2025: Looking Ahead

The last few months have felt enchanted and energized in unusual ways, and the progressive narrative has broken down in irreparable ways. A worldview that combines wildly incorrect claims about reality combined with none of the softness and openness of Christianity—the acceptance of oneself as a sinner, atonement, forgiveness—was perhaps always going to burn out quite quickly. It has proved impossible to live in such a taut way, even for the most scrupulous.

Rumour has it that many of the most censorious in recent years are embarrassed about their participation in mobs: we will unlikely have any kind of truth and reconciliation event, but perhaps there will be a thawing in relations, new possibilities for dialogue. There is much to discuss, and you can only say “no debate!” a few times before someone says “er, why? I’d quite like to talk about this please”. For every self-appointed Stasi officer, there are a hundred people interested in free and frank discussion. Life is, apart from anything else, extremely boring when you feel constantly inhibited. I see many yearning for a new openness, a new honesty. If there hasn’t been a preference cascade in favour of non-fearful speech, there soon will be. The more courageous individuals are, the more everyone can think again.

Is it too soon to say that the era of identity is over? Looking ever more like a symptom of excessive bureaucracy, diminishing returns for young people struggling for recognition in an attention economy, I speak to people often who talk instead in terms of experience, character, personality and being a work-in-progress rather than a fixed set of coordinates. If we never change, we never learn from our experiences: changing one’s life—one’s mind, one’s health—is a sign of maturity. We do more good for the world—the people around us, our communities—if we look after ourselves first. The world is a terrible and unjust place, but we contribute to its overall misery if we choose misery as a coping mechanism. Optimism is a better mode for getting things done than guilt.

In the wake of populist sentiment all over the world, the UK has started to look like an outlier, clinging on to a model of politics which amounts to “not the other guys for a while”. Starmer’s incredible unpopularity—combining the personality of a spreadsheet with low-level venality over gifts, though he is hardly alone in his party—has manifested in turmoil, as the country wakes up to hypocrisies over prison sentences for social media posts in the wake of July’s unrest, and people are ever more aware that their country is not the one they remember—yet they appear to have had no say for many years in its running. Attacking the farmers and the elderly over tax is idiotic and unpopular, entrenching the impression that Labour exist for the benefit of a small number of city-dwellers while the rest of the country can go hang.

Who knows if Labour will even see out their full term: formerly taboo subjects—immigration, two-tier sentencing, council and government inaction over grooming gangs over the fear of being accused of “racism” are now being openly discussed by millions. People are tired of police indifference to crime and bureaucratic incompetence. While Reform’s popularity is indicative of these frustrations, and cannot be ignored, there is a sense that a bigger reckoning is underway, along the lines of recent fraught discussions in America. While the “tech right” rush for more immigration (and cheaper workers) in the name of a future that sees the US beating China, many MAGA supporters want Trump’s incoming administration to follow through on its promise to limit immigration and defend American workers first and foremost. These tensions on the right raise deeper metaphysical questions that concern all of us as we grapple with the realities of globalisation, namely what is a nation? What is a people? What are our values? Should techno-scientific progress be pursued at all costs? What about tradition, families, communities, history and quality of life? My hope is that all channels will be kept open so that conservative factions will continue to speak to futurists, and that anti-capitalists of all stripes—romantic, religious, socialist—will argue their case in good faith and in all seriousness. What we don’t need is more division and censorship: everybody has reasons for their position, and we only live well by understanding each other, not by socially or economically shunning one another. One hopes that the tactics of cancel culture are known and institutions will cease responding like headless chickens to accusatory tweets or anonymous emails. We are in the process of understanding the true nature of all of this. As Joseph Heath puts it: “the origins of cancel culture are neither political nor cultural. Cancel culture arises from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media… social media have dramatically expanded the power to individuals to recruit third parties to conflict.” It’s easier than ever to generate a mob, but these things are storms in a teacup that pass quickly, and are largely motivated by personal resentment: asking who is making the accusations and why must come before any panic about controversy, or dropping someone who has been targeted. Institutions need to grow a spine again and defend open and controversial discussion and individuals. The vigilante class have no standing: they are best ignored, just as newspapers used to do with angry and mad letters: drop them in the bin.

A new light-hearted seriousness is in the air, culturally speaking. Audiences are beyond tired of propaganda and moral hectoring, particularly from unintelligent people incapable of reflection or critical thought. In this regard, the new Versailles show at the Science Museum, for example, strikes an intriguing note, presenting the scientific achievements of the various French Louis without resentment or condemnation, but with an intelligent eye for what is powerful in humanity’s Promethean ambitions to conquer nature. People are gathering at salons and talks with renewed rigour, after the long dreary tail of Covid antisociality. Contemporary literature and criticism are flourishing, particularly on Substack, and people are getting used to reading long-form and books again. The major publishers are being bypassed by small and independent publishers, and self-publishing has taken off in a major way. We don’t need sclerotic institutions, sensitivity readers or simple stories: in the face of forthcoming shifts in work, AI, and knowledge, the complexity of the world, and the unfinished nature of our own humanity requires a culture brave enough to pose difficult questions without clear answers. If the Greeks invented tragedy to deal with the invention of writing, which suddenly made communication without presence possible, we will need cinema, theatre, music, literature and art capable of dealing with all the chaos and dynamism that is here and will be upon us soon. Sanity lies in real life: real nature, real people, real discussion, real art.

Cling on to truth and beauty and have a thrilling New Year!