In the absence of some sort of unifying spiritual belief people are left with only the religion of economics, of personal interest in a purely material sense. And that’s not enough. Hence all the bickering over policies and rule making and who pays how much for which public service. It’s a form of displacement activity.
As the author suggests, even in a society that increasingly denies, even rejects, its roots, the ancient memory of a white hart as symbol persists. And the sight of the forces of rationality slaying the deer speak in a language much deeper than words. Writing over thirty years ago, the mythologist Joseph Campbell said modernity is a ‘terminal moraine’ of myths: incoherent fragments of older myths scattered here and there. But the absence of a unifying myth doesn’t imply the absence of a deep need for a unifying myth.
The forces of rationality will not create our myths for us. That’s the job of artists as defined in the broadest sense. Sadly, the new censors of the left would deny artists their voice. Campbell wrote of an underlying force, a life force that some might call God, that manifests through each of us and will not be denied. Let’s hope that force breaks through our current spiritual and social stagnation and leads us to a brighter future.
And, yes, kudos to Mary Harrington for another fine article.

Mary is fast becoming one of my favourite writers on this or any publication. She is one of those few whose articles I *have* to read, not necessarily because I always agree with her (though I often do) but because she writes so beautifully and presents such provocative ideas that I find it impossible to resist.

Spot on! How acutely ironic it is that such fine words as “progressive” and “rational” have to be imprisoned in quotation marks. The grim truth is that the Greens and other loud mouth peddlers of total “health and safety” are exactly not intending to fly less, or take advantage of an insect diet, or stop heating/cooling their exquisite lodgings nestled in glorious locales.

We find ourselves in an age similar to that of the seventeenth century. Back then the publishing press was becoming widely used. As people grew more literate they consumed greater amounts of information thus becoming more susceptible to conspiracy theories. It was a strange century. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) was used to justify burning witches, a plague ravaged Europe, and a thirty-year holy war was being waged in Germany. The economy didn’t do great either.
The internet is relatively new. Much like people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we are still learning how to cope with it. We create our tools, but in a strange way our tools also create us.

I’ve said it before, I shall say it again: Mary Harrington for PM!
Mary could have added to her list of questions that cannot be answered: if the world is dangerously overpopulated – as the XR and WEF Malthusian cultists would have us all believe – who, exactly, should die soon to save it?
At the heart of all of this is an epistemological vulnerability. Westerners in both the Old and New Worlds have stopped believing in their respective foundational myths. The narrative of the inherent virtues of liberal democracy has been challenged by both authoritarian states such as China and by the crisis of greedy corporatism, which has suffocated the optimistic genuine liberalism and individualism of the founding fathers of the US. Their revolution was successfully sustainable (230 or so years and, just about, counting) precisely because it wasn’t founded on some vague abstract idea or in response to an outpouring of compassion or pity. That is, it wasn’t based on vague goals such as “save the starving masses”, or “eradicate racial injustice”,or “achieve zero covid”, or “purge our church of papism”, or “net zero by 2050”, or any other such utopian, ill-defined notions. It wasn’t based on a conception of how each citizen should behave, or what they should believe. Rather it was grounded in a Christian belief based on a genuine respect for the sanctity of the individual, their freedom to live their life as best they choose, and their right to defend themselves and their families against tyranny – hence the second amendment. It was also the case that, for the vast majority of emigrants to America in the late 18th an early 19th centuries – they would only know and be known to the people in their immediate vicinity, wherever it was the ended up. That means no bull excrement.
In that sense, the American revolution had extraordinarily sound epistemological foundations. How many of those on the Mayflower and similar early expeditions do you think were virtue-signalling by jumping aboard in the face of religious persecution? They certainly were not taking snaps from the poop deck to post on their Insta account! How courageous were those men and women, to leave behind their families and friends home countries and voyage into the unknown in the face of persecution at home? Can you imagine their reaction to a broadcast by Chris Whitty suggesting that they stay at home and cover their faces (in some but not all situations) to “stay safe”? Despite the hardhsips they endured, and their lack of superfast broadband connections, I envy them, in many ways – at least they could leave their ideologically divided home countries, and the ignorance and intolerance of their erstwhile fellow citizens.
Those of us who grew up with, and built our adult lives around, a belief that our public authorities are there to protect us now fear the pogrom that many us now, rationally, believe that way be coming. We see the subliminal hatred in the public messaging; we see idea that individuals must do things that they know may harm them, for the supposed greater good; and we hear history rhyming loud and increasingly clear. The fear and uncertainty in the voices and faces of those in ostensible authority is becoming more palpable by the day.
I can’t help feeling that despite the luxury, automated conveniences of globalised early(ish) 21st century society and all of the wonders of modern medicine, that something essential to ourselves as thinking and feeling individuals is slowly but ineluctably sliding from our grip. We are losing a sense of our authentic selves, we are losing the courage to stand up for our true beliefs, we are too scared of feeling bad, guilty or ashamed, we are losing the humility to admit that we can get things wrong. We are losing a spirituality that, if you like to acknowledge it or not, is always going to be there for limited, flawed, and mortal organic beings capable of emotional and intellectual thought and love that our best scientists would tell us are living on a little sphere of rock with a hot middle spinning around a big ball of even hotter fire which is itself on the arm of a vast galaxy of stars all spinning around a weird black hole that no-one can really explain, which is itself a tiny constituent part of a vast universe that we know next to nothing about.