The Economist: Let’s Talk About Kevins
I’ve long admired The Economist for combining both the predictable with the unexpected. Your missives are logically rigorous (often iconoclastic) in exploring the uncomfortable Cartesian contours of the underlying policy debate. And yet there is also a very English, almost eccentric, predilection for surprise by dabbling in life’s marginalia, before circling back to the greater themes of our times. Two articles in your Christmas edition (December 21st) illustrated this with gusto.
Charlemagne’s “We need to talk about Kevins: How an American name became a European diagnosis” was wonderful. However, as a lifelong member of the International Society of Much Misunderstood Kevins, I feel compelled to reply on behalf of my blighted brethren across the West, and now a growing throng of Chinese parents selecting the K word for their kids’ English names.
Contrary to the article’s claim of Americanness, the name Kevin is quintessentially Irish, Catholic and thus deeply European. Our common patron is Saint Kevin of Glendalough, a sixth-century hermit who, we’re told, lived to 120. Few modern Kevins have inherited the saint’s depth of piety or asceticism, but we are certainly inspired by his longevity. Life-extensionists, eat your hearts out.
It is true, however, that there is a growing reaction to this Kevinisation of the world. The election of two Kévins to France’s parliament in 2022 was noted as a remarkable first for the lower classes. Germans worry about Kevinismus. And now Charlemagne warns us of a Kevinometer! Despite this dose of class and cultural condescension, we Kevins are a robust lot; we’ve seen it all before.
Our European friends are borrowing from more ancient English Kevin tropes following the mass migration of Irish families as factory fodder for William Blake’s dark satanic mills to escape the potato famines. These Irish folks—Catholic, working-class and just plain “different”—became the butt of English humourists who, hardly alone in the world, enjoyed ridiculing the foreigners among them.
The late great Barry Humphries, whose humour absorbed the mores of the English elite, built a career ridiculing his fellow Australians (which, in our own national spirit of self-deprecation, we thoroughly enjoyed). Nonetheless, in the deep subconscious of England’s upper crust, Australians represented the triple-whammy: hardened convicts, Irish Catholics, and an expendable British working class. No pilgrim fathers there. That’s why, when I sought the prime ministership, Humphries pondered aloud whether “Australia was ready for a PM named Kevin?”
Good-hearted banter aside, Charlemagne may be on to something about these grands debats de les Kevins. Among the few countries where Kevin maintains good stead across racial and class divides is the rugged meritocracy of the United States (to which I say heartily, God Bless America). But if this Euro-English anti-Kevin movement should become a popular metaphor for repudiating brand America, or worse their own working families’ aspirations for a better life, we’re in trouble.
People will have different views on American politics. But the American people have spoken loudly through their democratic institutions. This same America, for all its imperfections, remains the world’s oldest continuing democracy. It liberated millions from occupation during the last war at enormous cost to itself; it remains the largest, most dynamic economy on earth; and it maintains the world’s most lethal and effective armed forces.
The international democratic project, where American leadership remains crucial, is founded on a combination of three great philosophical traditions which should unite, not divide, us. European rationalism, Anglo-American empiricism, and a belief in the individual’s inalienable rights that flows from centuries of Christian teaching on the intrinsic dignity of the human person. The twin barbarisms of slavery and colonisation were ultimately rolled back by this philosophical trifecta being unleashed around the modern West and the Global South. They remain a formidable ideational legacy for the democratic ideal worldwide, a fact that authoritarians know well and fear greatly.
This brings me, briefly, to the second big surprise in your Christmas edition, the obituary on the remarkable, unconventional and utterly quixotic Brother Harold Palmer. More than 50 years ago, he built from scratch a medieval hermitage and Romanesque chapel in the outer reaches of Northumbria with the purpose of resuscitating the contemplative Christian soul in a relentlessly secularising society. Whereas others wrestled with war and peace, climate and artificial intelligence, Brother Harold, like his patron, Saint Francis, called us back to the most elemental teleology of our civilisation.
Many around the world no longer believe in either a liberal democratic or social democratic order, or the complex web of values that underpin them. Indeed, authoritarian states use every opportunity to foment division among us, real or imagined.
My hope is that we Kevins, rather than becoming a cute meme for underlying social and cultural cleavage within and between democratic societies, keep playing our own small role in strengthening the sinews of our shared democratic project. That way, yobs like us can all have a constructive place in what Churchill famously called the worst form of government in the world, except of course for all the others.
Kevin Rudd
Prime Minister of Australia, 2007-10 and 2013
Brisbane