Paul Johnson

It is all very well saying Asia is replacing Europe as the prime creator of wealth, but is there any evidence that new superpowers like China and India will be able to supply the cultural magnificence which once accompanied European productivity? We take European art for granted. But its profusion and variety, and the thoroughness of its penetration into every aspect of life, are unequalled. I have been repeatedly to the new medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum since they opened. Many wonderful artefacts never before seen, or at any rate never properly displayed, are now on view in all their opulence. They overflow with objects which testify sometimes to the genius but always to the ingenuity, invention, skill and taste of the craftsmen who created them.

Before the advent of Political Correctness — the system of censorship which has settled over the English-speaking world like a dense cloud of phosgene gas — clever people were unashamed of being eccentric. This applied particularly to dons. I am reminded of this by browsing through a gigantic book, Magdalen College, Oxford: A History, edited by L.W.B. Brockliss. How lucky I was to go to that magical place when the people who ran it were still totally self-confident, and not afraid, as Belloc put it, ‘to shout the absolute across the hall’. This magnificent book, probably the finest college history ever put together, is a threnody for the weird personalities of the learned over more than four centuries.

This Christmas my thoughts go out to the people of Cockermouth, perhaps my favourite little town in all England, as it was Wordsworth’s. Especially I think of its small shopkeepers, for what makes the town so delightful is its many tiny businesses, selling unusual and curious goods. So well-mannered and friendly are the people who serve in these shops that making a purchase, however modest, is a pleasure in itself. Most of them have been flooded, the stock ruined. Wordsworth was born there, and ‘fair seed-time had my soul’. He recalls, in ‘The Prelude’, walking, aged five, along the banks of the Derwent, ‘behind my Father’s House... along the margin of our Terrace Walk’.

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid figure drawings, which he deepened by clever hatching and watercolour washes.

What are the salient evils of our time? They are two-fold. One is social engineering, the idea that human beings can be changed, improved and moved about as though they are quantities of cement or concrete. Today, virtually all regimes, whether democratic, dodgy or outright totalitarian, practise social engineering. Not least Gordon Brown’s crumbling New Labour set-up, where virtually all the innumerable quangos it has created are designed to engineer the population in a direction designated by government.

The more I see of the intellectual world and its frailties, the more I appreciate the truth of G.K. Chesterton’s saying: ‘When people cease to believe in God, they do not believe in nothing. They believe in anything.’ It is one of the tragedies of humanity that brain-power is so seldom accompanied by judgment, sceptical moderation or even common sense. The vacuum left by the retreat of formal religion is most commonly filled, today, by forms of pantheism. Zealots devote their lives to ‘saving’ the rainforests, deserts or habitats of endangered species. They believe, passionately, in pseudo-scientific myths like climate change, global warming and the greenhouse effect. Some worship science as a faith and a way of life. Others hate it.

What is simplicity? And is it desirable, on principle? A good question. My recent essay on the origins of the universe, arguing that the simple explanation, its creation by an omni-potent God, is more plausible than its sudden emergence as a result of infinitely complex (and disputed) events, angered some readers. They took the view that only the simple-minded see virtue in simplicity, and that a love of complexity is the mark of intellectual maturity. So, returning to the subject, let us look at complexity, and what promotes it. There seem to be three main factors. The first is constructive knowledge. Human beings are clever creatures and delight in their ability to create, and to put their creations to the test. This is particularly true of those who design machines.

It is a sobering thought that a year ago the nominal wealth of the world, as registered in bank holdings, stock and bond prices, real estate and company valuations, was twice what it is today. Where has all the money gone? Was it there in the first place? The $50 billion ‘invested’ with Bernard Madoff seems to have simply disappeared into a celestial, or infernal, black hole, leaving ‘not a rack behind’. I heard the other day of a man supposedly worth $6 billion a few months ago, now down to $500 million, so technically he is not even a billionaire any more. He did not actually do anything to cause his fortune to be divided by 12: just sat appalled, watching it vanish, on TV.

Are you sophisticated? Here’s how to find out The word ‘sophisticated’, though commonly used, especially by persons who turn out on close investigation to be unsophisticated, is tricky, and truly sophisticated people avoid it altogether. Now, having got that off my chest, let us try to define it. One difficulty is that the root of the word can mean opposite things. Thus, a sophist can be either ‘a wise or learned man’ (OED), or ‘one who makes use of fallacious arguments’. Macaulay, in his History, ferociously calls Catholic theologians, especially casuists, ‘this odious school of sophists’. ‘Sophistry’ nearly always means ‘deceptiveness’.

This is the time of year when I repeat Christina Rossetti’s lines In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron Water like a stone. November was as cold as I remember this once-muggy, foggy month. And December even harder. The Met Office says the rest of winter will be severe, and this is the first of a cold series. I am prepared. I have two lovely, comfortable scarves, one of white, of pure cashmere, bought at an Armani sale by that Prussian beauty Lady Niti Gowrie, which somehow found its way to me, and I also possess an immense long red thing of wool, from MoMA in New York, with matching gloves, a present from Drue Heinz to my wife, which I appropriated as the spoils of war. What war?