The Great Feminisation Invades Netflix Drama: The Anatomy of a Scandal

Well-made, perfectly acted, accurately set, this drama riveted me, mostly for the wrong reasons, and left me uncomfortably disturbed. It highlighted one of the most worrying trends in modern discourse – the feminisation of experience, where feeling has become truth and powerful men are always villains.

In the background of a rape trial, the wife of an accused senior Tory minister is portrayed as a kind of pivot of truth and moral integrity around which the drama revolves. She has loved and trusted her husband James since they were at Oxford together and they now have two young children. They both come from highly privileged backgrounds and this privilege seems to act like an insulating blanket against the serious disruption a marriage breakdown might cause the likes of you and me; in the series the wealth and privilege is shown, on the whole, as a good thing.

At first Sophie stands squarely behind James as he stands trial for the alleged rape of Olivia, his young research assistant. Both parties freely admit they had a five-month affair. The alleged rape occurred in a moment of passion, in a tiny lift, a week after James broke off the affair, very much against Olivia’s wishes.

It quickly emerges that there is word from a former Oxford administrator that James had been accused of sexually assaulting a young friend of Olivia’s during a night of wild partying at the end of their Oxford year. We are shown the event in flashback and, critically, it is clearly not rape although we, the viewers, are meant to accept that it was in fact sexual assault because it was sudden and unexpected and the girl, Holly, quickly regretted it. The sequence we are shown, however, makes it clear that Holly never declined or objected verbally and offered no physical resistance, in fact the naïve virgin, overcome by being kissed and embraced by the most desirable member of their group, played first a willing part and then a passive one. A jury being shown a full video of the event would certainly have acquitted Tom. There is a strong suggestion that a ‘supportive’ friend was behind the eventual complaint to the administrator. Holly herself has vanished, supposedly to Australia, but we gradually realise that Holly is in fact Kate, the crown prosecutor, drastically remodelled and living a new life. This constitutes a serious ethical breach and Kate and her ‘supportive’ friend Liz know this and agonise together about it.

Now a diversion on my part, if you will excuse me, on the subject of ‘supportive’ female friends. This is a personal tender spot. Decades ago I was in a stable, de facto relationship with the mother of my two then very young children. She was a school teacher at a Catholic boys’ school. She and a couple of her fellow women teachers used to gather every Friday night and get drunk at our house. They would sit around mocking men and making anti-male jokes in the hearing of my son, who was old enough to get the gist of what they were saying although I would do my best to divert him. They ‘supported’ her by validating and encouraging behaviour that would eventually wreck our relationship, very much to her regret. She used to have temper tantrums. I detest family arguments and these tantrums eventually became unbearable. But a woman’s anger is her birthright in this rotten male-dominated world, declared her friends; she had nothing to regret or apologise for. The furies continued until I could stand it no longer and ended the relationship.

It has been my long experience over the ensuing decades that, while most men will not shrink from telling a mate that he is making a mistake, that he should dial it down, stop cheating or whatever, support is often viewed by women friends only as agreement, encouragement, validation, regardless of the rights, wrongs or advisability of her actions. Anything that could be seen as criticism is to be avoided as ‘unsupportive’.

This is the role played by Liz, a schoolteacher and Sophie’s friend, when she learns of her situation. Although she points out the perils of Kate’s predicament she does not insist that Kate should recuse herself from the case or threaten to blow the whistle, even though she knows that, in reality, Kate is prosecuting James not for the possible rape of Olivia but for what she is now convinced was her own rape. It is only when Kate tells Liz that she is sure that Sophie has recognised her that Liz urges her to cleverly scuttle her own case, as a conviction would probably result in her exposure, ending her career and quite possibly seeing her in prison.

At no point in the narrative is it suggested that Kate is not one of the heroines of the story, when in fact she is persecuting a man for entirely personal reasons, for a crime he did not commit. In any modern drama a male acting like that would be painted as a wrongdoer, quite justifiably.

Meanwhile the pressure is eroding Sophie and James’ marriage. He is trying his best to be completely honest, confessing to other matters which he could easily have concealed. However, he tells one lie in his testimony, denying that during the alleged rape that he called Olivia a ‘pricktease’. It becomes clear to the viewers, but not to James, that Sophie is starting to doubt every word he says. In a big confessional scene he tells her that on the night of the event with Holly his best friend Tom, now the Prime Minister, had obtained some heroin and shared it with Alex, who, in a thoroughly unconvincing scene, becomes convinced he can fly and jumps to his death from a building. (Hallucinogens have occasionally persuaded someone that they can fly; heroin is not one of them.) He tells Sophie that he disposed of the foil of heroin he grabbed from Tom by throwing it into a rubbish bin. Thus, technically, he had been an accessory after the fact to the crime of … what, we might ask. Manslaughter? It’s a stretch which we are expected to make.

Since the rape is simply two conflicting and uncorroborated stories James is acquitted. As James sets out to celebrate Sophie vanishes. She visits Liz, asking where she might be able to find Holly because she wants to ask her a question. Liz tells her Holly is long gone but the answer to the question is ‘Yes’. Sophie then has a secret meeting with Kate, in which she tells Kate that she has called a friend in the media and that the government is about to implode. In the final scenes we see Tom being put in a police car while the Prime Minister makes a statement to the media.

So the whole thing ends in an absurdity. There is no evidence of any crime. There is one piece of hearsay from Sophie that James had disposed of heroin, many leagues short of anything like an evidential basis for a prosecution, but the convention must be obeyed that the bad powerful man, who has in fact done everything in his power to be honest with Sophie, must nevertheless be carted off to his well-merited imprisonment. Sophie, brave heroine, is shown cavorting with her joyful children in the fields in front of their gorgeous cottage on the Devon coast, which I found highly distasteful. They had just seen their beloved father taken to prison. What were the makers of this programme thinking?

In sum, not very much, wrapping up this glossy feminist clap-trap with final scenes that were equally ludicrous and repellent.

Anatomy of a Scandal was in the Netflix Global Top 10 of most-watched English language series for five weeks, holding the number one position in its second week.

  • Wikipedia entry

Eve’s Apple – They Knew, Right from the Start

We all know .. Actually, no we don’t. Not any more. I was going to say we all know the story but plenty of children born in the 21st century have actually never heard the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis, the first book of the Bible. So let me recap; on the face of it, it’s pretty cheesy.

God makes Adam and drops him into this paradise called the Garden of Eden. After a while, Adam realises he’s lonely so, while he’s grabbing forty winks, God whips out one of his ribs and fashions it into a woman, called Eve.

God told Adam that he could have anything he wanted in his garden of plenty with one caveat – he must never eat any of the apples from that tree! Fine. Adam is happy. Plenty to eat, a shiny new wife. Who needs an apple?

But Eve, strolling through the garden on her own one day, hears a hissy sort of voice calling her.

“Hey. You there. These apples. They’re the best.”

It’s a talking snake. He tells her God isn’t really their friend because those apples are actually magic and anyone who eats one will know all sorts of secrets God doesn’t want getting out. Eve goes for it. Of course she does. She’s nosy, mischievous and disobedient. (Getting the misogyny and stereotyping here? The writers skate right over the obvious question: why did God make her like that if it’s such a problem?)

She eats the apple, likes it and immediately makes sure Adam also has a bite or two. Suddenly they realise something awful – they are stark naked! Overcome with shame they quickly grab some fig leaves and cover their bits. Then God comes along, finds them hiding and drives them out for a life of toil. Interestingly, he specifically tells them that they will henceforth be tilling and weeding and living on bread.

You may have read Yuval Harari’s book Sapiens, in which he effectively describes agriculture as a dirty trick played on humans by the order Graminales, including all the various cereal crops, which enslaved them and ensured it would become successfully dispersed far and wide.

I was nosing around in the Bible and realised that this was the story of Genesis. Even there we are told that the suffering, the diseases, the wars and the interpersonal strife arising from agriculture were not our natural state, but that observation quickly gets lost as the Bible rattles on with its bloody and bitter story.

On the evolutionary time scale the Bible, indeed all books, are new publications. What we had for hundreds of millennia preceding the short 10,000 years since agriculture came along were shared stories, oral histories and myths. We hunted and we gathered. We certainly had short tribal wars but never armies or defensive fortifications because we had few or no significant possessions. God gives Mr and Mrs #1 enmity and division at the same time as he sentences them to living on crops. This was extremely perceptive of the Bible writers, who must have known hunter gatherers and saw that they stored no crops and hence had nothing to defend. I find it fascinating that, right back at the beginning of our recorded story the writers understood that we had a natural state and it was that of the hunter gatherer. This is really what the Genesis story is about. They just drew the wrong conclusion, namely that God had sentenced us to this miserable, unnatural life and we should knuckle under and accept what His Omnipotence had ordained.

And why? Because it was in their interest to do so. The writers were the ones at the top and they, as has always been the case since the dawn of settled society, sat back and farmed us while we farmed the land.

Actually, this is a very modern interpretation of the writers’ motives. Greedy capitalist priests rorting the rest of us while they lived in comfort. Maybe, but I suspect they may have had different motives, rooted in tribalism. We know now that the progression from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a stop-start thing and even know of some places where they experimented with agriculture and returned to their previous way of life. So the writers of Genesis could have had plenty of opportunity to compare the pros and cons of either lifestyle. At the time they would have been in the intermediate phase, living as nomadic pastoralists, a point from which they could have moved on to agriculture or, as did so many of the other peoples of north Africa and the near east, stayed with leading their herds around seasonal sites or even returned to hunting and gathering for a living. But they saw it as God’s will that they should increase. They would have known that hunter-gatherers and nomads had small families. This was a necessity where a group constantly on the move had to carry their infants. A carrier can neither hunt nor defend and their ability to gather was limited by the burden they already carried, so any group could only sustain a small number of infants at any time. How they limited their progeny is unknown, but it likely to have been by infanticide. Not attractive.

It is fascinating to me how this mandate to become agricultural and suffer the known consequences is the product of the people of the Bible’s peculiar theology, their belief in one, omnipotent being. All their neighbours near and far, as far as we can tell, were polytheistic. As we can see from other ancient writings, the polytheistic gods were only passingly interested in humans. They had their Olympus or similar where they hung out, fighting, feasting and fornicating and largely regarded humans as playthings, or as instruments to meddle with rival gods.

Not so the one omnipotent God. Anthropomorphising him as they did, the Bible folk saw themselves as his only company and the entire object of his interest. So he chose them, promised them great things provided they settled to agriculture and increased. Greatly, indeed. A couple of pages after Adam and Eve he is promising one of them that he would be the ancestor of nations. They were all about increase, and as we know and as they almost certainly knew, agriculture was the only option if that were to come true.

I have to say this belief in one God who regarded them as his special and favoured people hasn’t worked out well for them. It is problematic enough to hold that belief, but telling others about it has been catastrophic.

“You’re think you’re better than me?”

“Absolutely. Far better.”

It never plays well.

This has been a bit of a ramble, I’m afraid. My point, on which I am something of a bore, is that most of us are a couple of centuries beyond believing that we should toil on the land and suffer because that was God’s command. So the smart thing to do is live as much like a hunter gatherer as you can because ten millennia is an evolutionary eyeblink and we are still wired up emotionally and physically to live the way we did for not ten but hundreds of millennia. I was fortunate to have seen a documentary decades ago made by a couple who followed a group of aboriginals as they rambled around central Australia. This came back to me when I was walking the Camino de Santiago and wondering why, in spite of their strenuous days, everyone seemed so content. Of course! We were living in the way were designed to live, picking up our few possessions every day and walking, just like those aboriginal hunter gatherers who lived lives free of neurosis and stress, deeply connected to nature and to each other.

That moment of realisation changed my life. I walk every day, a proper walk, a brisk nine or ten kilometres. I own little and do work that I enjoy, which I am free to do because I am not interested in acquiring stuff. At 77 years of age I can still put in a full day’s work, although I rarely have to. I am an omnivore and most of what I eat is made at home from ingredients my grandmother would recognise.

In respect of accumulating belongings I received a great gift early in my life. I had moved to live with my sister in Singapore; she was married to a wealthy American who worked away a lot of the time. She was, sadly, an alcoholic who rarely drove their late-model luxury car. So I got to tool around this intoxicating city, in 1968 nothing like today’s modern metropolis, in a flash new motorcar. After about three weeks of this I parked downtown one day, got out and walked away. A sudden realisation hit me: the late-model air-conditioned leather-seated electric-windowed all-singing all-dancing Opel sedan was already just … the car. I had driven all the way thinking about and looking at this and that with never a moment of Wow! This car! I made a note to myself: never strive for flash stuff because it turns ordinary overnight.

So I have very few possessions, but they are good ones that I value highly. A Jose Romero studio-built flamenco guitar. An OM-1 Martin guitar that I rarely play but that was not the case when I bought it decades ago. A twelve-year-old MacBook Air – essential. An old Toyota car that is really a tradesman’s van. A few pieces of art that I love. A digital camera that cost a lot when new but is now worth a fraction of that, thanks to the ubiquitous cellphone. A backpack and very good walking shoes. That’s about it. Oh, and a 1994 Harley Davidson Sportster 1200 that will never, ever be just the bike. It’s not just a source of great pleasure, it is a shared enjoyment with my son and his friends who all ride old Harleys. Added up in monetary value it would amount to so little it would terrify most men in their 70s but for me it is everything in the world I could wish for.

You really can live like that, and live well. Of course you can – it is in our nature.

Albaicin

I spent a large part of 1971 in a town that so utterly captured my heart that I never wanted to leave. I had just landed in India after more than three months in Thai prisons. I saw a giant picture of the Himalayas and Tibetan monks in the window of the Government Tourist Office of West Bengal. Although I had almost no money I knew I had to see that place. I fell in love with Darjeeling almost instantly and wept for hours when the Bangla Desh war brought down an edict that all foreigners had to leave sensitive border areas, among which Darjeeling was unfortunately numbered.

Throughout subsequent years that became decades I always nursed the thought that if it all turned to custard I could just go back to Darjeeling. Three years ago it did, and I did. It was a journey that came close to breaking my heart. Everyone I had known was dead and the town itself had been comprehensively and brutally trashed by random, hasty and ugly development. My home street, Tenzing Norgay Rd, had been one long, lovely vista. Too narrow for cars, all I ever heard outside my window was voices, footfalls and the bells of the various wallahs who brought milk, bread and shoe repairs, among other things.

Now the lower side of the road has been completely built out with shitty brick buildings. All you see is filthy walls, there is rubbish everywhere and noisy motorbikes and scooters zoom by, horns blaring. Almost the whole town has suffered this fate. I left, shattered.

But fate has been kind. Incredibly kind. Three years later she has given me the Albaicin, the old mountainside Arab quarter of that most wonderful city, Granada. Strangely, many of the qualities that made Darj so special are present in the Albaicin. Cobbled streets too narrow for cars. Voices and footfalls. Bells, many bells, not of pedestrian traders but churches. Here they still ring the Angelus.

The architecture, this architecture, is protected for all time. Whitewashed walls, terracotta tiles on a hill so steep that your immediate view is often your neighbour’s roof, just like Darjeeling of old. Towering over the streets and houses not the Himalayas but a man-made wonder, Al Hambra castle, against the backdrop of Spain’s highest mountains, the Sierra Nevada. They say it is listed as one of the ten most beautiful structures in the world. Perched on a hill and stretching a good kilometre of towers and walls it is oddly reminiscent, to me at least, of the great Kanchenjunga massif that floats in the sky above Darjeeling.

The people, too, have similar qualities to those others back then. At the top of the hill poor but cheerful, warm people live in caves fronted by shanties. The shopkeepers are full of laughs. Shopping is done at a cheerful shout – my Spanish is getting better all the time, but I won’t be happy until I can join in the shouting. That has started. Buying bread at the panaderia the other day, the big, jolly baker said with a big smile what I thought was, “Sank you bery much.”

“Thank you very much,” I answered. No, he said, in Albaicin we say ‘Sank you vene mas!’ and roared with laughter. So did I – it was a great joke. Vene mas means come again or come more often. He reached out, still laughing, and shook my hand.

At the little Coviran grocery store on Plaza Larga the woman serving greeted me with, “Holá vecino!” “Hello neighbour.” I had been here for less than three weeks.

Yesterday morning I was up among the caves hauling sand for my guitar teacher’s cave building when a 30ish African man came out and started calling. He had an odd accent and it took me a moment to clock that he was greeting me. I went over and shook his hand, exchanged smiles. He was very clean, not so common up there, and had a big string of beads around one shoulder and under the opposite arm with two large icons, one of the Holy Family, hanging from them. His beautiful, full set of teeth were well cared for, also not the norm in the caves.

“I’ve got work,” he said, grinning broadly. “Congratulations,” I replied, “doing what?”
“Singing and playing.” He made a drumming gesture.
“Well done, man,” I said. “When did you start?” I was a bit doubtful that actually had a job, but he did – for a week now he had been playing a regular gig at a club in town that features African sounds. He was just so happy about it, I guess he was telling everybody. I congratulated him again, we did that upside-down-handshake thing that ends with the fist-to-fist touch and went back to filling my wheelbarrow, warmed by the moment.

For most of the year Granada is hot, and the architecture is all space, cool white surfaces and big openings to facilitate airflow. But come December the thermometer plummets and I found myself freezing and alone in an unheated apartment designed for an entirely different climate. I found myself visiting Mariano, my guitar teacher, and his family in his cave on the Alto San Miguel, the slopes above the Albaicin, for the warmth. They had, and needed, no heater. The temperature in the caves holds at a steady 19º C year round – people don’t inhabit caves out of poverty. Mariano, Gabriela and their kids Coral and Michi welcomed me for New Year’s Eve. We sat around drinking wine and playing music until midnight approached. Gabriela laid out a large bowl of grapes and as midnight chimed throughout the city we each consumed twelve grapes, one at a time, to bring good fortune for each month of the coming year.

I was never so well.

What I Believe

Something is watching out for us. I don’t know what. Call it God if you like. Why do I believe that?

First, there’s all this perfection. Examples of perfection are never more than an arm’s reach away. I had this thought as I waded through dry leaves under a great linden tree after three weeks of midsummer drought. Stressed by too little water the tree sheds its leaves, cutting down transpiration to save water. Automatically it tunes itself to the conditions, keeping its leaf surface area just right and returning the nutrients to its feet. Absent some blight or the chainsaw that tree will go on doing that for hundreds of years without our laying a hand on it. Perfection. Virtually all the organisms we see are perfected to live in their current environment.

I don’t doubt that this is the product of natural evolution but I feel sure that there is something driving it, transcendent, infinitely powerful and ubiquitous. This force inhabits and invigorates nature’s realm, set it going in the beginning and keeps it running. Extend your senses, shut down the filters which are only there, after all, to keep us safe and alive. Perception does not equal reality, not by a long stretch — this has been proved over and over. If we reach beyond the survivalist chatter of our verbal reasoning we can feel it. Know it. And know that it is looking after us. Not gently. It permits all nature of savagery, excess and barbarism. It allows genocide and starvation in one country while other countries like Qatar throw money around like confetti.

One indicator is how every now and then this divine caretaking shows up in a single, identifiable moment when it saves us from falling all the way into global darkness, evil and destruction, coming to the rescue of the good and the wholesome, sometimes through the agency of a single human at a single moment. General von Rumstedt decides to halt his panzers 15 miles short of Dunkirk, ensuring the survival of an allied army that will eventually shorten the thousand-year Reich by nine hundred and ninety years. Vasili Archipov refuses to acquiesce in the decision of his two co-commanders to launch a nuclear torpedo at a critical moment of the Cuban missile crisis and literally saves the world from nuclear annihilation. Single decisions that changed the entire history of the species. You could say we got lucky those times but I don’t think so. At Dunkirk the weather was critically important; calm and clear for six long days, enabling sailing dinghies and little runabouts to cross the Channel. I know; there’s nothing miraculous about that but the timing was literally perfect. In the Soviet era Archipov’s independence of thought and courage of his convictions were virtually unknown, doubly so in the ranks of the military. Everyone followed instructions. I can’t prove it but I believe these were not rolls of the dice: we were saved.

I believe that it will often be a close-run thing but as long as there are enough good people in the world, (the ten good men of Sodom?), and most people are fundamentally good, that force of goodness will save us and the good world and, at times, show up in something that we can see and name. Jesus Christ was its epitome. Reminders appear in the form of the virgin, as avatar. After three separate Papal enquiries by appointed ‘Devil’s Advocates’, deliberately chosen atheists, we still have no explanation for what happened at Fatima. We were visited, spoken to, in human language. An explicit warning was given. Either three illiterate shepherd’s children in a rural Portuguese backwater had their finger on the pulse of Russian politics or a miracle took place. The warning was ignored and Russia and peoples all the way to the middle of Germany endured 70 years of misery and massacre. There have been other such miracles and not only in the Christian epoch.

The question is what do I do about it. Be as good as I can, obviously. But why do I and so many others feel the need to do more, to reach out, communicate, supplicate, humble ourselves and give praise and thanks? It is more than the essential homeostatic urge to bind with our neighbour and support the good and powerful among us in the interests of communal survival. It is a deep thing, a fundamental. Faith. We long for faith. Indeed if faith can be named as a thing among things, not sui generis, then it is an emotion. One of the basic emotions that we are kitted out with, along with love, hate, grief, joy and the others. Psychologists say, and they are right, that wellness requires the expression of a full range of our emotions, and every emotion contains within itself the powerful urge to share it with others. It’s why we have love songs and hate preachers. We are literally built to have, and share, the emotion of spiritual faith and without it we are incomplete, just a transport vector for water and cellphones.

Of course many, even most people are not aware of this potential for faith. But everyone who has ever asked themselves. “Is this really all there is? This the whole deal?” is feeling its absence. They just don’t know it. People of faith don’t ask themselves that question.

Which raises another question: why do we have the capacity for this emotion, faith in a higher being? Can we be furnished with with such an essential emotion as faith and it be based on an illusion? I think not. If we are made to be creatures of faith then there is something there that is to be the object of that faith.

God. We are designed to believe in God. It is universal. Truly atheistic societies have been rare, short-lived and chaotic. So I’m inclined to believe in God, aware of my desire for faith, but to be honest, most of the time it is not enough. I’m just too damn rational. Fortunately, realism in the 21st century, scientific rationality, has come to our aid. Thanks to advances in physics, belief in a creator is now the rational choice.

Traditional rationalists, the Richard Dawkinses of this world, would have you believe that faith in the supernatural has been superseded by our deep understanding of the natural universe, right down to the quantum level. We start out by discovering that thunder and lightning are not displays of the wrath of gods and advance to the present day to where there is no need for divine explanations of anything: we understand the world, we see how it works.

Well, as we will see, we don’t.

That proposition worked pretty well for a century or so but around the middle of the 20th century it began to unravel. I’m talking, if you haven’t already guessed, about the fine-tuned universe.

I think it got going with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Why could no two identical particles in a system not be in the same state? And more importantly, how is that when you force one particle into a state already occupied by another its counterpart immediately changes state, regardless of the distance separating them? We don’t know – it just does and has been shown to do so in experiments that are now almost commonplace. Simultaneous interaction at a distance with no connection or information being transferred. It should be impossible. Showing this experimentally was, in my opinion, the point at which traditional rationalism started to come apart.

Far greater steps have been taken since then. Thanks to computer modelling and a hell of a lot of mathematical legwork, we are able to say what the universe would look like if the force of gravity, for instance, were just a shade stronger or weaker. The short answer is a universe totally unable to evolve or support life.

What about the weak nuclear force, the thing that keeps electrons orbiting protons? A fraction of a percent stronger and electrons would bind so strongly that no compounds could form. The same degree weaker and the electrons would fly off and everything would just be some formless stew of undifferentiated matter. Obviously, again, a universe without life.

The fact is, gravity could theoretically have any value. Likewise the weak force. There are no fundamental principles behind them – they just happen to have, within a tolerance of ten to the power of a ridiculously large number, the exact values needed to create and sustain a universe with stars and galaxies and planets like Earth. And, amazingly, the same can be said of literally dozens of other universal constants. Introduce the most infinitesimal variation and it all comes apart.

The same is true of life itself. In the mid-20th century there was a lot of excitement about the ‘primordial soup’. A couple of scientists sealed methane, hydrogen and ammonia, supposedly replicating the pre-biotic earthly conditions, in a glass container and passed steam over it. This produced a handful of amino acids – the building blocks of life, no less! The crowd went wild.

Alas, later work has revealed that pre-biotic earth was nothing like that. And supposing that chucking a whole lot of amino acids together could eventually produce the exquisite, densely coded phenomenon that is life is like supposing, as the great Fred Hoyle put it, that a giant tornado blowing through a vast junkyard could leave behind a fully-functional Boeing 747 (although a single living cell is probably even more complex than a jumbo jet).

I won’t cover the whole subject here – there are plenty of works already doing that, and it’s huge – but get to the end point: maintaining a ‘rational’ conviction that life is accidental requires the rationalist to believe in something so unlikely that believing some lucky chancer could win Lotto week after week for years would be a safer bet.

The fact is that traditional rationalism now requires a far greater leap of faith than any deist has to face.

Some unimaginably intelligent force with unlimited agency created the universe and then, with a second wave of the almighty hand, created life, and us.

It is the only reasonable conclusion.

There you are: God exists. Science proves it. The rest, however, is supposition. I happen to believe that Jesus Christ, and possibly Gautama Buddha, were dropped in at the right time to give us some direction as to the deity’s intentions for us. They came along a mere few hundred years apart, i.e. simultaneously on any evolutionary or geologic time scale. It was time. I wonder if humanity was not going through some kind of phase shift around then, but we are too far down among the weeds to see it.

Perhaps one day science will prove those things too, although I doubt it. Never mind. I see no harm, and much good, in taking it on faith.

Vape!

How loutish, greedy homo sapiens turned a public health miracle into a social and environmental disaster

It started with such promise, supported by an unimpeachable authority: Public Health England. In 2015 the NGO commissioned a series of investigations into the relatively new phenomenon of vaping. The conclusions, which it kept updated with further studies and never resiled from until its dissolution in the reforms of 2022 are unequivocal. To summarise:

  • Vaping is probably the most effective, lasting and easiest path to quitting smoking yet devised
  • Vaping is 95% safer than smoking
  • Vaping neither stains, infects or in any discernible way damages the lungs, (by inference including that of bystanders).
  • Vaping is not a gateway to smoking among young people. The decline in the uptake of smoking among young people in developed countries continues.

Are we sure about that? Let us turn to a more disapproving but equally prestigious body, the John Hopkins Centre for Heart Disease:

There are many unknowns about vaping, including what chemicals make up the vapor and how they affect physical health over the long term. “People need to understand that e-cigarettes are potentially dangerous to your health,” says Michael Blaha MD.

After more than a decade of widespread vaping, that’s what they’ve got: ‘unknowns’; ‘long term’; ‘potentially dangerous.’ From the language we can tell that they feel that it must be bad, why, it’s almost obvious. It’s just that, dammit all, they can’t find any evidence, and it’s not for want of trying.

Now to what is happening on the ground. The virtuous public regards vaping as another form of smoking, and equally bad. Most people firmly believe it to be harmful. Laws have been passed in some jurisdictions limiting and controlling vaping. This should be a civil liberties issue — banning an activity many find helpful and pleasurable, with no evidence of harm? Where is the outrage?

Silence.

Why? Because it looks like smoking. It’s … cheating!

“You can’t do that here!”

“No smoking!!!” Ah, the shrill self-righteousness. The self-satisfied revelling in judgement without fear of third-party disapproval.

Vaping has become a trope in screen entertainment. Heroes never vape. The bad guys, and especially the bad guy’s dim muscle boys, frequently do. Slaggy molls vape.

The papers are full of material treating vaping as a known evil. Of course they are; that is how the echo chamber of modern media works. If the public conceives a prejudice, any prejudice, feed it to them with all you’ve got. Truth? Who cares? We have advertising to sell.

How did this happen? Let’s roll back to the beginning. For me, it started fourteen years ago. I was living in England and sitting in a surgeon’s office being briefed for a knee replacement, the damage from an old skiing accident having by then almost crippled me.

“Do you smoke?”

Answer: yes. In fact, after decades of abstinence I had returned to smoking a few years earlier in the cauldron of a marriage gone bad. Partly for the stress and partly, I confess, because it infuriated my wife. Mea culpa.

The surgeon: “If you stop six weeks before your operation, you will have 50% less carbon monoxide in your blood. If you quit three months before the op you will have none. This is very good news for the anaesthetist, whose job it is to keep you alive while I saw your leg off.” (A doctor once told me orthopaedic surgeons were glorified mechanics; he might have had a point.)

This was not really what I wanted to hear. I still rather enjoyed a fag and was, of course, properly hooked. But there was this new vaping thing. Not available in any shop I could find, but all over the Internet. A few days later I received my kit. A thing called a ‘vape pen’ that constantly leaked a fluid that the label warned should never be allowed to touch the skin, and a range of flavoured liquids. The so-called tobacco flavours were uniformly foul, the sweet ones less so but I did not want to smoke a lolly, but that espresso flavour hit the spot. Coffee and a fag rolled into one — what’s not to like?

I ditched the smokes and started vaping. Effortless. Literally effortless. Vaping was every bit as satisfying as smoking, in fact if I got the coil resistance and wattage right I could generate vast, gratifying clouds of steam that looked like smoke but wasn’t.

I quickly learned that those around me most emphatically did not enjoy being enveloped in the visible products of my exhalations so I toned it right down. Vaping was to be a private pleasure. Fine.

Alas, the instincts of the young to loutishness soon dropped a spanner in the works. Online forums sprang up swapping tips on how to wind your own coils and supercharge your kit to produce a fog of vapour sufficient to conceal the advance of an infantry battalion. Within the year stores began to pop up on the high street, gleaming palaces of fluids and kit ranged up like expensive perfumes. Posters and instore videos advertised conventions where yoof in giant pants competed to blow the most smoke rings from one puff.

The idiots seemed to think vaping was cool. Wrong! A Gauloise hanging from the corner of Albert Camus’ mouth, perhaps, but those clunky devices the size of a small handgun, those vast nimbuses of water vapour? Never.

The rest is history. Obnoxious zoobs marched around with their portable fog machines literally getting up the noses of the citizenry and the long decline began, a decline which turned into a cliff thanks to one Zang Shengwei, of Shenzen parish, godfather of the Elf Bar and similar candy-coloured devices which are now the curse of our landscape. In 2022 it is estimated that 40 tonnes of lithium were tossed away in tiny batteries inside those bits of bright plastic trash in the UK alone. In the middle of an eco-disaster, they let it happen. Business is business.

How did the powers that be not instantly ban those things? If there is one harm that can absolutely be sheeted home to vaping, it is the effect of high doses of nicotine on developing brains. The lamentable Mr Zang knowingly, deliberately designed those things to look like toys and to deliver the kick of a horse. And he was allowed to. Became a billionaire, in fact.

And so we go down the familiar track. Australia and New Zealand have passed a raft of laws, some sensible. Most importantly they have banned disposable vape devices. With luck, medicalising vaping will channel it successfully down the quit smoking route for which it has been a godsend. The Ministry of Health website in NZ is almost silent about vaping risks but admits that no long-term studies have found any evidence suggesting it is harmful. In the UK, search for ‘vaping’ at nhs.uk and you will find that everything I am telling you here is true. But the Aussies have blown it spectacularly by letting loose a barrage of misinformation and outright lies.

The ‘About vaping and e-cigarettes’ page at health.gov.au lists several toxic substances that e-cigarettes ‘can contain’, such as acetone and formaldehyde. Sure, they can contain them but any fluid you are likely to buy most certainly will not. Acetone is highly flammable, a substance only a lunatic would expose to a glowing e-cigarette coil. Inhaling its vapours would make you throw up. The page repeats the ‘gateway to smoking’ lie, which the authors must know to be untrue. And so on.

What any over-the-counter fluid does contain are two substances widely used in food, drinks and, significantly, in vaporisers designed to deliver drugs: propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin, both rated GRAS (Generally Recognised As Safe) world-wide. And nicotine. Nobody objects to nicotine in gum, pills and patches and nor should they in vaporisers. Time for a little-known but true fact: exhaled vape steam contains little or no nicotine because the drug is very rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream across the alveolar membrane of the lungs. You breathe a lot in but breathe very little out. So here is the truth about forcing others to breathe in your ‘chemicals’: the vapour is almost entirely steam, and the trace chemicals it may contain are the very same that your bystanders have probably, voluntarily but unknowingly, ingested by one means or another in the preceding twenty-four hours. All they had to do was eat a supermarket muffin or anything else listing E1520 and/or E422 in the small print on the ingredients label.

One flavour of one brand of liquid in NZ was found to contain small quantities of diacetyl, the compound that can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, or ‘popcorn lung’. The product was immediately recalled. Acetone? Yeah, right.

None of this, of course, will make the slightest difference to my life as a vapist. No matter how discreet I may try to be, I will continue to be cursed and condemned. In the end the war on smoking is in one respect like any other war: the first casualty is truth.

In Defence of Nicotine

Tobacco is a dirty weed. I like it.
It satisfies no normal need. I like it.
It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
It takes the hair right off your bean.
It’s the worst stuff I’ve ever seen.
I like it.

Tobacco, by Graeme Lee Hemminger

Vaping is rather satisfying. It recalls the pleasure of the pipe. It delivers one of those plant-based drugs that almost appear to have been devised by God to benefit us humans, the alkaloid family. Caffeine, morphine, nicotine, codeine, quinine, atropine and thousands more.

Nicotine, with a couple of caveats, is a Good Thing. It’s a pity it’s addictive, like many other alkaloids, but hey, we’re addicted to oxygen, water, food, motion. The idea of a life without addiction is a nonsense. A lot of people, and as a vapist I know, are deeply addicted to passing judgement on others. God knows I’ve given enough of them their fix.

But taken to excess, nicotine is bad for your blood pressure. I vape using a machine with a removable rechargeable battery containing liquid with a very low level of nicotine – 6 mg/ml, so much weaker than a cigarette that when I took a puff on one a while back I turned green and nearly vomited. My blood pressure was 119/68 this morning thanks to my practice of Nordic walking thousands of kilometres per year. If you don’t know how outstanding 119/68 is, ask a nurse. It plummeted when I quit drinking. I am 77 years old, in bouncing good health, and I have been vaping for more than a decade. Bad for you? Bah!

In fact, nicotine is rather good for your brain. So good, in fact, that they give it to some dementia patients. There is a reason the photographic annals of the world are awash with pictures of great writers and artists smoking while they work. This is no trivial thing – Walter Raleigh brought tobacco to England in 1587, just in time for Shakespeare and the great English literary renaissance. It is my belief that tobacco was one of the driving forces that turned England from a country with few literary figures of note to one whence flooded a literary canon revered to this day. A canon, one must say, overflowing with praise for the weed. Google ‘literary praise for tobacco’ and you will be swamped. Were they all wrong, all fools? I decidedly think not. A pity they did not fully appreciate the dangers of inhaling smoke, but we are the beneficiaries.

My father was a writer and I grew up next to his study, forbidden territory, where he sat pounding his typewriter and filling the atmosphere with a grey fug from his endless cigarettes. They killed him in the end, but he died content at 84, hardly a life tragically curtailed by the fags. But I am under no illusions: he got lucky. Now I spend my days at a laptop, puffing happily on my vape, my brain firing on all cylinders on much smaller doses of the blessed drug than he ingested, but still doing its benign work.

Vaping, by removing the harm of smoke but retaining the benefice of inhaled nicotine, is to my mind an outright blessing. Long may it reign.

You may commence firing. I may flinch but will not run.