The tyranny of non-fiction and current affairs

Fred Skulthorp has an interesting and entertaining Critic piece on the battle of ideas.


Against ideas

We have too many of them and they are not doing any good


Last Saturday afternoon, mid-way through the “Battle of Ideas” event in Westminster, I realised I was incredibly bored. Perhaps this was my own failing. This was after all an array of interesting people speaking about interesting things, from The Critic’s own Lola Salem on classical music to Andrew Orlowski on AI, and Tomiwa Owolade on the importation of American racial politics. Yet sitting through the various panels, on everything from Mizzy’s Tik-Tok antics to the fraying of the social contract, I couldn’t help but think I had heard it all before.

I know I’m not the only one who felt that way. One of the speakers Thomas Prosser has already written a polite and thoughtful questioning of the extent to which ideas did actually clash. I would go further. Substitute for “battle” the word “skirmish”, or even “circle jerk” — given that there was an orgiastic tendency for agreement — and you have a better event descriptor.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder that there are too many useless ideas floating around the public arena. It is also a reminder that the idea that we have ideas may itself be a useless idea.


Reel in the ideas. Stop talking about them. They are everywhere now. Fiction, having died, has been replaced by the tyranny of non-fiction and current affairs. We have festivals, podcasts, endless books with titles starting with How, Why, When.

Underpinning this obsession, especially in an atomised society and a dying culture, is the entertainment value, the thrill, the purpose, of agreeing and disagreeing, of debating and debunking, and discussing and predicting from a thousand different angles. No one ever really changes their mind about anything. If they do, it’s usually because something terrible happens to them in the real world beyond that stagnant realm of ideas.

But sometimes not even this is enough. This week the Covid Inquiry saw Dominic Cummings once again cast as the pantomime villain. For all the sound and fury about swearing and Cummings being rude to people on Whatsapp, he had a point well worth addressing. Faced with a crisis, the government didn’t seem to work very well. In fact many of our institutions are the same. They don’t seem able to do the basics — usually because they have come to have ideas above their station. But who wants to discuss that? What a boring idea.