Aurelien – The Long And The Short Of It…Or, in defence of nuance

Like everyone who writes online, I do so because I hope to be read. More than that, I hope that people who read what I write will reap some benefit, or even some entertainment, from it, or at least be engaged and stimulated to think. I don’t write to make people angry (there’s enough of that already) and I don’t write to make people love or hate me (there’s a surprising amount of that, too) But I was interested when I started to see whether it was possible to write relatively long essays on difficult subjects and have people read and engage with them. Somewhat to my surprise and greatly to my pleasure, the answer seems to be yes, measured by the steadily increasing number of subscribers over the three years that this series of essays has been running. I’m starting this week’s essay in this fashion to stress how gratifying it is to see here, as in a number of other places, some evidence of a willingness to invest a little time and thought in reading something more than a paragraph long.

Why? Because it’s become a received opinion that nobody reads books any more, that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, that Internet articles are increasingly brief, and soon everything will be reduced to soundbites. There’s quite a lot of anecdotal evidence for this: I can’t remember the last time I saw someone reading a book on a train or on a plane, for example, though it’s not uncommon to see entire families travelling together or in restaurants, each intent on scrolling on their own smartphone, and not exchanging a word. Allegations that young people are now incapable of sustained attention to texts are largely true in my personal experience: even students at elite universities have seldom actually read any books, and their knowledge is largely gained at second- and third-hand, from summaries, and increasingly from LLMs. All of which is depressing in that it suggests that we are moving towards a post-literate culture, and reinforces the worries I have expressed recently about the declining ability to see arguments in all their complexity, and the transformation of political positions into football chants.

And yet, there are signs that the worm is turning, or is at least having second thoughts, and that those who foresaw the end of anything that took more than thirty seconds to consume were wrong, as they usually are, in just assuming that short-term trends would continue forever. The estimable Ted Goia, whose site on popular culture should be required reading, has recently been digging into the figures, and has found that audiences actually like longer forms, that sites that publish long-form essays are doing well, and that even on YouTube, people are increasingly prepared to watch videos of 20 minutes or more. The short-term dopamine hit of a two-minute video disappears instantly, whereas an essay that takes twenty minutes to read might give you material for reflection for some time, and encourage you to engage with the argument in the comments. My humble experience is that this is often so: I have remarkably little subscriber churn, and the sum total of the comments on some of my essays exceeds the length of the essay itself.

Now of course the length of time it takes to consume an intellectual production doesn’t say anything about its value. A full performance of Hamlet takes about twice as long as one of Macbeth, but one play isn’t twice as good as the other. A symphony by Mahler may take an interminable couple of hours, but it isn’t four times better than a symphony by Mozart. War and Peace may be ten times as long as the latest prize-winning best-seller, but it isn’t necessarily ten times as great (though on reflection it probably is.) Many of these differences have to do with the survival of variant texts, the circumstances of composition and the circumstances of diffusion (nineteenth-century novels were frequently published in serial form, for example, and authors were paid by the instalment.)

But what length does, if you can avoid unnecessary complexity, is to permit the development of nuance: the longer a production of any sort is, the more space there is available for development and subtlety. A Mozart symphony may ultimately be based on dance forms, but a fifteen-minute movement provides space for development that a three-minute dance doesn’t. However, the arguments about non-fiction writing are rather different, so let’s talk about them separately, and leave the cultural part to one side.

It’s helpful first to distinguish between the question of complexity and that of uncertainty. A lot of the complexity of science, for example, is in the addition of new levels of detail and subtlety, new discoveries of equivocal cases, and controversies about the precise detail of causes and effects. But these tend to be under an umbrella of knowledge and consensus which applies at least down to a certain level. In history, politics and current affairs, by contrast, there may be disagreement over even the most basic facts, and almost no point of consensus. If we take the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example, about all that historians are agreed on is that it was signed, and it said the following. There are furious controversies over whose idea it was, the comparative involvement of Hitler and Stalin, the motives of each leader, how they hoped it would work out, and so forth. All that something the length of an encyclopaedia article can do, is to indicate what the controversies are.

A worked example from the last few weeks may make this distinction clearer. The US has claimed that it attacked Iranian nuclear sites with MOP bombs and destroyed them. Within limits, the characteristics of these bombs are known, and their effects can be calculated according to established rules. There are specialists who can tell you what happens when a bomb like that impacts on different types of surfaces in different scenarios, with the associated equations, and they can go into as much detail as you like, differing marginally perhaps in some cases. By contrast, there is no consensus over even whether the attack actually took place, or whether the whole thing was an invention staged for political purposes and the attack was actually carried out with other weapons. Commentators disagree on even the most basic facts, notwithstanding the confidence with which they each claim to know them. There are dozens of factors—political, strategic, military, technical—which have to be weighed against each other, and no way, as things stand, of arriving at a consensus answer. The true “facts” indeed, may never be known, especially the nature and extent of any collusion between the different states. Thus the difference between complexity and uncertainty.

Most issues in politics and strategy therefore involve uncertainty, not just complexity, and thus require nuance in their treatment, making any simplification problematic. Research into the detail of such problems reveals not just extra complexity (though it does that) but often greater and greater levels of uncertainty. Now of course these two concepts are not entirely distinct: sometimes just understanding the degree of complexity that exists can itself be salutary, and demand a nuanced understanding. Years ago, I had an ethnic map of the Former Yugoslavia on my office wall. If you are familiar with such things (here’s an example) you know that they resemble an explosion in a paint factory. Visitors to my office would stand and gawp for a while if I was on the ‘phone. “My God,” they would ask, “is it that complicated?” To which someone would inevitably reply, “oh, that’s the simplified version.” Complexity of that sort can impose the requirement for nuance, but of course nuance isn’t something that then results automatically, as we’ll see.

There’s a parallel scenario about complexity I’ve sometimes come across. Let’s say you’re a journalist or a researcher visiting a country in multi-faceted conflict. Conscientiously, you do the rounds of experts before you go. The Foreign Ministry laments how difficult it is to explain to the political leadership the full complexity of the situation in the country, and how many unexpected nuances there are. When you arrive, you call on the Embassy, and they wearily explain just how difficult it is trying to make the capital understand how complicated things really are. You talk to anthropologists, resident journalists and conflict experts, who tell you that Embassies never get out on the ground, and know nothing of how complex things are away from the capital. On your last day, you bump into someone from the Embassy, maybe the “First Secretary (Political)”, who you strongly suspect works for an intelligence agency. Over lunch, protesting that he’s not criticising his colleagues, he explains how the real issues in the country have to do with business relations within and between elite factions in and out of government. On the plane home you wonder disconsolately how you are going to make sense of it all. Certainly, not by piling explanations up on top of each other.

This kind of thing—and it happens all the time—illustrates the difference between the recognition of nuance as a pre-requisite for understanding, and the simple piling up of facts, or at least of assertions, which often contradict each other, but which are hoped somehow collectively to provide the answer. Ironically, whilst nuance encourages a more sophisticated analysis, complexity doesn’t necessarily do so, and may indeed provoke oversimplification in response. Partly, this is because of the natural human reaction to excessive complexity, which is to reject it, and to look for simple patterns or emblematic incidents instead, or even known factors, which can explain everything. The development of the conflict in Syria since 2011 is a good example of this. Sunni officers and their units, some ultimately supported by Turkey and some by Saudi Arabia, provided the initial opposition to Assad, but were rapidly infiltrated and overtaken by radical populist groups of international fighters with ever-changing names and loyalties who fought the regime, the Kurds (where did they come from?) and sometimes each other. The fact that only specialists could hope to keep track of all these changes, and disagreed even among themselves, led journalists and pundits in search of simple explanations to desperate expedients such as calling the Islamists “Al Qaida in Syria,” ignoring the bitter split that took place in Iraq after the US invasion between the battered remnants of the Leninist vanguard movement of AQ, and the radical populist Islamist groups federated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, until he was killed by the US in 2006, still active under various names, and which were the ancestors of today’s Hayat Tahir Al-Sham. (Yes, I know that I’ve left out a lot of nuances.)

There’s also the problem that complexity and nuance are seldom simply linear and cumulative. A lot of complexity can arise from parallel types of explanation from competing sources, each claiming to be “true.” There are very few important issues in the world where governments, or even non-government movements, are entirely united, or entirely under the control of a single person. The larger the organisation, the easier it is to get lost. Thus, I’ve read several accounts by pundits of how “their sources” in Washington have told them this or that about the conflict with Iran. And what they say is probably sincerely meant, and their contacts probably did tell them these things. But if you are familiar with how Washington operates, you realise that there are as many points of view in Washington as there are power-players, and that every government organisation leaks, both officially and unofficially, all the time, for different reasons. Another set of “sources” in another organisation might well have said something completely different, each genuinely believing what they said. Often, each member of the groups of sources is, in fact, repeating the same message that they got separately from the same person: the problem well known to intelligence agencies as “false collateral.” And that’s without considering other governments, and other actors outside government: indeed, one of the main reasons for the lack of nuance in the writings of American pundits and journalists is that there are just so many competing sources available in Washington that the rest of the world hardly gets a look-in.

Similarly, one of the reasons for the obsession with both “bringing down Putin” over Ukraine, and “regime change” in Iran, is the simplistic belief that political power in both countries is concentrated in very few hands, that the majority of the country do not support that power, and that it is unnecessary to seek further details or consider nuances. Indeed, the desire to do so is itself seen as rather subversive, and “making excuses” for things about those countries that your interlocutors don’t like. The fact that the West always gets lost in detail and is frequently out of its depth in nuance, and as a result stumbles from shambles to disaster doesn’t really register. Indeed, the West habitually takes refuge in simplistic and nuance-free explanations of its own defeat.

And this is the main point I want to emphasise. It’s not that we should plunge thoughtlessly down to any level of complexity, nor try to identify and take account of every last potential nuance. It’s not that we should consult every possible source at every level of detail. All that would be impossible, and it would be counter-productive anyway, and lead to intellectual indigestion. What is needed rather, is a type of humility that accepts that things are often more complex than they may appear, and recognises that nuances may exist in even the apparently simplest political situation. The problem is that for some the acceptance of nuance and complexity is a threat, since it implies that there are things we don’t know, and perhaps should find out, before we make decisions.

But of course the problem goes well beyond governments: it affects all of us. We prefer simple explanations wherever possible, but more than that, we like explanations to be unitary and un-nuanced. We like good guys and bad guys, we like to know who represents the future and who the past, we want to be able to sympathise with some and denigrate others. In turn, this is because most of our important judgements are emotional. They are what Daniel Khaneman famously called the product of “System 1” thinking, which is rapid and instinctive, and suited to the need to make immediate, often life-saving, judgements. By contrast, “System 2” thinking is rational and coherent, and better suited to long-term decisions. Yet whilst the latter is obviously better suited to important and longer-term issues, including those of politics, the first tends to predominate in practice. As a result, not just our abstract and theoretical views about politics, but also our practical loyalties and dislikes, tend to be instant and emotional. Once we have made our choice of sides, it becomes egoistically important to us, and we become emotionally invested in its successes and failures, and a criticism of some country, faction or political figure is therefore implicitly a criticism of us. To the extent that we are prepared to countenance rational discussion at all, it is to find a logical-seeming support for judgements we have already reached emotionally. (Indeed, some psychologists have suggested that the main function of the conscious mind, and even the left hemisphere of the brain, is to rationalise to ourselves decisions already reached unconsciously.)

Thus, if I suggest that there is a nuance or a level of complexity in a controversial subject in which you are emotionally invested, you will naturally see that suggestion as an attack on you. When I was younger I didn’t realise this, and I couldn’t understand why patiently explaining to people that the Sun actually rose in the East could lead to such outbursts of temper. It should also be conceded, though, that people who are predominantly left-brained, as I tend to be, can not just infuriate others, but also drown them in complexities and nuances to the point where the objective is forgotten completely. That objective, of course, should be to get what Iain McGilchrist calls “the Master and his Emissary” working creatively together, accepting that it’s much more difficult in practice than in theory. But the key, I think, is to go just far enough into nuance and complexity and no further, to make judgements and decisions as robust as they can be, without drowning them in unmanageable detail. Well, it’s worth trying, anyway.

Thus, our methodology, our algorithm if you like, for contemplating the world and deciding what to think, is poorly suited to the nature of the world itself. We like clear and distinct categories, right and wrong, good and evil and sympathetic and unsympathetic. But the world is full of nuance and complexity, and we resist acknowledging that, because it destabilises us. Now of course if that were all this essay was trying to say, there would be little point in me writing it, since most readers after a little thought, would agree, and after a little more thought would ask “so what?” So the rest of this essay is devoted to the so what.

The radical truncation of the time to think and react that the Internet has brought about over the last decade or so has made these problems substantially worse. Perhaps fifty years ago, a story might appear in a morning newspaper that required a reaction. So during the day something would be assembled, agreed by Ministers if necessary, and passed to the Press Office or equivalent, to be used in the evening news or in the next morning’s newspapers. Already by the 1990s we were experiencing what was then called the “CNN effect,” where continuous news coverage meant that stories (or “stories”) could break at any moment, often direct from the ground, without context or nuance, and that random pundits would be dragged in to the TV studios to fill up time with random and generally uninformed comments on them. These days, of course, entire news cycles can go past in the course of an hour, without any attempt at context or nuance on the part of those contributing. A tweet with accompanying atrocity video can make the rounds of the Internet in minutes, leading to instant demands that those allegedly responsible should be indicted by the International Criminal Court, only to be rapidly overtaken by denials and accusations of AI trickery, and you might miss all of that because you were busy doing your shopping, and had not looked at your phone.

Politically, this strengthens the unscrupulous, those with rigid and unchanging views, who always know what to think, and those who distrust nuance and are uninterested in complexity. Conversely, it weakens those who actually know what they are talking about and those who understand that most situations are complex, and thus require nuance. It means that sensible decision-taking and even just understanding are more difficult than ever, and leads to the complaint which I’ve heard from many intelligent, educated people in recent years: “I just don’t know what to think!”

Now, I have already suggested that neither nuance nor complexity, is automatically good, and certainly not in unlimited amounts, and so in fairness I should concede that there are circumstances where their cumulative effect is clearly negative. Decisions have to be taken, after all, and judgements have to be made in our private lives as well as by institutions. We can’t procrastinate forever on the basis that “it’s complicated.” The way in which we do this pragmatically is to base our decisions on the best information available at the end of a reasonable time, which is, in practice, what we all do a lot of the time in daily life. I sometimes explain this to students by the analogy of choosing a hotel to stay at in a city you don’t know. You can look at guides and review sites of greater or lesser authority, you can do some simple but basic research on the city and the area, you can ask others, you can dig into the details of reviews and ratings up to a certain extent, but in fact you rapidly approach the point of diminishing returns, where further detail just leaves you more confused. At some stage you have to say, Enough, and make on decision on the best available information, and if it turns out that the local authority started disruptive roadworks in front of the hotel the day before, well, that happens.

This is a metaphor, if you like, for what governments do, where decisions have to be taken all the time about complex and nuanced issues, on the basis of very incomplete information. There’s an inbuilt tension in all government systems between the political leadership, which wants Just The Facts, and the expert community, whose favourite opening line is, “it’s complicated,” which it usually is. We can see this very well in the currently-fashionable issue of the Iranian nuclear programme, where pundits have been making fools of themselves for the last few months, because in general they are hopelessly epistemologically confused. These questions are interesting and could easily be expanded to a complete essay (which I could do if there’s enough interest) but for the moment let’s just stick with two points.

The first is that intelligence agencies (and organisations like the IAEA and for that matter various technical NGOs) give very precise answers to very precise questions, and these answers are generally highly nuanced and caveated. The questions, “is Iran making a bomb?” “does Iran have the technical capability to make a bomb,?” “does Iran have a nuclear weapons programme?” “has the Iranian government decided to build a nuclear bomb?” and “does Iran have the capability to strike other countries with nuclear weapons?” are all quite different, involve different sets of information and judgements, and will result in answers which are nuanced and caveated in different ways. The paradoxical result is that most of the statements by governments, pundits and independent experts over the last couple of months are actually consistent with each other (or at least not mutually contradictory), because in practice they refer to different things.

This applies especially to judgements incorporating intelligence information, which is by nature fragmentary and inconclusive, and it’s not surprising that such judgements are nuanced and caveated, and often expressed in guarded terms. Thus, for example, words like “assess,” “believe” and “estimate” are used in preference to anything more definite. Often, the information just isn’t available to make definite judgements, and can’t be, no matter how much you review it. So agencies tend to produce judgements which resemble haikus, or the dialogue in a play by Samuel Beckett:

There is no firm evidence

To indicate that Iran is currently building a nuclear weapon.

But it would be unwise

To rule out the possibility entirely.

Which amounts in practice to “we are not sure.” But the political system is not interested in that: it wants answers, and will trivialise and even misrepresent assessments if it can.

The second is that there is no special magic about “intelligence” information. All that distinguishes it from gossip, or what you read in the newspaper, is that it has been obtained by underhand means. To call something “intelligence” says nothing about its validity or its usefulness: those are quite separate issues. It just indicates that the information was, basically, stolen. Thus intelligence information, more than any other kind, has to be carefully assessed and presented in an appropriately nuanced form. A comparative example may make this clearer. The Foreign Ministry in Tehran may announce that a team will be meeting a US team in Qatar. Alternatively, Iranian newspapers may carry well-sourced stories with the same information. Or the Iranian Ambassador to Berlin may tell your Ambassador at a cocktail party. A source in the Foreign Ministry may tell your Embassy in confidence. A source in the President’s office may tell a trusted interlocutor in the strictest confidence. A telegram from Qatar to its Embassy in Washington which you intercept may strongly suggest this will happen. The information content of all of these, whilst not identical, is basically consistent, but the means of acquisition and the sensitivity of those means are very different.

The urge to find certainty is inherent in human beings and not necessarily a bad thing. You can sympathise (to a degree) with political leaders obliged to make decisions without enough information. There are lots of cases where the pursuit of overmuch nuance can be disabling, and institutions that start to fetishise it can suffer as a result. An unusual but important example here was the Christian Church. Until very recently, doctrine and its correct observance were the Church’s central preoccupations, because believing the wrong thing could lead to damnation, and propounding erroneous doctrine could damn others: thus the obsession with heresy. People thought in this way for a very long period of time.

The ‘sixties saw the beginning of a radical change, with Churches increasingly abandoning fixed doctrines, and many Church leaders of different dominations progressively moving to a kind of lukewarm agnostic humanism. Churches started to give up their role as purveyors of The Truth, and encouraged their adherents in true ‘sixties ego-driven fashion to “think for themselves.” Indeed, if you were to ask an Anglican priest in recent decades “did God actually create the heavens and the earth?” you’d probably get a handwaving answer along the lines of “well, that’s a very difficult question and all of us have to decide for ourselves. Of course, scientists say …” Naturally enough, churches around the world emptied. The only thing that matters with religion, after all, is whether it is true. If it’s true, then its precepts have to be accepted and acted upon, irrespective of the irritation that might cause to our egos. If it’s not true, then religion loses any special legitimacy, and becomes just another set of abstract ethical ideas, which is what has happened in most of the world. Indeed, interfaith dialogues are by definition an acceptance that the leaders concerned don’t believe that their doctrines are actually true, or there would be nothing to talk about.

There are exceptions of course, even in the western world. Sometimes (as in parts of rural France) the Church is not really separable from the local community, and churchgoing is quite common. But more widely, traditionalist Catholicism, often of pre-Vatican 2 vintage, has retained its force, as has evangelical Christianity. (The latter has actually gained ground around the world in recent decades, and in surprising places such as Korea.) Although part of the attraction of such systems is that they have retained the magical and dramatic aspects that religion used to display, the principal reason is surely that they are not afraid to tell worshippers The Truth and ask them to believe it. The reluctance of mainstream Christian churches to do this any more simply encourages the disappointed to seek The Truth elsewhere, in New Age gobbledegook or in conspiracy theories. As GK Chesterton famously remarked, those who stop believing in God do not believe in nothing, they believe in anything. This is reasonable enough, since few of us actively enjoy living in a meaningless universe.

George Orwell commented on how, in the 1930s, British intellectuals overwhelmingly fled into either the Catholic Church or the Communist Party. In spite of their bitter differences, the two were remarkably alike, not least in the existence of a rigid and un-nuanced doctrine, and the consequent persecution of heresy wherever it was to be found. We tend to forget, indeed, how rigid and uncompromising was the international Communist movement until the 1970s, especially under Stalin who had a personal power and authority that medieval Popes would have envied. Stalin’s judgement was final, he was always right, and if necessary history had to be rewritten to make awkward incidents such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact appear in a better light. Yet Stalin and his successors would have been much less powerful without the existence of ultra-orthodox leaders of national Communist Parties, such as Maurice Thorez in France, and the unqualified support of intellectuals around the world.

Such people naturally found themselves at a loss after 1990, and understandably retreated into other sets of nuance-free certainties. Notoriously, neoconservatives and extreme market liberals in various countries were often former Marxists. In rather similar fashion, lapsed Marxists (and for that matter lapsed Catholics) were influential in formulating Social Justice ideology, taking over the refusal of nuance and the intolerance of dissent, and mixing it with the traditional vicious ideological infighting that characterised those belief systems. Yet unlike the rigidity of Christian thought (based on revelation) and of Marxist thought (based on drawing the correct interpretations from history) these new ideologies were held up by nothing much except a priori assertions, and so often left their adherents feeling vulnerable and unsatisfied.

Which helps to explain, for example, the curious tolerance of some on the Left for Islamic fundamentalism, in spite of the fact that it despises every last historical value of the Left itself. In France, a surprising number of French intellectuals greeted the Islamist takeover in Iran in 1979 as a popular uprising. (Mind you, some also found the Khmer Rouge congenial). More recently what has become known as “Islamo-Leftism” has seen the Left making common cause with Islamist political movements, both publicly (under the guise of fighting “Islamophobia”) and in electoral pacts. This has become the official ideology of La France Insoumise, with which it hopes to make major electoral breakthroughs in the next few years. It’s clear that many French intellectuals have a curious fascination with the stark, rigid, unwavering ideological purity of Political Islam, and its intolerance for dissent, and tolerance for extreme violence. (Michel Houllebecqu’s 2015 novel Soumssion, recounting an electoral alliance between the Left and Muslim parties to defeat Le Pen, and leading to a Muslim President, perhaps seems less a far-out satire now than it did then. Not coincidentally, the novels’s central character is an unsatisfied mid-level intellectual, who finishes by converting to Islam himself.)

But it’s not just intellectuals. A whole generation of people brought up in the 70s and 80s who had learned Marxist slogans without ever engaging with the actual theory drifted around looking for substitutes, alighting on everything from hard-line punitive ecology to various social justice ideologies, all of which provided them with easily-assimilable slogans rather than actual ideas, and an implacably rigid and nuance-free belief system that explained everything and tolerated no dissent. Some followed the logical progression into conspiracy theories, where every nuance and reservation could be waved away with assertions of even deeper and more sinister plots than had previously been realised. Their pupils and their children, two generations removed from having anything that could be described as coherent intellectual training, are now coming into positions of influence and power. I find that worrying.

The combination of ever shorter-form treatments of facts and ideas, the disinclination to actually engage with anything substantial and difficult whether written or spoken, the fact that most people identify their ideas with their ego, and see disagreement as a form of aggression, and the consequent fear of nuance and even debate, are collectively a bad omen for the future of our political system. I see the recent nonsense in universities about the “dangers” of free speech essentially as a kind of ego defence mechanism, to avoid having to confront ideas, and even facts, that destabilise us, and make us realise that our ideas are, in the end, not based on anything very much.

Which is why, perhaps, public discourse now seems to be at a lower level than ever. The barriers to entry, after all, have never been lower: it takes a few seconds to intervene in some debate, even if just to try to show how clever you are, or how much you hate one side or the other. The trend, therefore, is towards ever-simpler, ever-shorter, ever more evanescent interventions designed to create an immediate impression and gather “likes,” after which they can be forgotten. Even politicians, whose public interventions once used to be carefully prepared, now seem quite happy to dump the transient contents of their brains onto the Internet, without any thought for the longer-term consequences.

This implies, of course, that there is no scope for nuance, and no real space for discussion. Indeed, much of what passes for “debate” these days is no more than an escalating exchange of insults. In turn, because our political views are based more than ever on gut reactions and herd instinct, we are not interested in qualifications, subtleties or any level of complexity at all, any more than a Manchester United fan is prepared to concede to a fan of Real Madrid that this or that player made mistakes or was bought at too higher price. The result is that on controversial issues—Ukraine, for example, or Iran or Gaza—there are simply competing sets of structured orthodoxies, which have to be accepted and regurgitated in their entirety, like slogans, and which cannot brook any interrogation. It’s all or nothing, because actually you know nothing much about the “all,” and you are afraid that if you concede anything you will have nothing. Thus, to introduce a qualification along the lines of “well, actually I think the media have greatly exaggerated Russian casualties,” or “actually it seems to me that at least some of the Ukrainians are fighting out of sincere patriotism” is to invite a scared, vituperative response by people who feel destabilised and thus frightened by comments they aren’t capable of rationally responding to.

In the end, as I have suggested, the long form, and the patience and application it demands, is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for recovering a degree of calm and rationality in political discourse. This doesn’t mean, of course, that there is no room for other forms: even Twitter can be useful in certain contexts. But perhaps the ever-more frantic, ever-more rigid nature of political “debate” has gone as far as it can without actually imploding, and there are signs that some people, at least, understand that the world is complex and nuanced, and that anything worth saying about it requires enough space to say it in. We can only hope. And that’s the end of another long-form essay.