, who did not share its metropolitan liberal distaste for faith and flag. But by the end of the book it’s clear that he’s become sympathetic to conservative philosophy, the ideas “that people are inherently imperfect and are prone to act badly when all constraints and accountability are removed” and that “our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, so it’s dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason, unconstrained by intuition and historical experience”.

In contrast, the “fundamental blind spot of the Left”, he says, is that it fails to consider the effects of changes on moral capital. That’s why revolutions turn to despotism, and why social reforms aimed at helping perceived victims of society often end up damaging society and even the victims themselves.

And yet despite leaving a bitter taste in many people’s mouth, liberalism controls academia and the media, and by its very nature has a stronger narrative, one in which “authority, hierarchy, power and tradition are the chains that must be broken to free the ‘noble aspirations’ of the victims”.

Haidt’s book has been well received across the political spectrum and its plaudits are deserved. Like Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, The Righteous Mind may become one of those rare publications that frames the public’s view of politics, psychology and human nature. It is a vital work for anyone who wonders why we are like we are.

Ed West says that Charles Murray’s careful study of America’s growing social divide is disturbing

Coming Apart
By Charles Murray
CROWN, £17.99

Charles Murray has produced a sociological study of America that should startle readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The political scientist has trawled through the statistics to paint a picture of how American society has changed from 1963 to 2008, and his conclusions are clear: that since the 1960s America’s society has cracked into three parts, with a broad middle class separating a super-rich elite and a growing underclass.

Back in 1960, Murray argues, America was essentially a classless society. There were rich and poor people, but people generally ate the same food, took the same kinds of holidays, watched the same sort of television and, crucially, had the same values.

There was an elite, he writes, but it “was not a group that had broadly shared backgrounds, tastes, preferences or culture. They were powerful people, not a class.” It was also fairly fluid, with a great deal of upward social mobility.

Compare that with the new upper middle class of today, the group that David Brooks characterised as Bobos (“bourgeois and bohemian”) or, in Murray’s words, “the cognitive elite”, one first popularised in the 1980s television series Thirtysomething.

He writes: “The culture depicted in Thirtysomething had no precedent, with its characters who were educated at elite schools, who discussed intellectually esoteric subjects… the characters all possessed a sensibility that shuddered equally at Fords and Cadillacs, ranch homes in the suburbs and ponderous mansions, Budweiser and Chivas Regal.”

The new elite are ultra hard-working and competitive, and their “are the object of intense planning from the moment the woman learns she is pregnant”.

Murray argues that the cognitive elite have been responsible for a huge stride in technology, but it comes with a downside: the new rich being more isolated from the rest of American society, congregating in ever more exclusive neighbourhoods that he calls “SuperZIPS”.

At the other end of the spectrum, and far more distressing, is the lower class, who are morally cut off from the rest of American society in a way that very few people were 50 years ago. One of the strange paradoxes of the last half a century is that cultural changes have largely been driven by the young wealthy, and yet the wealthy are still very conservative in their behaviour.

Perhaps the biggest social change of recent years has been the decline in marriage, yet births outside marriage have barely increased among the middle class, up from three to about six per cent. In contrast, among the poor they’ve gone from three to almost 50 per cent. Only 0.2 per cent of wealthy men of working age declared themselves unfit to work in 2010, compared to 10 per cent of the poor (a five-fold increase). The marriage gap between rich and poor has increased from 10 per cent to 35 per cent.

Murray has asserted the negative impact of illegitimacy for three decades, both for children and men, and takes the view of sociologist George Gilder that “unmarried males arriving at adulthood are barbarians who are then civilised by women through marriage”.

Most surprising of all, considering the stereotype, the wealthy are actually more religious, with white working-class neighbourhoods suffering a shocking decline in religious belief and participation, with just 12 per cent of people in those areas now involved.

Murray writes: “Such a small figure leaves the religious core not as a substantial minority that is still large enough to be a major force in the community, but as a one-out-of-eight group of people who are increasingly seen as oddballs.”

And though atheists can be good people, Murray says. “The empirical relationships that exist among marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiosity, and a self-governing society mean that the damage is done, even though no one intends it.”

The author is writing about America, but Britain’s gulf may be even worse, which makes this book important reading. Inequality is a major topic at the moment, and rightly so, and although there are economic causes, at the heart of the gulf is the worst inequality of all – one of culture. Until we start to tackle the perverse state systems that help to create this problem, both Britain and America will continue to come apart.

Despite the economic collapse of our continent and a vaguely hysterical populist campaign against the bankers who helped to bankrupt our country, the British are still glued to the US presidential election, with Mitt Romney’s image rarely off most UK news sites’ home pages.

American politics fascinates the British for a number of reasons; the sheer spectacle of the long, gruelling and expensive race, carried out over a physically enormous area; the glamour of the candidates; the strange attachment to morality as a central issue; the talk of God.

The strangest issue for Britons to comprehend is Americans’ views on evolution, as was expressed by my Telegraph colleague Tom Chivers in this piece “Republicans turn their back on the Enlightenment”.

To Europeans American arguments over Darwin seem genuinely baffling and depressing, while in reverse British secularists often appear like intellectual snobs, as was illustrated during the Guardian’s hilariously bad Clark Country campaign (although I should add, if it’s not clear to the reader, that Tom is very much not the stereotypical British intellectual snob and, though an atheist, does not dismiss the religious).

Yet it is understandable, if one looks at what Darwin actually entails as a package.

In the latest Catholic Herald Dennis Sewell explains just why Americans dislike Darwin:

Two years earlier, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life had published evidence that only 26 per cent of adult Americans accepted Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as it is understood by scientists and taught in public schools. Or, to put it another way, almost three in four American voters did not. The polling firm Gallup found Pew’s figure to be a considerable overstatement of support for the science side of the argument. According to its own 2006 survey, only 13 per cent of Americans accepted the truth of evolution.

For this year’s election, Gallup has been digging beneath the surface to produce numbers that allow candidates to optimise their responses to the inevitable evolution questions along the campaign trail. Voters were invited to choose between three options: “God created humans in present form within the past 10,000 years” “Humans evolved, God had no part in the process” or “Humans evolved, God guided the process”. The first of these is full-on Creationism. The second represents orthodox Darwinian science, while the third could be seen as congruent with Intelligent Design, but is not necessarily so, offering space for more nuanced theological and scientific positioning.

Gallup’s findings pose some radical challenges to the reflexive assumptions of secular, liberal commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. For a start, those rejecting the scientific orthodoxy do not all conform to the media stereotype of an inbred, Right-wing, Christian fundamentalist redneck. Support for the “God guided” option is, for instance, stronger among Democrats (40 per cent) and Independents (39 per cent) than it is among Republican voters (36 per cent).

Sewell is the author of The Political Gene, one of the most fascinating books of recent years, and one every Catholic should have in their rhetorical armoury. Focusing less on the well-trodden path between Darwin and Hitler, he looked at how social Darwinism in the United States inspired (most Left-wing) eugenicists to instigate campaigns of sterilisation against the poor.

And yet this dark, shameful story has disappeared down a historical wormhole, while our collective memory of the most famous Creationist v. Darwinist set piece, the Scopes Trial, is totally distorted.

In fact, Sewell wrote, John Thomas Scopes was just a football coach with “no special commitment to his pupils, and was not planning on staying in Dayton very long”, and probably never taught his class about evolution. The trial was a “cynical contrivance”, a plot hatched by local businessmen to make Dayton famous, and responding to an advert by eugenicists wishing to challenge the anti-evolution Butler Act. That Act, rather than being some ancient, outdated law, had only been signed into law by the Governor, less than 2 months previously, passed by overwhelming margins by both houses.

As Sewell pointed out:

These margins reflected the Butler Act’s enormous popularity among the people of Tennessee. In 1925, the nationwide eugenics campaign was at its height. In the rural areas of Tennessee folk may not have had a sophisticated grasp of Darwinian science, but they knew the eugenicists who preached Darwinism in the cities despised country people, called them “imbeciles” and “defectives” and would sterilise them if they got the chance. They knew they despised God and the Bible too. Now they wanted to teach children that grandpa was descended from an ape. But America was a democracy, and that meant that simple people, if they made their views plain, could fight.

The First World War probably played a part, the trauma of which caused different countries to behave in different ways (in France and Britain pacifism and self-hatred, in Germany revenge). Americans were especially influenced by a pacifist called Vernon Kellogg who went over to Belgium in 1915 on a humanitarian mission and, having spent much time with the German high command, came to see how Darwinian philosophy had poisoned their thinking. “The creed of natural selection based on violent and fatal competitive struggle is the Gospel of the German intellectuals,” he wrote, his words coming to influence American public opinion then and for a long time after.

As Sewell concludes in his piec, Americans clearly aren’t stupid and are nor are they anti-science, but they are foremost a Christian people and are never prepared to sacrifice a Christian worldview.

Read the full thing here.

The year after Queen Elizabeth II’s successful visit to Ireland the Republic is set to pardon 5,000 Irish soldiers who deserted to fight for the British against the Nazis.

As the BBC reported, even Sinn Fein supports the move:

Over Christmas the issue of a pardon was referred by ministers to Maire Whelan, the Attorney-General, whose decision is expected early this year. Alan Shatter, the Irish Defence Minister, who is Jewish, is thought to sympathise with a pardon.

Campaigners for a pardon said that Sinn Fein’s support would help to reduce historic divisions in Ireland.

“These men who went off to fight fascism regraded themselves as patriotic Irishmen,” said Gerald Morgan, a lecturer in English at Trinity College Dublin. “It seems Sinn Fein have been able to recognise that.”

In July 1940, as the Battle of Britain began, the IRA said in An Phoblacht, the republican newspaper, that if “German forces should land in Ireland, they will land . . . as friends and liberators of the Irish people”.

As recently as 2003 Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein’s vice-president, spoke at a memorial rally for Sean Russell, the IRA leader who went to Berlin during the war to seek Hitler’s support.

Ireland’s relationship with England has been transformed in the past 20 years, thanks largely to the ending of the troubles as well as Ireland’s economic boom (now very much over).

But the history of World War 2 has also changed, too. Today the conflict is seen almost entirely through the prism of its later 1944-1945 rationale, as a worldwide campaign against fascism (and by extension, racism), rather than what it was in 1940, a great patriotic war for the British against foreign invaders (and from October of that year the immediate threat to Ireland receded with the end of Hitler’s invasion plans, thus making the Irish less sympathetic to anti-Nazi fighters).

That changing narrative, though, is almost nothing compared to the narrative of the Church during the War. Michael Burleigh’s Sacred Causes, which explores the relationship between religion and politics in the 20th century, demolishes most of the accepted “wisdom” about the Vatican and the Third Reich.

One of the common myths is that the Vatican concordat with Nazi Germany (standard international procedure, and one of over 30 it conducted with states at the time) was directly responsible for the Catholic Centre Party’s support for the 1934 Enabling Act. But, says Burleigh, the scholarship of Rudolf Morsey and Konrad Repgen (Burleigh is a first-class German speaker) shows that the prospect of a concordat played no part in negotiations between Centre Party and Hitler. As Burleigh wrote: “Nor when the Vatican responded in early April 1933 to vice-chancellor [Franz von] Papen’s offer of negotiations for a concordat was the intention either to abandon the Centre Party or to go along with the Nazis’ wish to stop all clerical participation in politics. The Vatican also took the opportunity of condemning the persecution of the Jews.”

Although overshadowed by the vastly more visceral and violent hatred of the Jews, the Nazi state was very hostile to Catholicism, and the feeling was mutual. Catholics voted for the party in far smaller numbers, and there was no Catholic equivalent of the 600,000-strong Nazi-Protestant German Christian movement, for example. While the most eminent Catholic theologians of thee period, Engelbert Krebs, Wilhelm Neuss, Karl Rahner and Romano Guardini, all lost their posts when the Nazis took power. Krebs, a noted philo-Semite, was eventually imprisoned.

Catholic journalist Fritz Gerlich was to suffer a worse fate. Raised in a Calvinist family in Stettin (now the Polish Szczecin) he first published an account of Russian Communism as a form of medieval political messianism in 1920. A religious sceptic, in 1927 he visited the village stigmatic Therese Neumann, who had cured many people of illnesses, and who made cryptic utterances in Latin, Greek and what may have been biblical Aramaic. Gerlich ended up writing a two-volume refutation of her critics, and in 1931 converted to Catholicism.

After losing a job due to alcoholism, Gerlich then went to work for the magazine Catholic Action and made numerous criticisms of the Nazis, including one spoof review in which he had a character writing: “Doesn’t the penetration of homosexuals into leading positions in the [Nazi] movement and in the intimidate circles of the coming Caesar provide a further shocking parallel to the Eulenburg era of Wilhelm II?” (Botho Graf zu Eulenburg was a Prussian statesman and favourite of the last Kaiser, and was rumoured to be homosexual. Criticism of the Nazis often focused on their homosexuality, with William Shirer describing the SA as being “notorious homosexual perverts”, all of which sounds uncomfortable to modern ears.) In March 1933 Gerlich was taken away by SD men and the following year was taken to Dachau and murdered.

Waldemar Gurian, meanwhile, had the sense to flee in July 1933 after a Nazi journal used him as example of how “German Catholicism has allowed itself to be heavily judaised”. In 1935 he wrote, with some prescience, that: “The Nuremberg Laws appear to be only a stage on the way to the full physical destruction of Jewry.”

The Nazi persecution of Catholicism took many forms; in 1936 the leader of the Catholic Young Men’s Association was charged with treasonable involvement with Communists.

Catholic newspapers and journals were closed and diocesan newspapers were curtailed on the pretext of paper shortages, with the number of periodicals falling from 435 in 1934 to 124 at the outbreak of war. In 1935 the SD banned Catholics from sending money to Rome, and invented songs, “currency ditties” to encourage anti-Catholicism.

Most anti-Catholic propaganda focused on sexual innuendo and claims that Catholicism was judaising Germany. The Nazi pervert-pornographer-in -chief Julius Streicher, an especially repulsive figure even for that regime, promoted anticlerical smut, his Der Stürmer calling the Black Madonna of Częstochowa “a middling thing between a negress and a Mongol woman”.

The SS produced a poem about the pope called “Chief Rabbi of all Christians”, while the state organised well-publicised denunciations of Catholic clergy for homosexuality and paedophilia. Between May 1936 and July 1937 there were 270 prosecutions of monks and priests, while supposed sex crimes at Catholic boarding schools and religious houses “enabled members of the government to claim that the Catholic Church was awash with sex friends”. The SD and Gestapo interviewed “disgruntled religious drop-outs, ex-pupils and orphans with offers of sweets alternating with a head bashed into a wall or the threat of concentration camp to secure the appropriate testimony”.

Opposition came from the top. Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical, Mit Brennender Sorge, written in German rather than Latin and read out in every Catholic Church on Palm Sunday, attacked Nazi ideas of collective racial immorality as well as the Führer cult elevating man into a god. It declared:

“He who sacrilegiously misunderstands the abyss between God and creation, between the God-man and the children of men, and dares to place beside Christ, or worse still, above Him and against Him, any mortal, even the greatest of all times, must endure to be told that he is a false prophet of whom the words of Scripture find a terrible application: ‘He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them’.”

The Church also hated the racial doctrines of Nazism. In April 1938 Catholic universities and theological facilities were informed that the Pope condemned the notion that “purity of blood and race had to be maintained with every means; everything that serves that goal is justified and permitted” or the idea that the aim of education was “to develop racial quality and passionate love of one’s own race as the highest good of mankind”.

When, in 1938, Mussolini introduced racial laws (even though a quarter of adult Italian Jews were fascists and 230 had taken part in the March on Rome), the Church made its condemnation clear. In July that year the Pope told chaplains of Catholic youth organisations: “If there is anything worse than the various theories or racialism and nationalism, it is the spirit that dictates them. There is something peculiar loathsome about this spirit of separatism and exaggerated nationalism which, precisely because it is un-Christian and irreligious, ends by being inhuman.”

No wonder, then, that when Pius died, in February 1939, the Chief Rabbi of Britain wrote to Cardinal Hinsley, telling him: “Jews throughout the world will reverse the Pope’s noble memory as a feared champion of righteousness against the powers of irreligion, racialism and inhumanity.” The London Jewish Chronicle mourned “the loss of one of the stoutest defenders of racial tolerance in modern times”.

Before succumbing Pope Pius and Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli had helped Jewish scholars affected by Italy’s new racial laws. Yet Pacelli, who succeeded as Pius XII that year, has since become one of the most controversial Catholic figures in history, most famously described as “Hitler’s Pope” by John Cornwell. Burleigh is one of numerous historians to crush that idea.

Between September 1933 and March 1937 Secretary of State Pacelli wrote 70 notes and memoranda protesting against Nazi violations the concordat. His first encyclical Summi pontificatus, published in October 1939, referred to the fundamental unity of the human race, quoting Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bind nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

But he went further than mere condemnations. In January 1940 Pius informed British ambassador D’Arcy Osborne that he had met representatives of various German generals who wished to overthrow Hitler, and who wanted a peace that would include a restoration of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  The British would not do anything without the French and soon lost interest. Despite this the Pope had taken considerable risks in doing so, not least for the Church inside Germany.

Of course the Church could have done and said more about Nazi inhumanity (everyone could have), but where the Church had condemned the Nazi inhumanity in Poland the Germans responded by killing priests, some 3,000 in total. And when the bishops in Holland protested about the deportations of Jews, the Nazis responded by murdering 600 Catholic Jewish converts, including St Edith Stein, within two weeks.

Afterwards Nazi deputy Fritz Schmidt announced that “Owing to these events, the Germans must consider the Roman Catholic Jews their worst enemies and arrange for their quickest possible transport to the East. This has already taken place.”

As Burleigh concludes: “Experiences such as this, and what had occurred when Vatican Radio broadcast reports of atrocities in Poland, were among the considerations that inhibited a fortnight condemnations that inhibited a fortnight condemnation by Pius XII of Nazi persecution, not only of the Jews but also the Catholic Poles.”

And yet in the popular imagination Pius was virtually at the Wannsee conference – so why has Pius XII’s reputation sunk so low? According to the director of the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano (describe by the Italian government of Mussolini as “the faithful interpreter of Masonic Jewish democratic thought”), the “leggenda nera” surrounding Pope Pius XII and Nazism originated largely with Communist propaganda. As Zenit reported a couple of years back:

Soviet propaganda against Pius XII was powerfully re-launched in Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), performed for the first time in Berlin on Feb. 20, 1963, which presented the Pope’s silence as indifference to the extermination of the Jews, Vian said.

Already then, Vian continued, it was noted that the play took up many of the ideas proposed by Mikhail Markovich Scheinmann in his book “Der Vatican im Zweiten Weltkrieg” (The Vatican in the Second World War), first published in Russian by the Historical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a propaganda instrument of Communist ideology.

It is certainly the case that Soviet propaganda has had a far longer lasting influence than the USSR itself, mainly because Western intellectuals were so keen to promote it. So much of what we now accept as truth, post-1968, originated with Soviet ideas from the 1920s and 1930s, including current analysis of imperialism and racism as a continuation of class struggle.

One of the most popular is the rather tasteless comparison people make between Israel with Nazi Germany, which was invented by the Communists in the 1980s. The Soviet Union even had an “Anti-Zionist Committee of Soviet Public Opinion”, which was formed in 1983 to blacken the name of Jewish anti-Soviet dissidents flocking to Israel, and also to curry favour with Arab governments at the time.

It seems that, some 20 years after the USSR collapsed, its propaganda is more successful than ever, aided of course by the decline in critical thinking and historical and theological literacy in the West.

In yesterday’s Observer Nick Cohen made an admirably un-crowd-pleasing call for intervention in Syria, citing my colleague Michael Weiss’s proposal for helping opposition forces in that country. He wrote:

Intervention to stop a regional war carries vast risks. But we should be honest about the consequences of acquiescing to Assad. A failed state and nest for terrorism will sit on the edge of the Mediterranean. Foreign mercenaries and Alawite paramilitaries will continue to massacre a largely defenceless population and the conflict may spread into Iraq, Israel, Turkey and Jordan.

As the news that escapes the control of the Syrian censors reminds us every day, those who say we should do nothing also have blood on their hands.

I can just imagine the reaction of many readers choking over their [insert unmanly, organic foodstuff popular in N16 here]: “Neoconservatism!”

It’s rather funny that in the popular imagination, and in the adolescent protest movement, neoconservatives are characterised as these evil, warmongering, American imperialists, who sit around in smoky rooms with a map of the Middle East with little oil field figurines, and a hotline to Jerusalem. (They are also disliked by some Right-wingers, who talk about “neo-cons” in the same way they might have once used terms such as “cosmopolitans” or “international finance”; or as one Egyptian “moderate” pundit once explained to me about the “forces” that controlled America, his eyes squinting – “these people, you know of whom I speak”.)

The opposite is in fact true. As the very title suggests, neoconservatives are not conservatives as such but liberals who have fallen out with other liberals because they think non-Europeans should be held up to the same standards as everyone else; alongside Christopher Hitchens, the impeccably liberal Cohen was the finest British writer to advocate the removal of Saddam Hussein on the very decent grounds that he was an evil, sadistic mass-murderer who continued to cause misery for millions. Neocons take the Holocaust mantra “never again” seriously, whereas most on the Left mean “never again by whites”. They are the good guys, and just want the Arab world to be more like them; wealthy, free and slightly less weird about the opposite sex.

Operation Iraqi Freedom failed for the same reason that a-thousand-and-one liberal schemes fail; they’re right in theory, but suffer too many unintended consequences in practice. So while liberal welfare schemes can end up creating more poverty, and liberal sex education results in more impregnated teenagers, liberal imperialism suffers from the same law – except that in war unintended consequences are magnified ten-fold (liberal warfare is also difficult because war can only be won by sacrificing liberal principles – it’s very hard to wage without the use of torture, terror and internment.)

Neoconservatism also suffers the un-conservative weaknesses of utopianism and sidelining historical experience. I recall one liberal pundit writing five years back that our victory in Afghanistan proved that history, which teaches us to never go near that country, should not be considered a necessary subject anymore.

But unpopular though it is, interventionism is not going away, for there is one issue that becomes more and more pressing with each week – the parlous state of the Middle East’s Christian (and other) minorities. The ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Assyrians and Chaldeans was the great, ignored tragedy of this century so far; Egypt and Syria’s Christian populations are substantially larger, and if the former slides into an Islamic theocracy and the latter into civil war life will become unbearable.

The West is then left with the decision: whether to open its borders to save them, and so enable religious cleansing, or to take action.

Already, as Andrew Brown of the Guardian noted last month, there is growing concern among western Christians, and a willingness to do something about it. What is only missing is an organisation. Up until now the fear has always been that any sort of help will be presented as a crusade and will only incite further violence, but a point might come when there is nothing to lose anymore.

Having said that, there may be nothing we can do anyway. The Middle East is going through the same transition that Europe underwent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where democratisation and national consciousness led to minorities everywhere being driven out, starting in the Balkans (where Turkish Muslims were often the victims) and culminating in the events of 1939-1945, with the worst genocide in history and subsequently the worst mass expulsion, of 12 million Germans. Where religious and ethnic minorities lack defensible territories, they tend to end up far away from home or dead, and, with the possible exception of the Lebanese Maronites and the tiny Assyrian Nineveh Plains region of Iraq, minorities in the Middle East have no such territory. Of course all this goes to show that the establishment of a separate Jewish state was a good thing for Mizrahi Jews, who almost certainly would have ended up suffering a sad fate even without the establishment of Israel.

Unless, of course, you believe that without Zionism none of the Middle East’s current problems would have come about. In which case you’re an idiot.

Does technology ultimately militate against democracy? Ed West looks beyond the Arab Spring to ask if democratic representation was fundamentally a product of the industrial era. Is it becoming obsolete as new technology makes large swathes of the population economically irrelevant?
Democracy is in retreat. In Greece and Italy, respectively Western civilisation’s cradle and nursery, democratic politicians have been replaced by technocrats at the behest of a European Union that has now removed any veneer of democracy. While the Arab world has risen against the sometimes bland and sometimes eccentric – but always brutal – dictators of the second world, only the most green-gilled of commentators would bet on democratic outcomes in any country. The world’s second largest economy is now an autocracy, and is steadily building a stable of similarly-minded clients across Africa.

It is common at this point to invoke the name of Francis Fukuyama, who must rue the day he wrote The End of History, which goes to show that one can produce a lifetime of incredible work but get one thing wrong and that’s what the first four pages of a Google search of your name will show.

And yet Fukuyama’s critics may be as mistaken as he was: they assume that his dream of democracy spreading across vast swathes of Africa and Asia did not materialise because those countries have failed to reach the level of economic and cultural development necessary for liberal democracies. And yet, what if economic, cultural and technological development did not in themselves ensure democracy? What if the technology of the twenty-first century was to lead away from people power? It is perfectly feasible. Indeed, it seems to be happening.

In Athens, a city now ruled by the inappropriately named Mr Papademos, democracy emerged in the fifth century BC not because of philosophical appeals to the wisdom of the demos – most intelligent Greeks despised the people – but because the sea-based Athenian Empire needed poor Athenian men to row the triremes that ruled the waves.
Athens’ might was dependent on working-class men, and so the working class were given a say in government.

In Britain, where democracy emerged between 1837 and 1918, there was a philosophical justification for the change, whether from the liberal tradition of John Locke or the radical Thomas Paine, both of them having more impact on the British colonies. (At the birth of American independence 70 per cent of adult males in Massachusetts had the vote, compared to 3 per cent in Britain.)

Yet, like the poor Athenians who muscled their way to a vote, it was a question of power for the British too. The English Revolution, during which the House of Commons wrested power from the monarch and aristocracy, reflected a change in the balance of power and money and the rise of a non-aristocratic middle class that was clearly visible by the mid-fifteenth century and whose emergence accelerated in the following century, especially in Puritan-dominated East Anglia, Kent and London.

Likewise, the development of full democracy two centuries later came about because the British working classes, as well as being large in number and potentially dangerous, were economically necessary. With the development of the more radical, unskilled trades unions, the working class could bring the country down with or without the ballot box. During the 1926 General Strike, there was genuine terror that strikers could topple the country; middle class students volunteered to perform vital services as a patriotic duty.

How times have changed. Today, more than ever, British culture is immersed in the ideology of equality: the Marxist fantasy that equality of outcome can be achieved between individuals and groups is more popular than ever, despite being ever more detached from scientific reality. Yet, paradoxically, recent technological advance has made society radically more unequal: a general strike today by manual workers would be inconceivable, not least because manufacturing jobs have dropped from 50 per cent of the workforce in the early twentieth century to 12 per cent today (although output has increased). Manual jobs can be done far more cheaply overseas or by robots.

This has hugely reduced the political power of working-class men, whose economic position has drastically declined in the last 40 years, especially since women and ethnic minorities have replaced them as the chief client of Left-wing politics. This is no coincidence: technology has created a labour market more female-friendly, while the importation of workers from the developing world has brought social costs borne almost entirely by the increasingly powerless and irrelevant working class. Needless to say, the wealthy have felt the benefit as wages at the bottom are kept stubbornly low.

Old manufacturing jobs have been replaced by unskilled service jobs, which are less well-paid and often part-time, and in which men have no advantage over women – no wonder, then, that in Britain the low-skilled young are five times as likely to be unemployed as the highly-skilled, and that this ratio has increased markedly in two decades. Where there is power, it is with Unite and Unison, unions that represent female-dominated public sector industries.

There are still good jobs out there, of course, but they increasingly require a level of intelligence that most jobs in the mid-twentieth century did not. The problem with this is that many people are not intelligent: as Daniel Knowles recently pointed out in the Telegraph, our greatest social problem is that “there are no jobs for the dim”. The August 2011 riots in London, if they meant anything, were essentially an uprising of the stupid against a society which now punishes stupidity, thanks to the relentless pace of technological innovation.

Inequality levels have been increasing at a steady pace for over three decades now, and the number of conservatives who shrug their shoulders at this fact is shrinking every year. After all, who wants to live in a gated community nervously watching out for hooded youths every time you leave the house?

For men below a certain intelligence, there is now no hope of acquiring a decent income, nor of ever supporting a family without the state’s help, so it is entirely rational that they instead turn to crime or listlessness. And it is entirely understandable why so few vote. People tend not to vote when they feel powerless; a subconscious recognition, perhaps, that they are not worthy to take part in the democratic process.

Even the panacea of National Service would not solve the crisis, because the Army no longer needs muscle like it used to – and, historically, there has always been a link between fighting power and political power: British democracy was fully realised in 1918 after the working classes had proved themselves vital to the war effort. Unpopular and unwinnable foreign adventures aside, there may no longer be a need for a 190,000-strong British military – historically, a small figure.

In 1948 and 1967, Israel desperately needed fighting men to ensure its survival. Today, the country does not require young Jewish men good at firing rifles, but technology experts, such as those who set back the Iranian nuclear programme two years with a computer virus. The irony is that many Israelis once despised the Yiddish-speaking Diaspora Jews as weak and over-intellectual, in comparison to the rugged Hebrew warriors of the desert; now, Israel’s greatest warriors sit with their eyes pressed against a computer screen.

If geeks are the new heroes, it is perhaps not surprising that their status has changed. As American commentator Steve Sailer has pointed out, American culture has become infinitely more nerd-friendly: computer geeks who would once have been beaten up at school on a daily basis are now… sexy. Forty years ago, Carnaby Street was the coolest place in London; now it’s Old Street, the centre of Silicon Roundabout.

So if, as it seems from developments in the West, full democracy was a product of the industrial age, will it fade away as the new information age highlights natural inequalities? People have assumed that China will eventually democratise, because capitalism and democracy go hand in hand, but that is not necessarily the case. China may well become some sort of oligarch-democracy, with only professionals being given the franchise.

What does this signify? That technology in the twenty-first century is mitigating against democracy and egalitarianism, having shifted the dynamic between brains and brawn in favour of a privileged minority.

Few articles in The Catholic Herald have moved readers as much as an interview we ran two years go with the American seminary applicant Philip Johnson, who in 2008 was told he had an inoperable brain tumour and just 18 months to live.

The interview prompted many people to write heartfelt letters, and one reader even wrote to us offering to pay the cost of his priestly training.

At the time of that first interview the young man (he was just 24) had already decided to pursue his priestly vocation, having been given a medical discharge by the United States Navy. And, incredibly, last month he was admitted to candidacy for the orders of diaconate and priesthood at a ceremony in Philadelphia.

When I catch up with him Philip has just received the news that after over a year of intensive radiation therapy his tumour is stable, perhaps even a little reduced.

“It went well,” he say. “The doctors think the tumour is slightly smaller. It was hard for them to tell because they had to zoom in on it. But they’re going to keep me on chemotherapy for a few months.”

Philip’s story starts on October 15 2008. He was then a gunnery officer in the US Navy and discerning his vocation. He had been suffering from nocturnal fits for several months and had been to the doctor, who thought that it was sleep paralysis, an unpleasant but not serious condition. But because he was asleep he was unable to accurately describe the seizures, and it was only when his ship was in the Persian Gulf on deployment that a fellow officer saw one of the seizures.

He was given an MRI scan. Doctors sat him down and told him he had a brain tumour, and just 18 months to live. He went to the chapel and cried.

The following January exploratory surgery revealed that the tumour was cancerous, malignant and more aggressive than previously thought. The tumour was rated as 3.3, with 4 being the fastest-growing, with average life expectancy being under two years. Because it was too big to operate on the only option available was radiation and chemotherapy. That was three years ago now.

Philip’s health up until that point had always been good. “That’s why it was so surprising,” he says.

Philip was raised a Catholic in North Carolina, although he speaks with a standard Midland American accent. “I don’t know why,” he laughs. “My whole family has a southern accent. I just never picked it up.” Like most Catholics of his generation, he drifted away in his teenage years, rather than actively rebelling, and even as a child he says he was not especially devout.

Graduating from high school in 2002, he immediately entered naval academy in Annapolis, Maryland, although this involved some sacrifice for a young man. “The other universities all had parties all the time,” he says, while Annapolis was very strict and focused. But looking back, he says: “Going to naval academy saved my faith. In any other school I would have fallen away.”

At the time he had a steady girlfriend. The relationship lasted for two years, but he always had an affinity with the priesthood (his former girlfriend went on to marry and the two are still friends). “I started thinking about it after I came back to the faith,” Philip says now. “I had five years owed to serve in the military because they paid for college.”

In 2006 he met his bishop, Bishop Michael Burbidge of Raleigh, to discuss his priestly calling. Then came the news.
“I never felt anger,” he says. “I was just really scared at first and I was confused.

“I wanted to become a seminarian. We have so few priests, why would God cut short someone who wants to add to it?” he says, almost laughing.

The military gave him a discharge and he returned to the United States from his posting in the Middle East to prepare for priestly training. Later, he visited Lourdes for the first time. “I’ve probably been six or seven times. I’ve done that three summers now. It does still have that power. It keeps drawing me back. It has a unique atmosphere.”

There, he met his teacher, a hermit called Fr George Byers who was one of the English-speaking chaplains. Fr Byers teaches him only. Philip just refers to him as “the hermit” as he lives alone in a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“He’s been a seminary professor all his life,” Philip explains, “and it just happened that he decided to become a hermit, and the bishop of the diocese next to mine invited him. So he moved to North Carolina right when I needed to take time off for the seminary. We kept in contact ever since.”

I ask Philip whether his way of thinking has changed after carrying this disease.

“You start to care a lot less about worldly things,” he says. “Things that used to bother you don’t bother you any more, when you think about it. It changed my life for the better. It made my prayer stronger, I came into contact with people I otherwise wouldn’t have met. I can see God’s hand in it. I can’t be mad, because I can see how he is working through this. You think about the blessings you have already.

“Death: you never think about it, and if you do it’s so far away that you never give it a second thought,” Philip says. “Now I have to think about it every day.” (He recently lost a friend, Jennifer Robbins, to brain cancer. For like many people with terminal conditions he has come to know many other sufferers.)

Philip is currently assigned to St Catherine of Siena church in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and hopes to return to St Charles Borromeo Seminary for on-campus studies next year.

He loves the Extraordinary Form Mass, which he says is rapidly growing in his part of the United States. Raleigh cathedral now hosts an EF Mass one Sunday in each month and Philip finds it a source of strength. (His mother, incidentally, only became a Catholic three years ago, although he doesn’t believe he was a direct influence.)

Philip writes a blog, In Caritate Non Ficta (which translates as “in unfeigned love” and can be found at Philipgerardjohnson.blogspot.com), and his faith and stoicism in the face of such a terrifying condition have inspired many people.

“My bishop asked me to speak at the local high school,” he says. “He’d already asked them to pray for me, they were praying novenas. There was just overwhelming support.”

Philip gets letters from well-wishers all the time, and he says that knowing that people care helps a lot. “If you have a difficult day, knowing people are thinking about and praying for you helps.”

A friend in the Vatican even arranged for his name to be entered into the prayer book that sits on the Pope’s prie dieu. He remains in the prayers of so many people, friends and strangers who have been touched by his story.

Last month Bishop Burbidge, for the second year in succession, announced a novena for Philip. In a letter to priests, religious and the lay faithful of the diocese, the bishop noted that the “growth of the brain tumour appears to have stabilised about the time of the conclusion of last year’s novena”.

I happened to have read a couple of days before interviewing Philip about a new trial for treating brain tumours, called GALA-5, in which 60 patients newly diagnosed with glioblastoma, the most common type of malignant brain tumour, will be given 5-amino-levulinic acid, a substance which makes the tumour glow under UV light during surgery, making it easier to remove under surgery. I mention this to Philip, then realise he probably gets these sorts of snippets of hope all the time from people. It is natural when confronted with such a terrible injustice to want to offer reassurance.

He laughs. He says that he gets “a lot of emails from a lot of people” telling him about the latest in developments in brain cancer treatment.

I ask Philip what he is currently praying for. “I’m praying for strength,” he replies. “I’m praying for the strength to accept God’s will and be joyful about that, because miracles happen.

“I’ve always had a feeling, right after I was diagnosed, immediately I was told I had 18 months to live… for some reason I didn’t believe it. And I keep hearing it from different people, from priests I know, who say that when they pray for me they have a feeling I’m going to be around for a while.”

For some reason I get the same feeling when we speak, such is the strong feeling of hope that he communicates, not just for himself but for all of us who are ultimately heading in the same direction. So many people, in fact, across the world are praying for Philip that it seems as if he has an enormous force of faith behind him. So this Christmas, please remember him in your prayers.

The European Court of Justice has ruled that Britain and Ireland cannot return asylum seekers to Greece because their human rights would be jeopardised.

An Afghan had challenged a British decision to remove him to the first safe country he had arrived in, and the court stated that “an asylum seeker may not be transferred to a member state where he risks being subjected to inhuman treatment.”

The case is significant because the convention on refugees has always been that they must seek asylum in the first safe country in which they arrived. But now the EU’s own court says that Greece does not pass that basic test, mostly because it is too poor (because Ireland is rolling in money right now). It is also significant because it suggests that refugee policy is now going to be pooled.

It is interesting how far the logic behind the asylum system has shifted down the years. The first UN Convention, in 1951, dealt with people made homeless by the changing map of Europe (including millions of Germans driven out of Prussia). It was never intended, nor even imagined, that vast numbers of people from failed states would move permanently into Europe, marking the continent’s greatest movement of people since the barbarian invasions.

There are many arguments to be made against our current policy, the prime one being that it enables dictators to rid themselves of troublesome elements, and for failed societies to avoid confronting their problems; more pertinently, with birth rates in the most disastrous countries far outstripping death rates, there is no simply no foreseeable end (Afghanistan, for instance, has a fertility rate of 6.42 children per woman).

And next year, as conditions worsen in the Middle East – Iraq is surely going to collapse, as anyone not on the political equivalent of lithium could have predicted – libraries across Europe will start to notice increasing demand for history books about the fall of Rome.

There are, of course, many other similarities between our age and the late Roman Empire: a declining birth rate, especially marked among upper-class women; a collapse in religious belief and the growth of a more vital and passionate monotheistic faith from the Middle East; a shrunken attachment to the ideal of the country – patriotism – and increased attachment to the state, a state which virtually all ambitious, educated people wished to work for.

Today the large taxpayer-funded charitable sector is one area of the state that attracts well-educated and idealistic people. On the radio this morning Donna Covey, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council (88 per cent state-funded) argued that refugees have a “right to protection in Europe and we have to do our bit to uphold that”. (One thing I will say for the Refugee Council – unlike many politically active charities, they do not appear to take money from the EU).

Do Afghans have a “right” to protection in Europe? Who granted them such a right? God? Nature? The UN? What right do I have to live in, say, Afghanistan, assuming I was insane?

This is, in reality, a distortion of the English language. An Afghan has no rights to England; if he is within its borders he enjoys the human rights that English law and custom ensures (well, used to), but he has no civil rights, including the right to reside. (I remember a particularly dim-witted individual on Question Time claiming that government policy made refugees “second-class citizens”.)

An Afghan who arrives here is, in fact, a guest, and the system takes into account thousands of years of custom whereby guests are protected; this featured strongly in ancient Jewish and Greek culture, with Zeus being the patron and protector of all strangers. Likewise a Pathan will look after you if you stray on to his turf, but in no sense do you have any “rights” within his society.

That’s because the asylum system is by nature contradictory, taking that ancient custom of hospitality and confusing it with the very modern concept of rights, rights which can only be derived from citizenship (and in a modern democracy asylum seekers, assuming they stick around, must inevitably become citizens).

And the idea that an Afghan has “rights” here is based on the totally fraudulent idea of indiscriminate altruism. In his famous 1982 essay, “Discriminating Altruisms”, Garrett Hardin wrote that a world without borders, barriers or distinctions is impossible.

The success of countries such as England can be partly attributed to their ability to widen the spheres of trust within society, beyond family, clan and tribe, allowing vast numbers of people to co-operate and trade through a common culture and law; the failure of Afghanistan is much down to its rigid old clan and tribal codes (this makes it impossible to build any sort of civil law or to counter corruption). Yet there are limits to how far the sphere of trust can extend. Hardin wrote that “altruism practised without discrimination of kinship, acquaintanceship, shared values, or propinquity in time or space” was impossible, because the benefits of belonging would cease to exist. Eventually, if we continue down our path of universalism, the benefits will disappear for us, too.

As the 19th-century French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once put it: “If all the world is my brother, then I have no brother.”