Such Times.

And the banalisation of Evil.

Two small points first. Yannick has completed another excellent translation into French of one of my essays, and it should be on line very soon. I will post a link to it as soon as it is available. Second, the people at Auraist, a site about good books with far more readers than I will ever have, were courteous enough to ask whether they could link to this site. I naturally said yes, and in return I think it’s only fair to suggest you go and look at their site as well.

Otherwise, these essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ I am very grateful to those who have supplied me with generous amounts of coffee recently.

As always, thanks to those who tirelessly supply translation in other languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here,. Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. And many of my articles are now on line on the site Italia e il Mondo: you can find them here. And now:

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I was at the cinema recently, watching Matt Brown’s Freud: the Last Session, which has recently been released in France. I won’t say much about the film itself—it’s decent enough, and well worth seeing if you are interested in the main characters, played by a superb Anthony Hopkins and a competent Matthew Goode— but oddly enough it was the film’s major weakness that got me thinking, along two different but related lines.

The film is an opened-out version of a two-handed theatrical drama, recounting a (probably apocryphal) meeting in London in September 1939 between the militant atheist Sigmund Freud, not long before his suicide, and a much younger CS Lewis, then an Oxford Professor, just becoming known as a popular apologist for Christianity. The two run through the Greatest Hits of theodicy and theurgy, such as the Problem of Evil (how can a loving omnipotent God allow suffering in the world?), but with a commitment and an application that dates the story to a time when these issues were seriously discussed.

But Brown, as though nervous that an audience won’t sit through nearly two hours of ethical and theological debate, no matter how well acted, introduced other main characters (notably Freud’s daughter Anna, and the English psychotherapist Ernest Jones) and subsidiary storylines. I tend to agree with those critics who thought this opening-out distracted from the main story, but it’s well done, and the atmosphere of Britain on 3 September 1939, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, is faithfully reproduced, as far as I can tell. It’s this atmosphere, and the way that it differs fundamentally from how we see war and peace, good and evil, today, and also how we might react to a major security crisis, that I want to talk about this week. Because I fear that we are moving into an era now where there will be moral and psychological challenges of a comparable intensity for which our minds, our societies, our countries and our governments are completely unprepared.

The first thing I noticed, half-way through the film, is a flashback to Freud’s last days in Vienna before he fled to England, already a very sick man. For reasons that aren’t really explained, two Gestapo officers come to Freud’s apartment, although somehow they agree to take Anna away rather than him. The iconography—the black uniforms, the swastika arm-bands, the black Mercedes waiting outside—sent shivers up my spine. I suspect anyone who grew up in the immediate postwar era would have felt the same way, because such diabolical iconography was within the living experience of most people, and everybody knew and feared what it stood for. My parents’ generation almost all served in “the Forces” or did other war work, and they were very clear about the evil of what they had confronted, and the fear it induced. Banalisation, relativism, and other tiresome -isms were a generation in the future: too many soldiers had returned from Germany with nightmarish memories of what they had seen, although few wanted to talk about it.

Public life then was full of people—politicians, intellectuals, journalists, churchmen, civil servants, refugees from Nazism—whom the Gestapo was planning to arrest and send to concentration camps after a successful invasion. Hitler was furious when Churchill’s Cabinet refused an offer of peace in 1940 within an hour of it being made, and talked of turning Britain into a slave-state in reprisal. (And contemporary records reveal a widespread anger in the country against Britain, believed to have provoked the War in the first place to serve the interests of the City of London by destroying Germany and stopping its return to Great Power status: Hitler would scarcely have been alone, then.) Military defeat and occupation were likely to have been the least of Britain’s post-war problems, and people were well aware of that.

Sometimes it was more personal: refugees were everywhere. I was taught mathematics by an Austrian Jewish teacher who escaped to Britain as a young man, and had retained his Viennese accent. One of my landladies had escaped from what is now Poland as a child, almost the only one of her family to survive. And among the few places we could afford to eat as students in London was a faithful reproduction of the Viennese restaurant its proprietors had been forced to leave behind by the Nazis. (Indeed, in many ways London fifty years ago was actually a more cosmopolitan place than it is now, in the best sense of that term.) The same was true at a public level: it was common to hear those who had escaped the Gestapo on the BBC. Eric Hobshawm, Karl Popper, Jacob Bronowski and others were among the leading intellectual figures of the day, at a time when there were still intellectual figures.

It was also the period when the complete horrible truth of Nazism began to be generally disseminated. The public mind was more robust then than it is now, and even school-children were allowed to watch films of the concentration camps. I still vividly remember first seeing the film of bulldozers moving corpses around in, I think, Buchenwald. And the first accounts of the French Resistance were also appearing in English, with their stories of insane bravery in the face of overwhelming power.

It couldn’t, and it didn’t last, and by the seventies the long, slow decay in understanding of what had been fought against was already under way. So today the Nazis are computer-game villains, kitsch-art artefacts, a source of sick fascination to some, a source of edgy transgressive humour to others and a universal reference for anyone who is too lazy and too uncultured to find a better epithet to fling at somebody they don’t like. This process—not so much the overworked “banality of evil’ of Arendt’s questionable phrase, as its banalisation— has among other things made it impossible to understand any more what real evil actually looks like. We apply the term lightly, to politicians we don’t like or to government actions we think are wrong. It is routinely applied by some people to the acts of governments the West doesn’t like, and by others reflexively to acts of western governments they don’t like. It has now become effectively meaningless.

Decades of this have blunted and atrophied our ability to make moral distinctions let alone to debate them. Much ethics, after all, is circumstantial and relative, but I find that even university students today have difficulty in constructing any kind of coherent ethical argument. The world has been divided into two categories: Nice and Not-Nice, without nuance, and the only argument is about which basket to put things in. (Governments, it should be added, are especially prone to this dualistic thinking. Historically, Col Gaddafi was Not Nice, between 2004-11 he was Nice, and when he started to lose his grip on power he was Not Nice again, and never had been.)

So the big political story in Britain in the last week has been yet another enquiry into the scandal of Pakistani child grooming groups, active in parts of England for at least the last twenty years. It now looks as if something may actually happen to those who tortured, abused and in some cases even murdered white working-class girls, some as young as ten. But it’s also clear that the authorities collectively were trapped in what they saw as an insoluble moral dilemma. Like a donkey between two rancid carrots they were immobilised between two imperatives. Hundreds of girls being tortured, raped and in some cases murdered over two decades was obviously Not Nice, but then the risk of “stigmatising” entire communities was Not Nice either. How to deal with such an acute and complex moral conundrum? They had no idea. So they did nothing. And just before I started writing this, the last thing I read was the first few paragraphs of a pompous article in—where else—The Guardian, saying it was all right because child abuse was also perpetrated by white people.

Unsurprisingly then, the modern mentality simply cannot comprehend actual acts of widespread cruelty and violence, and above all it blanks out at the idea that one day we could experience them. Episodes of mass killing in Cambodia, Burundi or Rwanda are so far beyond what the western mentality can understand that they have become nothing more than horrors without content. We sort of know that terrible things happened to individuals in the former Soviet Union, Greece under the Colonels, in Latin America, in apartheid South Africa and in more recently in countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya, but we wrap them in normative cotton wool entitled “human rights violations.” Few accounts by those who survived Assad’s prisons have been widely published, for example, because our contemporary Liberal view of the world simply can't refine them into anything it can understand, given its facile understanding of human behaviour.

Much more so with the Third Reich. The best analogy I can think of for the Nazis is a crew of psychopathic management consultants with demonology as their hobby. They took the ruling scientific orthodoxy of the day, that humanity was divided into “races,” eternally warring with each other, the strongest surviving and the weakest exterminated, and applied it mechanistically to Europe, seeking to wipe out their enemies, notably the Jews, before their enemies did the same to them. Far beyond anything that any billionaire today would dare to suggest, they literally saw all non-Aryans as assets, to be used up if valuable and discarded if not. After all, Europe was desperately short of food from 1941 onwards, and if the Reich and its Army was to be fed others—like two million Polish Jews—would have to be disposed of, and much of the rest of Europe go hungry. It was all bureaucratic, and if you could grant the insane starting assumptions, quite logical.

So Jorge Semprùn, the great Franco-Spanish man of letters, sent to Buchenwald for his Resistance activities had his life spared because the German Communists who largely ran the camp’s administration recognised one of their own, and falsified his records to show that he had technical skills he didn’t possess. He lived. So Primo Levi, the great Italian writer was also imprisoned for his partisan activities, first in a concentration camp in Italy, then in Auschwitz. But he was a trained chemical engineer, and the Germans needed chemical engineers. He lived. They were both useful, just as nannies and Uber Eats deliverers from the Third World are useful today..

This was evidently too much for western Liberal opinion to hope to swallow, emerging as it did terribly battered from the war. And those who survived generally did not write about their experiences until much later anyway. So Liberal opinion quickly retreated into hand-waving banalities about hatred and intolerance, to be combated through school exchanges, the suppression of national differences and collective singing of Kumbaya with guitars. And by the seventies the first relativists were sighted, originally on the extreme Right, leading among other things to the Historikerstreit, the “historians’ dispute” of the 1980s, when right-wing academics attempted the “normalisation” of Nazism as a defensive response to Stalinism, and to some extent an emulation of it. And ultimately, a generation or so later, controversialists and political figures (rarely historians) began to push for a sort of moral equivalence between the Nazis and the Western Allies. This was partly a back-projection of the opposition to Vietnam, partly the adolescent desire to shock, which some people retain into middle age, and partly the pursuit of contrarianism for its own sake. (Is there anything more tedious than the unselfconscious reflex contrarian?) So “snigger snigger OK Auschwitz but what about Dresden nyaah! nyaah! ” is unfortunately heard in some quarters. (Ironically, in view of the film I mentioned, part of the motivation is Oedipal: we cannot hope to emulate our ancestors so we try to drag them down to our level.)

To get to that point, you have to be incapable of understanding what evil is, and indeed very few people today actually have any acquaintance with it, even indirectly. I don’t mean by that the Manichaean opposition of pure Good and Evil you find in comic books and Hollywood films, or that is supposed to characterise The Lord of the Rings (a gross misreading of Lewis’s friend Tolkien, by the way.) I mean simply that the vocabulary and concepts that once shaped our moral view of the world and which enabled us to make our own moral judgements, (and which Lewis and Freud actually shared to a large degree) have atrophied to the point where we can no longer discuss the evils of the world intelligently. After all, even the quasi-atheist David Hume never denied the distinction of good and evil according to “ the natural sentiments of the human mind.” We know it, he would have said, when we see it. This, rather than the precise detail of what the Nazis did, is the real issue, and we can no longer be confident, given the decline in understanding that I’ve referred to, whether we would know it.

Today, we fall back on the bloodless technical vocabulary of lawyers and the ethical judgements of billionaires. I suppose you could say that the twelve million civilian victims of Nazism had their human rights violated, just as, according to some, transexual men forbidden to compete in sports as women have theirs violated. (After all, if A=C and B=C then A=B, doesn’t it?) To such moral confusion have we now descended. Words no longer mean anything, when “speech is a form of violence” and when women feel “threatened” in mixed-sex swimming pools. It makes you wonder how many of these people have ever seen or experienced real violence, or even threats of it, and how they would react if they did.

This poverty of our moral vocabulary, which now consists mostly of sneers, goes with a flattening of moral categories. If Trump is another Hitler, then Hitler was just another Trump, and fighting a war to get rid of Trump would surely be considered ridiculous. (Though what might be called Hitler envy is a powerful political force in some quarters today: symbolically, we use Twitter to bring down “Hitler” and feel proud of ourselves, because we are as brave as our grandfathers.) On the other hand, the idea that there are moral universes out there that the western mind cannot understand, and for which there is no analogy in recent western history or popular culture is too much for many of us to accept. In the Middle East, for example, we do not seriously try to understand the motivations and behaviour of actors as various as the State of Israel and the Islamic State: we describe them instead in terms of ethical norms which we do, sort of, think we understand. But when organisations with very different norms (like the Islamic State) come visiting us, the response of our leaders is intellectual and moral panic, handwaving, and the desire to forget something that incomprehensible as soon as possible. The best description they can come up with the atrocities recently inflicted on Europe is the morally neutral “tragedy,” as though the attacks were a natural force, like severe weather. Early in the film, Freud expresses consternation that in a few days of fighting, twenty thousand Poles have already died. Well, thoughts and prayers.

It’s not so much that we lack a moral vocabulary entirely, it’s more that it consists almost entirely of insults delivered from a position of splendid moral superiority. Yet our leaders and our pundits, seem to me utterly incapable intellectually of making genuine moral judgements founded on something, let alone debating those judgements and conveying those them to a potentially sceptical populace. On a purely practical level, as we have seen in the case of Ukraine, they have nothing but the promotion of fear and hatred with which to motivate their populations, and history suggests that such tactics don’t work for very long.

I do not believe for a moment we are going to see a repetition of Nazism, which was the product of a very special time and place, and of historical and cultural circumstances which are now broadly understood. Rather, we are moving into a new and morally-complex era, but one where we no longer have the moral, intellectual and ethical resources available to understand what we see, let alone to act sensibly. There is the real risk of some kind of collective ethical nervous breakdown, as rulers and people are increasingly confronted with a reality that is not only frightening, but which they cannot even interpret sensibly.

This is especially true, I think, in the Anglo-Saxon world, with its relative isolation from the nastier side of political conflict. I’ve mentioned before the Polish critic Jan Kott, whose book on Shakespeare took it for granted that the History and Roman plays described a world of violence and insecurity not unlike that of modern times, and that all of his readers would know what it was like to be woken by the secret police in the middle of the night. Contemporary Anglo-Saxon reviewers gently mocked him for exaggeration, but of course such experiences were within the living memories of nearly all Europeans in those days, and indeed were still lived daily in Eastern Europe and in Spain and Portugal. The gulf between these sets of historical experiences and those of the Anglo-Saxon countries is unbridgeable. George Orwell once remarked that it would be difficult to install a police state in Britain because the British people would not know how to live and behave in one. With due allowances, I think that’s still true of both Britain and the United States today, in the sense that in neither case would people understand, and be able to cope, with the imposition of a genuinely authoritarian regime, not just one that annoyed civil liberties NGOs. It’s striking, for example, that there has been so little organised opposition to Mr Trump’s recent high-handed actions, as though his opponents can’t quite process what’s happening: “Trump is Hitler” was a clever, reductive campaign slogan for them, not a call to action.

The other thing that struck me about the film was its presentation of England in 1939, and how different that world was from today’s in some important respects. It includes an extract from Neville Chamberlain’s speech on 3 September declaring war on Germany: a notably sober, even sombre, allocution, the speech of a tired, disappointed man who had failed to prevent the coming apocalypse and would himself be dead a year later. There was none of the febrile posturing and empty braggadocio that we have come to expect from our leaders today, who want to be war leaders without actually have to go through a war. In this, he faithfully reflected the spirit of the times. All contemporary accounts, and everything I have ever heard from people alive then, suggested a mood of sombre stoicism, fear but not panic and a desire just to “get it over with,”as the phrase of the day had it in both English and French (en finir.) There was no enthusiasm, little overt patriotism, and a generalised sense of foreboding.

History explains much of this. The First War (the “Great War”as it was then known) was a living memory and a universal point of reference for families, institutions and governments alike. Any thirty-year old would have memories of the war. Any man of forty was likely to have served in it, as Lewis did. Every family had lost a husband, a son, a father an uncle or a brother. And uniquely in history, an entire ruling class had for once fought as soldiers in the front line. If being prepared for war is a virtue, the country was prepared for war.

It was also prepared physically. Chamberlain had already introduced peacetime conscription and set up reserve forces for Home Defence. The rearmament programme which was the other leg of the appeasement strategy was starting to show its results: the Royal Air Force was massively expanded, the Spitfires and Hurricanes were starting to arrive, the Chain Home radar system was operational. War production of all kinds was stepped up, and “shadow factories” capable of transferring to war production were established. Civil defence organisations were updated and improved, local organisations were set up to coordinate air raid preparations and an Auxiliary Fire Service was established. In turn, these preparations, quite impossible to reproduce today, were based on stable communities and extended families, and often organised around churches, trades union branches and men’s and women’s associations. There was a substantial pool of ex-military personnel and ex-police officers, and no lack of volunteers.

And it was prepared psychologically. Throughout the 1930s the threat of bombing was openly discussed. Large-scale attacks on populated areas perhaps with the use of poison gas were widely anticipated, and there were going to be no miracle weapons to stop them. Stanley Baldwin’s warning that “the bomber will always get through” has been much mocked, but he was perfectly correct in 1932, and essentially correct in 1939. British air defences destroyed only negligible numbers of German aircraft in night raids over Britain. For years before 1939, the British public (and for that matter the French public as well) had lived in expectation of direct attack, and perhaps heavy casualties, if a war were to break out.

As a result, pre-war contingency plans were made for the evacuation of children and the old and sick from London. More than half a million were sent out of London in the days following Chamberlain’s broadcast, most by the state-owned London Transport system, and at least twice than number from other cities. (This is covered briefly in the film.) Many went to specially-prepared evacuation centres. It goes without saying that such facilities and even such capabilities no longer exist in western nations. More than that, though, our society no longer demands that children should begin to free themselves from the parental embrace at an early age. In a time when the average child started work at fourteen, children were expected to be self-reliant and capable of choice and independent action far earlier than that. Leaving your parents for a while was a recognised rite of passage: I can’t remember when I first went off on a weekend camp; I was nine or ten I suppose, as was normal then. Some children cried, everybody got over it. The popular culture of the day celebrated children’s emancipation from their parents and the adventures they could have. Would such an evacuation of children today even be thinkable?

This isn’t, of course, a complaint about Young People Today, or even Parents Today. It’s just an observation that society gets the results it merits, as a result of the norms it projects about life, how to live and how to succeed. In 1939, and for some time thereafter, parents were expected to be capable of making, growing, and repairing things, of dealing with minor injuries and childhood illnesses and of responding to everyday emergencies. Children were expected to look after themselves for the most part, often sent outside all day to play. A society like that had less difficulty in coping with stress and danger than our contemporary society would, which prizes vulnerability and powerlessness, and teaches its citizens that they should use these to claim benefits and access power. Plans in 1939 relied not only on official capacity but, critically, on assumptions about individual and collective effort which are no longer valid.

In those days, of course; government functioned properly at the national and local level, and had assets under its control that it no longer has, and was able to place orders for things using industrial capacity that no longer exists. Chamberlain could ask a population to remain calm with some hope of success, partly because that population was well aware that there was a threat but aware also that the government was publicly doing what it could to protect them. It’s instructive, but also alarming, to contrast that with the chaos that would result today. It’s not simply that such national and local organisations don’t exist any more and can’t be recreated, it’s also that no western government dares to admit to its population that there is a serious threat that it can’t protect against. As I pointed out some time ago, the missile will always get through. It’s for this reason that western governments have made so much noise about fantasy land/air invasions and said nothing about missile attacks against which defence is essentially impossible. Indeed, I’m not at all sure whether the higher reaches of western governments simply don’t understand the problem, or whether they are just too frightened to even think about it, let alone discuss it in public. The potentially catastrophic political and strategic consequences of this ignorance and the resulting silence do a lot to explain the obsessive desire of western governments to continue the war, and the desperate belief that somehow the Russian system will collapse as a result: these are points I will return to next week.

Of course western states have known acts of violence since 1945, but in a limited and highly contextual fashion. You have to be of a certain age now to remember the sense of insecurity and fear generated by the IRA bombings of the 1970s and 80s on the mainland of the UK, and the slight twinge of nervousness you felt passing a car parked in an odd place. The Islamic terrorist attacks of this current century in Europe have been covered with normative cotton-wool about “tragedies” and with bouquets of flowers, and don’t you dare talk about the wider context if you want to avoid being called an Islamophobe. Even the attacks of September 2001 in the US seem to have been absorbed into national folklore now, and the long and futile war in Afghanistan that followed them is not the kind of thing nations voluntarily seek to remember.

Whilst there are certainly myths about the public reaction to the outbreak of the War in western countries, as there are myths everywhere, it’s fairly clear that people mostly reacted with the kind of maturity that was then expected of adults, and the kind of social solidarity that is only possible if you first have a society. At one point in the film air raid sirens sound (this actually happened) and people, including Freud and Lewis seek shelter. In a piece of heavy symbolism, that’s in a church. but there’s a moment later that could have come from a black-and-white film from the 1950s, as an Air Raid warden on a bicycle pedals around with a megaphone explaining that it was all a false alarm and apologising for any inconvenience caused. In the event of a missile attack on London or Paris or Berlin, where would you find such unpaid volunteers now, and would the population take any notice of them? (In Britain, some 7000 volunteers died during the bombing of London.) The fact is that organisations of this type, good bad or indifferent, more or less successful, require a functioning society as a base, if they are to exist at all. And for the most part we no longer have that. Mass panic will probably be the least of the problems the authorities would have to cope with, to the extent that there are functioning authorities any more.

As I said, I’ll go into this in detail next week, but for a moment let’s just imagine that major western nations are explicitly threatened with missile attack by a victorious and angry Russia if certain demands are not met, and that it becomes clear very quickly that there is no way of intercepting the missiles reliably, nor even giving warning of their approach. It also becomes clear that the emergency services have very little spare capacity, and no special equipment or training, to deal with such attacks, and anyway there aren’t enough trauma counselling specialists to go round. As it happens, there is a precedent for this, the V-2 attacks on London and other cities in 1944-45, by missiles which travelled so fast they could not be detected, let alone intercepted. Nearly three thousand people died in London, and roughly the same number in Antwerp and Brussel together. Since the rockets could not be detected, and fell randomly, mass panic was a real worry, although after four years of war and with victory within sight, this was contained until the launching sites themselves were overrun. But the British government was worried, with some justification, that a tired and stressed population would eventually crack if the attacks continued too long. Comparisons with today are not encouraging, and it’s hard to see such a situation turning out well.

But we don’t want to fixate just on specific scenarios that might not even happen. I’m more concerned, in fact, about a long period of tension and political turmoil, in which western leaders and western societies, with no experience of long-term fear and stress, might start to crumble, as they might have, but did not, in the second half of the 1930s. (I wonder, for example, if any western society today would be capable of long withstanding the kind of low-level stress and tension that is everyday life in Beirut.) After all, western political systems today are overwhelmingly based on an ethos of management: the model is the private company or the NGO, whose important decisions are about investment, resource allocation, recruitment and promotion, and how to present its activities in the media. Neither the government structures nor even the structures of thought exist any more to cope with a really major crisis, and none of our politicians will have the remotest idea how to deal with the need to take actual decisions that have important real-world consequences.

My concern is that this will lead to something like an irrational and even nihilistic mood among western decision-makers. Fearful for their own popularity and even their positions, unable to get what they want, forced to do things that they don’t want, they could react in ways that are unpredictable and dangerous. Freud noted in Civilisation and its Discontents that human beings largely obey a “collective super-ego” because they want love, and so restrain their aggressive impulses to others. He argued that we internalise negative external events, and treat them as punishment for our sins, so increasing our sense of guilt. But of course Freud was writing, as the debate in the film reminds us, against a background of Christian belief in personal guilt and responsibility that no longer exists. We are not guilty today, we are victims. We do not seek love, we demand it. We are incapable of sin. Nothing is ever our fault, and we have no obligations to anyone. And our political class is the absolute epitome of this mentality, which Freud would no doubt dismiss as a dangerous pathology. If so he would be right.

Like a child breaking its toys to punish its parents, our ruling class may just destroy everything in its fury. There are precedents for this, and they lead us back uncomfortably to the Gestapo officers in the film. In Freud’s later years, and in the work of his followers, we see the progressive development of the concept of the “death instinct,” the counterpart to the life-instinct, the “libido” which seeks happiness. (Later Freudians actually christened this the “mortido.”) It reminds us that Nazi Germany was in effect a gigantic Death Cult, with a paranoid psychotic view of the world, vowed to eternal unrelenting warfare with its own extermination one of the possible outcomes. Hitler killed himself, ultimately, after driving his country to destruction, because he thought the German people had failed him, and the Third Reich ended in apocalyptic destruction, as death cults tend to.

As I’ve said we’re not there yet, and people who think that Trump is Hitler or that the US today resembles Germany in 1933, need to keep quiet, because they are, in fact, prisoners of the kind of banalisation I was referring to above. The immediate risk, in fact, is less of the Evil than the Psychotic, less of the authoritarian leader than the much more dangerous adolescent one. Which is not to say that genuinely dangerous and evil forces will not arise elsewhere: unfortunately we will have no idea of how to deal with them or even understand them. Lewis’s friend Tolkien went on to write The Lord of the Rings, where unheroic characters who would have preferred to lead a quiet life get called upon to do extraordinary things. Thus the famous exchange:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Freud died in misery and despair, from the agonising pain of untreatable cancer and the abandonment of hope in the human race. What, I wonder, would his spirit make of our current situation, and our likely incapacity to deal with, or even comprehend, the times that are to come?