Russia is ramping up preparations for a ‘large-scale’ war with Nato. That’s the verdict of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, which reports several indications that Moscow is preparing for war with Nato ‘not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline’ than many Western analysts believed. Is the West ready for war? Its self-doubt about what it stands for makes it seem worryingly unlikely.

Echoing the words of General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British armed forces, that to fight in any such war the UK would need a ‘citizen army’, Latvian Foreign Minister Krisjanis Karins has suggested Britain introduce conscription to prepare for any threat. Meanwhile a leader in the Economist recommends a further, very different step, arguing the West needs ‘to deploy one of its most powerful weapons: universal liberal values. It was these, as well as Star Wars and dollars, that helped bring down the Soviet regime by exposing the inhumanity of its totalitarian system.’

Fear of ‘cultural appropriation’ or causing a career-ending controversy has an effect on the craft which cannot be calculated

No one can seriously contemplate the 87.97 per cent Putin received in his March ‘elections’, nor the February murder of Navalny, nor the recently filmed FSB torture – uploaded to Telegram – of those accused of last weekend’s Krokus massacre (including, obscenely, one of the defendants being made to eat his own severed ear) and claim that a moral equivalence exists between Russia and the West. But, equally, can anyone confidently identify what these Western ‘universal liberal values’ consist of any more? If soft power, as well as hard power, can be crucial in winning conflicts, there is perhaps a case for the West in 2024 taking a sober look at itself and putting its own decaying house in order.

I first visited Russia as a travelling literature lecturer in 1999, at a time when it was very clear what Western values – or at least British ones – meant. I took for granted the quality of our university system: its rigour, strictness with the grading system, the way it encouraged students to think for themselves and come to each work they read with a sceptical ‘Yes, but…’. Meanwhile in Belarus and Russia (however much worse it’s got since) the system was a mess. A visiting American professor was told he had to pass even the laziest students if they’d paid for the course and there was constant grousing among undergraduates about the need to parrot their teacher’s views. At one university I was told all you needed to get a PhD was ‘a photocopier, a pair of scissors, and some decent glue’.

Yet there was a hunger for Western culture. As a teacher I was proud, I realised, of so much of ours: the National Gallery lunchtime concerts during the Blitz, Henry Moore and his bomb-shelter drawings, Orwell’s bloody-minded willingness to speak his mind and upset all sides at once. Writers like Evelyn Waugh or John Osborne (and latterly Martin Amis) proved you didn’t have to be anything as dull as ‘likable’ to be a great writer, that you could be outrageous and even loathsome and yet be all the more readable for it.

Then there was British comedy, a more effective ambassador for our country than any diplomat. Mentioning British comedians was often the start to conversation and, in some cases, even long-term friendship. Students loved Monty Python (seeing them as a kind of antidote to political power) and enthused, when I played the videos, over The Day Today, marvelling at the merciless precision of the satire. UK comedy, I felt, was invincible, one of the things that Brits – with their thumbed nose at authority and inbred sense of the absurd – would never allow to come under attack.

Fast forward 25 years, and it’s clear we’re living in a world completely changed. Universities have suffered from grade inflation, the number of firsts more than doubling in a decade. There have been scandals about cash-strapped universities admitting high-paying overseas students with lower grades. Nearer to home, it seems, there is an unstated ‘quota’ scheme for admissions more concerned with social engineering than meritocracy. It’s an environment in which one academic (writing anonymously, for obvious reasons) can write that ‘universities today are turning away from merit, skill, and thinking,’ and suggest to an imaginary, rejected applicant from a private school that only by including the words ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ or ‘violence’ in his application could he have helped his suit. Tibor Fischer, novelist and creative writing teacher, claims in an interview that: ‘I only know about the humanities but I can tell you, categorically, from what I’ve experienced, that there are students getting MAs now who wouldn’t have passed an English A-level in the 1970s.’

Things don’t look rosy for comedy either. The BBC output more than halved between 2010-2020 – laughter perhaps inappropriate to the sullen, score-settling nature of the age. Performers from Maureen Lipman to Dawn French and Shappi Korsandi complain about cancel culture’s chilling effect on the craft. Comedy writer Graham Linehan, defending women’s spaces from trans activists, was booted off Twitter. He had his musical of Father Ted shelved by old colleagues and, at the Edinburgh Festival last year, was kicked out of his venue with the familiar explanation that Linehan’s views did ‘not align with our values’.

Things don’t look rosy for comedy

A kind of fundamentalism seems to have swept through society. We have the unappetising sight of comedians like David Walliams and Matt Lucas apologising for jokes made decades ago at the height of their success. In the face of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, native virtues like irony, sarcasm and wit seem to have had their day.

Then there’s literature. In 2016, Penguin Books declared what amounts to diversity quotas for future publication and said they’d no longer require most in-house staff to hold a degree. When the novelist Lionel Shriver pointed this out as mission creep, she was roundly denounced by her profession and accused of ‘mocking diversity goals’. The novelist Sebastian Faulks has been called out for daring to describe the physical appearance of his female characters, and capitulated, declaring he won’t do it again. At publishing houses, the sensitivity reader reigns supreme, resulting in absurdities like the writer Anthony Horowitz, writing about Native Americans, being told to take out the word ‘scalpel’ as it sounds too much like ‘scalp’.

In 2021, the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy was forced to rewrite her already published (and celebrated) memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me and hounded almost to the point of suicide for using phrases like ‘almond eyes’ to describe the looks of one pupil or speaking admiringly of another’s ‘fine Ashkenazi nose’ (for which she was linked surreally, by one hostile fellow-writer on Twitter, to Nazi eugenicists). The President of the Society of Authors, Philip Pullman, stepped in to defend her, but was quickly forced to recant and resigned from his role soon afterwards. When the novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times at a lecture in New York, the Royal Society of Literature refused to take a public stand and its president, Bernardine Evaristo, said the organisation ‘cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues’ and ‘must remain impartial’.

Fear of ‘cultural appropriation’ or causing a career-ending controversy has an effect on the craft which cannot be calculated. As Shriver points out: ‘We don’t know how much people in my profession are not writing things. Because there’s no record of what you don’t do… of what you think but don’t allow yourself to say.’

But that, increasingly, is the tone of the times: the comment unmade, the insight stifled, the strangled joke between friends. In the workplace, we’re told that banter and office romances are now frowned upon – meaning, one takes it, threatening to your career. One academic described a student being reported in 2020 for remarks overheard through a bedroom wall and having their accommodation rights taken away. In this publication, an Estonian émigré wrote a disturbing wake-up piece about the UK increasingly resembling the Soviet society she grew up in and left behind.

So it goes on, salami slice by salami slice, with doublethink becoming a default setting. We hear pleas for ‘equality’ from groups who clearly seek hegemony, and calls for ‘tolerance’ by those who actually want submission. At the same time, we’ve grown used to colleagues who back the new orthodoxy looking us in the eye and telling us brazenly – through fear, self-deception or the obedience of ambition – that none of it is happening at all.

Doubtless some of these sideshows would evaporate in a time of war, but is a culture in this state – increasingly the case all over the Anglophone world – fit to fight one? The revelation last year that 31 people were held back from RAF training to meet diversity targets, or alleged plans to relax security checks on foreign applicants in order to diversify the British army, would suggest strongly not. Nor does anyone, it seems, have the will to put it right when the damage is so pervasive. In Britain, the Tories have, over 14 years, done woefully little to stem the tide and any forthcoming Labour government will have even less interest in doing so.

But still, the question remains: should the West, preening itself on past glories, continue to crow about its ‘universal liberal values’ and be quite so complacent about their appeal to other cultures? And, in time of war, would any young person honestly put themselves on the line to defend these principles, when the adults they were raised by – in classrooms and on TV screens, in lecture halls and parliament – have failed so catastrophically to show them how to do it?