Welcome to the Age of Jerks

Spectator

3 days ago

How screwed is Britain? I've checked with the Impartiality Police. They said stick to the facts. Like many ailing, ageing western democracies, we've had low growth, soaring debts and flat living standards for nearly two decades. Have our politicians met the moment? You tell me. Perhaps, as The Spectator has long advocated, we need some heretical and brave thinking to improve our prospects and make sense of the giant forces – of technology, ecology and demography – that are reshaping our world at a dizzying rate. For a decade, I have tried to rebalance the news, from events to trends. The result of all this: a new podcast from the Today franchise, called Radical.
I've always had a soft spot for the word. When I was at Downing College, Cambridge, my don said that when he sat the All Souls exam in Oxford, where you write about one word for three hours, his word was 'radical'. It comes from Latin radix, for root. Though now associated with upheaval, the etymology carries a different sense, closer to 'the root of the matter'. If writing about the word today, I would argue that the radical spirit, long associated with the left, now animates the transatlantic right.
On last week's episode, Dr James Orr, the Cambridge theologian and friend of J.D. Vance who is becoming to Nigel Farage what Keith Joseph was to Mrs Thatcher, described the ambition of his new thinktank, the Centre for a Better Britain. I reminded him of the lovely line from William Buckley, in his 1955 opening editorial for the National Review, that a conservative is one who 'stands athwart history, yelling Stop!' I suggested the elegiac conservatism of Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton has been succeeded by the missionary zeal of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who stand afore history, yelling 'Go!' Dr Orr believes this is not just because of the marriage between MAGA and assorted techno-utopians; nor is it a response merely to the rampaging globalisation chronicled in Vance's memoir, with its Scrutonian title of Hillbilly Elegy. He argues that 1789 to 2016 was an Age of Liberalism, and now we're suffering the birth pangs of a new epoch.
What should we call it? Such is the rate of technological innovation today, some people call it The Great Acceleration. Sadly, that's been and gone. AI, which is underhyped rather than overhyped, will speed up history as never before. For instance, I suspect the future of work is Head (AI), Hand (Robots), Heart (Us, we hope). Acceleration is the rate of change of speed. The rate of change of acceleration is jerks. This is the Age of Jerks.
At Lord's the other week, I spoke to a former prime minister. This kind soul wondered aloud if PMQs is the optimal use of a PM's time. It eliminates half of Wednesday and much of Tuesday, so around 20 per cent of the week. The arguments for PMQs are familiar. Of course PMs hate it, you may say. But would a monthly interrogation by the liaison committee, while annoying for bulletin editors and keyboard warriors, better serve democracy?
I put this to Kemi Badenoch, whom I have just interviewed for TV. She said she likes the current arrangement. I shall remind her of that if she becomes prime minister. Watching the edit, I wondered if I am encouraging too many tears on television. Recently, in a BBC pilgrimage to India, I cried when thinking about my dear departed dad. Mrs Badenoch has a similar moment when talking about her late father. It was a revealing moment from a politician who's not normally known for her vulnerability.
I strongly believe in rote learning poetry. I can recite, verbatim, most of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard', Satan's unanswerable temptation in Book IX of Paradise Lost, and several of Shakespeare's sonnets. I do it partly to combat cognitive decline. In the week of BBC scandals about Gaza, Glastonbury and MasterChef, I dutifully turned my attention to a denser verse – the BBC editorial guidelines – but found the decline accelerated.