Arianne Shahvisi

The anthropologist Margaret Mead was just over five feet tall and had to stand on a suitcase to be seen above the lectern when she delivered her 1967 keynote address to the President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped (now the Office of Disability Employment Policy) in Washington DC. Mead began her lecture by referring to archaeologists’ observations of a healed fracture in an ancient human skeleton, noting that this is the point in hominid evolution at which ‘we know we are approaching what we regard as true humanity.’ It takes time and respite for bones to heal; a body that lived beyond a break is evidence of people taking on extra burdens to feed and tend those who were ill or disabled. In a Green Paper published earlier this week, the Labour Party unveiled its plans to cut five billion pounds from the budget for health and disability benefits.

Keir Starmer described Badenoch’s election as a ‘proud moment for our country’. He presumably meant that Black British children will see a person like them at the helm of a major political party and believe that they can do it too. Does a poor Black immigrant child look at a wealthy Black person who hates immigrants and feel a dream take shape?

Recognising the role of moral luck encourages empathy and humility, but it also threatens the notions of culpability that help us to make sense of evil. Luke Holland died in 2020, a few months before the release of Final Account. Watching it again I could not find my way to thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ I was, and remain, quite sure that I wouldn’t have been a Nazi.

Even the most effective tools get blunt through overwork, and parliamentary transcripts document the rise in recent years of terrorism’s slyer and more versatile cousin, ‘extremism’. (The act of defining undercuts the term: extremism is all that is not moderate, while the government gets to define moderation.)

My grandfather worked as a school building inspector from the 1950s to the 1980s. Farajollah Shahvisi travelled the perilous, slow-going roads that ribbon around the jagged, scrub-tufted peaks of Iranian Kurdistan, visiting schools with keeling walls and dripping roofs. There was a lot of theft. Builders would make off with government-issue cement, stuff gaps with debris and let bricks sit loose. A fault-finder by nature, my grandfather would close down schools and report cowboy developers, who’d be ordered to rebuild for free.