_ My latest trip to New York saw me straddling the social divide of employed rich, white liberals and unemployed rich, white liberals. The latter lot I met in Zuccotti Park, protesting against Capitalism, Obama, inequality, and the spiraling cost of Gant summer wear. I’ve been skeptical about the Occupy movement (hereafter referred to as OWS) because I went to university with many of the people in it. These were generally folks from good families and expensive schools. Something about Oxbridge put their backs up, because they walked away from it out-and-out revolutionaries – critics of the very social order that had given them a brilliant education. For about a year – during the Iraq War – we were kith and kin. I never entirely fitted in, but they were nice enough to share their nut roasts wrapped in tinfoil on long marches around Trafalgar Square. They slept with anything that moved; took a bucket-load of narcotics. They were citizens of the world, jetting from crisis to crisis to be seen standing with a sign declaring the end of the world. Their faces were evergreen and innocent: the soft, wide-eyed stare of someone who has never had to worry about paying for food or rent.

When their names came up in association with the St. Paul’s protests in London, I thought, “Haven’t any of these kids got a job yet?” They’ve been occupying things for about ten years. All that made a difference this time is that the media finally paid attention. I refused to attend the London occupation because I was worried about bumping in to people I know. They won’t like the fact that I now write for the Daily Telegraph and that I’m a hardcore “burn the witches” Catholic convert. I also seem to remember that some of them didn’t smell so good.

However, I was perfectly happy to drop by Zuccotti Park while I was passing through New York on a trip to see my publisher. It was a sad sight. As I wrote in the Telegraph, the media and journalists outnumbered protestors, and at least half the protestors were mentally ill folks looking for soup and shelter. A large proportion of the coherent demonstrators were foreign: always a bad sign. It suggests that they are part of that international jet set of anarchists that I knew at Cambridge. The Tea Party might have been crazy reactionaries, but at least they were American crazy reactionaries.

After a few hours standing in the rain taking photos of tattooed women climbing trees, I dashed back to my hotel to change for the evening. I was staying in a part of town I’m sure most of OWS has never visited. My hotel was next to an exposed subway track; the walls shook every time the 7 train passed by. I’d guess the hotel was used almost exclusively by ladies of the night: almost exclusively, because at breakfast I spotted a family of cornfed Alabamians tucking into their free oatmeal. All the other tables were populated by women in low cut tops who had stayed just the one night.

I threw on a suit and took the metro over to Park Avenue, for a cocktail party to celebrate my publisher’s 25 years in business. I promised myself that I’d stay thirty minutes and only drink OJ, but ended up polishing off two bottles of red and staying through to the bitter, bitter end. It was there that I had the good fortune to meet my boyhood hero, Steve Guttenberg. He’d written a book and was in town doing a show on Broadway. Growing up in the early 1990s, living on a diet of Blockbuster videos (how miraculous that technology seemed back then!), much of my understanding of the world outside West Kent came from watching Police Academy. Admittedly, they dropped off in quality after the first one (and about fifteen minutes into the first one, at that) but Steve seemed the acme of cool to me. Like the chivalric knight or the cheap detective, the wise guy lady killer remains a standard in heterosexual chic. The conversation was stilted because I was overcome with nerves, but the best bit went like this:
SG: What’s that on your lapel?
TS: It’s a badge for the British Red Cross.
SG: It’s shaped like a flower. Is it anything to do with Veteran’s Day?
TS: No it’s not, although I think you’re thinking of the poppies that we wear to commemorate the British dead in World War I. Although, actually the Poppy Appeal was started by an American nurse.
SG: Really?
TS: Yes, it was inspired by the poppies that grew where the soldiers fell on the battlefield.
SG: You know, we are really the first generation in history that has never experienced suffering like that. We’re the first generation who have never been called to kill or die for something.
TS: Yeah – instead we send other people to do it for us. And, of course, we fetishize anyone who acts like a killer.
SG: I’d love to see some of those hip hop guys spend ten minutes in the army, dodging real bullets. It’s one thing to rap about blood and guts but it’s a different ball game to actually see them.
TS: They sing about killing, but all they really do is eat pizza and smoke all day.
SG: Although, there’s nothing wrong with pizza and pot.
TS: No. Nothing wrong with that.
PAUSE
SG: You got any pot?
TS: No.
SG: Well, I hope you won't think I'm rude if I go and talk to someone else.
TS: Okay, bye.

Wow, I thought, Steve Guttenberg is kind of deep.

And now, as I write, I’m taking a train out of New York north to Boston. From a distance, New York is brown and beautiful. Even the railroad tracks seem to glitter in the morning sun. It takes just twenty minutes to hit open countryside and an hour to see the Atlantic. How loud and cruel it is, crashing mercilessly against the fishing boats. Above me are gulls and to the left, miles of reeds and silver pools of water. No wonder the Puritans thought New England was a gift from God. In the midday sun it is as pure and golden as it was when the Mayflower first landed. God bless America.

As all my regular readers will now know, I don't like the New Atheism. I don't like its chauvinism, its bad manners, its appeal to adolescent barbarity, the lack of philosophers and theologians involved, and, most of all, its intellectual arrogance. So it was with the expectation of getting very angry indeed that I picked up The Good Book: A Secular Bible by Professor A.C. Grayling. Surprisingly, it proved a worthwhile effort. For this might be the text that sinks the New Atheism forever - so artless, humorless, vain, and conceited that it is.

The Good Book offers a non-religious religious text for non-religious readers in search of something a bit religious that isn’t in any way remotely religious. It’s hard to think of a more perfectly oxymoronic title than A Secular Bible, although The Kama Sutra for Eunuchs springs to mind. It is a collection of sayings by humanist figures strung together in a narrative that parodies the Christian Bible. There are chapter headings like “Genesis”, “Wisdom”, and “Parables”, and it is structured in verses. The language is epic; naturalism ascending into heroic lessons on reason. “Genesis” begins this way: “In the garden stands a tree. In springtime it bears flowers; in the autumn, fruit. Its fruit is knowledge, teaching the good gardener how to understand the world.” [Pause for thought: is the gardener morally good or just a good gardener? And is there a link between the two? The original Good Book was written in Hebrew, which lends itself better to subtleties like this]. This section goes on to describe the apple falling on Newton’s head, “[He] saw what no one had seen before: that an apple draws the earth to itself, and the earth the apple/ Through a mutual force of nature that holds all things, from the planets to the stars, in unifying embrace.” From this we bound to the first lesson. Life ticks by, but man is unique in nature because he notices it. “In humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite/ In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things.” QED, it is the ability to recognize what works and what fails that gives us ethics and makes us different from the animals.

The Good Book offers an ethical blueprint to the Good Society, as opposed to a faith-inspired dictat. It catalogues the sum of human knowledge as drawn from practical experience rather than mystical revelation. Grayling quotes great figures like Aristotle or Lycurgus of Sparta, whose legal experience forms a great many of the “Acts” that readers are encouraged to emulate. We learn to be nice to one another, to study, to pursue the truth, to reject superstition and bigotry. And in this enterprise, A.C. Grayling may have done the world a great service. He has exposed the New Atheism for the unimaginative, anti-intellectual bore that it really is. If you want to know why it won’t fly, buy this book.

From the above excerpt, it should be obvious that the prose is leaden, repetitive, and self-important. Parodying the Bible only reminds the reader of how marvelous the real Good Book is. In its Hebrew variant, the Tree of Life is a complex image divided and subdivided into branches of good and evil. Rabbis have spent centuries arguing about its meaning: one word can be expanded into a million and translated ten-times more ways. In Grayling’s hands, it is either a pear tree or a metaphor for a BSC in Chemistry. Compare Grayling to the King James Version. A few words to remind you of their beauty and power: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat/ And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Perhaps the Christian version has a more censorious take on the getting of wisdom, but the English is far superior. And artistry and mystery are elevating to man, where as practical observations will put him to sleep; especially when extended over 608 pages. It’s an artificial, unedifying read – like cracking open a billion Chinese fortune cookies, studying every empty platitude that falls out, while masticating that nasty vanilla shell that sticks in the tongue and dries the gum.

The Good Book is a work of stupendous arrogance. Not only is it vain to try to rewrite the most influential and popular book ever written, it takes some nerve to try to sum up all human experience in a single read. Inevitably, things will be overlooked. “Mythology is fantasy” according to Grayling, but Jung would disagree. He argued that they are the conscious realization of things buried in our psyche. Most contemporary anthropologists would at least concede that there is a need demonstrated across all societies for the expression of something beyond material life – normally communicated in worship and veneration. Whatever its source, it is perverse to dismiss it so. It is downright bizarre then to construct or appropriate a whole new mythology in service of Grayling’s ethical fancies. The chapter called “Parables” is manufactured in part out of a conversation between a fox and a leopard as recounted by a heathen. And yet, the overall narrative of “historical discovery” suggests that all of human knowledge is interconnected – that progress begat progress. The Bible was more elaborate, as the enormous differences between the sensual Psalms and the tyrannical letters of St. Paul demonstrate. Moreover, knowledge actually isn’t disseminated across history in that way. A philosopher might think that it is, because he/she is textual in approach. But history shows that ideas are invented, censored, forgotten, and later reconstituted in a different form to their conception. There is no religious or cultural context applied to any of these stories. Greek society was very religious and very moral. That’s why Socrates was condemned for corrupting the youth of the city and promoting false gods. Nor would sociologists enjoy this book. Concepts like “man”, “society”, or “knowledge” pass undefined. Marx would rankle at the book’s lack of concern for material realty; Foucault would laugh at its naïve faith that “learning” is objective and unrelated to power.

Aside from these authorial missteps, The Good Book illustrates two big problems with the New Atheism. First, the ethical system of the Bible is superior to Grayling’s version precisely because there is a God involved. The threat of God’s wrath means that readers are not persuaded to be nice to each other, they are compelled. Likewise, Christ’s physical resurrection gives us hope of salvation. Without his divine nature, Jesus was just a failed revolutionary. It is the literal realization of God on Earth that gives Christ moral authority, confirming the truth of everything that has gone before and prophesying what is to come. Even if the reader does not believe in God, they can surely see the greater social utility of theistic morality than Grayling’s republic of ethical astronomers. The Good Book’s model for basing ethics on experience raises this question: what if experience and necessity urge us to make a decision that is objectively evil? Theistic morality says that we have to say no, but Grayling’s text is full of loopholes. Without an authority external to man, good and evil become constructs. Recall that in Genesis, Grayling wrote, “In humankind there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite.” Not only can he not name evil at this foundational stage [why? Is this political correctness?], but he defines good as the sum of human experience. Until very recently, experience said that blacks made good slaves, that the disabled could be sterilized, or that women were intended for housework and breeding. There was also a consensus that accumulated human experience proved there was a God that served a useful moral purpose.

Second, Grayling’s decision to produce a sacred text for atheists underlines the New Atheism’s evolution from healthy skepticism to the status of a new religion. It has its inquisition (Richard Dawkins’ endless TV programs exposing miracles we all knew were frauds), its process of confession and redemption (the phenomenon of teenagers posting recantations on Youtube), and now its own Bible. Why does every humanist movement inevitably imitate religion? The French Revolution produced the Cult of the Supreme Being; the Cultural Revolution gave us the Little Red Book. The reason is that man needs something to venerate, something to live and die for. What is unusual about the New Atheism is its lack of artistry. None of its proponents are formally trained in theology, so their knowledge of the subject is embarrassingly limited. Most are scientists of some ilk, so they lack the imagination required to offer something in the place of faith. Their movement will eventually be forgotten because, like this text, they are fundamentally dull.

No better review could be written for The Good Book than this one I found online: “Grayling had signed my copy, so I couldn’t even get my money back”.

I’ve never understood the opposition of so many priests and pastors to Halloween. Growing up a Baptist, I was solemnly warned that it was tantamount to devil worship. Now that I’m a Catholic, I’m told that the festival has stolen the thunder of All Saints Day, which venerates those who have made it to Heaven. It’s all politics, of course: the Day of the Dead and Halloween are often proxies for pagan festivals that we did our damnedest to suppress. The Catholic Church is right to push its line for the sake of orthodoxy, but one senses a touch of jealousy when millions of Mexicans gather around their private altars to offer marigolds, tasty snacks, and sugar skulls to their dearly departed.

The mainline churches miss a trick when they denounce Halloween. In a culture which is so unashamedly materialist, it’s nice that we take a moment to contemplate the supernatural – even if it is by dressing up as Freddy Krueger and hitting on Janet from marketing. Christians should surely have no fear of this devil fancying. In a recent editorial for Fox News, the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, writes that he never grasped why people found his book so scary. He intended it to be, “a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story – in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through.” He was inspired by the possession of a boy that occurred while Blatty was at Georgetown University in 1949. He explains, “I remember thinking, ‘Someday, somebody’s got to write about this, because if an investigation were to prove that possession is real, what a help it would be to the struggling faith of possibly millions, for if there were demons, I reasoned, then why not angels? Why not God?’”

Blatty makes an excellent point. Acknowledging the existence of the Devil is a first (albeit tortuous) step towards acknowledging the existence of God, for one is proof positive of the other. For this reason, genuine Satanists (and a few probably exist) have bet on the wrong team and are nothing to be afraid of. To accept the Devil is to accept God is to accept the Biblical narrative of their conflict. And the Biblical narrative ends with the Devil’s defeat and God’s victory. QED, Goths, Wiccans, Satanists, and Ozzy Osbourne are all witnesses to the eventual triumph of Yahweh over everything. They are Bible bashers in every sense.

I grew up in an odd age in Britain in which there were still only four TV channels, but we suddenly had VHS – which meant you could theoretically watch everything that was on them. As a kid, that opened up Halloween for me. Year after year, there’d be a slew of movies shown around midnight that I could record and watch the next day, while skipping school. Even during my malevolent teens, I was struck by how moral most horror movies are. That might just be a product of form: getting the audience on side requires pitting identifiable good against tangible evil (Van Helsing vs. Dracula). But creakiness of the movies helped, too: for every shudder at a bitten neck, there was a giggle at a pair of plastic fangs. The fact that I could see the wires holding up the bats, or occasionally hear someone shouting “action”, proved that it was pure artifice. The Devil/Frankenstein/Mummy/Dracula was being set up for a fall, much as you could guarantee seeing Christopher Lee fall on his backside in the final reel (and then try to act like it was in the script). I suspect that our exposure to crappy late night movies explains a lot of the cynicism of my generation.

I’ve been impressed with Los Angeles’ preparations for Halloween. One house two doors down has covered the shrubbery in sugar cobwebs and planted tombstones in the lawn. Another building has a skeleton hanging from a tree that moans. There will be a street parade soon and roads are already being blocked off. In an unrelated incident, a drunken girl dressed as Wonder Woman sat on my apartment block lawn last night and shouted obscenities at the moon. Several residents shouted back and the foul language reached a fascinating crescendo around 11pm, when the cops finally arrived. The lady, who was struggling with that ancient conundrum of which breast to try to keep inside one’s costume when there just ain’t room enough for two, told the officers, “I’ve had a bit to drink.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” came a cry from the apartment next to mine.

The writer Charles Coulombe has a nice summary of the various things one can do in Los Angeles this weekend, and he notes that part of the fun is the naysayers. “From his desert stronghold, evangelist Jack Chick annually unleashes his horde of comic-book tracts upon unwary trick-or-treaters. Numerous other evangelical preachers vociferate against the proceedings’ evil nature, allowing various atheists to prattle on about how stupid the Christians are. Each side is thus able to enjoy Halloween in their own way. It is truly a festival for everyone.” In the sense that it gets us all talking about the supernatural in one form or another, it’s all probably good for the soul.

Warning: this will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t seen either Alien or The Thing. And if you haven’t, you should. As soon as possible.

What a lucky boy I am: this week I got to see both Alien and The Thing (the prequel). It was an emotional experience, bringing up a lot of repressed memories from my childhood. Both movies are “pretty cewl” (©South Park) on a dramatic level, but they also play to themes of physical decay that mean a lot to me. Every time I see the alien pop out of John Hurt’s chest I think, “Brother, I’ve been there.”

It wasn’t until I re-watched Alien on Friday night, with chamomile tea and a pizza, that I realized quite how much it’s about sex. The sets are pure fetish. The Nostromo looks like Roger Vadim designed a womb: soft tan furnishings, gently throbbing lights, and lots and lots of hexagonals. In contrast, the spaceship that our heroes find crashed on a windswept planet is a Freudian nightmare. They enter it through an open orifice and descend through a small gooey hole into a misty pit full of eggs. John Hurt then stumbles upon a monster that latches onto his face and lays its fetus inside his stomach. One might accuse the alien of pushing his luck, but then he did pay for dinner…

When the little brute burrows its way out of Hurt’s chest, it becomes a metaphor for the nightmare of physical change. When he first reviewed the movie, Roger Ebert hypothesized that its cast is middle aged in order to emphasize that they are a group of ordinary people doing a job, not action heroes. I disagree. I suspect the director (consciously or unconsciously) cast older actors because people over 30 are more vulnerable to physical change than adolescents are. As a young adult, the things that happen to us are unnerving but healthy: they are the body evolving towards its zenith of intellectual and physical capability. After 30-or so, what was once growth becomes decay. The hair falls off one’s head and sprouts elsewhere. Muscle becomes fat; dull aches become “warning signs”. The infinite sexual possibilities of youth become desperate and less probable: one must breed ASAP, before everything dies up or falls off. Romance is dead and man is a walking advert for entropy.

When the body starts doing things that you don’t want it to, it becomes a separate personality from oneself. That theme is picked up in The Thing, which has just hit cinemas. It’s a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Predictably, it’s an inferior movie. But by dint of the excellent premise, it’s okay. In this movie, the alien is a virus that replicates or consumes its victim, hides in the body, and then attacks others. We never entirely understand the nature of the thing, but it is hinted that its victims don’t know they’ve been taken over. The monster only bursts forth (with several arms, a dog’s head, and a scorpion tail) when threatened. The metaphor for the loss of control of one’s body is striking.

A chronic illness is like undergoing a personal alien invasion. The tumor that was recently discovered in my father’s throat could be the seedling of a malevolent entity. It consumes half the calories that he puts into his body, growing stronger as he grows weaker. This, combined with a nervous disorder, has left him bowlegged and tiny. Every time I see him, I recognize him less; the changes in his character suggest possession. This process is tragic, but entirely natural. Cancer is the body’s way of placing time limits on our mind’s habitation. If we all lived to 150, we would be a walking mass of tumors not unlike the creature that slithers into shot in the last reel of The Thing.

For others, the horrors of Alien and The Thing provoke a subconscious response. For me they are a trip down memory lane. When I was thirteen, I contracted an appalling case of eczema that required hospital treatment and lasted for five years. Isolated with my own carcass, I found the most bizarre and terrifying things taking place. I discovered that the skin can bleed without breaking, that sores can blister and hatch, that it is possible to scratch to the bone. Doctor after doctor unwrapped my bandages and recoiled in horror, without a clue what to do. My legs were encased in cotton wool and I began every morning with a bath of antibiotics and salt. O, how I spent so much time rubbing salt into my body – desperately trying to dry up and dust off the ooze. I was a “thing” all right: a larva jammed in metamorphosis. Oddly, the disease never touched my face. I suspect it understood that if it did, I might elicit sympathy from other human beings and someone might actually try to help. Hidden beneath the neck line, it was free to feed uninterrupted.

I am sure that it is significant that this condition arose during puberty. It convinced me that sex and physical decay are intrinsically linked. It left me with a profound revulsion for the human form – perhaps because the hours spent mapping it in hospital made me aware of its every imperfection, its every potential for disaster. Today, I am a physical Dualist. I earnestly believe that the body and soul are not only separate, but at war with one another. The soul’s quest for transcendence is constantly disrupted by the body’s sensual needs. The only way to achieve salvation is to starve the body and free the mind. Of course, living as we do in a material reality, that is impossible. So, unable to completely liberate myself, I live a dual existence between mental exercise and physical degradation. Once in a while I give my body free reign and permit it excess. When it is done “wandering the world seeking the ruin of souls”, I punish it with purgation. The best cure for a hangover is prayer and green tea.

I am a survivor of eczema. Around 18, it suddenly went away. Incredibly, I have no scars and haven’t suffered with it since. Always, there is the lingering fear that it will return; every small itch could be the beginning of a long campaign. But the experience has taught me that the body is intrinsically treacherous. Treacherous, but still a part of me: something to be negotiated with, or placated.

Watching The Alien, I was struck by the conviction that me and the “toothy one”, if given a chance, could get on rather well. I’m sure it wouldn’t want to eat me (I’m all skin and bone) and I’d make a terrible father for its little facehugger (I’d always be out with my mates getting drunk). So, instead it might tolerate me as the chronicler of its exploits. By writing about the beast, maybe I could pacify it and even own it – just as I have done on this blog post by writing about my eczema. I can imagine myself crossed-legged on its icky nest floor; one hand tapping away at the keyboard, the other tickling the gelatinous space between its numerous chins. Sci-fi yin and yang.

The bus stop I use in Los Angeles has a large poster of a chap in his underwear. I think it’s supposed to be advertising his briefs, but the object of the picture is clearly the man himself. The image is disturbing. Not only is the model being objectified like a prime cut of beef, but he has been blown up so large that his anatomically perfect body looks freakish. Each rib is as thick as my arm. West Hollywood is full of homoerotica of this sort; a sensuality so aggressive that it borders on Hitlerian. Confronted by images of thrusting masculinity in every shop window, I feel soiled just buying a pint of milk. West Hollywood is Pornotopia.

Back home, in Great Britain, there’s a discussion going on about whether or not to force internet providers to put filters on porn sites. Prime Minister David Cameron’s modest proposal was denounced by “conservative” commentators as injurious to liberty. The government cannot and should not legislate morality, they cried. I am confused as to why such people use the label conservative to describe themselves. The single purpose of conservatism is to protect what is good about the traditional order. The internet is a threat to the traditional order and so it is not our friend. The North Koreans understand that, even if we do not.

Government can legislate morality and it does. Aside from murder and theft, it also outlaws things that can be consensual – like incest and polygamy. Against this regulation of the sexual code, critics often argue that whatever the government prohibits instantly becomes fashionable. The fact that arrests for public drunkenness actually increased under Prohibition is often cited as evidence that state censorship of this kind never works. The argument is redundant on two counts. A) Morality takes its authority from something other than popular sentiment. B) There are plenty of instances in which something has been outlawed and the public hasn’t reacted with civil disobedience. Florida recently banned sex with animals. By this logic, are we to expect a sudden spike in assaults on chickens? Are Floridians really that bloody minded?

Internet pornography is an obvious example of how permitting one variety of perversion invariably leads to greater and more terrible crimes. The internet turned pedophilia from a private sin into an organized crime. It put people in touch with each other who would never have otherwise met, allowing them to pool resources and share victims. It gave predators access to kids through forums. It also used mainstream porn as a gateway drug. By introducing younger and younger models into erotica, it blurred the lines between childhood and adulthood. People who previously would never have had access to material by which to test their inclinations were now goaded into more and more depravity (“If you enjoyed that, you’ll love this…”). Its the expansiveness of the internet that makes it so ripe for regulating.

When I was a child, getting access to filth was bloody hard work. The best source was The Daily Sport, a silly old rag that featured saucy stories. America could have dropped a bomb on China, and The Sport would have run with the headline, “Six in a Barracks Sexy Sex Shock!” Beyond The Sport, there were one or two books in the school library that covered the sexual cycle in terms of the birds and the bees (with the occasional reference to the behavior of monkeys). I also recall a sex education video that featured a family playing Frisbee in the nude. I'll never play Frisbee again.

All of this contact with nudity was fleeting and furtive. The joy was less in the seeing than the getting. Nowadays, all a child has to do to access some muck is to log on to the family computer. Within seconds they can see videos of whips, goats, origami and tantric projection – the whole T&A. “O brave new world that has such people in’t!” It is madness to suggest that this environmental pollution should not be subject to regulation. We shall never expunge the natural curiosity of the young, but we can at least make sure that the messages they get about sex are healthy ones.

I would go one step further and suggest that it’s time to give back to local authorities the power to outlaw the sale of pornography altogether. Like heroin, porn has been proven to be addictive. Back in 2004, medical witnesses told the Senate Commerce Committee's Science, Technology and Space Subcommittee that there was no doubt that it can lead to physical dependence. Sexual activity releases hormones that provide a short term high. If that high is not associated with ordinary, socialized sexual activity, then it becomes internalized and unhealthy. Mary Anne Layden of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, called porn the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today. The internet is a perfect drug delivery system because you are anonymous, aroused and have role models for these behaviors.”

Given how potentially dangerous it can be, it’s astonishing how weakly pornography is regulated across the Western world. It is even more astonishing considering the West’s supposed commitment to human rights. The porn industry is an unpleasant sector that often mistreats its workers. Innocents are dragged off the street with an offer of "modelling work" and then intimidated into more. Inevitably, rates of venereal disease are high. To quote one official report, “In September 2009, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 2,396 cases of Chlamydia, 1,389 cases of gonorrhea, and five syphilis cases among porn performers. It was also reported that Chlamydia and gonorrhea prevalence in porn performers is ten times higher than that of Los Angeles County 20-24 year olds and five times higher than that of one of Los Angeles County’s highest risk populations.” 

On an existential level, pornography objectifies human beings, reducing them to the status of commodities. There is no need to engage with them as real people because the sexual stimulus is entirely one sided. This encourages the viewer to regard the subject as less than human. Of course, all of us like to be objectified on some level – to be told that we are handsome or pretty. But for us to benefit, we have to have some degree of personal exchange with the spectator. Pornography lends distance and alienation.

That objectification has lethal consequences. Porn addiction is a common trait among serial killers. The murderer Ted Bundy detailed his experiences thus: “I would keep looking for more explicit, more graphic kinds of materials … until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far. You reach that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.” This is not to suggest that pornography conditions the madman’s mind. But, as with latent pedophilia, it normalizes and feeds perverse desires. It reduces humanity to fresh meat. It becomes easy to disassociate sex from mutual pleasure, violence from pain.

The profusion of legalized porn reflects so many paradoxes about 21st century society. We are supposedly an epoch that respects the personhood of women, and yet we objectify them. Gays are trying to build stable families, and yet they are ghettoized by a culture that stresses fetish and permissiveness. We assiduously protect the virginity of children, but we take away their emotional innocence as soon as possible. Most bizarrely of all, we have a conservative movement that prioritizes the freedoms of business over the health of society as a whole. Give me a conservative presidential candidate who values the souls of the vulnerable over the bottom dollar and there you will find my vote.

The finest time to be in Los Angeles is the early morning. The garden sprinklers turn the city into a veritable rain forest; the water steams off the pavement and the palm leaves drip gold. In every garden, a Hispanic laborer cuts and rakes on tiptoes so as not to wake his masters. Ladies with big hair walk their dogs along the curb. There are no cars and no bums, only empty, wide streets and the occasional jogger. This morning I ran up into the hills – a steep climb that puts you on top of the city. Pausing for a moment, you can see the studios to the south, Beverly Hills to the west, and the ghetto to the east. It’s incredible how flat and still the city looks at 7am. We’re approaching Yom Kippur, so the quiet is particularly broad and creepy. Millions of Jewish moviemakers are locked in their homes, twiddling their thumbs, unable even to use a light switch because the Talmud tells them so. It’s rather wonderful to think that an ancient faith is capable of bringing this modern metropolis to a standstill. The only thing that compares to it in Britain is the changing of the guard, when cars along the London Mall have to wait patiently for half a dozen horses to make their way to Buckingham Palace.

I’m back in the mad land of Los Angeles, the most frustrating place on earth. As my new friend, the writer Charles Coulombe put it, “This is the only city in the world that you can have a love hate relationship with.” Those emotions are felt in the extremes: the hate is strong enough to make you think every day about leaving, but the love is sweet enough to make you stay. It is possible with enough money and a car to spend one’s time only in the bits that you love. But I’m penniless and can’t drive, so every journey to something pleasurable requires a long walk through miles of pain.

One thing I appreciate is the city’s capacity to soak up insanity. Anything you want to do here – from a monkey’s tea part to a Trotskyite whist drive – you can make happen, and some fruitcake will happily join in. On my first night, my pal Rupert Russell (who seems to have graduated from Harvard academic to making adverts) took me to a comic book store on Sunset. We were greeted by a woman dressed as a butterfly. Rupert gave her a password and we were shown to the back of the store. There was a theatre comprised of a small audience of single men, each sitting two chairs apart from each other, their eyes fixed on the stage. The act was a woman in a Guy Fawkes mask signing “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again.” When she finished, there was a quiet round of applause. Catwoman introduced the next act: Wonder Woman and Super Girl singing “Don’t Stop Believing”. It went on like this for an hour. I sat in the back with Rupert, eating a mushroom pizza.

The evening was run by a comic book writer and a former porn actress. Rupert says that back in the early noughties, when the DVD market was really taking off, porn stars gained followings that rivaled mainstream actors. The sordid anonymity of the video (hidden away on the top shelf in a black box) was replaced with a new sense of commercial and artistic self-confidence. This particular actress loved comic books, so the gentleman in the audience hail from the subculture of Marvel fetishists. She is a heroine to them, a silicone goddess. “Of course, the internet has changed everything,” one creature with glasses and a beard told me. “Now you can download barnyard action for free and you won’t know the names of any of the girls in it.” He sighed “Porn has lost a lot of its personality.”

The least pleasant bit of Los Angeles is that for which it is best known: Hollywood. What is so frustrating about movieland is its introspection. I’ve spent a lot of time in politics and journalism – two areas of life that are equally self-obsessed. But they are also fundamentally extrovert: they exist to engage with or to change the world around them. In contrast, Hollywood is eaten up with itself. World War III could break out and all this place would be talking about is how much Shia Labeouf made for appearing in Transformers 4: the Rusting.

That narcissism is especially frustrating for me as I am here, ostensibly, to interview a bunch of celebrities for my book on Hollywood politics. It’s proving tough. Phone call after phone call is met with the same bland, joyless pleasantry (“O how fascinating, can you put that in an email?”), their small talk so empty of promise that sometimes, when I put my ear to the phone, I think I can hear the sea. Hours of deflection wound me up to breaking point. I called the office of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and asked to be put through. I mistakenly asked for “Jerry Katzenberg.”
The operator (and she is only an operator remember) said, “We don’t have anyone working here by that name.”
I ended the call and thought about it. Then I rang back and said, “Sorry, do you definitely not have a Jerry Katzenberg there?”
“No,” she replied.
“Do you have anyone by the name of Katzenberg?”
“We have a Jeffrey Katzenberg.”
“O that must be the one I meant,” I said. “But the names aren’t so different, why didn’t you just correct me and put me through?”
“If you can’t be bothered to get Jeffrey’s name right, why should I connect you?”
“Who are you?” I asked. “His mother?”
She hung up.

The bigger problem with getting access to a star is their obsession with image. I want to talk about their politics, a subject that threatens to muddy their profile. They won’t give me access unless they can control every aspect of the conversation, from what is asked to what is written down. An actor is like a corporation. They brand themselves to the hilt and carefully orchestrate every aspect of their waking lives. Working for them is, apparently, Hell. One girl told me that Holly Hunter sacked her for bringing her the wrong label of mineral water. I replied, “Holly who?” The banality of the sin and the situation is my big issue with Hollywood. Structurally it fascinates me – its etiquette, its soft power, its ability to define global culture. But artistically it is dead and socially it’s a total bore. Of course, there are pockets of wonder and wisdom. And the closest a person is to you is measured in how honest they are. If they give you their real age and the correct number of marriages they’ve had, then you’re in.

***

The vanity infects Hollywood’s politics. This evening Rupert and I saw a movie called The Ides of March, directed by George Clooney. Ostensibly it’s about a young staffer on a presidential campaign who is corrupted by the process. In reality, it’s about George Clooney’s fantasy of running for president. In this scenario he is that rarest of creatures: an electable liberal. Cue scenes of him explaining to unibrow Christians why it’s okay to be gay, or why solar polar is a sustainable alternative to the War on Terror. In the real world, Clooney’s candidate would be ranked somewhere beneath Dennis Kucinich, but in movieland he’s the frontrunner for his party’s nomination and a shoe-in for the presidency. His only flaw? Why, the only flaw that Hollywood would understand – sex. His nineteen-year-old squeeze gets pregnant. Whether one is prochoice or prolife, the this subplot is truly execrable. Not only does no one at any point suggest she might keep the child, but the movie’s handling of the physical and emotional realities of her condition would shock even Planned Parenthood. Put it this way: Clooney’s mistress is possibly the first woman in history who dresses for an abortion.

The movie’s lack of moral focus is beside the point. It is an exercise in Hollywood idealism that is now hopelessly detached from reality and no longer heartwarming. It’s time for Mr. Smith to either wise up or quit Washington – his kind of schmaltzy Jimmy Stewart pap won’t cut it anymore. Obama, rumor has it, has disappointed movieland liberals and his donations are down. If that is so then he has my sympathy. At a time when millions are unemployed and the Western world hurtles towards economic oblivion, only Hollywood could continue to express outrage that the Japanese go whaling once in a while, or that Bill and Ben can’t get married in the mosque of their choice.

Yet, for all its absurdities, I still find myself sleepless with paranoia out here. Intellectually it is bereft, but Hollywood always manages to convince me that it matters. Every unanswered phone call drives me insane. I want to walk up to Robert Redford’s front door, bang on it and cry, “Why won’t you talk to me, you SOB?” But he won’t be there; he’ll be away promoting a soap or launching an ice cream. And I won’t even get to the front door because every home is protected by a gate and private security. It’s easier to break into the White House than it is George Lucas’s garage.

For the respite that it offers from this madness, I thank Yom Kippur. Safe in the knowledge that the only reason Richard Dreyfuss won’t take my call is because he’s locked in his house with everything unplugged, I can relax and fool myself that Hollywood loves me – it’s just otherwise engaged. Free from responsibility, I shall hop on a bus to Century City and grab some food at Panda Express. Then I shall while away a couple of hours in America’s greatest innovation, the cigar café. Behind the dark curtain is another of Angelino wonderland, a place where grizzled truck drivers (who otherwise don’t exist on this side of town) gather to drink JD and coke and smoke themselves to death. We shall discuss Sarah Palin’s munificence and I shall fall in love with Los Angeles all over again.

Today I begin packing for another few months of work in America – Los Angeles in October, the east coast in November. Normally I do so with excitement, but now I have regrets.

England is hard to leave at this time of year. An Indian summer is descending into autumn, a moment of change that flatters our uneventful landscape. The trees are turning brown and the flowers are starting their long droop to the bed beneath them: soon their petals will fall, covering the floor in speckled marvels of pick and white. The season ends tragically for the bees. They swim around drunkenly in early September, sipping at the roses in the garden. But by the end of the month, they are fat and confused by the colder weather. A few venture inside and expire on the carpet. By October, they are all gone. As the birds fly off, the landscape falls silent. The trees are barren and cruel, the waters are stagnant. It is not the scene that bring comfort, but the knowledge that this happens every year. The old dies off and the new hibernates in nests, awaiting the fresh spring of tomorrow.

I returned home this afternoon to an extraordinary sight. My father had driven his car into the next door neighbor’s garden, tearing down the fence and crushing the flowers in-between. He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs in silence. The old man is dying and this is the latest manifestation of it. Nerve damage has left him unable to use his hands and he finds walking difficult. He has also developed a heart condition and cancer of the thyroid. None of these are connected and they all appeared suddenly and instantaneously four weeks ago. I have watched my father age twenty years in a month. I helped him indoors and fixed him some honeyed tea.

What is terrifying about death isn’t the thought of annihilation: it’s the threat of a long period of vulnerability. If only we could all, at a moment of our choosing, walk out into No Man’s Land and fall at the first volley. Instead we decline slowly and are forced to rely on the patience of others. My grandmother went this way. After a lifetime spent travelling the world as a mystic (she claimed to have read Nureyev’s palm) she ended as a tiny, broken lady locked up in a hospice. The hospice had a certain je ne sais quoi: it was converted from a World War I sanatorium and overlooked a wind-swept moor. But rather than reading tarot cards and painting terrible landscapes – as I imagined she would do – my grandmother watched TV and waited for dinner. I felt contempt for her willingness to die like this. “If it was me,” I told myself, “I would spend my last weeks on safari, drinking myself stupid with champagne.” But her will seemed to have gone. How extraordinary this was from a woman who was previously so independent that when my mother and I once called on her house, she pretended not to know who we were to avoid having to let us in.

But now, I can see from my father that this condition is universal. He has no defiance left, only an all-encompassing dread of the moment when he won’t wake up. I cannot understand or describe it until I too face the Grim Reaper. But, for now, I will label it the Last Shout of Atheism. My father believes in nothing and he knows that once he is dead, that will be it. He doesn’t care how he is remembered, because he won’t be around to hear the loving eulogy. He doesn’t believe Heaven exists, so he has no hope. He doesn’t acknowledge Hell, so there’s no galvanizer to action. He is waiting for oblivion.

When I have children – and so help me God, I will have a million – I will indoctrinate them all in The Faith. I’ll bludgeon them into it with Sunday school and prayers at nighttime. I’ll have them memorizing Psalms and spitting at the Heathen that live across the street. Some, perhaps all, will lose the faith in their adulthood. But on the deathbed, it’ll come back – the certainty that there is something beyond all the blood and tears of mortal life. Maybe they’ll only fool themselves that they believe it, but who cares? The important thing is that they will die in peace.

Combining love of God and love of nature, one of the great joys of having faith is the knowledge that the seasons will continue after I am gone. Every generation of plant or animal that evaporates in winter, will be replenished in the spring – perhaps with a thousand mutations that provide a constant, churning evolution of life. It will not stop unless He commands it. Who is He – Jehovah, Christ, Dharma, or Allah? I’ve still not figured that out, but after I am gone I will know. And that prospect gives death an added thrill: “I’m coming, sir. And I have a lot of questions to ask.”

So I regret leaving England for the fact that I shall miss that which gives me the greatest comfort: the cycle of death and birth that plays out in her fields and streams. Los Angeles is beautiful, but dry and white all year round. There life never stops and never starts. Like the plants and grass, it is artificial and thus immortal.

Across the world, the Catholic Church is under siege. The Pope is protested wherever he goes, Catholic dogma is challenged by the New Atheism, and sex abuse scandals have diminished the reputation of the clergy. But hope can be found in the most unlikely of quarters. I've found it while re-watching a mountain of Seventies horror movies (like the marvellously kinky To the Devil a Daughter, pictured on the right). The shifting fashions of this particular genre reveal that public opinion is very fickle. In the 1970s, priests on film swung from being perverted guardians of the old order to mystical prophets of the next - sometimes in the intermission between double-bills.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church fell afoul of the thirst for personal liberation. The reforming Catholic council of Vatican II shattered the Church’s confidence in its mission, while secularization – spurred on by liberalism triumphant – swept Europe. These changes were only felt at a popular level in the 1970s, when sexual freedom and a declining respect for authority finally trickled down to the masses. For millions of souls it was a heady age full of lingering regrets, like experimenting with LSD or voting for Jimmy Carter.

It was inevitable that the anti-clericalism of the decade would appear on film. Seventies horror cinema – best viewed with a keg of beer and lots of Monster Munch – is full of scathing critiques of the Catholic Church. Some of them are rather good. A typical example is Lucio Fulci’s Italian production Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972), in which a Catholic priest murders little boys before they can “come of age”. The priest is motivated by an obvious sexual lust for his charges, as expressed in a speech he gives while falling off a cliff: “They grow up. They feel the stirrings of the flesh. They fall into the arms of sin, sin that God easily forgives yes: but what of tomorrow? What sordid act will they commit? What sins will they enact when they no longer come to confession? Then they will really be dead, dead forever, dead for all eternity. They are my brothers … and I love them.” The priest’s killing spree is Lucio’s personal metaphor for a Church that won’t accept the social changes of the 1960s and let its congregation grow up into mature, self-governing adults. The message implied by having Barbara Bouquet appear naked throughout the entire movie is less clear.

But closer study of the horror genre shows surprising nuance in the handling of priests. Two movies that deal thoughtfully with priesthood in an age of flairs are What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) and House of Mortal Sin (1976). The latter was directed by the brilliant Pete Walker, who had previously made some surprisingly conservative horror movies satirizing social reform (in one of them a cannibal is given an early release from prison for good behavior and, predictably, becomes a recidivist). House of Mortal Sin stars the wonderful Anthony Sharp as Fr Meldrum, the ultimate Seventies symbol of Church hypocrisy. Meldrum’s a traditionalist priest who refuses to say the reformed Vatican II Mass. He tapes confessions and uses them to blackmail parishioners into attending rough therapy sessions at his house where he shouts at them for enjoying sex too much. We learn that his mother forced him into the priesthood and refused to let him marry his childhood sweetheart. Sexual repression twisted into religious mania and it’s not long before Fr Meldrum’s off killing buxom young wenches in a variety of symbolic ways (strangled with a rosary, poisoned with a wafer etc).

So far, so liberal a critique. But at the emotional heart of the movie is a younger priest called Fr Bernard who has shacked up with Stephanie Beacham (well done, sir!). He’s toying with leaving the Church and parades all sorts of hip opinions about sex and drugs. Drippy Bernard is established by Walker as the hero, the man always on the brink of doing the right thing. But at the end of the movie, Fr Meldrum convinces Bernard to help him cover up the murders. He reasons that if the public knew what was going on, faith in the Church would collapse and all its good works would be diminished. Walker’s movie may be scathing of moral traditionalism, but he is equally condemnatory of Bernard’s cowardice and cronyism. The message: the sins of the past are excused rather than corrected by the timid liberalism of the present. Given the willful blindness that many “progressive” bishops demonstrated towards sexual abuse in the decades to come, it’s a remarkably prophetic vision.

The more nuanced What Have You Done to Solange? argues that the problem with the Church isn’t hypocrisy: its moral emasculation in an age of excess. The eponymous Solange is the daughter of the headmaster of a Catholic boarding school. At the start of the movie she’s a gibbering, idiotic wreck and no one seems to know why – or care. The school’s gym teacher, Enrico, is having an illicit fling with an underage student (but it’s okay, because both of them are hot). The two are cavorting in a rowing boat when they witness the brutal murder of one of the schoolgirls. Later, Enrico’s sexpot girlfriend is drowned in the bath for what she saw, forcing him to go on the hunt for the killer.

Director Massimo Dallamano encourages us to think that it’s one of the priests at the school behind the kinky massacre. A rosary is glimpsed and it is implied that the killer picks his victims whilst hearing their confessions. But Dallamano has a surprise for us. Enrico realizes that the villain isn’t picking on random girls but rather on former friends of Solange. At the film’s climax, he discovers that all the victims were involved (very willingly) in a sexy sex ring. Solange got pregnant and the schoolgirls forced her to have an abortion, performed with rusty implements on a kitchen table. Solange was driven mad by guilt. Her father, the headmaster, took it upon himself to avenge her by slaughtering everyone involved.

Dallamano implies that the Church is partly at fault for not having chastised the schoolgirls and enforced moral order. The priests on screen are nice enough fellows, but presented as tired and confused; the schoolgirls regularly skip Mass and no one notices. The headmaster represents an outraged laity that must take order into their own hands. Given the awfulness of the abortion scene, the audience is prompted to sympathize. What Have You Done With Solange can be read as a sort of prolife response to It’s Alive!, a traumatic movie about a baby born with a taste for human flesh.

Solange and Ducking really belong to the early 1970s, when Freud’s influence was still felt in Europe's studios. But something changed in the horror genre mid-decade. Take the movies of Dario Argento, the master of Italian schlock. His early efforts (Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red) feature human villains motivated by sexual angst. By the end of the 1970s, he was making movies like Suspiria and Inferno, in which the culprits are witches. The popularity of the theme peaked in the mid-1980s with two movies he co-produced called Demons and The Church. Both feature literal demonic infestation, usually beaten back by cool black dudes on motorbikes. In the course of a decade, audience tastes had gravitated from Hitchcock to Edgar Allen Poe.

That slow change was reflected in the wider depiction of priests on film. In 1973, Warner Bros released The Exorcist. The movie depicted two priests; one modern and skeptical, the other a traditionalist mystic. It is the mystic, with his peculiar Latin rites, who is revealed to be correct about the demon possessing foulmouthed child actress Linda Blair. The hysteria surrounding the movie helped revive the Church’s reputation as a force for good. Its medieval understanding of pure evil, which seemed so anachronistic in the 1960s, was now terrifyingly hip. The release of The Omen in 1976, in which Satan is incarnated as a child, further underscored the triumph of Catholic mysticism. The movie features a batch of apostate priests, but there’s no doubt that it is Catholic dogma that holds the key to repelling the Antichrist. Both movies coincided with the American Fourth Great Awakening and a worldwide revival of religious evangelicalism that offered an escape from the economic miseries of the late 1970s. Alas, the Moral Majority typically campaigned against horror movies on the grounds of violence or explicit sexuality. They missed a trick. Many of the video nasties they opposed were infused with the religious sensibilities of the era. If only they had forced themselves to watch them, they would have realized that most were recruiting films for the Catholic Church.

Of course, individual movies and their directors don’t speak for the entirety of mass culture. But the improving screen image of priests does hold out hope for our current generation of clerics. History and culture don’t always progress forward; shocks to the system can spark social revolution, but they can also help resurrect orthodoxy. In the sexy, violent world of 1970s horror, everything old was new again.

It’s a pity that the riots broke out when they did, because I was just starting to fall in love with England again. I stepped off the plane at Heathrow after three months in Los Angeles and noticed, for the first time in years, how pretty Albion is. England’s beauty is not like America’s (harsh and empty) or Europe’s (exciting and big), it is small and perfectly managed. Like our food, it is quite plain. We drove home past miles and miles of patchwork green and yellow fields. I lay on the backseat and watched the tops of the telephone polls and the cotton-wool clouds go by, and I was very happy to be home.

Now it is a perfect Sunday, spent home alone at my parent’s place in West Kent. My father has a heart condition that this morning caused his lips to swell. He looks like Mick Jagger. My mother rushed him off to hospital and I had the house to myself. I opened all the windows, put on some Beethoven, and lit a cigar. I suppose I am lucky to have won the lottery of life and been born an Englishman. How other races survive without the comforts of Radio 4, shortbread, Marmite on toast, warm beer, Betjeman, and Viz, I cannot imagine. I don’t regard any of these things as a signifier of race or class. My own politics has changed, but my ideals have remained constant. I wish every Englishman could live like this: it is their inheritance, regardless of origin.

I believe that beauty and ugliness are lived in balance, which is why last week’s riots were less of a shock to me than they might have been to others. I am angry, of course. I yearned to go to London with a baseball bat and dish out some justice of my own. There was a window last week when it was possible to guillotine thieving children in public and no one would have minded. That window has closed and the liberal backlash is upon us. We will now have to consider “what is wrong with our society?” The answers will range from “too little money” to “too much money”. But I don’t think there anything wrong with England that can be understood in material terms. We’re simply human beings, and human beings are not nice animals.

The English think they are nice because they are obsessed with good manners and etiquette. But these are artificial things, not genetic dispositions. Throughout the centuries, we have used to them to suppress or hide our latent violence. The Japanese did the same, burying their brutality beneath ritual. In Blighty, we don’t talk, we don’t complain. We eye each other carefully over the kitchen table; take notes, record slights, plot revenge.

Anecdotal evidence from football matches and Saturday night punch-ups testifies to our nasty nature. The English drink like they don’t want to live. Unleashed from good manners by booze, we are monkeys. I was very amused by this post written by an American on the nightmare that is contemporary England: “I accidentally broke into a queue once and thought I might die from a thousand umbrella pokes. I’ve felt under physical threat at Gatwick by a man who thought my concern about making my plane was an accusation of him of something. England is the only country in which I’ve been pursued by a man in a car saying “I am going to get you.” Where I’ve lost many packages on the train or in a crowd when I was pushed against, where a taxi driver has stolen from my bags when he got them out of the car, where I’ve had a friend brutally beaten by an intruder where all the undergraduates in her building ignored her screams because they didn’t want to get hurt … So the idea is that there are inexplicable little outbreaks that are almost wholly ignored, until they come together.” Et voila, the August riots.

Don’t believe that a nation so anally obsessed about putting the milk in the cup first could kill indiscriminately? Why, the list of English atrocities in endless. In 1919, our fine military men gunned down roughly 1,000 Indians at the Amritsar Massacre. I’m sure we didn’t get a single drop of blood on our nice white collars. During the 18th and 19th centuries, we carried out a systematic genocide of the population of the Scottish highlands. Farms were burned down and thousands of people starved to death or driven abroad. In the 17th century, Oliver Cromwell carried out a similar decimation against the Irish as part of our civilising process over there. In the 15th century, the revolt of Welsh prince Owen Glendower was put down with predictable brutality. I remember reading about it in school books and blanching at the stories of Welsh women killing wounded English soldiers by cutting off their genitalia and stuffing it in their mouths. Fanciful or not, the idea speaks to an innate brutality in the British population. The bourgeois cult of good manners that erupted in the 18th and 19th centuries – when erotica was re-classed as pornography, prisons replaced local jailhouses, debtors were isolated, and the unwashed masses deported wholesale to Australia – created the mythical reserve that still represses our passions today.

This is a pessimistic message, but not without hope. Redemption from original sin is possible and we can all find it if we ask for it. But the first step towards redemption is admitting guilt. And the English myth of good manners prevents us from doing that: we just won’t admit that we are capable of violence. Our people, we insist, are the politest in the world – our soldiers the most orderly, our policemen the most courteous, our villains the most honest, our teachers the most hardworking. These precious fantasies cloud our vision. Meanwhile, the grip of good manners is slipping and bad behavior is on the march. We don’t even adhere to the cultural norms that we define ourselves by. The British are a dog unleashed.

What we don’t need is reactionary state violence. The thirst for it is natural, but its actualization never is. In his play Marat/Sade (properly titled, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade), Peter Weiss explored two revolutionary prerogatives. The first, represented by de Sade, is the tendency to spontaneous popular violence. The second, taking its lead from the first, is Marat’s brand of social justice brutally enforced by the state. De Sade initially supported Marat’s Terror, when it was random and democratic. He lauded the looting of the rich. But when the state took the mob’s place and set up committees to process enemies of the revolution wholesale, de Sade was disgusted by the turn towards dispassion. The guillotine was swift, clean, inhuman. To quote de Sade, as interpreted by Weiss, the urge to destroy is natural but state terror is not: “Haven't we always crushed those weaker than ourselves? Haven't we thrown in the throats of the powerful with continuous villainy and lust? Haven't we experimented in our laboratories before applying the final solution? Man is a destroyer. But if he kills and takes no pleasure in it, he’s a machine. He should destroy with passion, like a man.” De Sade recounts a romantic death by torture, murder, and final absolution. Then he compares it with the ruthless banality of the modern, totalitarian state: “Now is all official; we condemn to death without emotion. There is no singular, personal death to be had. Only an anonymous, cheapened death that we could dole out to entire nations on a mathematic basis until the time comes for all life to be extinguished.” We don’t want this, but it’s what we’ll get if we cede public anger to the government.

What we do need is to correct the imbalance between the reality of human nature and public policy. However that is done, it must involve a realization that we’ve grown apart from England as a place. Life lived close to the land is lived in sympathy with the cycle of birth, sex, death, and rebirth. Life lived away from the land has to be ordered by good manners because it is so unnatural and disturbing. Rats confined in a small space will tear each other apart.

Living without myths doesn’t mean living without beauty. There is a real England beyond all that nonsense about stiff-upper-lips and Sunday best. It is the England of the patchwork of green and yellow that I observed from the car. It is England real and eternal for it exists in one’s hand when gripped as a lump of sod or a blown like a fart as a blade of grass betwixt finger and thumb. To quote Edward Thomas, on leave from the slaughter in France: “Often I had gone this way before:/ But now it seemed I never could be/ And never had been had been anywhere else;/ ‘Twas home; one nationality/ We had, I and the birds that sang,/ One Memory.” August is leaving and Autumn will come. The leaves will fall, the green and yellow will become brown and red. Keep calm and carry on, Britons! For the England you have always known is still beneath your feet.

PS: the picture is a piece of Gin Lane by Hogarth, depicting a drunken Englishwoman cheerfully abandoning her child.