Ed West

Although I wrote in my last post that social media makes people miserable, Twitter is also a fantastic resource for acquiring knowledge from experts and specialists in different areas. One of my favourite accounts is Rolf Degen, who daily tweets a number of scientific studies into human behaviour. Just before Christmas he linked to a story concerning the impact of alcohol consumption on politics, suggesting that booze makes us more right-wing. According to the paper ‘alcohol strips away complex reasoning to reveal the default state of the mind’ and drunkenness therefore encourages ‘low-effort, automatic thought’ and so promotes political conservatism.

Was 2017 that terrible? Everyone feels like they’re losing and the world is going to hell, and in many ways it does feel like a dark cloud is approaching. This article, about a sex robot conference being moved after a threat from Islamic extremists, did strike me as the sort of thing one of the more pessimistic of 20th century writers might have predicted about our age. People are so depressed about the year they even got angry about Taylor Swift being happy, because how dare she. And yet despite this being such a terrible year medical progress continues in a miraculous way, worldwide poverty continues to tumble and while the planet is more violent than at the beginning of the decade, it has nothing like as many wars nor as many casualties as the 70s or 80s.

Whatever their views about the monarchy, most people will warm to the news of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s engagement. Sentimental as it sounds, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the last royal wedding and how happy I felt for Prince William and Kate Middleton, as she was then. It was one of those rare events when you felt lucky to live in a good country with a bright future. A marriage is, after all, the ultimate statement of confidence in the future — and God knows, we could all do with that right now. Marriage is not easy and never has been, as Harry will know from his own childhood. Nevertheless, people have always accepted that marital unions and stable families make society healthier, happier and more prosperous.

I'm never going to be able to own my home, that's why I'll vote Labour; also the Tories are horrible to immigrants and they don't think animals are alive or something, my friend Molly shared it on Facebook. That's basically the crux of the argument I'm hearing, obviously a reductio one, and I sense the frustration. I've argued before that house-building is an existential issue for the Tories and that we need to allow people to build the sort of beautiful homes neighbours will not object to. (Even if you don't like it, traditional architecture neutralises NIMBYism).

I've always thought of the Daily Mail as catering to a sort of Roundhead English tradition, the inheritors of low Protestantism, the solid middle class, high in conscientiousness and below average in openness. That's not my tradition, personally; I identify with the Cavalier inheritance, more Catholic, more reactionary-but-in-a-jokey-way (or is it?), represented by the Daily Telegraph, a long line of heroes from Prince Rupert to Michael Wharton. So it's not my paper of choice, but it's good at what it does and people I know and care for read it – almost all of them women, unsurprisingly, considering it has the highest female readership of any newspaper.

Here's an uplifting story from the vanguard of the culture war. As the New York Times reports: 'At the Advent School in Boston, Erina Spiegelman, who is an instructional coordinator, recalled that a teacher last year asked a group of students the big question: 'What is gender?'. The first answer came from a second-grader: 'It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.'' I have a daughter that age (second grade is the equivalent of Year 3) and I love her as much as any human has loved another, but she's not an evolutionary biologist, and for me to present her very vague understanding of such a fraught, difficult and controversial subject as some sort of font of wisdom would be sheer self-indulgence.

Remember when Keith Vaz got himself down to Luton Airport a few years back to greet new Romanian arrivals getting off the plane, declaring in his rather pompous way that: 'We've seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it's the 1st of January'. This was in January 2014, when Romanians and Bulgarians were granted free movement to Britain for the first time, and on that day there was widespread guffawing among right-thinking people about how we were going to be 'swamped'; Twitter, even more so than usual, was filled with humour that was ill-disguised class contempt and status competition.

There's a scene in the touching Richard Linklater film Boyhood where the young Mason goes to visit the rural family of his estranged father and is given a Bible and shotgun for the first time. I felt a niggling terror watching it, remembering Chekhov's maxim, that the film would end with the boy taking the gun to himself, or his family, or his school classmates. It's understandable why the audience might fear the worst, seeing as America's spree-killing epidemic seems to has no end in sight, with a new low reached on Sunday in Las Vegas. Why doesn't America just ban the damn things, people ask, or at least make them far harder to access, like in Japan for instance, where there are just six gun murders a year?

However stressful and bad things get for a parent of young children, there is always one thought that puts it all in perspective - just wait until they're teenagers and they're calling you up at 3am asking for a lift from a nightclub in New Cross. So reports like this one, showing that one in four adolescent girls suffer from depression, are bound to add to that gnawing feeling of dread. Firstly the caveats - any statistic that claims '1 in such and such' suffers from this, or is a victim of this, should be treated with scepticism. Depression is also an ill-understood term, a medical diagnosis widely applied by non-medical experts. But it's safe to say that a lot of people are unhappy, and in particular a lot of young women.