My wife gave me a rude but loving shove in bed this morning.

‘Well,’ she asked, ‘are you going to make me breakfast or not?’ My eyes flickered open unevenly and I groaned in self-pity.

‘Uhhhhhhhhhgggg-uuuuuuhhhhh…’ I responded, with the customary alacrity for which I’m justly celebrated when rising to the challenge of a Saturday morn.

I’m an uxorious sort of chap. And somewhere along the line got into the habit of making her breakfast in bed every single morning. Even after tying one on with one of the lads the previous evening (I stoutly defend that fifth bottle of plonk before I poured my friend into a cab) the moral sense assails me as soon as I realise I’m no longer asleep. (As Jim Dixon relates in Kingley Amis’s masterful Lucky Jim: ‘Consciousness was upon me before I had time to get out of the way.’)

‘Well, Cranswick,’ the old conscience queried me as I lay there dying, ‘are you a man or are you a mouse?’ And so it was that I peeled off the blankets, executed a daring roll off the bed and onto the floor, and within no more than eight minutes had regained the vertical.

Urgent shopping was performed, breakfast materials were acquired, bacon and eggs and asparagus spears and tea and coffee were duly prepared – and the happy wife was in her element.

And I felt happy too – if a spot dusty given prior evening’s merry-making. Fact is, she’s fundamentally a better person than me, and smarter, and earns more money. A highly competent, efficient, and effective lawyer – who brings home the lion’s share of the bacon, even if I cook it for her – she has that irritatingly inveterate quality that adheres to some people (usually women) who insist on giving one-hundred-and-fifty per cent to their work all the time. By contrast, I’m stuffed full of self-satisfaction if I only spend half the workday procrastinating.

Anyhoo – this is somewhat beside the point. What I’m really groping for here (forgive me, the hangover hasn’t entirely abated) is a way into some deep and meaningful themes discussed with aforementioned booze-buddy last night somewhere between draining the 10th and 20th glass of grape.

My drinking-partner is an old-friend with braininess in spades. But for the robust structural integrity of his skull, his brains would be pouring out his ears.

You doubtless know the type. Spends most of his waking hours writing computer code, then relaxes by studying physics and curling up with Karl Popper’s latest.

As with most discourse with pals of this sort, much time is given over to analysing the intellectual vacuity and moral iniquity of leftists. And I don’t mean good-old leftists of the traditional sort: labourists and social democrats who still go in for things like free speech and open-minded discussion. I mean leftists of my generation – those to whom clings the authentic stench of millennial mindlessness.

My pal happens to sport a not inconsiderable measure of indigenous heritage. He also has a fair whack of European heritage. His background was rather more hard-up than mine and involved tests of mettle that your humble servant – whose childhood was spent ensconced in the bosom of one of the richest suburbs in one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in human history – never had the benefit of being subjected to.

A devotee of Karl Popper, Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and David Deutsch – he is understandably peeved (as am I, needless to say) by the vulgar hooligan intellectual atmosphere that permeates much ‘thinking’ amongst our generational contemporaries.

As I said earlier, he is a brainy cove, and so hasn’t much time for the dim-witted bien pensant popular notions now circulating which insist that race maketh the man.

During the course of our bibulous evening conversation, he made a striking – and strikingly obvious, upon reflection – comment that cut through, like a hot knife through butter, much of the nonsense with which we now, regrettably, contend.

Given my state of high insobriety at the time, I won’t here attempt to render his formulation verbatim. But it went something like this: ‘What every human shares is a faculty for reason. Ideas are communicable; skin pigmentation is not.’

Civilisation, he continued, is the stock of ideas tried and tested by experience and experiment. The idea is to use those ideas that are less wrong – and more useful – than others. The post-modernist (or post-structuralist, or whatever) fancy that the provenance of an idea can be used to discredit it is sinister piffle – and the attempt to discredit an idea because it first materialised in the brain of a white rather than a brown person, or a brown person rather than a white person, is – well – racist.

Anti-intellectual, rubbishy racism.

I should hasten to add that my pal has been very involved, in various capacities, in programs, cultural engagements, and youth-outreach programs the aim of which has been to celebrate and preserve the rich and varied cultures that antedated European takeover of our continent.

But he registered annoyance at his recollection of a time when – at some such or other conference of indigenous folk – a demonstration was afforded attendees of how to start a fire by rubbing sticks together. ‘It was pathetic,’ he said. ‘Everyone there knew this was a highly ineffective means of starting a fire. And the fact that this was being celebrated as some essential part of indigenous culture was stupid and offensive.’

I agreed, of course, as who could not?

Preserving in amber some antiquated technological practice – like some fastidious Victorian era anthropologist collecting historical curios of long-vanished peoples – and insisting that this is somehow intrinsic to a contemporary cultural group’s identity is redolent of an imbecility not to be credited. It is also deeply and repulsively reactionary.

I better quit all this before I test the reader’s patience with further arguments and illustrations of the obvious. But part of the duty of the honest scribbler and polemicist is to continually return public attention to that which is true and obvious and obviously true.

And included amongst such eternal verities are the facts that some ideas are better than others, good ideas don’t give a damn about the skin tone of those expressing or receiving them – and it’s jolly good fun to drink far too much on a Friday night.