New Humanist Articles and Posts

Six voices on how to fight propaganda

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:58:41 GMT

With the great powers facing off and a global authoritarian slide, we are entering a new era of brazen propaganda.

Dissidents already living under totalitarian regimes are reaching out to those who feel their democracy is under threat. We hear from six of these champions of free thought on how to fight back and protect the truth.

Russia’s last dissidents

By Andrei Kolesnikov

Journalist, author and analyst. The following is an extract from The Closing of the Russian Mind (Polity)

I am one of the so called “remaining” – those who, continuing to fulfil their research and journalistic duties, risk staying in Russia, analysing what is happening to our country from the belly of the beast. There are few of us, but we do not feel isolated. We have spontaneously formed “clubs” where we discuss matters at private apartments or in cafés. One of the regular toasts at our table is: “May we all survive this.”

The sociologist Yuri Levada spent many years developing the concept of the “Soviet man”, the archetypical personality type shaped by the Soviet system. Adaptability is the main characteristic. Levada called this type of behaviour a “game”.

Consider, for example, the “work” game. In the Soviet version, it was described by a successful joke of those years, “We pretend to work, you pretend to pay.” Another is the game of “consent”: imitation of submission to the state and support for its actions in exchange for a quiet private existence.

When external circumstances in Russia once again became authoritarian and then hybrid totalitarian, both the former “Soviet man” and the new “Putin’s man” turned to all their adaptive capabilities to survive. Their reverse transformation into “normal” people – i.e. non-authoritarian personalities – is possible under very simple conditions: the authorities must change, the external conditions of existence must be altered, and propaganda slogans and ideological postulates must be modified. Then, quite unexpectedly – just as happened with “Soviet man” at the turn of the 1990s – the “neo-totalitarian man” will begin to evolve rapidly toward normalisation.

For this transition to occur and hold, institutions matter. During the transition period from the Stalinist state to a more or less normal, nearly democratic system, they did not have time to form. The post-Soviet person has become a consumer in the capitalist sense, but has not become a citizen who is a supporter of human rights, humanistic values and the rotation of power as something extremely important for everyday life. Without democracy there can be no modernisation, especially in an ideologised empire with messianic hallucinations.

Once, when my friends – all people with “dissenting” thoughts – and I made our regular toast, “May we all survive this,” one of the circle, in his 70s, who was born under Stalin, remarked gloomily: “No one has ever managed to do so.” He was referring to the endless return of Russian history to its despotic beginnings – several times in the course of his lifetime. My own mother was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”, and it’s a good thing she didn’t live to see me declared a “foreign agent”. Such are the Russian cycles from which one yearns to escape.

I am 60 years old. People of my age and circle are often asked why we are so attached to the 1990s, a time of transition from socialism to capitalism. For us, it was a time of hope and freedom. The freedom that the great Andrei Sakharov spoke of in his 1968 work, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom: “ ... intellectual freedom is essential to human society – freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy and culture.”

You might say that all this is too simple and naïve. Perhaps, but it is precisely the absence of such a vision of the world that leads to the emergence of Putins, dictatorships and wars. In my opinion, nothing better than this triple freedom has been invented in my 60 years on Earth. I would not want my sons and daughter, who have become the children of a “foreign agent”, to be the parents of the next “enemy” of the next Russian dictator. Me, my family and my country, which should not be equated with Putin’s regime, need the kind of freedom of which Sakharov dreamed.

Drowning in climate lies

By Adam Barnett

News reporter, DeSmog

“Climate change – it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” That was Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations in September. The US president went on to denounce what he called the “green energy scam” and praised “clean, beautiful coal”. Just months earlier, wildfires had devastated California. Trump and his allies around the world want people to believe this is normal. But everyone who can read knows that climate change is a clear and present danger.

Scientists say that 2025 was one of the three hottest years on record. The World Weather Attribution service identified 157 extreme weather events last year as “severe”, in that they killed at least 100 people, affected half an area’s population or led to a state of emergency being declared. Of these, it said the year’s deadly heatwaves were made 10 times more likely than a decade ago by climate change.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies (which donated $25.8 million to Trump’s re-election campaign) have taken Trump’s return to power as a sign that they can stop pretending to curb their emissions. Companies like BP have scrapped their 2030 targets for switching from oil and gas to renewable energy production.

All this has encouraged climate deniers in Europe. In December 2024, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage spoke at the launch of the European branch of the Heartland Institute, a US think-tank that boasts of “supporting scepticism about man-made climate change” and has received funding from ExxonMobil. Spooked by Reform’s polling, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party has declared net zero “impossible” and pledged to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Meanwhile, green policies at the European Union level have been opposed by far-right parties across the continent, with similar arguments from Conservative Pierre Poilievre in Canada. In Europe and North America, the Venn diagram of far-right parties and climate deniers is a circle. And these nationalists are increasingly working together across borders.

Despite this, and despite the COP30 summit in Brazil in November failing to even mention fossil fuels in its final statement, some long-time climate-watchers remain optimistic. Former US president Al Gore and environmentalist Bill McKibben have recently pointed to the extraordinary growth of renewable energy (92 per cent of new electricity generation in 2024) as a trend that right-wing demagogues can’t stop.

The biggest challenge is to generate political will for effective climate action. Advocacy has had some recent wins. Guardian climate journalist Nina Lakhani noted that the first ever “just transition mechanism”, agreed at COP30 for an energy transition that respects human rights, was the result of “years of civil society organising” including large protests at the climate summit itself. She also highlighted plans by Colombia, the Netherlands and 22 other states to work on moving away from fossil fuels outside the sluggish COP process.

In another promising development, the International Court of Justice ruled in July that states have a legal duty to tackle climate change – the result of a case brought by law students in the Pacific Islands, which are on the frontline of rising sea levels. That ruling could now be used to oppose new fossil fuel projects. In recent years, France has passed a law against corporate greenwashing, while the Hague has banned fossil fuel advertising outright. The idea is to treat “Big Carbon” the same as tobacco companies.

As for the climate denial flooding our screens, the EU and the UK’s respective Digital Services Acts require tech companies to moderate the deluge on their platforms. At COP30, more than 20 countries signed a “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change”, calling on governments, the private sector and civil society to tackle climate denial and support accurate information.

But these efforts are under growing attack from the political right, as if “freedom of speech” includes the freedom of corporations (and their proxies) to lie about their planet-warming emissions. The rise of nationalist politics threatens to drown out climate as a priority, and to use “cost of living” worries to dismiss green policies as a left-wing “elitist” luxury.

The challenge is to build a democratic politics that connects the struggle against predatory corporations and authoritarian demagogues with the need for climate action – and, crucially, gives people something to vote for, instead of simply against. “Clean power, people power” would be a good slogan.

We must hold the line against hate

By Zoe Gardner

Immigration policy campaigner

Anti-immigration propaganda saturates the UK. Well-funded far-right social media accounts proliferate, pumping misinformation onto our screens, often straight from the US where anti-migrant messages brought Trump to power. The mainstream media has joined in with obsessive coverage, framing immigration as a problem to be eradicated, rather than a human reality to be managed.

As Reform UK top the polls, Labour moves right and Tommy Robinson leads huge nationalist marches, it is easy to despair. But that is exactly what the people funding the far-right hope for: that decent people will stay quiet and let them pass.

While immigration is a huge issue of concern, we should remember the public remains relatively level-headed about the subject. There is significant opposition to small boats, but quite strong support for most other kinds of immigration, from carers to builders to students, and even for protecting refugees.

What is criminal is that so few voices speak for this silenced majority. Changing that starts with a more confident, proactive approach – less responding to negative framing and more telling the story of the alternative.

There are three lessons we can take into 2026:

Focus on who suffers from anti-migrant politics, and who gains

The government is making it harder for immigrants to get settled, permanent status. Care workers, for example, who came on the promise that after five years they could settle, must now wait a further 15. But when workers have temporary status, they are at risk of exploitation, as they rely on their employer for their right to remain in their home. This move creates a more exploitable second class of worker, which in turn impacts wages and conditions for all.

It is businesses seeking to underpay workers who benefit from them being more insecure, and loan sharks who celebrate more migrants being trapped in cycles of debt to pay visa renewal fees for longer. Meanwhile, private security firms and corporate landlords rake in lucrative government contracts to provide an ever-escalating but never effective pantomime of enforcement at the border and in asylum seeker accommodation.

On the other side, fewer workers means costs pushed up in hospitality, care and farming, resulting in higher prices for everyone. All the while, much lower immigration means a smaller economy with less money for public services and more tax rises.

Talk about real solutions

In the face of chaos, it’s tempting to say “but we must do SOMETHING” as if the only option were more restrictions on rights and movement. In fact, we have plenty of highly evidenced alternative approaches available to us. From the striking example of how a safe route for Ukrainians saved lives and bypassed smugglers, to the evidence that more stable, settled status correlates to higher salaries, or economic modelling that shows investment in integration and giving asylum seekers the right to work produces better outcomes and saves money for the state.

It is striking how utterly the anti-migrant politics of deterrence, pursued over years, has failed on its own terms. Yet we still accept a conversation where “more of the same, just a bit harder this time” is the answer. We must articulate how to run an immigration system to the benefit of the country, because we know how to do that. We don’t have to choose between the chaotic status quo and even more hostility.

Find our courage

For too long, progressive voices have been cowardly. Propaganda has convinced many that it is “out of touch” to support immigrants. Since the Brexit vote took much of the commentariat by surprise, they are desperate to prove they “get it” by giving up ground to an increasingly belligerent and extreme anti-migrant right. We find ourselves now facing potentially the most serious far-right threat in our history, dominated by figures like Farage, and even Robinson, who are miles away from representing the majority of ordinary Brits.

We ordinary people who reject a hyper-nationalist future for Britain, like that which has overtaken the US, need to find our courage. There can be no wishing this issue away. The right has successfully made the debate about immigration, and now we have got to win it.

Protecting science is a matter of life or death

By Michael E. Mann and Peter Hotez

Scientists and authors of Science Under Siege (Scribe), from which the following is an extract

As the great Mahatma Gandhi reportedly counselled, let us be the change we wish to see in the world. This also applies to us scientists. We can mount legal challenges to the promotion of lies and conspiracies. We can organise and pressure academic and scientific institutions to take a more proactive stance against anti-scientific disinformation, and to provide support and defence for scientists subject to concerted right-wing attacks.

If we don’t, these institutions will assuredly cave in to the bad-faith demands of polemicists, propagandists and pressure groups. Look no further than Stanford’s pitiful capitulation to right-wing critics in dissolving their Internet Observatory for the study of disinformation because it came under attack by disinformation promoters like the Putin-loving Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.

We’ve seen some progress over the past decade. Back in 2012, Andrew Weaver, a leading climate scientist from the University of Victoria in British Columbia ran for office. He was elected as the first Green Party member of British Columbia’s legislative assembly in 2013 and went on to become the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia in 2015. He used this platform to push for clean energy and oppose the expansion of liquefied natural gas. Climate policy scholar Claudia Sheinbaum took it to a new level in June 2024, running for and becoming president of Mexico. It remains to be seen just what she will do with this platform.

Of course, you hardly need to be an expert to play an important role. All of us can work towards increased support for science education and objective and comprehensive science standards in schools. Any lasting solution to the anti-science crisis will require limiting the ability of vested interests and plutocrats to seize control of our media environment, increasing support for public media, enforcing basic rules of journalistic integrity and getting special-interest money out of our politics. That relies on each of us taking action.

It often comes down to voting, and not just at the presidential level, but at the state and local levels. Even the 2024 US election, which handed full power of our federal government to a Republican Party opposed to science-based policies, offered at least one silver lining. Climate initiatives did well across the country. Voters in Washington rejected a ballot measure that attempted to repeal the state’s cap-and-trade system for emissions reductions, while voters in California and Hawaii overwhelmingly passed measures to invest in climate resilience. We must – as youth climate activists have done – speak truth to power and put pressure on our elected representatives to work toward global climate agreements that truly meet the moment.

We face an anti-science threat of epic proportions, a battle for the Earth itself. In The Two Towers – the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the two hobbits Merry and Pippin face a similarly daunting task. They find themselves among Treebeard and his army of tree-like beings known as Ents, as they mobilise against Saruman, who is destroying the forests for his military operation (yes, Lord of the Rings is replete with environmental themes). The diminutive Pippin questions the purpose of such a small creature as he in this great war. He says to Merry that at least “we’ve got the Shire” and that “maybe we should go home”. Merry admonishes Pippin, explaining that the war will spread, “and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone”. He chillingly warns, “There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”

It might be tempting to see the battle against anti-science as too removed from your everyday life. But if humanity fails to combat the great global crises we face today, there won’t be an Earth – at least not one that we’d recognise. We will lose the welcoming planetary home we know today, with its rich forests and oceans and ecosystems teeming with diverse, interconnected life forms. That’s stark. But the choice is ours. The obstacles are not physical or technological. They are political.

Today, harm is being done by the spread of despair and defeatism, some of it weaponised by bad actors like Russia to create division and disengagement. We are, in fact, far from defeat. The United States remains close, according to some estimates, to being on track to meet its commitment to cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching zero by 2050, despite the opposition by Trump, the Republicans, and polluters and petrostates.

A path to limiting warming below 1.5°C still exists, though it is becoming increasingly narrow. Yes, we may miss the 1.5°C target. But keeping warming below 2°C would still avoid much harm and suffering. It’s never too late to make a difference.

Orwell in China

By Yang Lian

Poet and dissident. The following is translated by Duncan Hewitt

With the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in 1989, history began to run in the opposite direction. Just as exiles from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were returning home, our own time of exile began. Not long ago, the nightmare was reincarnated, as the war criminal Putin strode smugly across the red carpets of China, the US and India. To my eyes, it was as though each of his footprints was steeped in the blood and flesh of those crushed by the tank tracks on Tiananmen Square.

“The Great Leap Forward”, the Chinese political slogan of the 1950s, could be changed to “the Great Leap Backward” to perfectly describe the post-Cold War world. Today, the spiritual crisis of humanity is far graver than during the Cold War. Globalisation and the illusion of “the end of history” have concealed a frightening reality: autocratic totalitarianism and western big capital have been quietly converging. Big capitalists are scrambling to throw themselves into the arms of the Communist Party of China, enjoying the cheap labour made possible by autocratic repression and obtaining huge profits that are unimaginable under the rule of law, while the CCP has strengthened its power by hijacking western capital, technology and knowledge.

The “theory of evolution” has thus become a joke: getting rich means abandoning your moral principles. Since there is no idealistic vision, all that remains is to grab what you can, in line with immediate interests. Selfishness, cynicism and “profit first” have combined to paint an ugly portrait of the world.

My poem “1989” ends with the line, “This is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year”. This implies a self-questioning. If Tiananmen shocked us as though it were the first time we had ever heard of a massacre, then where were our memories of the countless dead in the Cultural Revolution? If they had simply been forgotten, then who can guarantee that the tears we shed after Tiananmen Square were not just washing away our memory in preparation for the next shock? Today, we stare open-mouthed in astonishment as the nations of Big Brother – including Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Trump’s US and Khamenei’s Iran – openly form agreements, and democratic systems degenerate into games of majorities.

In China, lies and suppression are the two magic weapons of the CCP’s rule. While state propaganda blames the west for blocking China’s access to YouTube, Google, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, Chinese people are locked in a high firewall by their own government, hopelessly becoming either prisoners or their own guards in the world’s largest prison.

In 2018, I spent more than 10 months translating George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Soon after, news came from Beijing: Orwell was officially banned in mainland China. My translations could only be published in Taiwan in the end. 1984 reveals the true face of totalitarianism, which the Big Brothers of today seek to conceal. In 1984’s final, most terrifying sentence, we learn of the protagonist Winston Smith: “He loved Big Brother”. In 2026, it is we who love Big Brother. Today’s world goes beyond Orwell’s darkest imaginings. Once Xi Jinping rebuilds a comprehensive autocracy, and lies and violence become pervasive, Mao Zedong’s system of surveillance will pale in comparison.

This brings us back to the essence of resistance. It should not only be directed towards an external power, but even more towards our own spiritual decay, because it is precisely the surrender of each individual that creates opportunities for totalitarian control. Today, a rebel must be an “active other, who takes the energy of self-questioning – I question therefore I am – and consciously resists self-inertia, regardless of what immediate benefits this attitude might bring them.

Where do we go from here? Firstly, there is no heaven, but we must resist every hell; and secondly, we must understand that we are starting from the impossible. Orwell’s works can still guide us. They shatter the utopian illusion, and at the same time affirm human dignity and the essence of civilisation.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

Call of the wild

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Humans began bending wild things to their will at least 15,000 years ago (some evidence suggests these processes probably started earlier). Domestication was a turning point in human evolution. Starting with wolves, we exerted further pressure on animal and plant species honed by millions of years of natural selection – exaggerating desirable qualities and reducing undesirable ones on a much shorter timescale.

Dangerous predators became hunting partners and loyal friends. Flinty seeds and hard fruits were fattened in the forges of our appetites. And our lives became progressively easier as a result. The ability to harness evolution and turn it to our own ends was a major facilitator of civilisation and ultimately our colonisation of most of the planet.

But the organisms we now consider to be domestic were never truly our creations. We have certainly modified them beyond recognition in some cases. The obese pug waddling down the sidewalk bears little resemblance to its wolf ancestors. The plump kernels of a corn cob are nothing like the stingy, hard little knobs produced by its parent plant, teosinte. Given the chance, though, many of these organisms are more than happy to rewild themselves. They are not the static, placid entities we think they are. The genes of domesticated organisms remain compatible with those of their wild progenitors. The DNA in everything from a head of lettuce to a greyhound is primed to escape its human confines.

This rewilding process might seem benign – a return for these species to their older state, before humans started meddling. But the practical effects are more complex. When these domesticated genes make a break for it, they can have serious effects on wild populations, sometimes threatening their survival. These challenges call into question our ideas around what is “natural”, along with our assumptions about change and modification.

Interbreeding on the rise

Domestication was a messy process from the start. Ever since humans began to breed crops and domesticate wild animals, there has been some element of interchange with their ancestor species. After all, some of our domestic species were accidental in the first place, or at least partially; wolves in search of easy scraps were drawn into human encampments; wild cats attracted to rodents feeding on grain became prized as pest-killers. As they slowly integrated into human life, these early domesticates invariably returned to the wild or bred with newly acclimated wild specimens. Early dogs almost certainly bred with human-curious wolves, and freshly minted lapcats snuck off behind the grain silos for sneaky trysts with dirty-hot wild toms.

It was a similar story with plant life: crops selected for greater production (wheat and barley were two of the first) were often in proximity to their wild relatives and exchanged genes. This entry of one genetically defined population into another is called “introgression”.

However, as human civilisation has expanded, opportunities for this kind of interbreeding have increased exponentially. Large areas of the Earth are now covered by crops and livestock. Pollen is carried by wind or by insects and other creatures outside of the cultivation area, to fertilise any compatible wild plants. Of the world’s 13 most important food crops, 12 are known to hybridise with related species in the wild. Domestic animals often range freely or escape captivity entirely.

The effects of rewilding may be subtle, such as changes in size or colour or reproduction time. Or they may be massive, in some cases resulting in what is called “genetic swamping” – fundamentally altering the wild population and eliminating the genetic diversity that allows the species to adapt to changing conditions. This process is exacerbated by the fact that species are often bred by humans to be stronger and more resilient than their wild counterparts. But these advantages are general, whereas wild species may have adapted to thrive in particular environmental conditions.

Domestication can also go wrong. It can lead to the accumulation of hidden alternative forms of genes that result in problems such as greater disease susceptibility, which then enter wild populations too. In some cases, introgression can result in failed breeding events (incomplete fertilisation or the production of sterile hybrids). Think of the horse breeding with the donkey and producing the sterile mule.

Hybrid swarms of rice

It’s clear that domestic introgression affects a wide range of plants and animals. But research on the subject is patchy. In some cases, we simply do not yet know what the effects will be. “This is a somewhat avant-garde aspect of linking ecology and genetics,” says Joshua Daskin, chief scientist of biodiversity data organisation NatureServe. “There are not enough ecologists and geneticists, and there’s not enough funding to understand the depth of this threat.”

Most current research concerns the problem of hybrid plants that return to “invade” farmers’ fields, in the form of aggressive weeds. These wild-domestic hybrids can be stronger and more pesticide-resistant and can also evade detection due to their resemblance to the crop. Some of the world’s worst weeds are the result of domestic genes entering wild populations. For example, Johnson grass is a major pest of corn, soybeans and domesticated sorghum, after becoming more vigorous and resistant to herbicides as a result of breeding with its domestic relative. These supercharged weeds also produce larger, more viable seed crops. Genes originally sculpted to serve the needs of farmers have turned against them.

Another remarkable example is that of Asian wild rice. The entire global population now appears to consist of a hybrid swarm derived from domestic rice genes that made their way into the wild through wind and insect pollination. Unfortunately, domestic genes may have conferred some disadvantageous qualities, like reduced seed shattering. This is helpful for a crop meant to be consumed by humans, but wild seeds shatter as a means of resistance to insect damage.

We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of introgression may be. The picture is not clear cut, and while it should be monitored, we should also remember this process has been going on for millennia. For example, nearly all populations of wild rice have some level of domestic ancestry, to such an extent that tracing the exact origins of rice has thus far proven impossible. So clearly these mutations have not been fatal.

What we don't know

Genetic rewilding in animals is even less well studied, with perhaps the exception of salmon. Though the domestication of species such as Atlantic salmon only began in the 1970s, alteration to their basic physiology and habits has been rapid. As with most domestic species, farmed salmon appear less attentive to predator risk, and mature at an accelerated rate. Large salmon farming operations in the Americas, Europe and other regions have led to the escape of farmed varieties from ocean pens into the wild. Their precocious maturity appears to coincide with changes in their migration patterns. Domestic salmon return to the sea at younger ages and may also return to freshwater to breed at later dates.

When salmon escapees breed with local populations, these traits become more common and alter the long-established life histories of the species. This can pose a larger ecological problem, as salmon runs are major events, upon which entire species and ecosystems are dependent (think of grizzly and black bears who rely on salmon to fatten up before their winter hibernation). Even minor alterations may result in significant consequences.

When domesticated animals re-enter the wild, it’s usually because they have escaped captivity. But in some cases, domesticated animals are freed by animal rights activists. In the last few decades, well-intended releases of domestic American mink – bred for their fur, which is highly prized for coats and other clothing – have had damaging effects on native populations of both wild American and European mink. A 2009 Canadian study found that 64 per cent of mink in Southern Ontario were either released mink or hybrids between domestic and wild mink. Because domestic mink have been selected for both exotic colouration and more moderate temperament, survival instincts may be reduced, as well as general fitness and disease resistance. If they breed with wild mink, those vulnerabilities may be passed to their offspring.

In cases where American mink have escaped in Europe, their mating with European mink has resulted in reproductive failures. While American mink are stable within their native range, European mink are critically endangered.

A 2022 study on cross-breeding in New York City also raised concern. Researchers discovered a population of coyotes in Queens that had significant levels of dog DNA – and looked more like dogs too. The researchers also detected genetic elements associated with the domesticated dog trait of hypersociality, leading to concern that they might be less avoidant of humans than pure wild coyotes. Daskin says there is evidence of more of these hybrids across the eastern US. “There’s not a lot of work yet on what that functionally means for their ability to live as wild coyotes,” he says.

This was not an anomalous event – dogs, coyotes and wolves form a genetic complex that has been subject to intensely controversial research. There is debate, for example, as to whether the black coat colour observed in some wolf populations is the result of breeding with dogs or is an ancestral genetic variation. This coat colour may be a beneficial adaptation for wolves in northern, forested environments, but also appears in other populations where it might not be effective camouflage.

One wide-ranging study from 2020 found that Eurasian wolves had nearly 3 per cent dog ancestry, whereas free-ranging dogs in the same region showed evidence of less than 1 per cent wolf ancestry. While the wolves appeared to gain little benefit from having bred with dogs, the dogs seemed to have inherited wolf genes encoding greater caution and self-sufficiency.

The case of the rare Scottish wildcat

The problem becomes more existential when the threat of extinction rears its head. Should we care if the genes of one species are altered by those of another, to the extent that the original is wiped off the map? Mike Daniels is an ecologist with the Centre for Mountain Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He says that this dilemma tends to lead on to more questions. “You have a natural process: how do species form, and what is a species? Then you’ve got the even bigger question: is man part of nature?”

This might seem like abstract reflection, but the problem is brought into stark relief when domestic species swamp wild species. This is more likely to occur when wild populations are scant and free-ranging domestic populations are high. Such has been the case with the rare Scottish wildcat, a subpopulation of the European wildcat, now restricted to the Scottish Highlands, and thought to have been isolated from other European wildcats in Great Britain for some 9,000 years. Except now, all wild specimens are believed to carry domestic cat DNA. They are thus functionally extinct in the wild.

The Scottish wildcat is not totally extinct, however, as we humans intervened. From the mid-1950s, captive populations were established in zoos, thus protecting them from domestic cats, whose populations were spreading across the country. Modern conservationists then set up breeding programmes, pairing the purest specimens. In recent years, efforts have been made to release them back into nature, in the hope they would re-establish a true wild population. In 2023, 19 of the offspring of these wildcats were released in Cairngorms National Park in northeastern Scotland. Another nine were released the following year, which also saw the birth of the first wild litter. Further kittens were produced in 2025.

But these “pure” wildcats are constantly under threat. Daniels uses the analogy of water in a bathtub to explain. “You’ve got this bathtub full of cats,” he says. “You’ve got a cold tap and a hot tap and a [drain hole]. The hot tap is pure wild cats. The cold tap is domestic cats coming in. And then the [drain hole] is cats getting killed illegally. You put a plug [in the hole] – stop cats being killed – and you want to turn the tap off from the domestic cats.” The latter apparently has not yet happened. “They found a litter of kittens that suggests that the population they’ve reintroduced have started to introgress with domestic cats, so they’re kind of back to square one,” he says.

Abstract ideas of "purity"

Should it matter whether “pure” Scottish wildcats exist or not? These attempts at reverse engineering raise questions that have bedevilled conservation movements for generations. Are these efforts truly in the interests of a larger ecosystem? Or are they simply aesthetic or sentimental, based on a romantic notion of the superiority of the original species?

The act of reintroducing an endangered or functionally extinct species to its native environment appeals to basic human ideas around freedom and natural goodness. But does it matter if that animal can trace 5 per cent or 10 per cent or 50 per cent of its ancestry to another animal that has been touched by humanity? Outside of the scientific community, most people wouldn’t know, or care too much about that. “Normally you’re releasing Californian condors, or you’re releasing wolves. You’re not releasing something that’s a particular genetic ‘thing’,” Daniels says. The case of the Scottish wildcats is, for now, an unusual exception.

But as introgression progresses, we may want to pay more attention to genetics – and not just due to abstract ideas around “purity”. If a salmon migrates at a different time or is less resistant to predators or disease due to genes inherited from domestic escapees, that is clearly detrimental. If a crop plant is responsible for the emergence of a damaging weed because it has passed its superpowers on to wild plants, there are clear economic concerns. While the effects of interbreeding between dogs, wolves and coyotes may be less concerning, it’s still crucial that we bear witness to yet another effect of our activities on wild things.

There is a need for more research on the introgression of domestic organisms into the wild. For now, work in this area remains halting and inconsistent. Further investigation will in most cases be propelled by dramatic instances that are discovered well after they have caused damage. Occasional anomalous events will inevitably be discovered – a shockingly patterned wild animal or unusual flower betraying the adventurous sexual habits of its parents. But most of the pairings will remain beautifully obscure, taking place at the permeable boundary between wildness and domesticity, and reminding us that the line between is largely an illusion.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

The master of charm

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Back in the day, when online dating profiles contained more than a few sentences, I once put the phrase “enjoys the films of Wes Anderson” in my bio. Alongside the tattoos and my coffee addiction, it felt like a solid signifier of what kind of girl I was. Wes Anderson fans could be counted on to enjoy the unexpected and the twee, taking pleasure in the details and a well-chosen colour scheme.

These days, this same fact would reveal me as an ageing hipster, but judging by the turnout at Wes Anderson: The Archives – a retrospective currently showing at the Design Museum in London – there’s a lot of us. I visited a month after it opened, and it was still sold out for the day. But there’s plenty of time to attend – it’s in London until 26 July, before moving onto other cities worldwide.

This is a show for film geeks, for sure, but one that should also appeal to connoisseurs of design, and anyone with a love of craft and a curated aesthetic. On the surface, it’s a retrospective that allows us to study the archives from the director’s 30-year career, starting with the mid-90s Bottle Rocket before concluding with last year’s The Phoenician Scheme. We’re treated to more than 700 objects, from the icing-pink model of The Grand Budapest Hotel to the lefty scissors “used in self-defence” in Moonrise Kingdom. Anderson’s overarching topics are dysfunctional families, innocence lost, grief, and obsessive characters on a mission, all styled in an exacting, deadpan manner that’s somehow also very funny. Alongside the objects, screens play clips and music, presenting little set pieces from each film.

Some items feel like a celebrity sighting – I experienced a genuine thrill on encountering the Fendi fur coat that Gwyneth Paltrow wore in The Royal Tenenbaums. Ditto the incredible animal-painted suitcases that feature prominently in The Darjeeling Limited, made by the fictional brand François Voltaire (but actually made by Marc Jacobs, in his Louis Vuitton days). The extreme attention to detail is simply stunning – like how Anderson made sure the ink used to tattoo Mayor Kobayashi in Isle of Dogs is the exact type favoured by the Japanese yakuza, even though hardly anyone would be able to tell.

We’re taken deep into Anderson’s world and we’re learning a lot, but rarely does the director reveal himself – we’re left to interpret his intentions through the objects on display. I gather he’s a man who’s exact (his notebooks, which are small, cheap and spiral-bound, are filled with neat block handwriting). He’s uncompromising about detail (he once held an audition for left-handed children just to write notes for Suzy, she of the lefty scissors). He knows what he likes (while refined over time, his aesthetic was there from the start; Bottle Rocket, a heist film that’s really about friends growing apart, is visually framed in the same exacting way as all the rest). He’s not really widened his scope over time, but maybe that was never the point: this is about honing the form, slowly and meticulously, over a lifetime.

Born and raised in Texas, Anderson first met actor Owen Wilson at the University of Texas at Austin. Wilson appears in many of Anderson’s films, one of a list of regular actors he keeps returning to. “I don’t know who gravitated toward whom,” Anderson told the New York Times in 2021. “But as soon as Owen Wilson and I started making a movie, well, I wanted Owen to be involved with the other movies I would do. As soon as I had Bill Murray, I wanted him on the next one. I wanted Jason Schwartzman. It was natural to me.” This preference of familiarity extends beyond just actors – Anderson’s younger brother, Eric, is a painter whose works often appear in his films, while filmmaker Roman Coppola has worked with the director on several recent scripts.

Now 56, Anderson’s been doing his thing for 30 years, and keeping it the same has certainly aided his journey as an auteur. Although he has on occasion crossed the line to become a parody of himself – in Asteroid City, twee charm is not quite enough to suspend disbelief about a vending machine selling real estate. But I suspect Anderson would just say he’s doing what he likes. “I’ve done a bunch of movies. And it’s a luxury to me that they’re all whatever I’ve wanted them to be,” he once told the Observer. To this day, he puts out films that walk the line between the ridiculous and profound, in a way that somehow slips past even the most determined cynicism – it simply feels delightful. (And if you disagree, let me quote my step-daughter: “Is it because you hate fun?”)

The criticism for centering white, well-off characters is harder to brush off. But he’s rarely too sympathetic to his characters, often anti-heroes who are lost, stuck or reeling from recent bereavement. This criticism is most often directed at The Darjeeling Limited, where three rich American brothers blunder their way through India. But their cluelessness is a key point of the film – the trope of the white person going to India, where they try and fail to reach some sort of enlightenment. Anderson’s characters often demonstrate naive motivations and an obsession with what they desire, while struggling to fully grasp what’s going on around them – like a lot of us, one might argue.

Of course, most of us have to work out our issues without exploring quite as many exciting foreign locales, and certainly with far fewer decadent objects and stuffed exotic animals around. Leaning hard into the quirky details is part of Anderson’s process – it’s not a shark but a jaguar shark in The Life Aquatic, faithfully represented in miniature papier-mâché. And nothing speaks to his love of detail more than stop-motion – he created not just one full-length feature using this Sisyphean method, but two.

I think this attention to detail and craft is a big part of what audiences love about Anderson’s work. We live in the era of “enshittification” – a term coined by the author and technology activist Cory Doctorow to describe how our online experience is steadily getting worse, as platforms turn their focus to profits. When everyone seems to be cutting corners, it feels good to know that some processes are uncompromising. In the age of speedy video clips, where a minute is considered long, it’s refreshing that films are still being made that are going to take as long as they take. Fantastic Mr Fox took a gruelling two years, as the stop-motion figures were moved by hand, up to 24 times per second. The worlds that Anderson creates are an invitation into a more embodied time, where all phones are wired into the wall and the idea of asking a computer for its opinion would be absurd. At the core of his obsession lies a simple beauty, and when we stand in front of it we recognise something that is human and real.

The exhibition doesn’t dwell too much on the how and why of it all. Instead, we are invited to simply admire, for example, the mismatched red hats from The Life Aquatic. But maybe the withholding of context, and biographical information, is part of the point. (“The film is the thing,” director David Lynch once said when pressed to explain himself; everything he wanted to say was already on the screen.) In interviews, Anderson is described as reserved and polite, reluctant to talk much about himself but very eager to get into the nuts and bolts of his projects, so it’s fitting that the show is no different.

There are still some hints of the man behind the screen. There’s a miniature of the book Fantastic Mr Fox on display as part of the props from the film – we’re told it’s an exact replica of the edition the director had as a child. Anderson has commissioned lots of book covers to be used in his films, but this time he chose something from his own history. We’re not told why, but we can imagine.

I’m left enthralled by the exactness of it all, imagining the director in deep concentration as he chases down some rabbit hole, riding the flow of focus, seeking discovery and his own idea of perfection. Anderson is always going to be the one who cares the most. He’s doing it for the love of the craft – and thankfully, we get to watch.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

God enters the manosphere

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Connor Tomlinson is 27 years old, a regular commentator on GB News and a self-described “reactionary Catholic Zoomer”. But this wasn’t always the case. In a YouTube interview from 2024, Tomlinson says he was baptised as a baby but was “not a regular church attendee”. It was only, he says, in 2019 when conservative Christian friends inspired him to “make the grown-up decision to just believe it and see what happens” that he started attending weekly mass and was confirmed as a Catholic.

Soon afterwards, he began writing opinion pieces for Conservative media outlets before becoming a contributor to a group called Young Voices. Supported by the US-based Koch Foundation, the group helps to place young, right-wing commentators in prominent media roles. Since then, Tomlinson’s social media channels (he has more than 100,000 followers apiece on YouTube and X) have hosted hundreds of videos from a conservative Catholic perspective – ranging from rants about immigration to chats about everything that is supposedly wrong with women.

In one YouTube clip from 2023, Tomlinson and disgraced priest Calvin Robinson claimed that “seeking attention on social media [was] a form of digital infidelity … makes your man feel unwanted, and profanes the sanctity of your relationship”. Criticising both liberal and conservative women, whom Tomlinson referred to as “titty Tories”, they suggested that posting selfies online negated any worthwhile work these women may have done and advised them, quoting from the New Testament, to focus on “finding a good husband”.

Tomlinson and Robinson – and other Christian right-wing figures espousing misogynistic views – are gaining a disturbingly large following of young men, including in the UK. Over the last 20 years, the political divide between young British men and women has grown, with the former more likely to identify as right-wing and, according to a 2024 study from King’s College London, to feel negatively about the impact of feminism.

There has also been a growing narrative around disaffected young men turning to religion. Last year, the Bible Society reported a five-fold increase in the number of 18-24-year-old men attending church services in the UK since 2018. The report was based on self-reported data, and doesn’t reflect an actual rise in recorded attendee numbers, but it was nonetheless seized on as evidence that this demographic is turning to faith.

What does seem to be true is that parts of the “manosphere” – the umbrella term for men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, incels and others – are going Christian (or claiming to). It’s a shift that is being leveraged to gain legitimacy and influence for their misogynistic ideas in the outside world – including in political circles, such as via Tomlinson’s close friend and former Reform UK party candidate, 29-year-old Joseph Robertson.

Women and the downfall of humanity

Whereas the leaders of the manosphere often express a blatant hatred of women and a focus on manipulative pick-up techniques, figures like Tomlinson rely more on ideas of the perfect Christian family. But dig a little deeper and the lines between the two worlds begin to blur.

Take US author and so-called “Godfather of the Manosphere” Rollo Tomassi (real name George Miller). Tomassi, who gained fame with his “Rational Male” book series, teaches his followers that women with multiple sexual partners are “low-value”. He has also written that women use sexism as an excuse for their own unsuitability for professional careers.

For Tomlinson, women are unfit for doing 9-5 jobs, because they are “impressionable, led by material incentives and easily manipulated”. Therefore, he claims, it is the job of a man to “be the vanguard against the degeneracy that has wasted so many fertile years and the potential of women who are not ugly, who could’ve been someone’s wife”. Both he and Robertson are keen to blame all manner of societal problems on the contraceptive pill.

The only real difference is that, for Tomassi, these misogynistic beliefs legitimise men using and abusing women because that’s what “nature intended”. Meanwhile, for Tomlinson and other Christian figures, it compels men to take women under their wing and teach them how to live because that is “God’s plan”. In both worldviews, women are responsible for the downfall of humanity and only valued when serving the whims and needs of men.

But despite this overlap, both Tomlinson and Robertson are strongly critical of the manosphere. Tomlinson believes it “perpetuates the paradigm of the industrial and sexual revolutions ... which made men and women so maladaptive and unattracted to each other in the first place”. Robertson appears to agree with this and has written florid critiques of self-appointed manosphere leader Andrew Tate and the perils of pornography.

When we reached out to Tomlinson about his statements and their inherent misogyny, he told us that: “The time I spend with my wife, mother, grandmothers, friends, etc. matters more to me than if someone I don’t know calls me mean on the internet … Men should be considerate, compassionate, and chivalric toward the women they love and who love them. Women should return that compassion and consideration in kind. We may do it in different ways, but that’s the core of it. Ideology obscures those relationships, makes people think in zero-sum terms about competing categories, and is making people miserable … So you’re welcome to engage with what I’ve written and said throughout my career, and I hope you do so in good faith. But I don’t feel compelled to defend myself against such a bad faith charge as ‘You’re a misogynist.’ I would rather spend time with my wife.”

The "God pill"

Tomlinson may want us to think that his religious beliefs are in no way misogynistic. But the reframing of manosphere theories as the “Christian” way to think and live has been going on for several years, and is evident when we look at the trajectory of certain figures within the manosphere. Daryush Valizadeh (aka Roosh V) was one of the first. A key figure in the early manosphere, he taught a version of Tomassi’s beliefs as a pick-up artist – a man who uses coercion and manipulation to pick up women – via his lucrative Return of Kings website. In 2019, after disappearing from the scene, he returned with a blog post explaining that he had “received a message while on mushrooms” and was taking the movement in a new direction.

Having replaced the so-called Red Pill (a trope where “taking the Red Pill” reveals the unsettling truth of reality, in this case revealing women’s “true intentions”) with the “God Pill”, his commitment to misogyny remained the same, only now it was fueled by the teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church. While the rebrand lost him many fans, it opened the door for a new wave of manosphere influencers keen to present their misogyny as piety. No longer seeking to humiliate women by coercing them into sex, they were now “good guys” working to reinstil the supposed natural order of things.

Since then, other men have come into this space; like Tomlinson, Robertson, Calvin Robinson and other protege’s of far-right student organisation Turning Point UK. Justifying their hatred of women via pseudo-intellectual arguments and with reference to Christian teachings, they are far more appealing to men who wish to subjugate the other sex while avoiding associations with the bare-faced aggression and criminality of figures like Andrew Tate.

Even more alarmingly, convincing themselves and others that they are educated men working for God, these men have muscled their way into speaking engagements and onto national news channels like GB News and Talk. The groups they associate with include the anti-LGBT Christian advocacy group ADF Legal (which advised the Orthodox Conservatives, a pressure group with which Robertson is closely involved); the Family Education Trust, a group with evangelical ties whose policy suggestions have made it into parliamentary discussions (Robinson and Tomlinson attended their conference last year); and anti-abortion group Right to Life, for whom Tomlinson, Robertson and Robinson are all advocates. These groups seek to limit access to abortion, prevent children from learning about the LGBT community and push Christian and traditionalist beliefs into policymaking.

Framing their arguments as the only way to “save” the west, the people who truly benefit are white Christian men and the women who obey them. Feminists, people of colour, Muslims, the LGBT community and others have no role in their brave new world.

What's the appeal?

Many of these men also deny that they are “far right”, while holding beliefs in line with both ethnic and Christian nationalism. Ethno-nationalists believe that identity is based on ethnicity and culture, whilst Christian nationalists believe that Christianity is the only way to save race and nation. In both cases the words “race”, “culture” and “nation” relate only to the white, western world.

Examples of both are present in most of Tomlinson’s output. In an interview with the Daily Heretic, a YouTube channel hosted by journalist Andrew Gold who focuses on “culture war” topics from a right-wing perspective, Tomlinson said he was not an ethno-nationalist. But he also claimed that former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was not “nationally English” and that only those who could trace their British ancestry back to the Neolithic era were truly British. He believes that Britain is a Christian country; a bold claim given that less than half of those asked on the most recent census identified as Christian and 37 per cent claimed no religion at all.

These attitudes appear to be spreading, and are voiced by some Reform UK party candidates, including Joseph Robertson. In a video posted to X last year, Robertson claimed that “the natal crisis gripping the west” was happening because “the sacred act of motherhood ... has been demeaned and discarded” by feminists, which has “disrupted the natural harmony between men and women” and was “derailing the proper course of western history”.

Part of the appeal of these figures comes down to delivery. Whilst the angry rants of Andrew Tate are easily dismissed, the calm manner in which Tomlinson et al present their ideas makes them more accessible. Whether they are telling their audience that they need to “bring back women shaming women” to enforce modesty, or that men should be “the rock upon which [their wife’s] emotional waves may break”, it is delivered with the calm confidence of a Man Who Knows What He Is Talking About.

And while many manosphere leaders are actively grifting their audience, Tomlinson and his cohort appear to believe their own hype. These are not angry old men who will wrap themselves in the flag while getting arrested alongside Tommy Robinson; they present themselves as young, relevant “intellectuals”. For an audience of lost young men, uncertain of their role in life, that is more than enough to trust them.

Crisis of belonging

In the course of writing my book Incel: The Weaponization of Misogyny, I have had extensive conversations with youth leaders and teachers. They have shown that there is a clear crisis of belonging among boys and men in their teens and early twenties. They have friends, but the friendships stop at the school gates – and a lack of community spaces sees them confined to their bedrooms and screens. The algorithms are designed to promote the most lucrative content, which is often the most controversial.

Faced with a polarised, rage-filled digital world, which punishes young men as either “Nazis” or “soy boys” (progressive men who are deemed less masculine because they care about women), it is possible to see the appeal of the Christian manosphere’s calm utopia, which seems to offer a middle ground.

But aside from increasing support for the far right and growing levels of misogyny, Tomlinson et al are offering young men a version of a life which is both socially and financially unfeasible. For the vast majority, it is no longer possible to survive on a single income. As with the tradwife movement, which sees influencers advocating for women to quit their jobs, marry and start a homestead, Christian manosphere figures are recommending that young men seek out a simple life with a simple wife, while they themselves walk the corridors of power funded by podcast subscriptions.

In the offline world, parts of the Christian establishment are taking steps to separate themselves from these divisive figures and boost their image as welcoming, egalitarian spaces. Last year, Calvin Robinson was dismissed from a US diocese of the Anglican Catholic Church after he appeared to mimic Elon Musk’s “Nazi-style salute” at their National Pro-Life Summit, and he has never been ordained in the Church of England despite completing his training at Oxford. A year earlier, the Free Church of England fired one of their reverends for posting multiple online videos in which he criticised “woke” topics and referred to progressive female ministers as “witches”. And the new Archbishop of Wales is an openly gay woman.

But for those in the Christian manosphere, this simply provides further proof of the British Christian establishment “going woke” and will see them drift deeper into extreme orthodoxy to justify their own positions.

Thankfully, there are many secular groups working with young men. Last year, Mike Nicholson, CEO of the group Progressive Masculinity, told me how his team were going into schools and creating spaces for young men to talk about issues in the online world. Explaining that they “don’t teach boys to be men” but “give boys the agency and the freedom to design the man that they want to be”, Nicholson said that when boys were challenged on harmful beliefs in a safe environment the response was “phenomenal”. He believes in the value of discussion. “This idea that boys and men don’t like to talk is an absolute fallacy,” he said. “In the right spaces, somewhere they feel safe, they love to.”

Parents concerned about their sons can also improve their communication. The PACE model, developed by an educational psychologist to help children through trauma, can be adapted to almost any family situation. An acronym that stands for Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy, it describes how to approach concerning child behaviour without showing fear or censure.

Young men are bombarded with digital hate on a daily basis. It is our job to provide them with a nurturing, safe environment in which they can be encouraged to think critically about online content and the way they interact with it. It’s vital to remember that young men consuming harmful content are seeking answers to internal questions, not validation for pre-existing beliefs. If we engage with them, we can lead them to healthier sources than the Christian nationalist movement.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

All the world’s a concept album

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

It’s an old, old story: Nasty Unfaithful Sex-Crazed Man treats Poor Nice Monogamous Woman like crap. Everything explodes, and they all live divorcedly ever after. This is also the plot of singer Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl. Only here it has a fresh new twist: Nasty Unfaithful uses non-monogamy as a cover for his shitty behaviour, forcing Poor Nice Monogamous to (kind of) consent to him seeing other people.

Non-monogamy is becoming increasingly popular, with the growing acceptance that having only one romantic and sexual partner isn’t for everyone, and that there are other valid ways to conduct relationships. Advice about how to do it ethically isn’t hard to find: there are hundreds of books, websites, therapists and communities out there. The narrative arc of West End Girl is an absolute disaster movie, and an entirely predictable one. It’s a caricature of what to avoid: the bad communication, the fact that one partner clearly hates the whole idea and is being pressured into it, the attempt to implement rigid rules in order to “tame” the extramarital encounters. (The rules fail to do this, and are promptly broken anyway.)

But the story resonates deeply for so many listeners precisely because it is familiar. Anyone who’s spent time in non-monogamous circles (or, frankly, on any online dating platform) knows this story too, and these men. Every woman who ever fell for a modern Nasty Unfaithful can see herself in West End Girl, and now she has a whole album of (absolutely belting) new tunes with which to vent her feelings. So far so innocuous: new generations need new versions of old stories.

And this is a story. Allen describes West End Girl as “autofiction”. Crucially, this means it’s not autobiography: it’s a collaboratively made album, and some of the content is made up. The main character (Poor Nice Monogamous) is an alterego of Allen. She is the reluctant partner “trying to be open”, trying to be something she’s not. So many of us have been that woman, trying to defang our fears of abandonment with some kind of self-improvement project.

Did Allen the flesh-and-blood human really do the things the character does in these songs? Did her real husband, or the real “other woman”, do the things described? We’re invited to imagine that they did. The lines between real people and fictional characters are blurred in exceptionally clever ways.

Social media is part of the album, as well as part of the broader media landscape that feeds and is fed by it. Instagram, Tinder and Hinge all show up in the lyrics. The proximity of the album’s launch to the release of the last season of Stranger Things – starring Allen’s erstwhile husband – extended the tendrils of the Upside Down into the West End Girl storyline. The album’s promotional materials have caused a stir, particularly the specially branded butt-plug USB drives – a call back to the now infamous song “Pussy Palace”, where Allen’s alterego describes discovering her husband’s sex toy-laden New York City pad (which, again, may or may not be a real event).

Meanwhile, the storytelling itself gently invites the listener to blend life with performance: the first song on the album is about theatre and acting, and the inciting incident for the entire drama is that the narrator gets cast as the lead in a play, as Allen was in real life. The second song then describes a question posed by Nasty Unfaithful as a (fucking) “line”.

If all the world’s a stage, maybe all the world’s a concept album too. Where does West End Girl begin or end? And why does it matter?

As individuals, we relate the stories we consume to our own bodies, our own senses of self. The labels we use to refer to ourselves are tools of self-creation – be they dating app pseudonyms, metrics like height and age, or social roles (the Allen character describes herself variously as “mum to teenage girls”, “modern wife” and “non-monogamummy”). These are the ingredients for alchemising life and people into recognisable narratives.

In our late capitalist economy, those narratives are often structured by what or whom we possess, and what or who possesses us. As Allen sings: “You’re mine, mine, mine”. When you approach a relationship as a casting of another person in the role of your partner, you objectify them: they become supporting cast in the drama of your life.

Meanwhile, of course, they are busy doing exactly the same thing to you. Existentialists and romantic partners Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre disagreed on whether heteroromantic love could ever be more than a power struggle, each trying to “win” by objectifying the other. Beauvoir was the more optimistic of the two, but remained in a life-long open relationship with Sartre regardless. In Allen’s penultimate song, the narrator refuses to let her (ex-) husband “win”.

But this is about more than individuals. Media narratives play a key part in the social construction of romantic love itself, as well as in the construction of gender roles in romantic relationships. When we keep telling the same story over and over, we strengthen the grip of existing scripts.

West End Girl plays into the standard narrative: it’s men who want sex and therefore non-monogamy. Women who agree to it to try and make men happy will get screwed over and it will all end in tears. It’s obvious that misogynistically practised non-monogamy is no better or worse per se than misogynistically practised monogamy. But it’s more comfortable to demonise non-monogamy than to come to terms with the reality (and ubiquity) of misogyny. It’s easier to cling to the myth that monogamy would solve misogyny, if only men could keep it in their pants long enough. In the Paris Review, Jean Garnett calls West End Girl “a rather neat, crowd-pleasing, bias-confirming presentation of nonmonogamy that casts male extramarital libido as the bad guy and Allen as the victim.” Of course it is: that’s the story people want. That’s how you sell albums and concert tickets and branded butt-plugs.

Which brings us back to capitalism, and the sheer marketing genius surrounding West End Girl. The album is a giant invitation to chime in. It reads like a friend’s post on social media, on which we are expected to comment “you go girl!” and “yes, men are bastards who just want tons of pussy!” It’s chatty and unchallenging, rather like a patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, in which a late Victorian incarnation of Nasty Unfaithful gets hauled in front of a law court (and of course the theatre audience) to be judged for his abandonment of a Poor Nice Monogamous, offering in his defence the touching plea that “one cannot eat breakfast all day, nor is it the act of a sinner, / when breakfast is taken away, to turn his attention to dinner.” Edwin, though, is a caricature in a comic operetta. The trial-by-audience of Allen’s characters, and the real people behind them, is not a joke.

Sex sells. And people assume non-monogamy is just about getting lots of sex – an impression not exactly refuted by this album. In reality, non-monogamy takes many forms. Polyamory, for instance, is defined by openness to more than one loving relationship. But West End Girl is not a nuanced treatise on love. It is first and foremost a marketing triumph. Lily Allen and her collaborators are presumably making a lot of money out of all this. Is that, under capitalism, what passes for feminism?

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

Heroes of free thought! New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition is out now

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

With the great powers facing off and a global authoritarian slide, we are entering a new era of brazen propaganda. But for all those who keep their heads down, there are many more who refuse to go along with it.

In the Spring 2026 edition of New Humanist, we celebrate the heroes of free thought on the frontlines of the battle against dogma and ideology – from the Belarusian women standing up for democracy despite imprisonment and exile, to the poet translating Orwell into Chinese and the therapists helping people rebuild their belief systems after leaving religious groups.

We also hear from Harvard's Steven Pinker about defending America's besieged universities and historian David Olusoga about why we must revisit the story of the Empire.

Keep reading for a peek inside!

The Spring 2026 edition of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe or buy a copy online today, or find your nearest stockist.

Defend the truth!

We hear from six champions of free thought around the world about how to fight back against propaganda and protect the truth – including journalist Andrei Kolesnikov on Russia's last remaining dissidents, campaigner Zoe Gardner on how to fight anti-immigration misinformation, and climate and vaccine scientists Michael E. Mann and Peter Hotez on how everyone can do their bit to defend science.

"Today, harm is being done by the spread of despair and defeatism, some of it weaponised by bad actors like Russia to create division and disengagement. We are, in fact, far from defeat"

Breaking free from belief

A growing number of UK therapists are helping people "deconstruct" their beliefs after leaving high-control religious groups. Journalist Ellie Broughton meets the therapists leading the charge, and the clients working to rebuild their belief systems.

“Over time, losing your religion may start to feel less like a loss, and more like an opportunity to rebuild yourself from the ground up”

Inside the women’s prisons of Belarus

Women played a key role in the Belarusian pro-democracy movement that came to a head in the summer of 2020. More than five years later, hundreds of women are still being held as political prisoners or have been forced to live in exile. And yet, they refuse to give up. Journalist Alexandra Domenech hears their stories.

"Despite the government’s attempts to crush their spirits, the women who have emerged from penal colonies tell stories of defiance and solidarity"

Steven Pinker on America's besieged universities

Harvard's high-profile psychologist Steven Pinker has long argued that a lack of political diversity at US universities is skewing research – but now there's a new and more dangerous threat from the Trump administration. He spoke to us about why it's important to fight attacks on academic freedom, no matter where they come from.

"Professors and students have been harassed, fired, sanctioned and censored for constitutionally protected speech"

David Olusoga on Empire, religion in Britain – and The Traitors

Following the success of his BBC Two series Empire, historian David Olusoga explores the challenges of talking about the British Empire today, the influence of the Church in Britain – and why carefully-crafted logic got him nowhere on Celebrity Traitors.

"Much of the hostility towards anything to do with the Empire is just a desire to not have to hear difficult things about Britain"

Also in the Spring 2026 edition:

Journalist Katherine Denkinson explores how the manosphere is using God to target young men
Laurie Taylor digs into how life-changing rethinks can hinge on a single word
Zion Lights looks at the biomedical breakthroughs giving us a reason to feel cheerful
We can now study diseases to track people and fight crime, writes Oxford bioethicist Tess Johnson – but should we?
Richard Pallardy explores the havoc that can follow when farm animals breed with wild species
Award-winning comedian Shaparak Khorsandi on how Stranger Things united the generations
BBC Radio 4 presenter Samira Ahmed on the new nouvelle vague
National treasure Michael Rosen explores the history of the word "climate" in the latest edition of his language column
Marcus Chown on how our tiny brains are able to make sense of the Universe
Lily Allen's album West End Girl got everyone talking about non-monogamy – but it tells an old story, argue academics Carrie Jenkins and Carla Nappi
Jessica Furseth on the undiluted joy of the Wes Anderson archives
Jody Ray takes a tense but awe-inspiring tour of Libya
We talk to Russian-British comedian Olga Koch about comedy, class and computers

Plus more fascinating features on the biggest topics shaping our world today, book reviews, original poetry, and our regular cryptic crossword and brainteaser.

Subscribe to the print edition now to get a beautiful copy of the magazine delivered to your door, or choose a digital subscription to read it on the app.

David Olusoga on Empire, identity – and The Traitors

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

David Olusoga is a British-Nigerian historian, author, presenter and BAFTA-winning filmmaker. He is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. His most recent television series “Empire” – which explored the history of the British Empire and its continuing impact today – aired on BBC Two last year.

Let’s start by talking about the BBC series Empire. What was the motivation behind it?

We have conversations about the British Empire in this country as if we are the only people involved, which, given the nature of empires, is not possible. We often ignore the fact that conversations about the Empire are taking place in those many countries that were formerly British colonies.

There was a huge debate about the meaning of the British Empire in India – historians like Shashi Tharoor are kind of superstar historians because their ideas and their writings about the Empire have become enormous. In the Caribbean, there’s incredible scholarship, but also heritage work and memorialisation.

This conversation about the Empire is not a monologue within this country. It needs to be a dialogue with the countries that were colonies or territories of the British Empire. So the aim is to try to explore the story of the Empire as a history that is being revisited by people across the world. Because more than two billion people are citizens of nations that were formerly British colonies or protectorates or dominions.

What has the reaction been like?

Most people’s reaction to most aspects of history is that it’s interesting – not that this is a challenge to who I am, or an insult to my nation. And the viewing figures for Empire – it was one of the most successful factual programmes on British television in 2025 – show that most people are willing to engage in recognising that there’s much about the Empire that we don’t know.

But we do live in a moment when there is a kind of rearguard action to defend an “island story” version of the Empire, which takes any acknowledgement that the British Empire, like all empires, was at times extractive [as an unfair criticism].

What’s your response to this defensive attitude?

The British Empire lasts 400 years. It involves millions and millions of people, and there are all sorts of motivations and actions and behaviours that range from the genocidal to the purely altruistic. But the structure of an empire ... people don’t set sail to set up colonies in order to benefit the people who already own the land. Empires, by their nature, are about the mother country, the imperial power, more than the colonies.

But the expectation is that this is a history that must be dealt with as a piece of historical accountancy – that if you cover [a negative aspect of the Empire, you must cover a positive one]; if you talk about the Indian famines, you must talk about the Indian railways. When I write about the First World War, nobody ever confronts me for talking about the strategic failures of the generals on the Western Front, or the death toll, or the suffering in the trenches. This only happens with the subject of the British Empire, and particularly anything to do with slavery, where we suddenly feel that we have to be talking in terms of “balance”.

Much of the hostility towards anything to do with the Empire is just a desire to not have to hear difficult things about Britain, and they’re only difficult if you have a magical and exceptional view of Britain, that Britain is a nation unlike every other nation that’s ever existed in all of human history.

Does your work on the Empire feel personal? The phrase that people sometimes use is “we are here, because you were there,” right?

I don’t really think about myself that much, because I don’t look to history to give me a warrant to exist in my own country. There is this idea on the far right that the history of Empire and black history are ways of people of colour claiming their right to be in Britain. I don’t feel that needy. I pay my taxes, I contribute to my society. I don’t need there to have been earlier generations of black people in Britain.

However, I do deploy my background within story-telling, because I’ve been making television programmes as a producer and presenter for a long time, and I’m very good at understanding how to use your own experiences to make stories more impactful. So we end the Empire series with me deploying my ancestors to make the point that confronting the history of Empire, recognising it as part of our history, is not something about guilt or pride.

My Nigerian ancestors were in a town called Ijebu Ode in the 1890s that was attacked by the British, so I’m descended from people who were attacked by the British army. But one of my ancestors on my mother’s side was a Scottish soldier in the pay of the East India Company. So, if I did history in the hope of eliciting guilt from white people, I have a rather large Achilles heel.

I’ve experienced something similar myself. I read a review of one of my books about scientific racism, which argued “well, he would think this, because he’s half-caste.” That’s not a word I would use myself. But I still had a moment of self-reflection, asking myself, “would I be making the same arguments if I didn’t have Indian parentage?” I concluded that the answer was yes, but it stung me in a peculiar way.

These arguments aren’t arguments. They’re attempts at silencing people, at saying that certain voices saying certain things are illegitimate. What these arguments are all saying is, “I don’t like what this history is saying. Therefore, it’s not real history.” It is easier to attack the messenger than it is to deal with something that you’re uncomfortable with.

Episode two of Empire was particularly striking for me, because it’s about a story that I think isn’t well told – about this period of indenture. As you know, my great-grandparents were Indian indentured slaves (I’ve made a personal decision to use the word “slaves”) brought to Guyana. Could you describe what happened in this period?

In some ways, after slavery was outlawed, the British went back to what they had before slavery, which was the indenture system. British poor people would sell their labour for a period of years – five, sometimes 10 or longer – and they were transported to the colonies. They would then work for a free settler for those number of years, and at the end of it, they were freed. (If they were lucky; this didn’t always happen.)

But the story of indenture from one part of the Empire to another is particularly unknown because there’s no connection to Britain. In the case of India, somewhere between one or two million Indians left to become indentured labourers. There was a huge range of experiences – from the murderously exploitative to, you know, extremely positive for people being able to transform their lives, escape caste, buy land. It’s a system that lasted from the early 19th century, with some stops and starts, right through until almost the First World War.

Can you tell us about how your family got here?

My father was from Nigeria. He was studying here in Newcastle [when my parents met]. Then my parents moved to Nigeria and I was born there. They then separated and we moved back to the UK. So I’m a 1970s story of movement around former Empire connections, because Nigeria had been a British colony. I grew up in Gateshead, near Newcastle, and it was not a very diverse place in the 70s and 80s. It still isn’t. I was brought up in a white, working-class world with my grandparents and my mum and siblings. I have a strong feeling of affection for the north-east and a strong sense of belonging and identity to that.

What’s your family’s relationship with religion?

My mother worked really, really hard to not ever say what she felt, and we went through a normal comprehensive school system with the sort of religiosity and religious education lessons that you’d expect. It [the existence of God] just always struck me as really unlikely.

But I remember being young and thinking that believing in this stuff was part of being good, and I wanted to be good and to do my homework and not get in trouble and not upset my mum. So there was a feeling of “you should believe in this, and you should say the prayers and sing the carols” and all that sort of nonsense. There was a brief period when I went to Sunday school, because it was what you did if you were trying to be a good boy. But that clashed with the fact that I just always felt it was nonsense.

As I got older, I just wanted nothing to do with it. One of the challenges I’ve had as a historian is that I’m so disinterested in religion. And I’ve had to make myself [engage with it] because you can’t study the past when for almost everybody, part of their calculations, for every action that they took, was what was going to happen to their mortal soul. So I forced myself to read religious history, and particularly around the early Church, which was the university of the world. It was the centre of learning.

What about the relationship between the Church and chattel slavery?

The Church was involved in justifying slavery, but it was also involved both with the abolitionists and with enslaved people themselves, who found inspiration in the biblical stories – the obvious stories of Pharaoh and the escape from Egypt. So it was involved in every aspect. There were religious figures who justified slavery. There were religious organisations and individuals who owned enslaved people, who promoted and propagandised for slavery. And there were religious voices who were motivated by their religiosity to oppose it.

And the influence of the Church today?

I do resent living in a country where it is very difficult to educate your children without them being indoctrinated in religion. I believe in absolute toleration, but I am opposed to religious privilege. I don’t see why we have bishops in the House of Lords, having power in our political system. I don’t accept that collective acts of Christian worship should be imposed upon my child, or anybody else’s child. I also think that religious schools are becoming increasingly a force for disunity in the country.

It felt significant that Tommy Robinson did a Christmas carol service last year, which attracted more than a thousand people, and he’s had support from figures like Elon Musk. What do you think about Christian nationalism in the US, and the efforts to export it over here?

I think it’s people with a lot of money who can’t accept how different Britain is to America. You can’t have Christian nationalism in a country that’s essentially not a Christian country. But if you’re trying to keep your American paymasters happy, if that’s where the money coming in from America to foment greater division in Britain is coming from, then you have to do what your paymaster says.

Last time I went to church, it was young Nigerians and very old white British people. And if you go to a Catholic church in many parts of this country, everyone’s Polish. So if you’re interested in bums on seats, Tommy Robinson is not the obvious conduit to achieve that.

I’d like to see him go to church in north-east London with a big Nigerian community. See how he gets on there. But before we end this interview, we have to talk about something more light-hearted. Your appearance on the The Celebrity Traitors.

I was somehow in the final, which has been one of the most watched moments in recent TV history. It’s been interesting being involved in something, at this very difficult time, that made people really happy. Sadly, what made them really happy was seeing those of us who appeared to be incredibly incompetent. So it would have been nice to have made people happy with competency, rather than incompetency.

Rather than incompetency, wasn’t it that you were making very rational, evidence-based arguments, that were just always unfortunately wrong?

I’ve been trying to think about what happened. I spend my life reading, gathering evidence, and then trying to weigh it out, but when there was no evidence, I entered this kind of desperate starvation state, looking for it. I think my theories were entirely rational, but they were also entirely wrong. So for example when Stephen Fry suggested that we should not have discussions at the roundtable and instead we should just vote, most people went, “That’s interesting, Stephen,” and I went, “That would be really useful if you were a traitor.”

So you went for him.

You know, in lots of Victorian novels, there’s the boring accountant that the young woman doesn’t want to marry, and then the exciting cavalry officer? I feel I proved myself to be the boring accountant.

You’re Daniel Day-Lewis in A Room With a View.

Exactly. I should have been the young guy with my chest out, in the field, kissing Helena Bonham Carter.

Did doing The Traitors help restore your faith in TV? This is an industry that is slowly being eroded, and the BBC is constantly under attack.

Well, it didn’t change the BBC being under attack – we’ve lost a director general since Traitors went out. But it is a phenomenon. When I was a kid, when everyone watched something, the whole nation had been through this shared experience. It’s very rare now. The big TV hits of last year were Adolescence and Traitors; they couldn’t be more different but they both began national conversations.

But my passion for TV is because that was a way I could do history. I had a kind of fork in the road. I had to choose the academic path and the PhD that was in front of me, or do something else, and I wanted to do history in the way that it had enraptured me when I was young, which was watching it on television. The person who made me want to do TV – alongside my history teacher Mr Faulkner – was [the historian and BBC presenter] Michael Wood.

But also, I was brought up in a council estate. I had that deep fear of debt that people brought up with no money have. TV offered me a way of doing history and getting paid. Meanwhile, a sector like academia, in which you have to self-fund the necessary qualifications to advance, is closed to a great majority of the population.

What is it about Michael Wood’s work that particularly inspired you?

He did In Search of the Dark Ages and a whole series of different history projects with the BBC. He was often talking about what we don’t know. And I love the idea of unknowability. That’s what I try to do on television, to get to that precipice of what is knowable and unknowable, and then ask questions of the view.

The magic of history is that you can know enough to empathise with people who lived and died before you were born. You can imagine yourself in their situation, and that connection with people of past centuries is a magical thing. I feel deeply emotional about history. Sometimes I’m in an archive, thinking about someone who’s been dead for 100 years. I’m the only person in the world thinking about their existence.

Talking about humanism, it’s that idea that they [people from history] are exactly the same as me, and that I can imagine what they must have gone through, what the city that they walked through was like, and how different it is from the one of today.

I think exactly the same about evolutionary history. It’s just that the history I study is a bit older than yours. For example, the peopling of the Americas is a big question. And a couple of years ago in White Sands, New Mexico, they discovered fossilised footprints that put the date of people there several thousand years earlier than we’d previously thought. The paper described the prints of a young person, possibly a teenager, going out for a looped walk, which lasts about a mile. And at several points there are the footprints of a two or three-year old, but they come and go. So that’s a person with a toddler, and the toddler’s tired, and you pick it up, and it walks for a bit. Twenty thousand years ago, people were doing exactly what you do in a park on a Sunday morning with your child. That is what you’re talking about, for me.

I remember that. Maybe it’s because I was new to fatherhood when it came out. But just ... the universality!

So, what’s next? Will you be doing Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s been mooted. I think I could do Strictly for one reason, which is that I’ve spent a lot of my life fighting against racial stereotypes. And I could destroy the racial stereotype that all black people can dance. But no, I think the country has suffered enough.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

How "Stranger Things" united the generations

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

My new year began not with resolutions, but with tentacled monsters menacing 1980s children and their trusted adults. At the crack of dawn, I was on the sofa with my 12-year-old daughter, gripped by the Stranger Things series finale.

Watching TV with my children is one of life’s great joys – and at 12, my daughter is at the in-between age when the pool of shows we both love watching isn’t all that vast yet. Stranger Things bridges the gap between us so perfectly that for a couple hours she forgot I was her desperately uncool mother. I was a fellow adventurer flying with her through the Upside Down, entirely absorbed in the fate of the characters we have watched grow up and grown to love.

This used to be the simplest pleasure: watching TV with your family. One set, one channel and everyone in the same room. The chances of a shared experience diminished once we could watch our favourite shows on a train or during a challenging bowel movement. And this speaks to the great paradox of being a Generation X parent. We are forever explaining to our children that we were exactly like them once, while also insisting that our childhoods were completely different.

We had no internet, no phones, no streaming platforms – yet we were the modern generation. We had E.T. and Star Wars. We skateboarded without helmets and drank drinks that glowed in the dark. We were supposed to remain eternally youthful, preserved in the amber of grunge and VHS. So the creeping suspicion that our children might see us as old is frankly unbearable.

This is why Stranger Things has been such a joy and relief. Set in the 1980s, it should by rights be pure nostalgia syrup: bikes, basements, synths, curly hair that crunches. Yet somehow it surpasses that. The kids in the midwestern town of Hawkins don’t feel like retro relics. They feel startlingly like Gen Z: clever, funny, emotionally alert, but with more face-to-face bullying than online.

Then there’s the particular joy of Winona Ryder in the series. In the 90s, she was my complicated dream girl, the patron saint of dramatic eyeliner. I so wanted to be like her. Now she’s playing a frazzled single mum – just like me (sort of). Watching her character develop, as her anxiety strengthens into iron-willed protectiveness, has been unexpectedly moving. The show is a meeting point of generations, where Winona is still cooler than all of us combined.

That said, sometimes there are little jolts. Like when Will came out as gay, and my daughter informed me that “there was way more homophobia in the 80s, so Will is really brave and really felt he was risking losing his friends”. She said this, very earnestly, as though I wasn’t from that decade myself, when Section 28 set hatred into law. She speaks as though the 80s weren’t a real period of time, but more like a historical reenactment village.

But there’s something beautiful about that too. My daughter feels ownership over the 80s of Stranger Things – not as my past, but as her story-world. She meets me there, half in history, half in fiction. And for a moment, the generational performance drops away. I’m just a person who was once a child, watching children navigate the strangeness of growing up, next to my own actual child doing the same.

The finale of the show left me aching for my own childhood, where there were endless, wide-open skies of possibility. The writers, Matt and Ross Duffer, in their creation of a world that is part Star Wars, part Godzilla and part Eastenders, gave a glorious piece of my childhood back to me for a moment. As Bowie’s “Heroes” rang out in the final credits, I sobbed and said to my daughter, “See darling? The wonder, the magic never leaves us! It just changes shape and we forget to look for it, but it’s there, darling, the wonder is always there.”

She raised her eyebrows and got up, muttering, “Oh my god, Mummy, it’s just a show”.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

Book review: Proto – How One Ancient Language Went Global

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (William Collins) by Laura Spinney

In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British philologist and judge, made the remarkable discovery that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek, “bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident”. So was born the knowledge that has now expanded to recognise almost all of the modern European languages as Indo-European – alongside the main northern Indian languages, and some western Asian ones, such as Farsi.

A book by science journalist Laura Spinney now gives us the background on how the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was discovered, with linguists ingeniously managing to trace dozens of languages back to construct a hypothetical source language, estimated to have been spoken from 4,500 to 2,500 years ago. Most of the book is taken up with the question of where the language originated, and how it managed to spread so successfully across the globe.

The search for the region that birthed the language had proved elusive, until Svante Pääbo, in 2010, developed the technique of ancient DNA sequencing, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2022. Originally used to sequence the Neanderthal genome, the work expanded so rapidly, especially in David Reich’s laboratory at Harvard, that in 2015 the renowned British archaeologist Colin Renfrew wrote that “In just five years the study of ancient DNA has transformed our understanding of world prehistory.”

That same year, a paper was published by Reich’s group, imperiously titled “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe”. This, along with another, similar paper, proclaimed the end of the PIE mystery. The steppe is the vast region of grassland that runs for 5,000 miles from central Europe to Manchuria. The origin of PIE (and hence the languages now spoken by almost half the world’s people) was judged to be the Pontic-Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea – land that is now part of southern Russia and Ukraine. The population of the steppe, the Yamnaya, were animal-herding, horse-riding and chariot-driving nomads.

However, as Spinney explores, the mystery hasn’t been quite resolved. An earlier theory had proposed that PIE originated in Anatolia, land that now makes up the majority of Turkey – and it turns out that both might be correct. In 2022, Reich and his group showed that there had been an earlier migration from the mountains of Armenia, around 5000 BC, to both the Black Sea and Anatolia. In this theory, one branch of an archaic root language became the Anatolian languages, and another – via the Yamnaya culture – went on to produce the plethora of Indo-European languages.

Spinney shows us why this debate matters to us today. One pressing reason relates to false ideas around racial superiority. Yamnaya is the greatest part of the genetic heritage of most white Europeans (including in North America); English is the world lingua franca today; and from 1492 Europeans colonised a large part of the rest of the world. For some people, the belief that so many of our languages were birthed from the Yamnaya lent spurious credence to the notion that it was natural for white Europeans to conquer other peoples. The Nazis were invested in this idea, falsely locating the Indo-European source in Germany.

But how did the Yamnaya manage to dominate other cultures and impose their language? They were highly mobile nomads, and may have been physically stronger. Spinney writes, they are thought to have been “10 centimetres taller than the male farmers they encountered”. But were they violent conquerors? In Britain around 4,000 years ago the population was 90 per cent replaced by people with Yamnaya genes. But Spinney reports that, as with the British colonists in North America, who carried lethal smallpox (to which they were immune), the cause of the population change might have been infectious disease.

As a story emerges, what are we going to make of our exceedingly murky heritage? These issues are only hinted at in Proto but it is the best source – as up to date as possible – on the fantastic odyssey of our languages and the migrating peoples that carried them.

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.

What lies beneath

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 06:00:00 GMT

“Let us compare our consciousness to a sheet of water of some depth. Then the distinctly conscious ideas are merely the surface; on the other hand, the mass of the water is the indistinct, the feelings, the after-sensation of perceptions and intuitions and what is experienced in general, mingled with the disposition of our own will that is the kernel of our inner nature.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

For many of us today, it is commonplace to talk about the “unconscious”. We might use it to explain our own behaviour, or that of others, or try to uncover its secrets in therapy. We convince ourselves that a friend who finds a new partner soon after a breakup is “on the rebound” – we know their motivations better than they do, we think. Perhaps we ourselves struggle with relationships, and believe this is due to something that happened in our childhood, rather than that we have not yet met someone who makes us want to commit. Our moods, our hopes, our actions, are ascribed again and again to hidden impulses.

The unconscious is not a new idea. It was of course given huge impetus by the work of Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century, but the waning of his influence has had little effect on what we might call his cultural – we might even say “pop-cultural” – influence. From Freudian slips to the search for secret motivations, his ideas are now embedded in the way we talk and live. But there is no hard evidence for the existence of something called “the unconscious”. Is the idea just a way of removing blame from ourselves, and placing it elsewhere?

A brief history of the 'unconscious'

In the late 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant produced his masterwork, The Critique of Pure Reason. In it, he put forward a theory of mind which, for the most part, claims that all cognition is conceptual – that is, conscious. According to Kant, we are – or can be, if we take the time to reflect – fully self-aware, and can proceed by reason. As a founding text of modern philosophy, Kant’s theory has remained incredibly influential. But in the eyes of many philosophers, he left something crucial out of his picture of the human mind – what his contemporary Friedrich Schelling named “the unconscious”.

We might think the idea is uncontroversial. There are, of course, many things of which our brain is unconscious, even when they are being processed. If we were conscious of every sound around us, or everything within our field of vision, we would be overwhelmed – our brain is constantly filtering these things for us. But this is not what Schelling meant by the unconscious – the above examples are better described as nonconscious. For Schelling, the unconscious was not simply the passive activities of a brain (while thinking about other things), but an active and dynamic component of mind – it influences consciousness.

Arthur Schopenhauer took the idea further. In his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, not only is consciousness not the whole story of mind, it is merely the surface. For Schopenhauer, the active force of the universe was what he termed “Will”. The whole of the phenomenal world – that which we can see, touch, smell, which we can apprehend rationally and so on – is actually the manifestation of a huge irrational and impersonal drive. This is also the condition of each individual. While we believe our thoughts and motivations are explicable through rational thought, we are deluded. Rather: “The intellect remains so much excluded from the real resolutions and secret decisions of its own will that sometimes it can only get to know them, like those of a stranger, by spying out and taking unawares; and it must surprise the will in the act of expressing itself, in order merely to discover its real intentions.”

In fact, Schopenhauer was sceptical that we can ever get to know our secret decisions. We can only get at the representations of the truth of the universe, and the truths of ourselves. In this he was heavily influenced by Indian philosophy.

In works such as the sacred canonical text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, dating from at least 3,000 years ago, Schopenhauer’s theory of the world and the mind finds an early parallel, which he was quick to acknowledge. The phenomenal world is, in the Veda, an illusion, with true reality lying behind it – whether we can pull back the veil remains a matter for debate. Similarly, our human self is, in some key sense, ultimately unknowable to itself.

The three 'Master's of Suspicion'

One of Schopenhauer’s great followers – and, later, great critics – Friedrich Nietzsche, is often credited as Freud’s most immediate precursor. As with so much of Nietzsche, his position regarding the unconscious is difficult to pin down. But it remains fascinating. He wanted to question Kant’s idea that we were in control of our chain of thoughts: that when a person goes from thought A to B to C, that is because A led logically to B, which led logically to C. This, to Nietzsche, is to use a current term, “retrofitting” what is actually occurring – finding logical links where none exist. Rather, he argued that “the events which are actually linked play out beneath our consciousness: the emerging sequence and one-after-the-other of feelings, thoughts, etc., are symptoms of the actual event!” The “actual event” is what has happened beneath our thinking, in our unconscious.

In fact, the later French thinker Paul Ricoeur identified Nietzsche as one of what he famously called “the Masters of Suspicion”, each of whom called into question human confidence in our own self-knowledge. The second for Ricoeur was Karl Marx, who saw our minds as created not from within, but out of the social fabric which surrounds us. The third of the three Masters was Sigmund Freud.

Born in 1856, Freud, while being an avid reader of philosophy, trained in medicine before branching off into the field of psychology, establishing his own practice in 1886. While “psychology” as the study of the workings of the mind has been around since the Greeks, the late 19th century saw a great flowering of the discipline, and the Freudian unconscious grew out of a number of similar ideas that were being debated at the time.

Two immediate predecessors were the French psychologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet. Charcot was making groundbreaking discoveries in understanding and treating hysteria, which included the use of hypnosis, while Janet was among the first thinkers to directly link patients’ present conditions to past traumas – in particular traumas which the sufferer had forgotten, or where they were not themselves conscious of a link.

Janet termed this breaking of the link between the trauma and the later symptoms “dissociation”, and placed responsibility in what he called the “subconscious”. Failing to integrate these traumatic experiences with normal selfhood led, he believed, to neurosis. Like Charcot, he used hypnosis, seeing what he called a “magnetic rapport” between the hypnotist and their patient, which allowed for a cure to be performed. This is close to the Freudian model, with hypnosis replaced by “the talking cure”, and the magic rapport being termed “transference”.

Freud's 'internal censor'

But Freud did not just draw on philosophy and psychology as he moved towards his own version of the unconscious. An acute reader of literature, he credited writers such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky with leading him to theories of unconscious motivation, while of course, his famous – or infamous – concept of the Oedipus Complex is drawn from Greek drama.

There was also his religion. As the French writer Clémence Boulouque analyses in her excellent new book, On the Edge of the Abyss: The Jewish Unconscious Before Freud, the Jewish tradition, both religious and secular, has a strong tradition of engagement with the unconscious – from early works of mysticism and Kabbalism (with their beliefs in an underlying reality generally inaccessible to human understanding) through to the work of Schelling himself, who drew on these traditions. While Freud grew more and more to argue that religion is something to be overcome – in his The Future of an Illusion, religion is the illusion – his work remains peppered with religious symbolism.

For all that, Freud’s version of the unconscious is a more unequivocal one than anything that had preceded it. The unconscious is not, as in Schelling’s understanding, just a place where we store various random parts of our memory and experiences, nor just where we store things we believe we have forgotten.

The unconscious that Freud engages with is one where nothing is random, where nothing psychologically unimportant is stored. It is, specifically, a place formed of our repressed traumas. We have, according to Freud, an “internal censor” that is, in some sense, protecting us from harmful thoughts, by forcing them into the unconscious.

What is crucial here is that, for Freud as for Janet, the unconscious is formed by what happens to us. While Schopenhauer’s version of the unconscious can be criticised for being so impersonal that our individual lives become meaningless (to which criticism Schopenhauer, the great pessimist, might have simply said, “Yup”), for Freud the unconscious is perhaps more personal to us than the selves our conscious thoughts make us believe we are. While some of the behaviours caused by the unconscious of person A might give us clues as to the case of person B, our traumas are deeply individual.

Where, who and what is the 'unconscious'?

Fast forward to the 21st century and, despite criticism of his work, Freud’s ideas on the unconscious have, as we have seen, proved influential on popular beliefs around the workings of the mind, not forgetting the fields of psychotherapy and therapeutic practice. However, the very concept of the unconscious remains a problematic one. Many question whether there is such a thing, and if the idea is even comprehensible.

There is of course the question of location – where is the unconscious exactly? – but this mirrors the question of where consciousness is. Others have raised the question of what it means for Freud (and any psychoanalyst) to “know” about something that is, by its own definition, unknowable.

Further, what sort of game is our internal censor playing that it would hide information from us, and then not only leave clues for us as to its existence (such as, in Freud’s case, slips of the tongue or dream symbols), but also allow us enough access to un-censor the material in some way? And in a way that is good for us – why bother to censor it in the first place? What even is an “internal censor”? Is it part of the mind, too? How? Or we might even ask, “Who?”

This is a version of the homunculus fallacy, where there is a person inside a person inside a person. One thinker to raise it was Jean-Paul Sartre. If “we” are censoring material to keep it away from consciousness, how is that happening? Do we have another consciousness inside us – a little person or homunculus – which knows what is or isn’t acceptable, then makes a decision? But wouldn’t they need another one inside them, like a Russian doll? Finally, how is what is to be censored decided?

A bid to evade responsibility?

Sartre, for whom personal responsibility is paramount, thought the idea of the unconscious was the product of the human desire to evade responsibility. Rather than blaming ourselves for any wrongdoing, we are able to pass on the blame to our unconscious, and then, through psychoanalysis, on to those who have shaped it – our parents, for example.

This is Sartre joining the dots between the gods of the Greeks, the primal Will of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, and the unconscious of Freud – they are all of them, in his belief, mythical beasts which allow us to evade culpability. As the first humans invented gods to hold responsible for the great mysteries, so have we, but placed them inside us.

This is not to say that Sartre dismissed Freud’s work entirely. In fact he attempted to create a psychoanalysis aligned to Freud’s – just without the unconscious. This he termed existentialist psychoanalysis. He too believed we were shaped by external forces, but there was no extra layer of repression and censoring which needed to be accounted for.
While he admitted, with Nietzsche, that our motivations and indeed our consciousness might be opaque, opacity does not mean something inside us is performing an act of mysticism. Chinese mathematics is opaque, but it can be learnt. As a contemporary of Sartre’s, Eric Fromm, put it:

“The term ‘the unconscious’ is actually a mystification … There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: ‘the’ unconscious.”

Sartre’s argument is also one against determinism. Given facts A, B and C, Freud seems to suggest in this account, we will have outcome D. Freud believes he can argue, for instance, that a person behaves in a certain way because of this or that childhood trauma. Determinism was anathema to Sartre – we must, in his philosophy, have the ability to shape our own ends.

So, where does this lead us, when we reflect on the workings of our own minds, and the minds of others? We might like to think, as Kant did, that we are entirely rationalist thinkers, or as Sartre did, that we have absolute responsibility. But many of us still speak of, and believe in, the existence of the unconscious. It’s a belief that predates Freud and will undoubtedly continue in different forms for as long as humans try to pin down the self. Much of our burgeoning therapeutic industry relies on the idea, so it’s easy to forget that it is contested.

As Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” The sheer amount of “life” to which we are all exposed makes consciousness seem a thin tool for apprehending it. Perhaps science is not the place to seek the unconscious. Perhaps, like god, the unconscious may simply be a powerful metaphor – one that helps us understand and deal with our experience – rather than a thing?

This article is from New Humanist's Winter 2025 edition. Subscribe now.