Around the world, virtues such as compassion and kindness are gathering dust, like old hymn books in a long-deserted church Towards the end of the summer, the Tory-Reform defector Robert Jenrick authored an op-ed piece for the Daily Telegraph about the seemingly impossible economics of rising benefits bills because of mental ill-health. In his capacity as Reform’s Treasury spokesman, his task was to big up its plans to cut 25% of so-called welfare spending by 2030, and thereby tackle what he called the state’s “suicidal empathy”. Straight away, I wondered where this most opportunistic politician had borrowed that phrase from, and instantly found out: a book with the same title , published this year by the Canadian academic Gad Saad, whom the dust jacket describes as having particular expertise in “the use of evolutionary psychology in marketing and consumer behaviour”. It comes with an e