Culture

As an American coming of age at the fag end of the 1960s, I celebrated self-loathing. Everything about the United States was shameful: its shallow consumerism, its environmental rapacity, its worship of money, its racism, its political assassinations, its catastrophic involvement in Vietnam. Everything about the American past was shameful, too: slavery, the massacre of Native Americans, the arrogance of manifest destiny. No surprises. At the time, these views constituted a set menu. Yet amid all this wallowing in ignominy, did I feel, myself, ashamed? Nah. Sure, I claimed to. But the sensation of genuine disgrace is soul-destroying. Drenched in actual shame, you don’t want to leave the house — and I was eager to hit the pavement with placards.

One of George Santayana’s most famous dicta is that ‘To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.’ This may be a metaphor for life, but it is also literally true. It matters in countries such as ours, where no season is so extreme that it cannot be enjoyed. If you agree with Santayana, you will be irritated by our BBC weather forecasts, which misrepresent the weather as a constant, and generally losing, battle to get warmer. In their language, temperatures are forever ‘struggling’ — always to rise, never to fall.

So, the government has finally come up with a solution to the scourge of yellow-bellied censoriousness that has swept university campuses in recent years: it is going to ban it. Yes, it is going to ban banning. It is going to No Platform the No Platformers. It is going to force universities to be pro-free speech. Which is such a contradiction in terms it makes my head hurt. You cannot use authoritarianism to tackle authoritarianism. This is a really bad thinking. The thinking comes from the universities minister, Sam Gyimah, a politician I normally have time for.

The Left has found something to raise its cheer. Needless to say, it is someone predicting that mankind is doomed. The most-read piece on the Guardian website yesterday was an interview with Paul Ehrlich – not the one who did something useful, the 19th century immunologist, but Paul R Ehrlich, the Stanford Professor of Biology, who has made a career out of warning that mankind is doomed. His latest thesis is certainly eye-catching. The Guardian quotes him as saying “the collapse of civilisation is a near-certainty within decades”. “Population growth, along with over-consumption per capita,” he says, “is driving civilisation over the edge: billions of people are now hungry or micronutrient malnourished, and climate disruption is killing people.

Zuck speaks! He’s finally responded to the Cambridge Analytica debacle. To be honest, I could have predicted almost word-for-word this evening’s statement: It wasn’t really our fault; it was mostly their fault; we’re a little bit responsible (‘front-up’ I can imagine a comms person insisting); and here are the steps we’ve taken. In fact, we’d already taken most of these steps in 2014, when all this happened. I sensed a weariness to it. He concluded his penultimate paragraph with the phrase ‘going forward’, which is usually a sign someone’s out of ideas. Still, and I can’t quite believe I’m writing this, I almost feel sorry for Mark.

It’s no secret that my career isn’t quite what it was (lucky I’m rich!) so imagine my feeling of glee when I opened up my email account last Wednesday to find messages galore from all over the mainstream media. TV news programmes, radio shows, newspapers - even the Guardian! - were keen to have my views on…the end of the print edition of the New Musical Express. What a cheek! I started work there in 1976 when I was 17; I left when I was 19 as, hilariously, I thought that people in their twenties who still wrote about music were ‘sad old men'. Since then I’ve had number one best-selling novels, won an Emmy and been condemned in the House of Commons for tranny-baiting.

Not even twenty minutes had passed into the discussion between guest speakers Carl Benjamin and Yaron Brook at King’s College London before free speech was suppressed. Swarms of violent protestors stormed the lecture theatre, with masks and bandanas, hurling verbal abuse and inciting physical attacks. We were faced with a chilling demonstration of contemporary fascism. I was chairing the discussion, at King's College London, ironically devoted to free speech and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. The speakers had different angles, and the audience were invited to make up their own mind. Although for some, rational debate was not the aim. A large bang announced their arrival. Around thirty came through the back doors, going straight for the speakers and myself on stage.

The opposite of virtue is not Vice. It’s the Daily Mail. This week, Centre Parcs announced that it would be joining an increasing number of brands – Lego, Paperchase, the Southbank Centre – who have chosen to stop advertising in the newspaper. The catalyst this time was an article by Richard Littlejohn, in which he approached the subject of same-sex parenting with his typical pose of bemused middle Englander – all the more sharply defined from the vantage point of his Florida villa. The piece – which tore into dads-to-be Tom Daley and his partner Dustin Lance Black – was criticised in some quarters as 'homophobic'. Cue the PR of moral outrage.