What Peter Mandelson Should Learn From the BookTok Generation

The final downfall of Peter Mandelson has been hailed as a falling away of the Boomer Generation – the last gasp of the complacent generation that squandered nationhood and family life in favour of the warring wraiths of globalism and one world socialism. While some are fearful of what follows, and predict a future of One Battle After Another style ICE deportations, I am more optimistic, largely because a significant portion of young adults are becoming a generation of autodidacts. Young men are – hallelujah – rediscovering the joy of reading.

You might have noticed small piles of White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky by the tills in Waterstones. This marketing is in response to the recent BookTok trends of young men recommending decent books to each other. A few weeks ago my son began reading East of Eden then asked if we had a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. His friend had lent him White Nights and he’d read it in the bath one evening before passing it on to another friend. Agog at this burst of intellectualism, I learned (almost with relief) it was not self-generated but thanks to recommendations from Jack Edwards, Shaan, ReadwithMarcus and others on TikTok.

There is a useful word sehnsucht, which describes a yearning or wistful longing for something, that I think explains what might be happening here. In all the fuss about AI, we overlook the fact that human brain is still the most complex organism in the known universe: there are untapped wells of genius and illumination within all of us, and therefore a sehnsucht for more than has been offered thus far by years of British schooling. At present our Year Six son has as his class book Hidden Figures, a laudable but tedious book about the female black mathematicians at NASA. The older teenage boys currently devouring good books will have gone through an English curriculum that has prioritised broader voices over literary content and gradgrind reading theory. And yet the sehnsucht remains.

Plato has a lovely theory about knowledge that he deems to be rather recollection. In Meno he suggests that true knowledge is not acquired through empirical experience or teaching but is instead the soul’s recovery of innate ideas encountered in a pre-existent state before birth. We’ve all had that wonderful intellectual thrill that comes with suddenly understanding something. There are truths that are so obvious that when we hear or read them it is as if we knew them all along. I expect this is what these book worm young men are discovering. Reading White Nights they will recognise the truth of heartbreak and isolation so exquisitely rendered by Dostoevsky, realise it is a universal human experience and as such cannot be remedied by deconstructing hierarchies/mental health awareness week/medication or similar. The problem with a lot of recent literary and artistic offerings is that they don’t ring true: the confection of the plot or characterisations are false and therefore so too are societal responses to them (see Adolescence).

If young men – and hopefully young women – are enjoying well-written books about family life, what it means to be a good person, how to navigate hardship, truth, lies, temptation and extortion, rather than artificially confected false morality tales they are force fed at school, then so much the better. A new renaissance may yet get going.

Equipped with more reliable guides about what it is to be a good person than mere #anti-racism or #greenactivism, young readers will be better able to see exactly what sort of behaviour and character plays into the morality tale that is Peter Mandelson for example.

The Brothers Karamazov is doing the rounds amongst young readers on BookTok and these keen young men might recognise Peter Mandelson as the ‘new man’ that so worried Dostoevsky. Dimitri Karamazov is beset with worries about what will happen to people if “God is driven from the face of the earth”. He cries to his brother Alyosha: “How is he going to be good without God?” Dimitri panics that the ‘new man’ will show his “love for humanity”, rather than by love of God, instead by “the extension of civic rights, or even of keeping down the price of meat… but [the new men], without a God, are more likely to raise the price of meat, if it suits [them], and make a rouble on every copeck”.

And look! There, in a mere work of literature, is virtuoso insight into godless ‘new men’ such as Mandelson and Epstein and the whole post-war international order: hypocritical progress politics as a corrupt cipher for personal virtue.

Let’s hope this movement of readers of the classics grows. Perhaps Mandelson will join in and get himself a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.