The devil we don't know (JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images)

Throughout history, the poets, the prophets and mystics have usually done a better job of predicting the future than pundits, politicians or scientists. Generally the reward for their perspicacity is to be ignored or laughed at, but luckily they are usually far enough from the centre not to notice or care.
The French mystic and thinker René Guénon, who was doing his best work nearly a century back, was one of them. In his two books (The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times), Guénon laid out his notion that the modern world had deteriorated into a realm of pure materialism as a result of what he called the “Western deviation” from eternal truth. He called this the “reign of quantity”, and predicted its future collapse. But Guénon was not simply talking economics or politics. What was going on, he said, was something akin to a spiritual war, and as a Sufi Muslim he wasn’t shy about naming its antagonist. To this age, he wrote, “the word ‘Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied”.
Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies — this, wrote Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The “more or less direct agents of the Adversary”, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.
The heterodox Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, also believed we were living in the time of Anti-Christ, but for different reasons. For Illich, any claims that we lived in a “secular age” were nonsense. The modern West was still Christian, he said, but it had disastrously attempted to codify the spontaneous expressions of love which Christ had shown to be God’s desire for humanity within systems and institutions. First the Church, and then the supposedly “secular” liberal states which had succeeded it, had attempted to transmute Christian love into obligation and enforce it by law, thus twisting it into a new form of oppression. His biographer David Cayley explained in a recent essay that Illich’s work “emphatically rejects the idea that ours is a post-Christian era. ‘On the contrary’, he says, ‘I believe this to be the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.'”
A decade or so before Illich was writing, the Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also attending to the dark spiritual undercurrent of the age. He had a different interpretation of its source — or perhaps he was just using a different name. In Howl, he identified the forward march of industrial modernity — and especially the hypocrisy and brutality of the American empire — with the pagan god Moloch, who demanded human sacrifice from his devotees:
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! …
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Ginsberg, it seemed, could also sense that the spirit of his age was not under human control, either out in the world or in his own soul and mind. Usually this is easier to talk about in poetry or fiction, for the age doesn’t look kindly on anything which can’t be quantified. It can deal with Ginsberg, but it doesn’t want to talk about Moloch. It can just about cope with Christ if he has been brought down to our level — made into an activist or a defender of culture or a “cosmic” manifestation of the self — but it has nothing to say about Anti-Christ, who blows the whole story sky-high. As for St Paul’s famous notion that the world is subject not only to nature but to “principalities and powers” which wish us ill: this kind of talk was supposed to have been wrecked on the shores of the Enlightenment, never to be seen again.
But the powers and principalities didn’t die in the shipwreck of the old world, they just took on new forms. Today we can, in fact, still talk about these strange, underlying forces as long as we use the correct language. Take, for example, the Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly’s pet notion that technology has its own mind and its own purpose: that through the web of what he calls “the technium”, something is using us to create itself. Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explained in his book What Technology Wants: “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”
Other breathless Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his Metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity, regularly talk in the same register about where the technium is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods.
They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that “AI”, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying “Anti-Christ”.
Maybe it’s just me, but the ongoing and rapid inversion of so much we have previously taken for granted increasingly seems to be happening independently of human action. It is as if something else has become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times. Perhaps it has become self-aware, like Skynet; perhaps it is approaching its Singularity. Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and is now seizing its moment. Or perhaps it is simply beginning to spin out of control, as our systems and technologies become so complex that we can no longer steer them in our chosen direction. Either way, this force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too.
Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Anti-Christ. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force Progress. Then, à la Kevin Kelly, let’s ask ourselves a simple question: what does Progress want?
The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution — a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as “someone who thinks that ‘today it is no longer possible’”. We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before, he said. Instead, we believe we live after a “violent break with history”.
In the story of Progress that informs us today, the revolutions of the modern age — industrial, political and intellectual — are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced “a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history”.
What Progress wants is the end of history.
Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters: “what is excluded is the ‘supernatural’, religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process … has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.”
The modern epoch, explained Del Noce, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything “unseen” or “beyond”. From the 18th century onwards, philosophy swept away religion: the world was now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything became immanent: literally, down-to-Earth.
All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a “sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods”. Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason.
No longer, said Del Noce: the only “transcendence” that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is now nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained 20th century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.
How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? According to Del Noce, “the spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science”. In this “totalitarian conception of science”, “every other type of knowledge — metaphysical or religious — expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.”
But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead — as noted by Illich — religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was “resolved into philosophy”, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. “The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity”, said Del Noce, “accelerated the process of disintegration” that the modern revolution had unleashed.
What Progress wants is the death of God.
But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution.
The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. “The revolutionary attitude of creative violence”, writes Del Noce, “has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world”. If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had.
What Progress wants is permanent revolution.
The two world wars of the 20th century — which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 — spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging “the Enlightenment’s war against their own past”. Del Noce agreed with another prophet, Simone Weil, that “the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world” — and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others and hollowing out its own historic culture in the name of Progress: “Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now — oh, wonder! — in order to feign regret they are applying the same.”
Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and “the death of the sacred”. The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting “permissive society”, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family — but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.
Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a “new totalitarianism”. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, “the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power'”.
Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters.
The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would “absolutely deny traditional morality and religion”, basing its worldview instead on “scientistic dogmatism”. It would negate all “spiritual forces”, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: “the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism”. It would be a “totalitarianism of disintegration”, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, “the complete negation of all tradition”, including that of “fatherlands” — nations — would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.
Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that “current political formulas are completely inadequate”. Neither Left nor Right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the Left blaming “fascists” and the Right blaming “communists” for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine.
What Progress wants is liberation from everything.
Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution — and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced — pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism.
Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one — and getting it right this time: “Technology is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.”
Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple “reaction”, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines.
What Moloch wants — Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks — is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.
The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards — where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people — they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.
What Progress wants is to replace us.
Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.
A longer version of this essay first appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.
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SubscribeOf course, the 1619 Project was old hat compared to the 1584 Project when Sir Walter Raleigh, chief tobacconist to Good Queen Bess, sent the first shipload of “waste population” to the Roanoke Colony. Why “waste population?” Well, what with the end of the feudal era, there were a lot of landless vagabonds and vagrants — we call the homeless — wandering around in Britland. Something had to be done! Send the waste population to the Americas, old chap.
And then, let us celebrate the greatest slave states in all history, in which entire populations of vast countries were enslaved to a brutal overclass: Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China.
Let us hope African Founders gets the attention and respect it merits despite not endorsing the ideological approach. Sane and balanced history is essential if dystopian myths are not to drag the US down.
I cannot recommend Albion’s Seed highly enough. I listened to it recently on Audible and it was very well produced. If you wish to understand the relationship between Britain and the USA, this is the place to start.
African Founders will go on my list.
Reverse racism is no less awful than the racism is purports to target.
Reverse racism? Isn’t racism just racism? Unless you mean anti-racism (obviously a good), which can easily be perverted into an evil? But, if not, surely racism is just racism whichever way it goes?
Fair point. Some ‘anti-racism’ is a cover for straightforward racism.
Slavery or racism is “hardwired into (America’s) DNA”? Because Americans, at least most of them, have “a past that cannot be escaped”?
Does the 1619 express mean that … now America cannot deny the truth? Now that the truth has been elucidated? Does the project show that the only explanation for those scores of mostly men who were given the mantle of having made America is that it had to be their malign internal make-up of their DNA and all that that made them take all the credit for their undeserving selves? That their efforts had essentially been all show?
I must be exaggerating! But what is taught in the nationwide classroom curricula vis à vis this Project? Yes, “it is a dispiritingly static view of the country.” Do the very young, schoolchildren, need all that? Their school bags are probably weighed down by all the other theories they have to haul home with them.
Must America now look much less fondly and gladly upon the achievements of the Wright brothers: the inventors of the modern aeroplane? An invention that took place some forty years after the end of the Civil War. Because, well, there were many and profound injustices being committed against black Americans tens, hundreds, thousands of miles from where the Wright brothers, bicycle shop repairmen, were striving to solve the design problems?
Perhaps there are designs to make America miserable. To knock the stuffing out of America. What about music? The old pop singles charts? When stars, both black and white, smiled out from their record sleeve covers? It was a sign of equality and drive and hope and gladness, back in the day. Of course, there was probably not much equality back then either. But after the travails of the Sixties, and during them, music offered hope. The signs were displayed all the same. America was good at projecting hope. But how can America project hope when, in the technology age, when we’re all supposed to be having a whale of a time, misery and dispiriting fare dominate the airwaves, both in education and in entertainment?
What does it mean to be “hardwired” with badness? That Christianity is so yesterday?
Of course all this ignores the people who have arguably been the most abused by the events of the last 400 years and are still largely ignored – the Native Americans.
“The white man made us many promises, more than I can remember. They only ever kept one: they promised to take our land, and they took it” [Red Cloud]
The same could be said of virtually every native peoples on earth. It is the history of mankind all over the planet, not just the peoples of Africa or the Americas.
This article deserves to be read in conjunction with Paul Kingsnorth’s superb essay on “how the Left fell for capitalism”.
There’s a reason why the collectivist left, the corporatist right, and the technocratic “centre” all have a shared interest in trashing the spirit of the individual that set brushfires alight in the American revolution. And that is that it challenges their power, that is built in each case with a web of clever, convincing, materialistic lies; handouts of bread and circuses; and good old-fashioned fear.
Each day more and more people are waking up to their nonsense and they know it. You can only push people so far before they will snap and revolt: humans are hard-wired to seek and find truth, and they will sooner or later dispense with truthless things. What other way for a mammal uniquely dependent on its cerebral cortex to survive, if not intellectually to know what truthfully works and what doesn’t when faced with a threat or when looking for the means of survival? It may make evolutionary sense to stick with the herd, a strategy which works right up until to the point at which it doesn’t: and it doesn’t if individuals use their god-given sense to discern that the herd is being led at increasing speed off a huge cliff by a morally compromised, panicking, fundamentally untruthful leadership.
This could all flip around, and very quickly.
I hope it does flip around quickly
The French Revolution was met with stunned shock across all of Europe. Louis XVI never saw it coming. If he had, he certainly would have fled in time to save his own life. By the time the revolution completely concluded with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the old feudal nobility’s power was shattered forever. Where they weren’t entirely destroyed, they were obliged to yield their chokehold on political power, lest they end up on the guillotine next. Could Trump be a Robespierre who began what some future Bonaparte will finish? Things can flip very quickly indeed.
When will “The 1492 Project” be published? Isn’t it time for a rebuttal to “The 1619 Project” that correctly asserts that the creation of the modern Americas (including the US) began with the European colonization of the Western Hemisphere? This would correctly center the experience of indigenous people as the most important transformative experience in the history of the US and the rest of the Americas. The westward movement of Europeans in North America, and the near-eradication of indigenous peoples, is the single most important foundational aspect of the development of the US. The introduction of slavery into the economy of the early US in 1619 was a secondary effect of the conquest of land by European settlers who chose to use either slave, indentured, or free labor for its exploitation. And 1619 hardly marks the beginning of slavery in the Americas either, since slavery had played a role in many of the societies and civilizations of the Americas long before then. A history of America that centers of experience of indigenous peoples is badly needed.
I’m not sure about this at all, From this very brief review, it sounds as if this book is in a similar tradition to the 1619 Project, but conducted with more concern for evidence: viz., mining the records to construct a political narrative rather than to establish what happened and what was it like to be there. No doubt it will be said that history has always been done like this (step forward the Whig view of British history), but this seems much more selective and tendentious.
It is possible to explore the African tradition of America without pandering to the insecurity of modern black and white liberal women by pretending it was the centre of everything. 1619 is an exercise in narcissism and power grabbing; this is not. Most great history books have a narrative. They are not mere annals but have themes.
Well I read a lot of history, and it was my undergraduate degree, so I well understand that history is not “mere annals” (or even Annales). My point was that of course the 1619 Project is garbage and doesn’t really merit any serious consideration as history – it is a piece of flimsy propaganda. However, one of the jobs of the historian is to attribute appropriate importance to the themes which he or she is writing about: that is, after all, what is meant by historical context. My doubts about this book (which I have not read – I’m commenting on what this review tells us), is that it may fall into another form of ahistoricity which strives to attribute greater or different significance to people or events than they truly have for essentially propaganda purposes. We have seen that over here for the past twenty years or so with the promotion of Mary Seacole (for whom streets, parks and housing estates are now named) into a towering figure of nineteenth century nursing at least on a par with Nightingale, when her actual achievements are frankly indetectable. The title of this book, “African Founders”, appears to argue that some or all of the figures identified in it should be regarded as being of the same historical importance as the Founding Fathers: if that is the basic point, it is wrong, and “pandering” is a good word for it.
Agreed, that’s my concern too. I also read a lot of history books, and sometimes mistakenly buy books that have good reviews, only to realise on starting to read them that there is an agenda, which defeats the purpose of reading the book.
I can cope with agendas when reading the news, filtering it out as I read it; but I expect a decent historian to seek objectivity and perspective. I suspect ‘Albions Seed’ is an important contribution to understanding the USA, as the different parts of the British Isles contributed massively to the existing USA culture; but I suspect ‘African Founders’ will hugely over-egg the contribution of Africans to the existing USA culture, and therefore be a work for supporting social justice, not historical understanding.
In the strange times that we live in it’s difficult to ignore the common orthodoxy; difficult to escape it. I suppose that’s one sign of a successful propaganda campaign. (Think: Christianity in medieval Europe. Who could have written anything, other than Snorri Sturlesson, that wasn’t influenced by Church doctrine?)
So the question is “who was influenced by ‘1619’, the author or the reviewer”?
I discovered something useful in my own readings on history. Sometimes the heavy-weight academic tomes start with an “Author’s Forward”, or some such, that lays out the whole argument in fifty or a hundred pages. Saves a lot of time and effort. I’m going to wait until I can get “African Founders” from the library and see for myself.
The 1619 Project implies that there was no human life in the land that is now the USA before 1619. That in turn suggests that Native Americans are sub-human. Not exactly fighting racism.
This is a priority for today:“ancient ideas of open inquiry and empirical truth have gained a new importance, in part because of hostile assaults upon them from many directions.”
There are various harmful manifestations (Woke etc) of the intellectual invasion of post-modernist ideas. The central task is to alert fair-minded people to what is happening so that we can address and reverse it.
At present, most people are not aware of what is happening as it is rarely stated or defined.
The intellectual foundations of Western civilisation are being dismantled. It is an emergency.
Hackett Fischer’s best book is The Great Wave.
I have seen no evidence that multiculturalism works anywhere.