Ever since we launched Tales for Our Time almost eight years ago, I have had a persistent ripple of emails from listeners demanding that I set aside our audio fiction and do more audio non-fiction. Except for a few highly specific works, I can't say it has much appeal to me. But, in this interlude before next week's full-length serialisation gets going, we're making a rare exception.
This one begins with yet another round of "As I was saying twenty years ago..." Way back when, a stratum of otherwise sound persons thought the future of the west could be secured on the basis of something called "secular humanism". I thought it was a lot of hooey:
Which brings me to my big philosophical difference with Ms. Hirsi Ali: in 2006, she was one of a dozen intellectuals to publish a manifesto against radical Islam and in defence of 'secular values for all.' Often in her speeches, she'll do a heartwarming pitch to all of us—'black, white, gay, straight'—to stand firm for secular humanism. My problem with this is that, in Europe and elsewhere, liberal secularism is not the solution to the problem but the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated.
A footnote to the above: Anyone remember where the intellectuals' manifesto was published? It was a magazine called Charlie Hebdo.
No one talks about "secular values" anymore. Mainly because Islam's population growth in Europe, Canada and elsewhere has been so spectacular that even mainstream opinion has seen enough to know that trying to sell young Ahmed on the joys of secularism is a fool's errand. Don't know how Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri Lévy now feel about their 2006 clarion call, but the aforementioned Ayaan Hirsi Ali has abandoned the thesis and is now a believing Christian.
So now everyone talks about "shared values" - which are so universal that your average limp-wristed Euro-leftie can share them with any old firebreathing imam and his latest child bride. As JD Vance is merely the most eminent to notice, the westerners who bleat the loudest about "shared values" are generally the first to abandon them - see the woeful state of freedom of speech, etc.
There is a further contradiction that Mr Vance was too polite to point out: apparently, "shared values" are both what hold together the major globalist organisations such as Nato, the G7, the EU and increasingly the only acceptable definition of ancient sovereign states. So that poor ill-defined word "values" is doing an awful lot of work. On the other hand, whenever the coming man or woman uses it, it's a good way of signalling one need pay no further heed to anything he or she says.
In such a world, I thought it might be beneficial to hear what C S Lewis had to say about nationhood and patriotism, as originally published in his book The Four Loves, which came out in 1960 but might as well have been unearthed in an archaeological dig. Lewis did not foresee - who did sixty-five years ago? - that, within two generations of publication, most of Christendom would be well advanced down the expressway to Eurabian night. But I appreciate his thoughts as an elegant statement of what was once obvious. There is no bollocks about "values": a Swede loves Sweden because it is where his fellow Swedes are; likewise, an Austrian and Austria. Once that is no longer the case there will be no more Sweden or Austria. If you reject that proposition, get back to me in, oh, the mid-2030s.
What by comparison is the appeal to "values"? A chap from Dublin can lunch with a Parisian and discover, before they've drained their apéritifs, that they share oodles and oodles of "values". But in the end one is still an Irishman and the other a Frenchman. Unless of course - as is increasingly likely - they're both from Somalia.
So betting the farm on "values" is a form of self-delusion that ensures the loss of real countries and condemns your kids and grandkids to a future that would be unrecognisable to Lewis's generation.
"Shared values" Even London's Taqqiya mayor can do that shtick:
Mayor @SadiqKhan has a good start on St George's Day 🏴 in celebrating English culture. It soon goes downhill when he bangs on about multiculturalism, digs at the "far-right", migrants & Ukraine.
BTW the wonderful black guy dancing is a mate of Tommy @TRobinsonNewEra's. pic.twitter.com/BScf36Q9ym
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) April 24, 2025
To hear me read this selection from The Four Loves by C S Lewis, please click here and log-in.
As I've emphasised since we launched The Mark Steyn Club almost eight years ago, we now offer more free content than at any point in our twenty-two-year history. But we have spent the last few years letting Club members in on a few experimental features which we might eventually make more widely available: for example, my satirical romp The Prisoner of Windsor started as an audio entertainment for members only and is now published in hardback and digital editions.
If you're not a Club member (or you are but you've never partaken of this series) you can hear some of what you're missing in our first-birthday Tales for Our Times sampler, a 75-minute audio special hosted by me and including excerpts from some of the ripping yarns of our inaugural season - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, John Buchan, Jack London, Scott Fitzgerald and Robert Louis Stevenson. And, if it whets your appetite, you can find the above authors and over fifty more collected here.
Aside from Tales for Our Time, The Mark Steyn Club does come with other benefits:
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly (such as this coming Wednesday's);
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show and our other video content;
~My video series of classic poetry;
~Priority booking for our annual Mark Steyn Cruise;
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, assuming I'm ever healthy enough to hold such things;
~Customised email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the opportunity to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to C S Lewis on Love of Country but also to almost seventy of our monthly audio adventures.
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