It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

I felt the same way once at school, when I saw in a book an illustration of the national costumes of various European nations. There were the Welsh with their lace and the Scots with their kilts and the Dutch with their clogs, and it was all faintly ridiculous, but the most ridiculous of all were the English. Our national costume, according to this picture anyway, was a pinstripe suit, a bowler hat and a rolled‑­up umbrella. The Welsh made lace, the Dutch grew tulips, the Irish played the fiddle, the French did whatever they did with those strings of onions: hell, at least it was colorful. What did my people do? We made money.

That illustration was telling me the same thing as the jungle version of “Hard Rain”, and what it was saying was loud and clear: you don’t have a culture.

Since then, I seem to have picked away endlessly at this notion of “culture”. The quest for culture is always a quest for home. Probably humans can never be truly at home on this earth, but there are degrees of homelessness, I think. When you’re young you want to run away from home and sit around an Indonesian campfire with people from many nations and sing. But you find that home has followed you and that you don’t know what it quite is, or why that bothers you so much. As you get older, you realize both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found.

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The silence of the storm

By Paul Kingsnorth

Our age, I think, is unique. It might be that everyone thinks this about their time, but I think that today we have a good case. The sheer scale of global culture, the degree of technological interconnectedness, the dangers of those technologies, from AI to nuclear missiles, the human impact on the natural world and the rapid ­falling​­ away of many things that have buoyed and sustained us for centuries, from languages to religions, means that the times we live in are perhaps less rooted than any time in history. We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with it.

This anticulture is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western culture and history, it has since become universal. It is an “anticulture” because the elements of human life from which cultures of all kinds, however different, have traditionally sprung are negated by today’s way of life. The values of the Machine are an attack on the values upon which ­pre-modern, traditional societies were built. The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a ­one-​­word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.

The philosopher Patrick Deneen, in his 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, presents this modern drive towards liberation as an ideological project, suggesting that “liberalism” is one of three ideologies which have dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other­ two — communism and ­fascism —​­ were ­shorter lived, he suggests, and died in the West in the 20th century. Liberalism —​­ the elder ­brother —​­ is finally dying now. One reason for its longer life is that it piggybacked on an older story, presenting itself as the inheritor of older traditions of “liberty”, when in fact it was something quite different. While liberty is “the condition of self-​governance, whether achieved by the individual or a political community”, liberalism “re‑conceives liberty as the opposite of this older conception. It is understood to be the greatest possible freedom from external constraints, including customary norms.”

“Freedom from external constraints” is a good description of the central drive of the Machine’s anticulture. This pursuit, claims Deneen, seeks freedom for the individual from society itself, and it is built upon a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted, ­Weil-​­like in time and place, this new lens offers a new vision: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans are now, in Deneen’s words, “rights-​bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life”.

In this new world, the sovereign human person, ­disembedded from community, history and nature, will utilize reason, informed by science and enabled by technology, to choose how to live. The rational individual, making choices in a marketplace overseen by a government committed to “liberty” and guarding individual “rights” through a “social contract”: this was the basis of a wholly new world. The commitment to this ­post-​­Enlightenment liberal order is not a partisan one. The factions we refer to today as “Left” and “Right” are simply two different flavors of the same liberal food.

What is crucial to understand ­here —​­ and this is what makes liberalism an ideology —​­ is that in order for the new, “liberated” world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the family, the Church and private land ownership so that communism could materialize, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth. The individual “as a disembodied,­ self-​­interested economic actor”, claims Deneen, “didn’t exist in any actual state of nature but rather was the creation of an elaborate intervention by the incipient state in early modernity, at the beginnings of the liberal order”.

This echoes Chesterton’s argument that ­capitalism —​­ a system referred to as “liberal economics” for good reason —​­ did not “evolve” either, but also had to be created by force. Liberalism, suggests Deneen, grew in the same desert. And the biggest obstacle to the growth of ­both —​­ then as now —​­ was real culture. “Culture was the greatest threat to the creation of the liberal individual,” writes Deneen. Rooted trees are hard to fell. The Machine anticulture which is felling them one by one “is at once a crowning achievement of liberalism and among the greatest threats to our continued common life”.

There has always been a certain pathos, and a kind of nobility, to the modern human attempt at breaking the bounds and soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis: a utopian desire to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. It strives, at its best, for equality and brotherhood, rather than prejudice and conflict. The problem emerges when the ideals are divorced from the reality of what humans are, and what the world is made of. Liberatory ambition, in the abstract, can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalized liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil.

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By Zachary Hardman

As a result, human culture is in the process of being consumed by the Machine. Something organic is being superseded by something planned; something natural by something technological. This is the anticulture of the Machine, and it supersedes and replaces the values on which older societies the world over are based. At the risk of gross generalization, I think we can boil those older values down into a simple formula. I call it the Four Ps:

1. Past. Where a culture comes from, its history and ancestry.
2. People. Who a culture is. A sense of being “a people”.
3. Place. Where a culture is. Nature in its local and particular manifestation
4. Prayer. Where a culture is going. Its religious tradition, which relates it to God or the gods.

Maybe cultures can survive, and even thrive, without one or more of these elements. In fact, some measurably do: nomadic cultures, for example, do not have a permanent link to a particular place, but are not necessarily less culturally or spiritually rich for it. Still, if you remove more than one element from this list, your chance of sustaining a cultural story in place and through time is slim.

Looking again at my home country, England, in the light of this theory of culture, seems instructive. England, like much of the West, currently seems to be in a kind of freeform cultural collapse. Why? Well, if the Four Ps have anything going for them, the explanations are clear enough. The English long ago gave up on the religion that formed their nation and their ­values —​­ Christianity. They are one of the most urbanized nations on Earth, and the one which urbanized earliest. Our memory of the land, and our understanding of it, is almost entirely dead. We are an urban people. And we have largely forgotten our history, or had it taken away from us, depending on your point of view.

For this reason, we have no meaningful folk culture. Folk culture comes from a ­folk —​­ a people rooted in time and place, with dirty hands and a particular perspective. The English are no longer this, and have perhaps not been for centuries. Finally, the redoubts of high culture have fallen, since at least the Sixties, to a postmodern faction which believes that the very notion of “high culture” is elitist, bigoted folly, and that nations are too. England’s cultural elite today, fired by a ­longstanding oikophobia, are far more likely to be found cheering on the toppling of statues than thinking about what to replace them with. When an elite regards its people with thinly veiled contempt, and when it sneers at its own ancestors, the culture it claims to speak for and guard is not long for this world.

This same energy seems to be displayed to different degrees throughout the nations of the West today, and has elicited a growing reaction from those who object to it. But it is nonetheless the dominant understanding, pushed from above by those in power. We have forgotten who we are, or we don’t like who we are, or somehow both.

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in “advanced” countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilization it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

The anticulture of the Machine brings with it its own values. They supersede the values of the ­pre-technological age, and they spring from the need and the drive of the Machine itself. We could call them the Four Ss:

1. Science. Where we come from. Science can offer us a ­non-mythic version of this story, and assert a claim as to the true (i.e. measurable) nature of reality.
2. The Self. Who we are. The highest good is to serve the self and ensure its longevity.
3. Sex. What we do. Both the highest means of sacral pleasure and, through public expressions of “sexuality”, an affirmation of individual identity.
4. The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming posthuman reality of the Machine.

If the Machine has an ideology, I suggest that these four notions are a fair summary of it. Perhaps, though, it is less an ideology than a theology. Salvation, in the modern era, comes not through eucharist, pilgrimage or prayer, but through government action, technological progress or capitalist “wealth creation”. Ideology promises us a material world remade for the better; unfortunately, as the 20th century demonstrated, it often ends up drowning it in tyranny as often, if not more often, than religion ever did.

The Four Ss, then, offer a kind of catechism for the Machine age. We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in “science and reason”, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

***

This is an extract from Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which will be published by Particular Books on 23 September.

We have a box of candles, matches, batteries and hurricane lamps stored for just this kind of occasion. Big bottles of water too, because our well runs on electricity. So do our solar panels, which switch off when the grid does. The stove that heats our front room is connected to a back boiler, so we can’t allow that to get too hot either when the grid is down. We’ve been talking about getting ourselves a generator for years, but we never get around to it. So much for self-sufficiency.

This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams is a novel set in rural County Clare during the Fifties, during the electrification of the country. It’s beautifully written and funny and moving. It seems to have no agenda and yet it shows well enough the mixed emotions that the coming of the electric wires brought to the countryside here. What was gained (easy to measure), what was lost (hard or impossible to measure) — but also what was illuminated. Not just previously hidden bald spots and wrinkles and layers of dust that a darkened cottage would never reveal even in high summer, but a world that, once the switches came, could never come back again. An older, stiller, subtler world.

I won’t say it came back again for the 48 hours that we were wire-free in our house. But something came. Some other rhythm. I sat by the fire with a whiskey and did nothing at all. We read books instead of websites. Teenagers had no choice but to emerge from their bedrooms. We’re a low-tech household compared to most, but let’s not fool ourselves — we live in the miasma created by the grid. We are the grid. Without it, everything changes.

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The illusion of a pagan West

By Paul Kingsnorth

For the first 24 hours, I dreamed of living forever without electric power, and I reminisced with my wife about how much better life was in the Eighties and Nineties, before the web emerged to trap us. But there is no going back, at least not until nature loses her patience. The net is being hauled in, and us with it. This may not be Progress, but it is some kind of teleology, some kind of march, some kind of forward motion. I loved the stillness, but two days in, I missed the electric shower. The house got very cold. We are puffy, modern creatures, unused to life without our miasmic carapace.

The stillness, though: I loved the stillness.

Before the power cut, I was struggling with my words. Maybe the storm came to save me. Two weeks ago, I made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos. Agion Oros — the Holy Mountain — is a thousand-year old Orthodox monastic republic in northern Greece. It is not easily accessible, and nothing happens there except prayer. This has been true for a millennia. Every time I go there, something happens to me, and it is never what I expect. I try not to expect anything, but Athos always manages to upset me. I don’t mean that it makes me unhappy: I mean that it upsets my apple cart. It knocks me off my rails. Like the words of Christ which it exists to make manifest, it is not possible to honestly engage with it and remain comfortable. This time, Agion Oros seems to have brought me silence.

When the power was out in our house, more was absent than just the lights and the internet. Some feeling evaporated. The electrical grid does not just allow us to wash our clothes easily or watch TV; it changes us in some way. Some indefinable way. It gives, but it also takes. It takes away the silence; alters our bodies and minds and spirits.

In his 2018 book, In the Shadow of the Machine, the philosopher Jeremy Naydler suggests that electricity is a spiritual force. He shows how ancient cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt understood atmospheric electricity as “a destructive power wielded by the deities connected with violent storms”. The Egyptian God Seth, for example, with whom the power of electricity was associated, “was a desert god implacably opposed to the forces of life”. In ancient Greece, electricity was a secret guarded by the Mystery Religions. Hesiod wrote of three primeval Cyclopes who represented the electrical forces, all of whom dwelled in the deep underworld. Until at least the 7th century, knowledge of this power was taboo.

Now there is a button for everything, and here we are. “A new type of consciousness” has permeated the world, says Naydler. “We may have the uncomfortable sense of human consciousness succumbing increasingly to the domain of gravity, as it became more and more overshadowed by the mechanistic outlook.”

Maybe when the lights go out, even for a while, and the current withdraws, a certain lightness returns. The gears and the cogs are forced into retreat.

Early modern experiments with electricity in the 1800s, explains Naydler, demonstrated that “an electric current was also seen to have a disintegrating effect on a substance to which it was applied”. Humphry Davy and other early pioneers found that applying electric currents to existing substances both broke them down and revealed their constituents for the first time. Many new chemical elements were discovered through this process that would allow science to forge ahead with its project of understanding, and thus ultimately controlling, material reality. This we call Progress.

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I like to complain about the Machine, but the Machine is in me, and is me. Electricity has done its work, and that “new type of consciousness” has colonized my mind. I have struggled against it all my life. The rationalizing, controlling, argumentative, wordy, left-hemisphere thing. The thing that does not contemplate, but instead argues. The thing that does not sit still, but instead writes. It has made me what I am.

On the Holy Mountain it was winter. The snow was thick on the peak and the woodland trails. It is a remote place, but it has succumbed too. They have electricity and internet, and the old mule paths have been replaced by roads, cars, buses. It was a mistake, I think. They should have resisted: should have shown us that it is still possible, even in one small place, to live without the miasma, without the new consciousness.

I still came home with this stillness, though. With this gulf within. It was prayer, I think, that made it. Maybe prayer and electricity are fighting a war. Maybe they are two kinds of hidden spiritual power, two forces which cannot be seen and yet which affect at some radical level the fate of our species and our world.

You can aim towards God, I think now, or you can keep the doors closed. You can let the electrical current pull you down into the world. It’s noisy down there. The current is noisy. Once the rooms begin to be cleared out, though, the silence comes. It starts to creep up. When you least expect it, it comes and sits in you.

In his book Man or Matter, Ernst Lehr, according to Jeremy Naydler, refers to the scientific revolution as the Second Fall. The first time around, Adam and Eve “succumbed to the temptation to acquire knowledge prematurely. This led to a certain illumination of human consciousness, but at the devastating cost of a separation from the original state of participation in the divine world.” The Second Fall, on the other hand, happened as a result of “human action outrunning knowledge.” We came to grasp and use natural forces that we did not yet understand. Forces like electricity.

“Men were exploring the electrical realm as it were, in the dark,” wrote Lehr. “It was a realm foreign to their ordinary ideas and they had not developed the forms of thought necessary for understanding it.”

It was deeply dark outside when the grid was down. There was no glow in the sky, no lights from within the house falling in squares upon the hard grass. A frost came in and settled on the lawn and the rocks and the car windscreen. The sky was cloudless, the stars were hard and crystalline. There was not a sound. The electrical wire that passes over our garden, connecting our house to the main line, can usually be heard to hum gently on a still night. Not tonight. There was no humming. Venus was low and golden on the horizon. I saw a shooting star. I heard an owl. I went back inside. The room was dimly lit with candles and the fire was low.

I still don’t feel like writing any of my ideas down. But I suppose I will. I succumb to gravity every day. The underworld gods of the electric wires do their work. They bring me down into the caverns of ideas, arguments, battles and will. Prayer lifts me, though. It lifts all of us, if we let it, above all the humming and into another silence.

Now I glance over at the box on the wall and I see, even as I am typing away, that the internet has gone down again. The storm is over, but the consequences are not. The consequences of the storm will never be over. Perhaps I will never be able to send you these words, and maybe that won’t matter. Words all dissolve in this ether. None of the words remain.

Only the silence, if you let it.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Paul’s Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.

The building of the Colosseum was overseen by the father-and-son Emperors Vespasian and Titus, to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem, which they had personally directed. In response to the rebellion known as the Great Jewish Revolt, which began in 66AD, Titus, who was not yet Emperor, laid siege to Jerusalem, putting the city and its Second Temple to the torch. To hammer home his victory, he enslaved thousands of Jewish prisoners and took them back to Rome, where they were forced to build the Colosseum. Titus had his victory commemorated in style on a triumphal arch that still stands, not far from the remains of his family’s amphitheatre.

I visited the Colosseum this summer. It was as crowded as I expected — which is to say that it was barely possible to move — but it was bigger than I had imagined. The sheer scale of the stones that Titus had his Jewish slaves shift (while quietly bedding the Jewish queen Berenice) was astonishing. The fact that, 2,000 years on, it is one of the most recognisable ruins in the world probably ought to tell us something. But what?

This question wandered around my head as I wandered around Rome. What is it about ancient Rome that still speaks to us? Why has everybody heard of Nero, Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius? Why do we all still know, two millennia later, about Roman baths, gladiators, straight roads, centurions, Vestal virgins and the Colosseum? I like to spend my holidays developing spurious and lightly evidenced theories about human culture while I drink my espresso. It’s my idea of fun. This time around, my theory was simple and unoriginal: the Roman empire never actually ended.

Yes, Rome itself “fell” to barbarian invaders in the 5th century, but that, as every Orthodox Christian knows even if no-one else does, was not the end of the Roman Empire, which by then already had a new capital in Constantinople. There was a Roman Emperor reigning until that city fell to the Ottomans in 1453, which was when the Empire technically ended. But that’s not really what I’m talking about.

What I mean is that today’s “West” is really just Rome under another name. Not just because the Western Christian Church was and is quartered in the old Imperial city, and behaved like an imperial power itself for much of the Middle Ages. Not just because, for that reason, “the West” was in many ways ruled from Rome until the modern period. It’s something bigger than that, and yet also more nebulous. It’s the fact that, despite the Christian or pseudo-Christian, veneer, Western culture still really has many of the same values as those of Rome.

True, we don’t take slaves anymore, or throw people to lions, or crucify them, and all that is due to the legacy of the most famous man ever to be crucified. But we’re still, in some ways, Roman. We still valorise power and straight lines. We still have Emperors, even if we call them Presidents, and we still have Empires, even if we pretend we don’t. We still build vast amphitheatres for entertainment, even if the entertainment is an AC/DC concert or a Premier League match instead of a lions-vs-slaves face off. We still use Corinthian columns to demonstrate our social status. And we still make endless films and write endless books about the Romans — rather than, say, the Greeks or the Babylonians or the Assyrians or the Ottomans — because, deep down, we think we are their heirs.

Very near to the Colosseum, you can also visit the ruins of the Forum and the Palatine Hill, which are much less crowded. Walking around the Forum in summer will take it out of you. Fortunately, there is a cafe on the site. I took my children into it to buy a drink, and came out with some more evidence to back up my half-formed holiday theory. The young woman behind the counter, who took my money with a cheery smile, was covered in tattoos and piercings, but this wasn’t what made her stand out. That stuff is barely worth mentioning in the 2020s. It was her T-shirt that said the quiet part out loud, and it was quite a contrast to the optimistic cross which peered over the lip of the massacredome next door.

On the woman’s chest was emblazoned a giant inverted pentagram. In case you were in any doubt as to what this was supposed to convey, the words below it read: DEICIDE 666. “That will be €20 please”, she said, still smiling. Being English, I smiled back.

Deicide turns out to be the name of a bad metal band which began life when I was a teenager in the late Eighties. As a semi-metaller myself back then, I was more than familiar with the anti-Christian iconography that was required by any band that wanted to make a splash in the metal scene. From Black Sabbath onwards, if you weren’t praising Satan, wearing inverted crosses and pentagrams and writing songs with titles like “Death to Jesus” and “F**k Your God” (both stone-cold Deicide classics), you were in danger of being left behind. But we all knew it was an act. Nobody really believed it, so it was all OK. Most of these guys were probably playing golf in their spare time.

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Our Godless era is dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

That was a long time ago, though. Since then, the Satanic, witchy and openly neo-pagan iconography has crept steadily out of the crepuscular corners of the culture and into its centre. In recent years, in fact, there has been no creeping about it — it has been a sprint. This, for example, was Ireland’s entrant for this year’s Eurovision song contest: Bambi Thug.

Bambi is an openly anti-Christian “non-binary” witch who performs what she calls “ouija pop”. Her songs include spells and hexes, and in her spare time she likes to practise “blood magic”. All of this makes her almost entirely uncontroversial in 2024. In fact, unlike the God-hating pioneers of the Seventies and Eighties, it makes her pretty mainstream. After all, other mainstream musical acts like Sam Smith and Lil Nas X have also been working hard to push the pagan-Satan-witch thing to the max.

What is the connection between Bambi Thug, Deicide and our continued fascination with ancient Rome? Pretty obviously, the answer is that none of these things are Christian. In fact, they are all openly anti-Christian, and we are increasingly obviously an anti-Christian culture. It is often suggested that the modern West is “anti-religious” in a more general sense, but this is not really true. Witness, for example, the easy ride given to Islam by progressive elites, or the open arms extended to Buddhism and neo-paganism, or indeed the patronising tolerance extended to the Bambi Thugs of the world. The West is not really against religion. What it is against is its own heritage. And that heritage happens to be Christian.

In my series of essays on the Machine, I wrote at some length about what I called the culture of inversion which now governs us. This is, at root, quite a simple thing, and it is not a novelty either. Ancient Rome went through something similar after the Christians almost miraculously captured its Imperial centre and the Empire turned, in a remarkably short time, against its ancestral gods and towards the new one that would supplant them.

Today’s culture of inversion is the result of the 20th century social and cultural revolution which some have likened to a new Reformation. It has manifested in the sexual revolution of the Sixties, and an accelerating trend towards individualism, radical liberation and technological solutionism. It is resulting in the reshaping of nations, families, cultures and values of all kinds. Most of all, it has manifested in a rejection, conscious or unconscious, of the religion — Christianity — which built the West. For better or for worse, that “West” is now being superseded. We are leaving what we were behind.

Where, though, does this leave us spiritually? As we reject our Christian past we leave an empty throne at the heart of our culture. An empty throne will always attract candidates to be the new king. Who, in the age of Bambi Thug, is vying for it now?

One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is “repaganising”. The argument is simple and in many ways convincing. “Paganism”, in this reading, is the default state of humanity, and now that Christianity is receding, it is returning. Paganism is here defined, in Louise Perry’s words, as “an orientation towards the immanent”; a definition with which most Christian theologians would probably agree. If the word “pagan” is frustratingly vague (it basically means “not Christian”), the religious systems it tends to refer to find their object of worship or veneration in this world, among created things.

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To Christians, this is a terrible category error. But it is also an understandable one. Worshipping, making sacrifices to, or performing rituals with the things we can see — trees, mountains, fire, the sun — makes intuitive sense, in a way that Christianity, which looks beyond this world, does not. This is why Christianity is a genuinely revolutionary faith; something we tend to forget due to our familiarity with it. But paganism often ends up making practical sense in more sinister ways too, whether by justifying infanticide, sacrificing animals or humans to capricious nature-bound “gods”, or simply by reducing us to the base level of our humanity, as our passions and desires are justified or promoted by deities who personify them. This, it is argued, is where we are headed as we move further and further away from our Christian past.

I think there is a lot to this argument; and yet I don’t think it is quite right, for two reasons. The first is that there are a lot of people around these days who call themselves “pagans”, and they would all reject the values that this argument ascribes to them. The reason for this, ironically, is that most of our new “pagans” are in fact Christians in disguise. Their values — human rights, feminism, ecological sensitivity, and broadly liberal views — are derived from Christianity, and the “old gods” they claim to worship often have suspiciously modern attitudes. It’s true that there is a minority of far-Right pagan types who hang around on the fringes, blathering about the volk and the “old gods” of the Aryans, but the fact that they are roundly rejected by the majority of modern pagans just helps to prove my point.

This brings me to the second reason. Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief. Pagans and Christians might tear chunks off each other for all sorts of reasons, but they are essentially fighting over the nature of the divine. They — we — are all religious people.

If we were really “re-paganising”, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing with the likes of Bambi Thug, Sam Smith and the rest is not the resurgence of a threatening new (or old) religion. It is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

As evidence for this claim, I offer you an image of the notorious drag queen parody of the Last Supper which was part of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. This featured a large lesbian in place of Christ, and Dionysius, god of dark drunken revelries, in place of the Eucharist. A pure product of the culture of inversion, this very public, very global tableau, was as anti-Christian an insult as could possibly be made on the world stage.

Or was it? It was hard to tell because, as soon as mass complaints began and sponsors began withdrawing, and nations began demanding explanations from the French Ambassador, our brave iconoclasts swiftly copped out. Lesbian Christ deleted the tweet in which she had described the tableau as the “new gay testament”, complete with an image of Da Vinci’s famous painting, and the organiser of the show put out a new story. Rather than being a parody of Christianity, this was in fact something called “the feast of the gods”. In the twinkling of an eye, as is the way of the things on social media, all right-thinking progressive people swung in behind this new message. After a few days, everything died down, and people began looking elsewhere for something to be outraged about.

Were these people “pagans”? Not if that word denotes religious belief. If this had really been a “pagan” tableau — if these people had been true believers in and worshippers of the god Dionysius, for example — then they would have stood by it. They would have damned the offended, and defended their gods. They would have made a case for paganism and its metaphysics. They would probably have been quite popular in some elite quarters had they done so.

But they didn’t: instead, they ran away. They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the “gods” that they were portraying at all. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, but which in some way seemed “queer” or “subversive” or “brave”. The fact that the images were none of these things did not seem to register. In some way, they were on autopilot: blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place. They certainly weren’t wrestling with the implications of what Dionysian worship would actually mean for society.

Some theologians hold that hell is the result of getting everything you want. If the choice we are faced with is between following God’s will and following our own, and if we no longer believe in God, where does that leave us? It leaves us here. But “here” is not a new pagan age. Not yet, anyway. Neither is it a “secular” age. We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.

In the West today, this means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing. Most significantly, we are now even ceasing to believe in the ideas which arose to replace all religions in the age of “Enlightenment”. Reason, progress, liberalism, freedom of speech, democracy, the enlightened rational individual, the scientific process as a means of determining truth: everywhere, these “secular” beliefs, which were supposed to replace religion worldwide, are either under fire or have already fallen too.

Is this an atheist age, then? In one obvious sense, yes. We are perhaps the first godless culture in human history. Religious cosmologies have differed vastly across time and space, but no society has ever existed without one. Ours has tried to, for a brief, violent and explosive time. I don’t think that time has long to run. So yes, we are living in an atheist age — and yet, that’s not quite the full picture either.

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What Pagans can learn from Christianity

By John Michael Greer

Atheism, like religion, implies some sort of confidence; some sort of actual stance. A-theism is a position. It states: there is no God, and it can state that because it has a set of alternative beliefs, usually those which emerged from the European “age of reason”: the ability of science to demonstrate universal truth; the objectivity of rational thought; the knowability of reality. Atheism often also refuses religion on moral grounds: religions, it is said, are archaic, irrational, unjust and oppressive. Some version of “humanism” is a better and fairer fit for the modern world.

All of these are positions. They are statements of faith in the world working in a certain way, and in the way that it should work, and should be arranged. Atheism can even amount to a quasi-religious system itself. Orthodox convert Seraphim Rose, formerly a committed atheist himself, once wrote that “atheism, true ‘existential’ atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God”.

Does our age believe this? Hardly. These days even Richard Dawkins publicly regrets the results of the ignorant anti-Christian fatwa he helped to lead. So no, this is not an atheist age either. It is not any kind of “age” at all. It has no shape, no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is simply a vacuum, a void.

This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror. In the Void, nothing is real, nothing has meaning, and nothing leads us in any direction but inward. When we get there, all we find is our passions, and they drag us in every direction we can think of. We have no idea who to turn to for help, and despair rises all around us as a result. In this culture, Satan is cool, but not because we believe in him: precisely because we don’t. In the Void, we all hate Christianity, but not that much. It is barely worth hating. Nothing much is worth hating, or loving anymore.

In the Void, we can believe anything we want. And so, we believe in nothing at all.

This can all sound apocalyptic: but what, after all, is an apocalypse? It is a revelation, an unveiling, a reflection of the failure of something. What is it that has failed us? The “Enlightenment”? The “West”? Some pseudo-Christianity we mistook for the real thing? It is probably too early to say. Perhaps we will never know.

No matter: here we are. And despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last. The Void is a phase; it is the place you come to after the end of a culture, and after the end of a theology. The challenge now is not to mourn, to cling or to look back. We are not in charge of this thing, after all. The challenge for us is to think about what comes next — and how to live in, through and with it.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Paul’s Substack, The Abbey of Misrule.

What did that look like in practice? It meant, for a start, that Ireland was now a republic rather than a dependency of the British crown. It meant that it was a neutral country, with no standing army. It meant that it would attempt to foreground and revive its own language, music, arts and sports, many of which had been suppressed under British rule. It meant that the government in Dublin claimed the right to govern “the whole island of Ireland, its islands and the territorial seas”, even though the six (mostly Protestant) counties of the north had chosen to remain part of the United Kingdom instead of being absorbed into the (mostly Catholic) republic.

It also meant that the new Republic was, at least in theory, a secular entity. Freedom of religious worship was guaranteed to all Irish people and the establishment of any state religion was banned. Significantly though, the same constitution recognised what it called the “special position” of the Catholic Church in Ireland. It also had a specifically spiritual — which meant a specifically Christian — flavour. Article 6, for example, which establishes how the new country is to be governed, states that:

“All powers of government, legislative, executive and judicial, derive, under God, from the people, whose right it is to designate the rulers of the State and, in final appeal, to decide all questions of national policy, according to the requirements of the common good.”

Meanwhile, Article 44 reads:

“The State acknowledges that the homage of public worship is due to Almighty God. It shall hold His Name in reverence, and shall respect and honour religion.”

Technically, then, while Ireland was always a secular state with guaranteed freedom of worship, the “special position” clause acknowledged that the Catholic Church was to be involved in the running of the affairs of state. The driving force behind the document was the Irish-American statesman Éamon de Valera, who, more than anyone else, built the Irish republic in his image as a veteran of the 1916 uprising, the country’s first Taoiseach (prime minister) and later its president.

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Is there anything left to conserve?

By Paul Kingsnorth

De Valera was a complex man. He was deeply Catholic, and his traditionalism deepened, as it so often does, as he aged. He was responsible for the reference in the constitution to the “special position” of the Church, and he was responsible too, in consultation with the future Bishop of Dublin, for sowing Catholic social teaching throughout the state’s founding document. The constitution guaranteed that the state would “guard with special care” the institution of marriage, and it prohibited divorce. Outside of the constitution, his government prohibited the sale of contraceptives, and handed control of the education system to the Church. Long after De Valera’s time, Catholic teaching continued to drive state policy. In 1983, for example, the 8th amendment to the constitution, which banned abortion, was approved via a referendum and inserted into the document.

That referendum — and others like it — show that it was not simply de Valera’s faith and the Church’s power which created the Catholic-inflected constitution of the Irish state. It was also the people’s approval. De Valera was no outlier: he governed a deeply Catholic country. The Church not only had an effective monopoly on worship in the state, but also had a highly respected position as an institution which had often helped the people fend off the worst depravities of British rule, offering both charity and political resistance where often there had been none. Though Ireland was never in fact a Catholic state — de Valera, despite his own faith, always resisted calls for an established church, and always supported freedom of worship — it was for many centuries a very Catholic country.

But times change. In Ireland, perhaps, they have changed faster than anywhere else in Western Europe. The rise and fall of the 8th amendment to the constitution could serve as a striking symbol of the speed of this change. In 1983, the 8th amendment, guaranteeing the right to life of the unborn, was approved by 67% of voters in a nationwide referendum. Thirty-five years later, in 2018, the 8th amendment was rejected in another referendum by precisely the same percentage of voters: 67%.

In the 35 years between 1983 and 2018, Ireland had been transformed from a traditionalist, Catholic republic, still operating on the principles established by de Valera, into a globalised, progressive EU member state, operating on principles imported from San Francisco and Brussels. The Church had collapsed in spectacular fashion, at least partly as a result of its own sins: widespread child abuse by the clergy had come to light, as had abuse of women and children in mother-and-baby homes across the state. Meanwhile, the “Celtic tiger” economy of the Nineties had flooded the country with easy money, leading to an explosion in construction, economic growth, corruption and wealth. All of this was to implode dramatically in the huge economic collapse of 2008, but even this setback did not slow Ireland’s apparent desire to flee as fast as it could from its rural Catholic past, and into a future as a progressive corporate tech hub: an Atlantic Silicon Valley, with more rain and more potholes.

***

Every nation is built around a story; a foundation myth. The foundation myth of the Irish Republic of the Thirties was that of a Celtic Catholic nation throwing off the shackles of empire and building a country for its own people, around their own values. But that republic died with the 20th century. Now a new one has emerged with the age of globalisation, and it has a new myth. New Ireland is progressive. It is feminist. It is individualist. It is tolerant. It is irreligious. It is digital. It is diverse. It is, of course, Not Britain — but it is also Not Old Ireland. The culture of inversion is in full swing in Eire, as it is across the West. The governing classes of the Emerald Isle now define themselves against everything they used to be.

The constitution, however, has been slow to keep up. Documents are like that. As a result, there has been a slew of amendments to it in recent decades, all of which had to be approved by a public referendum. The direction of these has always been the same: they are designed to strip out the remnants of Catholic social teaching and insert instead the progressive equivalent. Over the past 50 years, amendments have removed the “special position” of the Catholic Church from the constitution, legalised divorce, abortion and gay marriage, prohibited the death penalty and allowed for various centralising EU treaties to be signed by the government, all of which reduced the Irish state’s political reach in Ireland while increasing that of the EU.

Traditional Catholics have been very unhappy about much of this — some of my older neighbours will bend my ear about it for hours — but there is no doubt that it is going with the grain of the culture, especially that of the younger population. Progressivism is the new faith of this republic, as it is across the West. Official Ireland prides itself these days on Dublin’s rainbow zebra crossings, on the country’s increasing levels of immigration (which, however, are increasingly resisted and resented by the population as a whole), on its role as an EU hub for Silicon Valley and Big Pharma, on its pioneering stances on the banning of tobacco and the legalising of gender self-ID. All that is Catholic melts into air in what was, just a few decades back, the most Catholic country in the West.

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Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

This Friday, Ireland will go to the polls again to vote in the latest referendum on constitutional change. This time around, the aim of the state is to alter the wording of Article 41, which is designed to promote and protect the institution of the family — text which New Ireland regards as “problematic”:

“The State recognises the Family as the natural primary and fundamental unit group of Society, and as a moral institution possessing inalienable and imprescriptible rights, antecedent and superior to all positive law.

“The State, therefore, guarantees to protect the Family in its constitution and authority, as the necessary basis of social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State.”

That “necessary basis of social order” is based on marriage, which is why:

“The State pledges itself to guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded, and to protect it against attack.”

The notion that the traditional family is a “moral institution” obviously cannot stand in a newly progressive nation. Our referendum will thus invite us to delete the words “on which the Family is founded” from the above clause. Marriage — having already been redefined by the legalisation of gay marriage — is now no longer to be recognised by the state as the basis of the family at all.

But it is the second proposal for change which has really caused controversy here. Redefining marriage and family is, like it or not, pretty much a done deal in the modern West. The Irish constitution, however, took its protection of the family one step further: it sought to define, and protect, the role of the mother. Here is Article 41:

“In particular, the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.

“The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

As we can see, this patriarchal, sexist text discriminates directly against women. It claims that a woman’s place is in the home, and in doing so limits a woman’s economic choices. It is a relic of old Catholic Ireland — the kind of Christian-inspired sexism which has long held Ireland’s women back. This is why the government proposes to replace it with a new version:

“The State recognises that the provision of care, by members of a family to one another by reason of the bonds that exist among them, gives to Society a support without which the common good cannot be achieved, and shall strive to support such provision.”

Much better, isn’t it? No more mothers. No more women. No more “moral institutions” or “social order”. Progress! Hurray!

Except that it is not progress at all. It is, in fact, a corporate wolf wearing the clothing of a feminist sheep. The narrative being sold by the government and its supporters — which, as ever, means most of the country’s political, cultural and media elites — is that the constitution as it stands is a misogynist relic. The notion that “mothers” should put their “duties in the home” above their right to economic independence is the kind of prehistoric notion that should have gone the way of the dodo by now. Just as we know that families do not have to be based on marriage, and that marriage can be “non-binary”, so we know that the state has no right to insist that a woman put her “duties in the home” above her right to choose how to live her life.

If the constitution did, in fact, oblige woman to stay at home rather than working, then some of these points would be fair. But it doesn’t, as any visit to Ireland will swiftly make clear. Women here, as in any other Western liberal country, can do pretty much what they like. Ireland has had two female presidents already, and they doubtless won’t be the last. The constitution doesn’t limit the choices of women in any way. In fact, it does the opposite.

The activist group The Countess, which campaigns for women’s rights in Ireland, is doing an excellent job of explaining how the state is attempting in this referendum to con women out of their constitutional rights, while pretending to do the opposite. As they point out in a detailed argument against the proposed changes, the 1937 constitution does not oblige women to stay at home. Rather, as the wording makes clear, it protects them if they choose to do so.

Understanding this changes the tenor of the whole conversation: or it would, if any of the “progressive” classes would acknowledge it. Unfortunately, the power of the “chaining women to the kitchen sink” narrative is so strong that it has been easy to sell the proposed change, especially to young women, as yet another move away from Catholic bigotry and towards current-year equality. The Countess, though, sees something very different happening. It’s an attack on motherhood:

“Of those who stay at home to look after their children in their early years, a staggering 94.3% are mothers. No one can argue with the importance of the mother-baby bond and the need not to rupture this bond. In clinical terms, we refer to this as one biological unit, the “mother-baby dyad”. However, if you are in receipt of Jobseekers Allowance, you must prove to the State that you are actively looking for work only eight weeks postpartum, lest your benefit be taken away. Herein lies a glimpse of the soul of the current government and its actual views on motherhood and the role of mothers.”

Article 41 currently protects the rights of any mother who wants to stay at home and look after her own children in her own family. It has, indeed, been used in court to argue against the state’s attempts to force young mothers into the market economy against their will. Opinion polls conducted recently show that an astonishing 69% of Irish mothers would prefer to stay at home with their children, rather than going out to work.

Here, then, is the nub of the matter: the vast majority of mothers in this country would rather bring up their own children in their own home than have to go to work. Article 41 of the constitution specifically guarantees their right to do so. Now the government wants to abolish it. In the name of “women’s rights”, the state intends to remove a constitutional right that most women value.

Why would they do this? The Countess offers an answer:

“Article 41.2 is a bulwark against the kind of neoliberal values that characterise this coalition, whereby all that matters is GDP and the meta economy. Mothering and the running of households is done by women, and this is explicitly and remarkably recognised for its benefit to all of society under Article 41.2. But, according to neoliberal economics, these things hold no value and therefore must be erased. In this worldview, mothering is disposable, replaceable and worthless, because it doesn’t contribute to GDP … In so doing, the unique contribution of women to society is erased.”

The Irish state is removing the rights of Ireland’s mothers in the name of “moving on” from de Valera’s Bad Old Catholic Ireland. What will be happening on Friday is a bait-and-switch operation. The people of Ireland are being told that by rewriting their constitution they can “liberate” the nation’s women from an outdated, patriarchal story. If they choose to do so, they will find instead that women have been “liberated” from their right to bring up their own children in their own home, rather than being forced into the market economy by a state which has no interest in anything beyond economic growth and a desire to seem “progressive” in the eyes of its EU neighbours.

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What we are seeing here is a familiar story across the West today: the collusion of progressive values and corporate power. As so often, “liberation” from some notional “oppression” just happens to dovetail nicely with the need of the state and the corporation for more labour, more consumption, more expressive individualism. Progressive ideology and corporate capitalism march ahead, hand in hand, singing songs of growth and progress.

But will the New Ireland’s attempt to abolish motherhood in the name of that progress succeed, or will it be a bridge too far? Ireland’s referendum questions ought to help focus our minds on the much bigger cultural inquiry that we are all refusing to face in the age of the Machine: what do we — in Ireland, in Europe, in the West — actually think a human is for?

Soon enough, we’re going to find out.

*

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

Everyone, everywhere, lives by a story. This story is handed to us by the culture we grow up in, the family that raises us, and the worldview we construct for ourselves as we grow. The story will change over time, and adapt to circumstances. When you’re young, you tend to imagine that you have bravely pioneered your own story. After all, the whole world revolves around you. As you age, though, you begin to see that much of what you believe is in fact a product of the time and place you were young in.

In my case, the time and place was Britain in the Eighties and Nineties, and the story we were immersed in then already seems like the product of a long-gone era. It was made up of the fading Christian heritage of England, the liberalism which had replaced it, an Enlightenment-era faith in science, reason and “progress”, and the much newer afterglow of the Sixties sexual revolution. This mess somehow gave birth to the weird combination of radical individualism and authoritarian thought-control that stalks the culture now.

Whatever the precise components, I grew up believing in things which I now look on very differently. To put career before family. To accumulate wealth as a marker of status. To treat sex as recreation. To reflexively mock authority and tradition. To put individual desire before community responsibility. To treat the world as so much dead matter to be interrogated by the scientific process. To assume our ancestors were thicker than us. I did all of this, or tried to, for years. Most of us did, I suppose.

Perhaps above all, and perhaps at the root of all, there was one teaching that permeated everything. It was to treat religion as something both primitive and obsolete. Simply a bunch of fairy stories invented by the ignorant. Simply a mechanism of social control. Nothing to do with us, here, now, in our very modern, sexually liberated, choose-your-own-adventure world. We were with Nietzsche, we moderns: we knew the God stuff was self-deluding balls, and soon enough the apostles of the New Atheism would be along to rub it in for us. Dawkins would sneer and Hitchens would bray and the pattern of the 21st century would open up before us: a slow, steady crawl towards a world unclouded by anything that could not be managed or measured by the people we believed we had become.

It was fun, in its way. Now that I look back, I almost wish it had been true.

*

A feast without a fast is a strange, half-finished thing: this is something I’ve only learned recently. We are coming up to the greatest annual feast of all, the one that most people, whether Christian or not, are going to end up celebrating. I’ve celebrated Christmas all my life, mostly with no religious trappings, and I’ve always loved it — more so since I became a father. But Christmas, in historical terms, is only one of a number of great feasts that make up the Christian ritual year, which was once — and still is in those parts of the world which continue to take it seriously — studded with saints days, festivals, processions, and feasts.

The Christmas feast is the last remnant, in the secular West, of this ritual year that made us. Since I unexpectedly became a Christian three years ago, I have thrown myself into it with the predictable gusto of a new convert, and it has helped me to understand something about the world I grew up in: we wanted the feasts without the fasts. This, in fact, is the basis of our economic model.

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Why we cling on to Christmas

By Paul Kingsnorth

In the Eastern Orthodox Church into which I was baptised, as in the pre-Reformation Catholic Church in Europe, Christmas, like Easter, is preceded by a long fast. The Orthodox fast for 40 days before both major holy festivals, which are then marked by several days of feasting. The fast, as I can currently attest, sharpens the feast. It counts down the days, it provides a communal experience — everyone in the Church is following the same fasting rules together — and most of all it trains the body and the mind to do without, in the service of focusing on something higher. That, at least, is the theory. After doing this for 40 days, Christmas lunch certainly tastes better.

What happens, then, if you feast without fasting? What happens if your culture encourages you to feast every day, because your economy is predicated on endless, consumer-driven growth? Probably the same thing that happens if you decide that all borders, boundaries and limits, be they economic, social, sexual or cultural, must be torn down in the name of “freedom”. It’s like taking a child to a sweet shop and allowing him to eat anything he wants. For a while it’s fantastic, and then it isn’t. More, it turns out, is not actually better. More just makes you sick.

*

A century ago, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats and his new wife George were ensconced in their Norman tower house in County Galway, taking down dictation from the spirit world. Yeats had just published one of his greatest poems, The Second Coming, which reads like a news report from the 2020s:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

William and George were newlyweds, and only a few days after their wedding, George, who shared Yeats’s passion for the esoteric and occult, had begun to produce what spiritualists back then called “automatic writing”. Both came to believe that, as the text progressed, they were being given access by something or someone to what Yeats called “a system” that explained the narrative arc of human history. Yeats later laid out this “system”, based on George’s writings, in his strangest book, A Vision, published in 1925.

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The symbolism contained in The Second Coming doesn’t make much sense without reading A Vision. What, for example, is this “gyre” and why is it “widening”? Who or what is the “rough beast” which the last stanza chillingly sees “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”? A Vision answered the questions. Yeats and George had come to see human history as a series of “gyres” rising and falling according to a predictable pattern. A gyre, Yeats explained, is like a cone of time. It begins as a tiny circle, then spirals outwards and forwards, widening with each revolution. When it reaches its widest point, it is unable to hold together. The “widening gyre” begins to break down under the centrifugal pressure, and a historical epoch crashes to its end. But as this is happening, a new gyre is being born within the first, spiralling out in the opposite direction. In the death of one world is sown the seeds of the next. 

Each gyre, wrote Yeats, has a fixed timescale of around 2,000 years. The Second Coming is the story of the end of the gyre which began in Nazareth 2,000 years ago. The “Christ gyre”, Yeats prophesied, would come to an end in the 21st century. Something else, then — some rough beast — would begin its slow, slouching rise.

*

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cyclical theories of history, like occultism, were all the rage. René Guénon, Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler: the bookshelves were groaning with them. It was obvious enough, in the shadow of the Great War, that something was ending, and the most perceptive observers could see, in the rise of occultism and sexual libertinism, technological warfare and globalised capitalism, Marxism and fascism, what it was: the values and the heritage of the old Christian West. Religion as a way of seeing had been supplanted by a can-do materialism, which sought to transform reality through ideology, technology and science. God, as Nietzsche’s madman had yelled before Nietzsche himself did, was dead. The modern West had killed him.

Oswald Spengler, on the other hand, was not so sure. Like Yeats, the German poet-historian saw history as a series of cycles. His mega-study, The Decline of the West, which became an unexpected bestseller across Europe in the aftermath of World War One, detailed the rise and fall of various global cultures, the latest of which — ours — he called “Faustian culture”. Faustian because it had made a deal with the devil, which was now, according to Spengler, about to come due. The West had triumphed in the goal it had set itself: corralling matter through science and technology. We had become masters of the material realm and had conquered much of the world, but like Faust we had sold our soul for it. “We are the hollow men,” intoned T. S. Eliot, a traditionalist disguised as a modernist. “We are the stuffed men.” He had it right. You can be both at once.

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By the time Spengler was writing, he was already clear that all of the theoretical edifices constructed by the West to replace its old sacred order — which mainly manifested as political ideologies — had failed. Beginning in the 21st century, he predicted, the grandchildren of the revolutionaries and the rationalists, adrift in a failing materialist culture, would begin to seek succour in another place entirely:

“The age of theory is drawing to its end. The great systems of Liberalism and Socialism all arose between about 1750 and 1850 … Belief in programme was the mark and the glory of our grandfathers — in our grandsons it will be proof of provincialism. In its place is developing even now the seed of a new resigned piety, sprung from tortured conscience and spiritual hunger, whose task will be to found a new hither-side that looks for secrets instead of steel-bright concepts.”

The West’s gyre was ending, said Spengler. Exhaustion and decline would follow, but the failure of both technology and ideology would prompt a turn back towards the spiritual. “Before us,” he declared, “there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America.” Beginning in the 21st century, this would manifest as what he called a “second religiousness”. The Faustian West would experience a religious resurgence. Spengler predicted that it would begin around now.

What if a human being is not primarily a rational, bestial or sexual animal but in fact a religious one? By “religious” I mean inclined to worship; attuned to the great mystery of being; convinced that material reality is only a visible shard of the whole; able across all times and cultures and places to experience or intuit some creative, magisterial power beyond our own small selves. There is, after all, no current or historic culture on Earth that is not built around God, or the gods. None, that is, apart from ours.

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If this is true, then it would make sense that the collapse of the false picture painted by the age of “science and reason” — mind-body dualism, religion as evidence of superstition or stupidity, the ability of ideology or technology to create paradise on Earth — would bring about a return to the mean. And if the mean is what we might call a religious sensibility, then a resurgence of religion itself would be very much on the cards.

I think there is a good chance that, beneath all of the surface culture war battles, below the arguments about free speech and democracy, coursing below all of these necessary and inevitable cultural strains and tensions, this is already happening. It could be that Spengler’s second religiousness is already here.

*

If this is so, what shape will it take? Many different shapes, probably, and all at once, with the first being an old and a familiar one. In recent years, more and more people have begun to notice that, as the tide of Christian culture has receded in the West, the place seems in some way to be re-paganising, and that as it does so it is offering up a new set of sacred values. What might those values be? We could start with nature worship, self-worship, and a sacrificial attitude to disposable human lives. Then we could combine these with the increasingly obvious religious vision of the Silicon Valley crowd, with their AI Gods and pursuit of silicon transcendence. Add it all up and we can make out the dim shape of the second religiousness in what passes for the cultural mainstream: self-creation in a Godless, genderless, borderless, natureless world of all-seeing living machines. Welcome to the silicon paganism of the 21st century.

In response, we are now beginning to see a resurgence in genuine religion. Personally, and anecdotally, I am noticing this everywhere. In American Orthodox churches bursting with young families. In atheists or neo-pagans suddenly becoming Christians (I plead guilty). In my own speaking events about Christianity, which are suddenly inexplicably popular, and not because of me. Others I know report the same thing: for the first time in a long while, people are beginning to take faith seriously again. Actual religion — the thing that was supposed to die a slow death at the hands of reason — is emerging slowly from the shadows as the new paganism takes hold.

But as Spengler himself warned, there is no guarantee that a “second religiousness” will be an entirely benevolent thing. Knowing what we do of human history, in fact, we can pretty much guarantee that it won’t. There have always been two kinds of religion, or perhaps two ways of responding to religious teachings. There is the internal or mystical response, and then there is the worldly or political one. In Christian terminology, we might call these the way of the world and the way of the kingdom. Christ taught that the path home to God — which is the path to the true self — is a narrow one, and that few ever find it. He also explained that God was to be found not in the clouds or in the stars, but in every human heart. The Christian Way, as its first followers referred to it, is in other words a path of internal transformation — what the Orthodox call the “unseen warfare” that goes on in the heart every minute. The battle between the way of God and the way of the world: every religion I know of teaches some version of this.

Being human, though, we like to take these teachings and overlay them onto the world. In Christian history, this has often taken the form of crusading — sometimes literally — to transform the kingdom of Man into the kingdom of God by force. Unfortunately, since the people doing the crusading have not first fought their own unseen war to transform themselves, they end up falling into a neat little trap set by the devil, and transforming the Church into an instrument of repression, or simply a vehicle for worldly political activism. This can apply equally to liberal Christians who want to remake the Church in the rainbow flag-bedecked image of the “social justice” Left, and to conservative Christians who want Jesus to lead their battle to defend “faith, flag and family” against the woke libs.

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Why I am now a Christian

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Currently, this trend is manifesting most obviously in the form of a “cultural Christianity” promoted by anti-woke public figures on the Right. In this reading, the Christian Way is a weapon which can, in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, writing here as a recent convert, “fortify us against our menacing foes”. Ironically, this spiritual-warfare-as-civilisational-warfare attitude is most obvious at present in the rise of the violent Islamism which so frightens Hirsi Ali, and with good reason. The nervousness with which Europeans have been shopping in their Christmas markets this month is testament to the reality of the violence which some people think God will help them justify. The warning should be clear.

If all of this is part of the second religiousness, it won’t work: or at least, it won’t take us any closer to God. Religion, despite the many calcified failures of its history, is not at root a weapon in anybody’s culture war. Religion and culture reign in separate domains. A faith wielded as a stick with which to beat the “cultural Marxists” will end up being as empty as the consumer void it seeks to challenge, and potentially as toxic. C. S. Lewis had already spotted the trap more than 60 years ago: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.”

What Lewis is describing is Christ’s narrow way: the path of the Desert Fathers rather than that of Emperor Constantine. The divine irony is that it is only by walking away from the world that we have any chance of changing it. The future, though, like the past, will probably offer up both paths. We should expect a second religiousness to lead to new Desert Father-like movements, away from the world and into the wilderness, and at the same time give us more openly religious conflict in the public sphere. The two have always been related. The original Desert Fathers, back in the 4th century, fled to become hermits in the sands of Egypt in part to escape the newly civilised version of the Christian faith, which had recently become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity and Empire have never mixed well. When God came to Earth, after all, He turned up as a barefoot carpenter, not a proconsul, and he had nothing at all to say about politics, despite living at a time of deep political ferment in an occupied nation. He had bigger fish to fry. I think we should assume He knew what he was doing.

*

Western culture seems in many ways to be visibly collapsing before our eyes. Our nations, our family structures, our communities, our assumptions, our ecosystems: everything is under strain, under attack or bursting at the seams. What is the cause? Is it mass immigration? Is it post-modern relativism? Is it the woke Left? Is it the far-Right? And what is the solution? Is it a robust defence of “enlightenment values”? Is it writing free speech into law? Is it border control? Is it even more YouTube videos?

I think that all of this is just a form of temporary displacement activity. I think the real story is that our religious sensibility is slowly revealing itself to us again, emerging blinking into the light; our instincts are trying to return to their source. On some level we perhaps know this, but we are holding it off as long as possible, because to turn around and look into the light would be to accept that our whole culture has been trailing down a dead-end road since the Enlightenment. We can’t look at that fact, so we look at absolutely everything else instead. But the confrontation can’t be put off forever.

The biggest lie my culture told me was that matter was dead, along with God, and that humans could reason their way to freedom. Reason has its uses — it is a gift we are given, and we should wield it, like technology, as wisely as we can. But at root, humans are fundamentally spiritual animals. The future is not atheists in space. The future, like the past, will be religious. Even the the rationalists and the soldiers-of-Enlightenment are wobbling on the ground from which they once scoffed so proudly at the babushkas and the saints. It may be that the new gyre is beginning, quietly, to turn.

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Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

Our crumbling culture can be so hard to navigate. Religion can be hard to navigate too. But maybe Christmas can help us understand what it is, and what part of us it services. Religion is not, as atheists often assume and I once assumed too, a set of beliefs to be adhered to, or arguments to be made and defended. It is an experience to be immersed in. The orthopraxy reveals the orthodoxy. Fasting makes no sense until you fast. Praying is meaningless, even embarrassing, until you start to pray. If the Christian path is straight and narrow, we can do nothing but try to walk it, even if we keep falling off. God makes no sense until you start to talk to him. Then, strangely enough, all sorts of other things start to make sense too. It is hard, if not impossible to explain, and yet it is the simplest thing in the world. We have always done it. We always will.

I remember the first time I tentatively stepped into an Orthodox church to attend a Divine Liturgy. I had no idea what to do, or what to expect, or whether I even really wanted to be there. From the outside, to the Western mind, it all looks intimidatingly Byzantine — not to mention extremely long. But something happens when you stand, immersed in it all. You come to feel as if you are being carried down a great timeless river to an almost unfathomable destination that you could never reach on your own. But of course, you are not on your own. Not now. You will never be on your own again. You have come home.

Welcome to 2023. 

But what can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer depends on what you were trying to conserve in the first place. In Britain, which has been at the speartip of the modern revolution for centuries, all that was solid has been melting into air since at least since the Enlightenment, and the consequence has been the loss of almost everything that the likes of Edmund Burke, who already had his back up against the wall two centuries ago, would have considered worth conserving. Across the modern world, the process has been the same: something I have described as a great unsettling. 

In this unsettled world, the notion that the West is declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide is reaching a crescendo. Multiple reactions are underway to try and shore it up. The chickens of modernity, which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano. 

But if you want to argue about how to conserve or defend “the West”, you first have to know what it actually is. And to do that, you need to revisit its origin story.  

This story starts in a garden, at the very beginning of things. All life can be found here: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening’’ an image I’ve always loved. Everything, here, is in communion with everything else. 

At the centre of this garden grows two trees, and one of them imparts hidden knowledge. The humans, the last creature to be formed by the creator, will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain this knowledge and be able to use it wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation, they are only partially formed. If they ate from the tree now, the consequences would be terrible.

“Do not eat that fruit,” the creator tells them. “Eat anything else you like, but not that.”

We know the next part of the story because it is still happening to us on an hourly basis. “Why should you not eat the fruit?” asks the voice of the tempting serpent, the voice from the undergrowth of our minds. “Why should you not have the power that you are worthy of? Why should this creator keep it all for himself? Why should you listen to him? He just wants to keep you down. Eat the fruit. It’s your right. You’re worth it!”

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and we fall out of the garden forever. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The Earth is our home now.

This Earth is a broken version of the garden. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we can’t see any other other way out, and anyway we need something to do with our big questing brains. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.

There comes a time when the creator takes pity. After so many centuries of humans eating the fruit again and again, He stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Being human, we react first by torturing and killing him. But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice, and his sacrifice gives us a path back home. If we follow that path, we can come back into communion again, and be as we were intended to be, which is to say holy — a word derived from the Old English halig — which means whole.

That’s the story. Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among the ruins, and you have been all your life. They are the remains of something called “Christendom”, a 1,500-year civilisation in which this particular sacred story seeped into and formed every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in this story’s image.

But we can’t live for long among ruins. Humans are builders, and Nature abhors a vacuum. God abhors a vacuum too, I think, and whether we like it or not  and mostly these days we don’t — humans need God. This is why every human culture, forever, everywhere, has directed its gaze towards the divine. 

This is what we should understand if we are going to think or talk about “conserving” or “returning” or “restoring” anything. If you want to “defend the West”, you are talking about defending Christendom and the values it created, and/or the post-Christian liberal culture it gave birth to, which itself was based upon those values.  

Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror. Chesterton, again, took issue with Marx on this one. “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people,” he wrote. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” This is the process which Christianity used to condemn as “idol worship”, and today’s West is at it in spades. 

A lot of people who talk about “defending the West” these days are either trying to defend red in tooth and claw capitalism — the system which has done more to destroy culture and eternal values in the West than anything else — or they’re trying to defend free speech, individualism and the right to be rude on the internet. I would suggest that these things in themselves were the results of a settlement designed, in the process now known as “the Enlightenment” to replace the West’s original sacred story with a new, human-centred version. 

This was the liberal settlement. It assumed that humans were disaggregated individuals who could roam the world speaking freely, consuming freely and imposing a rational science-based order on the world, the better to achieve progress. It combined the moral values and universalism of Western Christianity with rights-based individualism and a faith in science and technology, and it brought with it a new origin story, to replace the one about the garden and the snake.

This new story told of how we were saved from superstition and ignorance by the holy trinity of modernity: Reason, Science and Technology. Along the way, we stopped believing silly stories about gods and monsters, which had been made up by our ignorant ancestors before we could see the harsh but bracing reality that the universe is just a meaningless swirl of matter-energy which came from nothing for no reason, and human beings are just gene-replicating machines. Now here we are, working out how to rationally manage the whole show. Now, here we are, a new kind of being: post-religious Man.

I grew up sort of believing this story. I thought religion was over and we had moved beyond its stupid superstitions. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I believe something else: that in a significant sense, everything is religious. 

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The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

I became a Christian — an Orthodox Christian — in 2021, much to my own surprise and initial horror, after a very long search for truth. The subsequent immersion in the Christian story gave me a much clearer sense of what was happening around me in the 2020s. Most of all, they gave me an understanding of the sacred underpinning of human culture. Marx claimed that the history of all hitherto existing society was a history of class struggle, but it looks to me more like a history of religious belief. “Belief”, in fact is the wrong word. A better one might be “experience”, or “immersion”.

The more I attended the divine liturgy, the more I realised that what I had once dismissed as silly superstition was in fact the stuff of life. In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Again: everything is religious. The only people who believe otherwise, in fact, are a few people in what we liked to call our “secular” corner of the world. We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game. 

So if everything is religious, but our old religion is dead, and the thing we tried to replace it with — rational, secular, humanist progress — is failing because it doesn’t meet real human needs, then where are we? What is coming next?

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A good person to ask is the perennialist thinker René Guenon, a favourite of our new king. Guenon was a Frenchman who became a Muslim, migrated to Egypt and dedicated his life to trying to save the West from its own materialism. He predicted that, save for a turn back to religion, the early 21st century would see the arrival of what he called the “Reign of Quantity”: the age of pure materialism in which we now live, in which every aspect of life would be be measured, quantified and subject to scientific assessment and technological management. 

Crucially, in the Reign of Quantity, religious feeling would become quantitative too. Humanity will never be able to shake off its desire for transcendence, but it will become unable to manifest that desire on any level other than the material. The object of worship during the Reign of Quantity, then, will not be some mysterious, untouchable, numinous force outside of creation: it will be the force of will in the material realm.

This, I think, is where we are today: the religious impulse is manifesting in material form, primarily through the use of technology to promote the human will. This phenomenon, which I like to call the Machine, is a material manifestation of the human desire for liberation through technology, in which all forms are dissolved in favour of the final and only sovereign: the independent rational individual, freed from the obligations of history, community and nature.

In the Orthodox Christian worldview, all of us are icons of God. Humanity was made in the image of the creator, and even though we endlessly fail to live up to this responsibility, it  gives us a clear point of reference. We know what humans are, and what the world is for. Once that story goes, what is the still point of the turning world? Nobody can agree. The only reference point in the post-Christian, post-liberal West is whatever we happen to want or feel. And since consumer liberalism has taught us that desire is not something to be transcended or controlled, but something to be surrendered to immediately and then valorised, reality itself becomes open to endless redefinition. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong or real? 

But let’s go back to our founding story again: back to the garden. What does our current state look like from that perspective? To me it looks simple enough, and I think it would have done to a citizen of Western Christendom too. We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator. This is hardly a new development: the Bible is effectively an 80-book warning against it, and most other religions have their own cautionary tales. Once you reject God, you are fated to try and replace him.

This is where our path is now leading us, and it is, I think, the main reason that the waters of age seem so disturbed. Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the “transcending” of everything from gender to biology, the growing of food and babies in labs: openly now, we seek to break all given limits, remake nature, build the world anew. We seek to become gods. The people who are building our new digital Tower of Babel are very open about what they are up to. If you don’t believe me, let them explain it for themselves. 

Transhumanist writer Elise Bohan, detailed a conversation she once had with a biologist at a conference on the future of transhumanism. “He looked me in the eye,” she says, “and whispered to me: ‘We’re building God, you know,’ … I looked back at him and I said: ‘Yeah, I know.'”

Similar sentiments are expressed by transhumanist philosopher Martine Rothblatt, who claims, “We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful and beneficent. Geoethical nanotechnology will ultimately connect all consciousness and control the cosmos.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head of engineering and philosopher-general of of the robot apocalypse is more succinct. “Does God exist?” he asks. “I would say: not yet.”

To return to where we started, we might say that transhumanism — the silicon manifestation of our new faith — aims not so much to eat from the tree of life, as to genetically engineer a new one, and plant it wherever the hell we like. We are on the verge of a revolution now, and it may make the Enlightenment look like a tea party. The entire basis of reality is being rewritten, or so we tell ourselves. Whole generations are growing up with a closer relationship to screen-based abstraction than to manual work or to the natural world. They have been convinced that the world is our playground, and that everything from history to human nature to sexual dimorphism can be changed at will. 

We are consciously making ourselves post-human, even as we strive to make the world post-natural and post-wild. If the age you live in is starting to take on the flavour of a war over the very meaning of reality itself — which is to say, a religious war — well, that’s because it is. 

What, in this world, can we possibly “conserve”? Nothing. In a culture which does not agree that nature exists, or that we have some basic, shared assumptions about reality, the question barely even makes sense. The challenge now is not to ask what we can “conserve” or “restore”. We have to go much further back. We have to dig down to the foundations. 

Our challenge now is to choose our religion. Try to avoid the challenge and your faith will be chosen for you: you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age: the quest to build the digital Tower of Babel. The attempt to “build god” and replace nature through technology. The path of the snake.

What can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? Pray.

I was once one of those people. I’m a lower-middle class, suburban British bloke from Generation X, who was brought up to believe that the system broadly worked and was mostly fair, at least for people like me. The government did its best, though sometimes the wrong people got in; the police were here to help; there were career ladders and housing ladders, and if you worked hard and behaved responsibly and paid your taxes, then society would reward you for it.

Of course, this was a partial story, as all stories are. Plenty of people would have cackled cynically at it from the start, while others, including me, disabused themselves of it by degrees. I spent 30 years writing about the degradation of nature and culture by the state-capitalist technocracy that governs us, so I imagined I was a hard-bitten realist. But the last few years taught me that I was still too naive about the mythic “social contract” with the state that I apparently entered into at birth, despite having never signed a thing.

As I say, it’s not just me. The loss of faith across the West in our institutions, leaders and representatives in recent years has been radical. When, I wonder, did that contract expire? Maybe in 2003, when the lies with which the Iraq war was launched were so blatant that even those telling them seemed unconvinced. Or maybe later, in 2016, when Brexit happened and Donald Trump happened and European “populism” happened, and suddenly any opposition to liberal globalism became fascism or bigotry or the work of Russian bots.

But it was the pandemic — or rather, the response to it — that changed everything for me. I hadn’t been prepared see, in my allegedly free and democratic country, a merger of corporate power, state power and media power in the service of constructing a favoured narrative, of the kind which had previously only characterised totalitarian regimes. What the Covid regime brought home to me was that I had not, despite what I believed, really understood the real nature of power until I saw it exercised in its raw form over my life. Specifically, I had not understood the power of the state.

Nothing has the power or reach of a modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history, and that power only grows and deepens. The momentum of a state is always towards the centre, always towards the agglomeration of more power. A state is like a black hole: at a certain point, it begins to suck in everything around it. As it grows, it will tell stories that justify its existence. Democracy, liberty and progress are some of the more recent banners beneath which state power has gathered, but there have been others: racial or ethnic homogeneity, human equality, religious purity. All of these stories have the potential to unite a people around a state core.

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Who will stand against Progress?

By Paul Kingsnorth

What happens, then, when large and powerful states, along with the transnational institutions and corporations they promote and protect, are all driving towards the same goal: the universalisation of an American-style “global economy” and its associated culture? This has been the story of the world since 1945, and the result is the world’s first truly global system. The expansion of this system has created problems — ecological degradation, social unrest, cultural fragmentation, economic interdependence, systemic fragility, institutional breakdown. The system has responded with more expansion and more control, growing bigger, more complex and more controlling.

Modernity can best be seen as a system of enclosure, fuelled by the destruction of self-sufficient lifeways, and their replacement with a system of economic exploitation, guided by states and exercised by corporations. The disempowering of people everywhere, and the deepening of technological control, is the inevitable result, and the pandemic overreach will not be the last example. So what is the correct response to the problem of power, and the reach of the state? Avoid it? Hide from it? Confront it? Ignore it? All of these? Or something else? Can we escape the state and live differently? If so, how?

Jacques Ellul, the great theorist of technocracy, had his own answer to these questions: “The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilisation is to give them the slip, to learn how to live on the edge of this totalitarian society.” Ellul, I think, was right. The state is the chief enemy of human freedom. It cannot be conquered or replaced. But sometimes, under the right circumstances, it can be evaded.

In his 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed — subtitled, “an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia” — the historian James C. Scott offers up some historical examples. Scott’s aim is twofold: firstly, to lay out the history of a vast upland region he calls “Zomia”, straddling territories from India to Malaysia, which has managed over centuries to avoid assimilation by encroaching states. And secondly, to rewrite the standard story of historical progress as it applies to the region. The “hill tribes” and “barbarians” living outside civilisation’s walls, he says, are neither “left behind” by “progress”, nor the “remnants” of earlier “backwards” cultures; they are in fact escapees. “Hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppression of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour, epidemics and warfare.”

Scott’s thesis is that throughout history, escaping from the reach of oppressive states has been a popular aim, and that in response, some cultures have developed sophisticated ways of living in hard-to-govern “shatter zones”, which allow them to avoid being assimilated. Standard-issue historical accounts of “development”, he says, are really the history of state-making, written from the state’s point of view: they pay no attention to “the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness”. Yet that history — whether of hill tribes, runaway slaves, gypsies, maroons, sea peoples or Marsh Arabs — is global and ongoing. Taking it into account, says Scott, would “reverse much received wisdom about ‘primitivism’”. Instead, we would read a history of “self-barbarisation”: a process of reactive resistance, of becoming awkward, of making a community into a shape that it is hard for the state to absorb, or even to quite comprehend.

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The state, says Scott, is fundamentally a colonial entity. In its youthful vigour, it will institute a process of “internal colonisation”, creating a homogenised “national identity” from the various cultures it governs, flattening language and dialect and telling a story in which loyalty to community or place becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the state. Later that colonisation process may move beyond its borders, as the state projects its power onto more distant peoples, assimilating them too. This is enclosure at work, and it is never voluntary. Like laissez-faire capitalism, or aristocracy, the state — which has only existed for the last 1% of human history — did not simply “evolve” as some logical phase of human “development”. It was created, by the use of raw power, through land seizures, slavery, enforced labour and taxation.

For this reason, escaping from state power and creating different ways of living in the “shatter zones” was an attractive option. Those zones were usually to be found in hard-to-reach places; in Southeast Asia, this meant the hills and mountains. Their peoples — the “tribals” or “Adivasi” or “savages” — would not, in most cases, be entirely cut off from lowland life; they would often trade with urban centres, for example, and some would raid them, too, if they got the chance. But they would keep their distance, wary of being corralled by the state machinery.

The Asian states, as they expanded, sought to impose the religious, cultural and economic practices of the dominant ethnic group — be it Thai, Burman, Han or Kinh — onto disparate peoples. When European colonists arrived in Asia, they simply continued the process, with a new cultural flavour. The official religion now might be Christianity rather than Buddhism, and “civilisation” might mean British rather than Han manners, but to the peripheral peoples the result was little different. British imperialist Sir Stamford Raffles spoke not only for his Empress, but for the mind of the colonial state across history, when he wrote of Sumatra:

“Here I am the advocate of despotism … Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes, subject to no general government … At present people are wandering in their habits as the birds of the air, and until they are congregated and organised under something like authority, nothing can be done with them.”

But such localised, potentially dispersed cultures can be tough to conquer. In the 1890s, the British found the conquest of the Kachin and Palaung hill peoples in Zomia almost impossible. Because they had “never submitted to any central control”, complained the chief commissioner responsible for the process, they had to be attacked “hill by hill” to ensure their submission. The historian Malcom Yapp invented a wonderful term for this kind of dispersed culture of refusal: jellyfish tribes. In Scott’s words, jellyfish tribalism is “a process of defending cultural and economic autonomy by scattering” to “make the group invisible or unattractive as object of appropriation”. The Berbers of North Africa, faced with colonisation by the Arabs, had their own way of putting this: divide that ye be not ruled. Lois Beck, who studied tribal culture in Iran, pointed to the same tactic in use there: “Large tribal groups divided into smaller groups to be less visible to the state and escaped its reach.”

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All of this points to some potential ways forward for those who fear the continued expansion of the increasingly globalised, technocratic state today. The challenge, it seems to me, is to move beyond pat political formulations of “resistance”, and begin to think instead like the hill tribes of Zomia. To think about becoming barbarians by choice. To begin to build parallel systems — economies and cultures — which are hard to assimilate, and have a robustness to them which can last. To construct “cultures of refusal”.

But how could this actually be done? The modern West is not like Zomia — indeed, as Scott himself points out, modern Zomia is not like Zomia used to be either, with many of its stateless people now being rapidly absorbed into state systems, which new technologies have made more powerful and far-reaching than ever. What hope of any kind of alternative life in a hyper-connected, monitored, digital age? Even if we wanted to retreat to the margins to build our own community, how many of us could do it? And what would make that community more robust than the last counter-cultural wave of “intentional communities”, which sprang up after the Sixties, and failed to create utopia?

This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail — but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal; survival in order to uphold the values of a true human life. There is no easy or standardised way to emulate what Scott calls the “state-repelling characteristics” of the Zomians, but there is one question it might be useful for anyone who seeks to evade Leviathan to ask themselves: what kind of barbarian do I want to be?

In ancient China, the state distinguished between two different kinds of barbarian outsider: the raw (sheng) and the cooked (shu). A 12th-century document detailing the relationship of the Li people with the Chinese state speaks of the “cooked Li” as those who have submitted to state authority and the “raw Li” as those who “live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or do not supply labour”. But while the raw Li were clearly enemies of the state, the cooked Li were not exactly friends either. State officials “suspected them of outward conformity while slyly co-operating with the raw Li”. The raw barbarians lived outside the walls and the cooked lived within, but neither were really to be trusted.

What we see here, then, is two potential escape routes: one outside, one inside. Shatter zones do not have to literally be in the hills: they can be within our homes and even within our hearts. My heart soars whenever I hear of some remote monastery or surviving rooted community with no online access or even electricity, whose people know exactly where they stand: outside the state, the better to see God and experience creation. Such places are the work of the raw barbarians, and we need more of them.

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But most people are cooked barbarians. We are, to different degrees, in the state but not of it. Perhaps we look like good citizens on the outside. But if we coalesce as a jellyfish tribe, we can begin to dissociate ourselves from the state, while creating alternatives to it. Plenty of people are already doing this. They create cultures-within-cultures, parallel economies and ways of living. Like small furry mammals running unnoticed beneath the feet of the tyrannosaurs, we can thus build our own little worlds on the margins and wait for the coming of the meteor, which we can already see coming in the very un-sustainability of technological modernity. The mice don’t attack the dinosaurs, and neither do they wait for them to die out: they just avoid them as best they can, and get on with their work.

What Scott’s book shows me above all is that the tension between expanding power centres and free peoples is eternal and never-ending. Throughout history there has been an ongoing flow of assimilation and breakout, consolidation and collapse. There has never been any system as large, as overwhelming, as inhuman, as all-seeing, as technological modernity, and yet Rome and Babylon and Han China operated on the same principles. The shatter zones that rise in response are sometimes geographical, sometimes psychological and spiritual, and often all of these at once. Today, some of those shatter zones are at least partly online; and despite my own instinctive Luddism, I have to accept that such spaces are meeting points for state-repelling people who might never meet in real life. I have to accept, too, that using technology to resist technocracy can be of benefit, even though it can also be a trap.

In the age of Starlink, eyeball scans, AI bots and digital passports, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere to hide. But humans are creative. There are countless practical ways in which cultural refusal can manifest in our everyday lives. I am a writer, for instance, who is currently watching the publishing industry being taken over by political puritans who are purging incorrect thoughts from the shelves, while rooting around in the past for baddies to cancel. I can whine about this, or I can support or start new publishers on the margins who do things differently. The same might be true for music, art, academia, food-growing. Everything is compromised; nothing is easy. But building anew, retreating to create, being awkward and hard to grasp, finding your allies and establishing your zone of cultural refusal, whether in a mountain community or in your urban home: what else is there?

Whatever culture you come from, it will offer up at least one folk hero who earned his or her status through state-repelling behaviour. In England, we have hundreds of pirates, highwaymen, outlaws and rebels to choose from. You all know the name of the most famous: England’s shadow self, Robyn Hode, who flits through his shatter zone, the English greenwood, with his merry band of refuseniks in tow. We could do worse than to find our own greenwood and take our stand there, beneath the shelter of its great, ancient oaks.

*

A longer version of this essay was first published at the Abbey of Misrule.

Goldsmith founded The Ecologist in the early Seventies to challenge the myth of Progress, which was then at its bombastic and all-conquering peak. It was the age of big dams and DDT and space programmes, and Teddy was having none of it. Inspired by his studies and experience of indigenous communities, he was contemptuous of the “development” pushed by Western governments, NGOs and transnational corporations, which to his mind was colonisation disguised as charity. He believed that modernity was destroying both culture and nature, and that we should return to the models of the past, an argument which he laid out most convincingly in his magnum opus, The Way.

But Teddy was not an easy man to work with. He was chaotic and disorganised, he delighted in controversy, and he had what I regarded back then, in my youthful arrogance, as a ridiculous resistance to actually making himself understood. He would never use a simple word when he could invent a more complicated one, and if you ever dared to use the word “accessible” in his presence, he would go red in the face under his whitening beard.

These days, under my own whitening beard, I find that I’m almost entirely on his side, but back then I thought that greater accessibility was precisely what his work, and that of the wider green movement, desperately needed. This was before anyone in the media had heard of climate change or “sustainability”. Greta Thunberg was only a glint in her father’s eye. But I wanted to save the whole world all by myself, and I knew that the first step towards doing that was to tell the whole world precisely what was wrong with it, in easy language and with big pictures attached.

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So when Teddy told me one day, with some relish, that he was writing a book called Against Progress, I found myself spitting nails. What was the silly old sod doing that for? Did he want to alienate everybody? Didn’t he realise that this was the equivalent of insulting somebody’s religion in public? Why couldn’t he at least try to reach the mainstream with his important arguments? People needed to hear them urgently, so that we could change course! Couldn’t he at least, if only in the cause of saving the planet, try to be more… accessible?

Teddy never wrote that book, but I’ve purloined the title and used it here in his honour, and in acknowledgement of my wrongness. In the quarter of a century since then, the green argument has been made so “accessible” that it has been entirely absorbed and redirected by the system it set out to challenge, something that Teddy could probably see coming even if I couldn’t. Now, in the age of vat-grown eco-food, industrialised hilltops, killer robots and emerging machine intelligence, it’s become as clear as day that Teddy was right. Standing Against Progress is no fringe luxury, or eccentric tic: it is a first principle for anyone who is paying attention.

The work of what we have come to call Progress is the work of homogenising the world. I capitalise the word because Progress is an ideology — even a metaphysics — and if we want to understand it we need to grasp its foundational assumptions. We are trained from birth to see the living world and its people as a matrix of interchangeable parts, all of them potentially for sale. Our bodies, our nations, our forests, our heritage: Progress will not stop until everything is measured, commercialised, commodified, altered at the genetic level, put up for sale, forced into “equitable” relationships with everything else, or otherwise flattened and sold.

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The religion of Progress is leading us into the flames, as Teddy saw so many decades back. Those of us who feel this way need to have the confidence to say to: to denounce the religion of the age, to dissect it, to make claims against it. Those of us who seek to resist the emerging Total System, or simply to give it the slip, need an alternative worldview: something to stand for, and stand upon. Not an ideology, mind, and certainly not a blueprint for utopia. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place. No, what we need is something more old-fashioned: a stance. Even a politics. But what should it look like?

In a way, it seems like a superfluous question. After all, modernity has been the age of revolutions, and we have ideologies coming out of our ears. The last century has been an inferno of competing ideals on Left and Right and elsewhere, all offering a better world. But none of them, in my opinion, has challenged what Mary Harrington has usefully called “Progress Theology” at its root. They have just taken different paths towards it.

Various strands of socialism and communism, for example, have been pursued for nearly two centuries in the cause of abolishing or taming the monster of global capitalism. Some were beneficent, some were tyrannical, but none challenged the core values of Progress: all were centralised, statist, in love with technology’s promise and had their own idealist, rationalised notions of how humanity should remake Eden. Anarchism has lurked perpetually on the sidelines, but it’s barely been able to organise a meeting, let alone a revolution. The greens have been absorbed by the technosphere. Meanwhile fascism, National Socialism and their various cousins on the hard Right are infested with power-worship, a love of straight lines and marching columns, and an explicit call to impose the will of the strong on the unwilling bodies of the weak.

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Perhaps conservatism, then, could fit the bill? In theory, at least, it is the tradition which comes closest to offering a politics rooted in human reality. It promotes the value of tradition, centres home and family, values religious faith and refuses both the centralised state and abstract ideals of utopian justice. It embraces a society based on a notion of virtue, which itself is drawn from the cosmic realm.

But conservatism has failed as well. This is partly because it was always only, in Roger Scruton’s words, “a hesitation within liberalism”. Conservatism is a modern confection, a product of the post-1789 shift in Western consciousness (the “ism” is the giveaway). It evolved to slow the revolution, rather than turn it around — for how could it be turned around? Conservatism’s failure, in that sense, was baked in from the start, and by now, across most of the modern world, there is simply nothing left to conserve.

This in turn is partly due to conservatism’s other flaw: its love affair with private property and the sovereign individual. Both of these things can be necessary bulwarks against the top-down collectivism of the Left, but taken to extremes they lead to a top-down collectivism of another kind: oligarchic capitalism. That “conservatives” have been the foremost defenders of this monstrosity, as it strips the world of all the things which they claim to hold dear, is the greatest hole beneath their waterline. It is the reason why the political factions which bear the name are now little more than business cabals, throwing out anti-woke red meat to the proles here and there to disguise the fact that all they really want to conserve is their money.

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Yet if we look back further in history, there is a political descriptor that might, just might, apply to what I have been trying to write about here; something that we could perhaps pin to our lapels as we resist Progress Theology. I came across it in an obscure, 40-year-old history book, and a lightbulb went off somewhere in my skull. This, I thought, despite my instinctive loathing of labels and categories, might just be one that I could see myself claiming. Allow me to introduce you to the reactionary radicals.

Craig Calhoun’s drily-titled book, The Origins of Class Struggle, was published in 1982, and despite the title it is not a Marxist tome. In fact, it was written specifically to take aim at the popularity of Marx-inflected history, of the kind exemplified in E. P. Thompson’s famous work The Making of the English Working Class. Calhoun was politely critical of Thompson for imposing an anachronistic Marxist framework on the historical “struggles” of workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution, and particularly for labelling as “working class” people who did not fit into that category. For Calhoun, Marx’s binary portrait of a “proletariat” set against a “bourgeoisie” may have had some utility when studying the factory system of the late nineteenth century, but it didn’t apply to those artisans, farmers, small businessmen and families who resisted the rise of that system in the first place.

Those people — most famously the machine-breaking Luddites — were in Calhoun’s telling more radical than the later “proletariat” would turn out to be (despite Marx’s urging). While the industrial working class were fighting for their rights within the established factory system, the earlier rebels were striving to prevent that system’s arrival. Calhoun had a name for these people: “reactionary radicals”.

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In my work over the years, I have told the stories of some of their contemporary equivalents: Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, Mexico’s Zapatistas, West Papua’s tribal freedom movement, England’s anti-privatisation campaigners. But it was only when I read Calhoun’s book that I realised what I had been doing: tracing the thread of reactionary radicalism as it continued to resist the spread of Progress around the world. Calhoun’s framing explained my own work — and my own politics — to me in two simple words, and at the same time gave me an explanation as to why that work had sometimes been mischaracterised or misunderstood. Reactionary radicalism does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm. It is a politics from an older world.

Calhoun’s book is the story of the doomed resistance of the pre-industrial people of England to the destruction of their economies and associated ways of life. Accustomed as we are now to “work” and “home” and “consumption” and “production”, it can be hard for us to understand that for most people in pre-modern times, these amounted to the same thing. For an artisan weaver in early modern England, for example, home was where the family lived and worked, where children were born and reared and trained, where trade was carried out, where food was grown and eaten. Today all of this has been broken apart into small segments — turning the home into a dormitory, its adult inhabitants into both “workers” and “consumers” elsewhere, its children into pupils at a distant school, its parlour into a show-room for TV, tablet and gaming console, its kitchen into a store-room for shop-bought, processed “food”. What brought this about? The industrial revolution and the rise of the factory system. In a word: capitalism.

But those who resisted this process, emphasises Calhoun, did not do so for the kind of ideologically-driven reasons that a class-conscious Marxist might. What the reactionary radicals were defending above all, says Calhoun, was the “moral economy” — the polar opposite of the “free market” that was being built on the bones of old England. The free market commodified everything, from products to people, and sought to make that commodification global. The booming British empire was a scaling-up of what was already happening in England. Empire, in this sense, was never a story of “the British” imposing their ways onto “the colonies”. It was a story of factory lords, big landowners and a newly-empowered capitalist class destroying the moral economies of communities from Lancashire to the Punjab, and forcing all of their peoples into the new capitalist “workplace” — where most of us remain to this day.

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Reactionary radicalism, then as now, is a defence of a pre-industrial, human-scale system, built around community bonds, empowered people, local economics. The attack on that system may come via gunboats or trade agreements, redcoats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or digital currencies, but it will always suck wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders, just as it will suck the power away from local people and funnel it to national or international bodies. It will always replace people with technology, and it will always make consumers of us all.

The way that reactionary radicals, in the early years of the industrial revolution, attempted to defend the moral economy was not with the thoughtless thuggery that the propaganda of the victors would later suggest, but by a reasoned series of demands. The Luddites, for example, opposed new machinery in a way that was “thoughtful, not absolute”. They also, Calhoun, points out, “campaigned for the right of craft control over trade, the right to a decent livelihood, for local autonomy… Machinery was at issue because it specifically interfered with these values.” Technology, thought the Luddites, should be applied in a way which reinforced the moral economy rather than destroyed it.

Is it possible to cleave to a reactionary radicalism today? Or is it too late? For the reality is that the reactionary radicals of pre-industrial England comprehensively lost. The moral economy was destroyed, and we live in its commercialised ruins. Not only did they lose, but the ideologies of the modern age, both Right and Left, have an interest in burying their memories. The Marx-inflected Left wants no truck with workers who resisted capitalism in order to defend traditional ways of life, because those traditional ways stink of “reaction” and what Marx himself called “the idiocy of rural life”. Meanwhile, because modern conservatism has attached itself limpet-like to capitalism, its advocates today can often be found defending the very matrix of global trade, empire and unaccountable corporate power that laid waste to the last remaining “conservative” cultures in England.

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As ever, the modern ideologies fail us. And yet, reactionary radicalism is still to be found, if we look in the right places. It is especially prevalent outside the West, in places where traditional moral economies are still at least partially intact. Every time you hear of a village in China or India resisting a giant dam, or tribal people fighting eviction from their ancestral lands, or communities resisting vast mines, you are hearing from reactionary radicals.

But what of those of us in the “developed” world, where Progress has triumphed? Well, if the moral economy has been destroyed where we live, we are just going to have to start rebuilding it. I spent years of my life investigating experiments in doing so; my ageing but perhaps-still-useful book Real England contains plenty of examples. Perhaps we live in the place our ancestors lived, or perhaps we moved to our place from another last month: either way, we are part of the place’s life now. We can help turn it into a moral economy — a foundation from which to resist the values of Progress — or we can capitulate to those values. We start small: everything starts small, and the best things remain that way. All we have is our limited power; still, it has its own impact.

Reactionary radicalism operates at the human scale, and not at the scale on which ideology operates. Ideology is the enemy of particularity, which is why every modern revolution has ended up turning on its own people. From the mass murder of peasants in the Vendee by French revolutionaries to the Bolshevik slaughter of workers in Kronstadt, ideology is always the enemy of genuine, rooted communities. Real culture — human-scale culture — is messy. It cannot be labelled. The moral economy rarely makes rational sense. But it makes human sense. And that is what matters.

I was chatting to the log man as we unloaded chunks of dried beech into my driveway from his trailer. Usually he brings me ash, but ash is becoming harder to find now that ash dieback disease, imported into Ireland from Europe, is killing many of the nation’s trees. Our little home plantation, laid down five or six years ago, is not yet mature enough to keep us going for the whole winter, and we need help to make up the shortfall. So, beech it is this year.

In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories. No song we can dream up around a real fireplace can compete with what these boxed fires can sell us. “Thus,” wrote Michell, “the traditional cosmology is no longer represented by its domestic symbols, and a new, secular, restless, uncentred world-view has taken its place.”

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When you can no longer grow your own wood or cut your own turf to heat your own parlour, you are made that little bit more dependent on the matrix of government, technology and commerce that has sought to transmute self-sufficiency into bondage since the time of the Luddites. The justification for this attack on family and community sufficiency changes with the times — in 17th-century England, the enclosures were justified by the need for agricultural efficiency; today they are justified by the need for energy efficiency — but the attack is always of the same nature. Each blow struck against local self-sufficiency, pride and love of place weaves another thread into the pattern which has been developing for centuries, and which is almost complete now in most affluent countries.

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Even back in 1980, Berry recognised that the home had become an “ideal” rather than a practical reality — precisely because the reality had been placed out of reach for many. What killed the home? Three things, said Berry: cars, mass media and public education. The first meant that both work and leisure could, for the first time in history, happen a long way from home. The second — “TV and other media” — have played a role, since the mid-20th century, in luring us all into a fantasy world of freedom from obligation, and a limitless, fun consumer lifestyle. “If you have a TV,” writes Berry, “your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought.” Finally, the school system is designed “to keep children away from the home as much as possible. Parents want their children kept out of their hair.” Schools exist to train children to fit into individualistic, consumer societies; to internalise and normalise their ethics and goals, and to prepare for a life serving their needs.

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In this sense there is a case to be made that the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had in some ways more agency and power than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests. Certainly the feminist movement, in at least some of its iterations, has been thoroughly hijacked by capitalism. The “liberation” of women has often translated into the separating of women from their self-sufficiency, as men were separated before them, and their embedding instead into the world of commerce, whether they want it or not.

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Maybe this is all misplaced nostalgia; or at least, the shutting of the stable door long after the horse has been turned into dogmeat. Perhaps people leave homes, or don’t make them, because they just don’t want them much anymore. Maybe we are all loving our liberation. When I was a teenager, I certainly wanted to escape my family and its values — and I did in the end. But I suppose I always assumed there would be something to come back to. That I in my turn would grow up to be the thing that was pushed out of the way so that the world could be opened up before the young. This is how it should be, after all.

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Back in 1980, Wendell Berry ended his essay by suggesting some actions that could be taken in this direction. As well as the obvious — “get rid of the television set” took pride of place — he suggested that we should “try to make our homes centres of attention and interest”; to make them as productive and nurturing as we can. Once you rid yourself of the propaganda of the corporate media-entertainment complex (“a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household”), you will see new possibilities begin to open up. You will see, in Berry’s words, that “no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves”, whether in the country, the city or the suburb. “All that is necessary,” he suggests, is “the time and the inner quietness to look for them.”

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Those essays and articles could be rolled into one easily enough, and sometimes it seems as if they have been. The formula is always the same, and can be usefully applied across the political spectrum. Start with talk of the “rising tide of authoritarianism” all over the world, as evidenced by “populism”, Brexit, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orbán, Justin Trudeau, Donald Trump, Joe Biden or any other leader you don’t like. Move on to explore how much of this “rising authoritarianism” is reflected in environmentalism, as evidenced by Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, Bill Gates, Greta Thunberg or [insert name of bête noire here].

After this, list the historical inspirations for these new green authoritarians: Ted Kaczynski, Pentti Linkola and Dave Foreman should do for starters. Dig into the most miserable chans and Reddits of the internet and “expose” a few anonymised avatars promoting race war in the name of the planet. Mention the Christchurch shooter. Use the phrase “dark undercurrent” a lot. Chuck in the names of a couple of nature writers from the Thirties who became fascists. Mutter darkly about how Hitler was a vegetarian. Did you know there was an organic garden at Dachau? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Having got here, you can move on to the meat of the thing: sombrely intoning about the “new threat to democracy” represented by this frightening movement. Depending on where you’re coming from, you can now explain how these new eco-authoritarians represent either a threat to our God-given right to drive, mine, manufacture, fly, burn oil and freely enjoy the glories that only Western Progress can provide, or a threat to diversity, equality, human rights, LGBTQIA++ people, refugees, “global justice” and a woman’s right to choose. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: a non-specific but ominous call for more monitoring of “problematic” views, more work to tackle “radicalisation”, more laws to prevent protests and “hate speech”, and probably more internet regulation. For the safety of us all, of course.

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The problem, though, is that actual “eco-fascism” is notable mostly for its absence. Dark corners of the internet aside — you can find any craziness there, after all — it’s hard to find a single “eco-fascist” anywhere out in the real world. No public intellectuals, no writers, no philosophers, no politicians, no popular movements embrace anything of the kind. Plenty of people get the label applied to them of course — without the prefix, the word “fascist” has been a meaningless, all-purpose insult for decades — but they all reject it. I was in and around the green movement for a long time and I never met an eco-fascist, though I did have the pleasure of being called one.

So why all the dire warnings? I can think of two possible explanations.

The first is the simplest: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call “nature”, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and that everything we do to it we also do to ourselves. Change the climate out there and it changes in here. Erode the soil, erode your soil. Poison the oceans, poison your culture. This is how it works, and this is what we are now facing.

And we cannot face it, even those of us who think we can. Whatever we think our politics are, we have no idea what to do about the coming end of the brief age of abundance, and the reappearance, armed and dangerous, of what we could get away with denying for a few decades: limits. Those who point these limits out — and who point out, especially, that the very existence of industrial modernity might be the root cause of the problems we currently face — can expect to be smacked down with the worst insults our culture can conjure.

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This is one explanation for the mysterious rise of the ghostly eco-fascists. But I think there might be another. The phrase “eco-fascist” is a label which is increasingly being applied to the wrong kind of environmentalist: those who offer up a vision of humanity and nature that involves roots, traditions, smallness, simplicity, a return to previous lifeways. They are contrasted with the right kind of green: those who are modern, global, progressive and — most important — friendly to the onward march of the technological society.

Nearly a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Dark Ecology”, about the state of environmentalism. In it, I wrote about the emergence of a tendency in green circles which I called “neo-environmentalism”. The neo-greens — who preferred to call themselves “ecomodernists” — emerged as a reaction to the traditional green movement, which in its infancy had been relatively conservative, low-tech and focused on the human scale. The neo-greens rejected all this as backward, impractical and even dangerous. They believed, as I wrote back then, that: “Civilisation, nature and people can be ‘saved’ only by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering”. The “new environmentalism”, they declared, in manifestoes like this one, would be, as we might now say, “grown-up”.

Sucks to be right, as the kids say. Since I wrote that essay, the neo-greens have, as predicted, mounted an effective corporate takeover of most of the environmental movement. Examples of what we might call Machine Environmentalism have been embraced by the corporate sector, big NGOs, global institutions and most of the intellectual class, most obviously in the “Green New Deals” that are popping up like summer daisies in all corners of the globe. Meanwhile, the green movement is splintering into camps, determined by attitudes to the kind of intrusive and novel technologies that the Machine Greens are pushing.

In Britain, this divide has been illustrated recently by attitudes to green pundit George Monbiot’s latest book, which embraces the neo-green vision. In the humbly titled Regenesis, Monbiot, an urban vegan intellectual, makes a case — based, naturally, on the “peer-reviewed science” — for the “end of most farming” and the replacement of much of its output with vat-grown, bacterial “food” manufactured via “industrial biotechnology”. The vast acreages of land which have been stripped of their farmers can then be “rewilded” in various Monbiot-approved ways, which mainly seem to involve growing forests for always-on urbanites to go wolf-spotting at weekends.

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In promoting a high-tech, globalised food system (perhaps overseen by the world government he has previously argued for), and casually calling for the destruction of the basis of post-Neolithic human civilisation, Monbiot offers a perfect example of what a neo-green future will look like: utopian, hyper-urban, technological, rational and most of all, “efficient”. What matters now, as he explains, is mathematics:

“It’s time we became obsessed by numbers. We need to compare yields, compare land uses, compare the diversity and abundance of wildlife, compare emissions, erosion, pollution, costs, inputs, nutrition…”

Welcome to what the greens have become.

A number of actual farmers who are also first-rate thinkers have taken aim at Monbiot’s Machine Green dystopia in recent months (Simon Fairlie, Chris Smaje and John Lewis-Stempel offer some of the best critiques), but while they might win the battle they are, for now at least, losing the war. Only last month, a pioneering Finnish “solar food” company championed by Monbiot was given EU permission to roll out production of their new “sustainable protein” (as part of the “European green deal”). The company says that the laboratory in which it produces this “novel food” — which it calls “Factory 01” — is part of a “food revolution” that will, for the first time in history, detach food production from the land, the farmers who work it and the culture it creates. Excitable admirers are already explaining that this may give us the ability to one day 3D-print our own food. I’m salivating already.

Older, crustier greenies like me, labouring under the yoke of a pre-modern sensibility which makes us reluctant to eat the sludge and live in the pod, might feel that something has gone terribly wrong with the numbers-obsessed rationalism that underlies this new, corporate-friendly green technocracy. But we have no five-point plan of our own, and we can’t peer-review our intuition, so our complaints don’t convince anybody who matters. And now that the localists, the deep ecologists, the peasants, the small farmers — and anyone else whose human-scale vision might interfere with the march of Progress — have been conveniently designated “eco-fascists”, we are able to behold the only legitimate form of environmentalism which remains: a globalised technocratic, “progressive” push for “sustainability”, led by intellectuals, entrepreneurs and professional activists.

The green movement, long ago co-opted by the Left, has now been co-opted too by technocrats. For this reason, the neo-green (or should we say soylent green?) food future can’t be viewed in isolation. It is only one aspect of the unfolding phenomenon which has been dubbed the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — a revolution in which the Machine Greens, wittingly or otherwise, are playing a key part.

Dreamt up, like so many other catchy corporate catchphrases, by the World Economic Forum in 2015, the Fourth Revolution is a way of describing our historical moment. That same year, Foreign Affairs produced a book by the same name, to accompany the annual Davos gathering of politicians, business leaders and Bono. In it, the inescapable Klaus Schwab explains, in prose that could make a Martian invasion sound boring, the import of the times we are living through:

“The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanise production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third… It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”

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The rest of the book, made up of offerings from various scientists, engineers, politicians and philosophers, explores the implications of this “blurring of lines” between created and uncreated, natural and artificial, wild and tamed. Now that we inhabit what the neo-greens like to call the “Anthropocene” — now that we are, in H. G. Wells’s formulation, Men Like Gods — what do we intend to conjure with the thunder and the lightning that pours forth from our just and rational fingers?

All of the contributors stress that overcoming the old-school distinction between the digital and the natural is the essence of the thing. Neil Gershenfeld, for example, defines the “digital fabrication revolution” — the one which will soon be growing our tank-bred bio-sludge dinners — as “the ability to turn data into things and things into data”. “Intelligent” buildings, wearable sensors, implanted chips: six years ago, when this book was written, these may have seemed radical. Today, it feels as if they have been almost normalised.

Partly this is because of the ubiquity of Amazon Alexas, Smartphone apps and endless, boosterish narratives about the exciting future that AI is building. And partly it is because the Covid pandemic was used as a trial run for precisely the kind of technologies — smartphone-enabled passports, digital population tracking, media-driven narrative control — which are now increasingly sold to us as a means of “saving the planet”. It is no coincidence that some of the loudest proponents of Machine Environmentalism were also fanatical supporters of the Covid biosecurity state. We are being trained to like what is coming — or at least to shrug our shoulders and accept its inevitability.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Fourth Revolution, though, is what has been called “datafication”. The book’s chapter on “Big Data” explains that the knowledge available to each of us today on the Internet dwarfs that which would have been available in the Great Library of Alexandria, the greatest repository of learning in the ancient world. But size, as they explain, isn’t everything:

“Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it ‘datafication’. For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and ‘likes’ are datafied, via Facebook.”

Here we see the same “obsession with numbers” that George Monbiot demands of us as we contemplate how to produce our food and live in our landscape, and it reveals the elision between Machine Environmentalism and the elite-driven tech revolution it is part of. What we can see is that both achieve their goals through the process of datafication: the quantification of everything. The pattern of reality will be transformed into bits and bytes, comparisons and yields, numbers and statistics, until even novels and friendships and meadows and family meals on winter nights can be measured and compared and judged for their relative contributions to efficiency and sustainability.

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There is a rift here, and we should gaze deep into it, because there is something down there that we need to make out. It is the ancient rift between those who embrace the mindset of “datafication” — which is, in the form of sums and written language, one of the foundations of civilisation — and those who are repelled by it. I suspect it can never really be healed, because it marks the border between two distinct ways of seeing. The philosopher Jeremy Naydler has referred to them as ratio and the nous, but we could just as well call them left and right brain, mythos and logos, or — perhaps most simply — the sacred and the profane.

The Fourth Revolution and the Machine Environmentalism which it contains offer us a profoundly profane vision of the world. Life in this understanding is not a sacred thing but an engineering challenge. It is something which can be studied, quantified and constantly tweaked until we arrive at the most efficient version. This may be done with the best of intentions (or it may not) but the things which cannot be measured will, of course, be left out of the equation, and the things which cannot be measured happen to be the stuff of life. Love. God. Place. Culture. The profound mystery of beauty. A feeling for land or community or cultural traditions or the unfolding of human history over generations. Song. Art. They’ll “datafy” all of this soon enough, no doubt, or try to. But the kind of people who think that the Great Library of Alexandria contained “exabytes’ worth of information” rather than the collected fruits of hard-won wisdom are lost before they ever sit down to their datasets.

If you have ever wondered why climate change has so utterly dominated the green debate to the exclusion of so many other problems which stem from industrial society — mass extinction, soil erosion, the collapse of human cultures, ocean pollution — then the answer, I think, is here. Climate change is a problem amenable to numerical questions and technocratic answers. It is, furthermore, a problem which, almost by definition, can only be solved by elites. If you can’t read or understand the “peer-reviewed science” then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people — drawn, as all green “thought leaders” are, from the upper strata of society — will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen. If you’re wondering where you’ve heard this story before, just dig out your dirty old Covid mask. It will all come flooding back.

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Interestingly, some of the progenitors of the Fourth Revolution are themselves uneasy about where some of it is leading. Even Klaus Schwab, who these days is often lazily presented as a volcano-dwelling Bond villain pulling the global strings, admits to unease at the speed and scale of change. In the book, he expresses his timid concern about how our “quintessential human capacities such as compassion and co-operation” might be eroded by deep shifts like these. “It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self,” he writes, “and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation”.

Even as he proselytises for the Fourth Revolution, Schwab can see what is coming. Google maps and smartphone apps were always just the beginning. We are headed into a Brave New World of all-knowing Smart homes and vat-grown sludge for breakfast, and every step along that road will make perfect rational sense. A Panopticon world, remade at the nano level by the allegedly well-meaning, lies just around the corner. C. S. Lewis understood the trap well: “Of all tyrannies,” he wrote, “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

What the Fourth Revolutionaries never seem to grasp is that the question you ask will frame the philosophy you develop. If your question is “how can we remove all this atmospheric carbon to avoid what these computer models say is coming?” then the answer can only lead you to a globalised technocracy. If, on the other hand, the question you ask is “how can we build lives which offer us meaning, in alliance with the rest of nature?” then you may be led in a very different direction.

It is the first kind of question that a Machine society will always ask, and there will always be endless, multiplying justifications for asking it. Ecology, equality, feminism, democracy, public health, growth, security, the war on terror or crime or drugs or whatever: there is always a reason for Big Data. The control is always necessary to prevent a greater evil. Even a movement which once challenged this grim way of seeing has today been bought and sold by it.

For at least 200 years we have been thoroughly undermining the foundations of all of our assumptions. Now, new cracks in the masonry are appearing daily. Can we caulk them up with vat-grown eco-sludge and hope they don’t spread? Can Big Data come to our rescue? What can we measure, manage, monitor, to help us escape from this? This is what I think, though I often wish I didn’t: we are living now through what may be the final triumph of Rational Man. The tower he has made has nearly touched the very roof of the world. Every old story can tell us what will happen next.

Last Thursday evening we were camped on the shores of a lough, cooking our day’s catch on a grill as the sun set. Remote though we were, there was still — unfortunately — a phone signal, so my wife was able to bring us the unwelcome news from the outside world.

“Did you hear that the Queen died?” she said.

I hadn’t heard. I had been living in a different world for a while, but now the bigger, bleaker one had broken back in. I was surprised at the sense of loss that swept over me. You have to be British to understand this — and British at this moment in time especially. For my entire lifetime, and almost all of the lifetime of my parents, “the Queen” was just there. She was on the stamps and the coins and the telly every Christmas. Technically, she owned the whole country and had the power to dismiss governments and sack prime ministers, but we all knew she would never use them. Even republicans admitted a sneaking admiration for her sense of duty and work rate. At least somebody in the country, ran the subtext, still knew what duty actually meant.

The Queen lasted: nothing else did. Come up with whatever diagnoses you please, blame who you like, but you can’t deny Britain’s downward trajectory over her reign: steep, dizzying, painful. Only the Queen stood still, or seemed to, and as she did so she represented something much older than any of the rules we live by. A monarch has sat on the throne of England for 1,500 years. The meaning of this is mostly inaccessible to our argumentative modern minds.

Now we have a new monarch, we British, and sitting by that Irish lake last week I felt both sad and, suddenly, homesick. I felt that I wanted to be back in my country to share what was happening with my people. All the ceremony that is unfolding around me as I write, leading us smoothly and impressively towards the funeral and the coronation that will inevitably follow, embodies at once both the determination of the British state to maintain itself and the strange, proud, bloody-minded anachronism of the whole business.

How much longer can it last? The republicans and the rationalists have mostly been keeping their heads down this week, as the tide of media-fanned national sentiment roars over them. But those who want to “modernise” the country still further will be back soon enough. A monarchy is, after all, an offence against modernity. It is a hang-up from an earlier, more organic age, which at its worst is a trapdoor to a particular type of tyranny (our new king’s ancestral namesake ended up with his head in a basket on this charge), but at its best is a bulwark against another: the money-power of digital modernity. A monarchy is irrational, uncommercial and inexplicably mystical. It embodies tradition passed down through time. As such, it is deeply “unrepresentative” according to the current, constipated definition of that word, and yet it manages somehow to represent the country better than any elected politician, celebrity, pundit or philosopher ever could.

For all these reasons, a monarchy in the Machine age will always be in the crosshairs. What, after all, is the point of a monarch in the modern world? There is really only one: to represent a country and its history; to be a living embodiment of the spirit of a people. As such, the throne represents to its critics more than some putative offence against “democracy”: it stands for something whose very existence is increasingly contentious in its meaning, form and direction: the nation itself.

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I recently wrote about the home, and its degradation by the culture of the Machine. We are all being levered out of the domestic sphere and sold instead a pseudo-egalitarian fulfilment “in the workplace”, at capitalism’s behest, upending our family lives and diminishing our self-sufficiency. I suggested that the home can be a place of independence and of resistance to this process — for a real home is an economy, a dwelling, and a web of mutual care. For this reason, the home, and the family which inhabits it, must be broken if the Machine is to triumph.

If this is true at the domestic level, it can be true at the national level too. A nation is, at least in theory, a home on a grander scale: a home for a people. “Nation” is one of those over-capacious words which, if not used carefully, can mean almost anything and almost nothing. A term which can be applied both to an Amazon tribe and the United States of America has to be handled carefully. The connecting tissue, though, is that a nation is a group of people with a shared sense of self, forged through time. Quite how that “people” is constituted or defined is as varied as the nation itself, which may be of the tribal, ethnic, civic or imperial variety. But a nation remains a signifier of group belonging, something which seems to have defined humans, for better or for worse, since humans have been around.

Like a monarchy, then, a nation can be hard to define, or perhaps even to justify, at least on reason’s terms, and yet it offers the human psyche something that it seems to need. It should be obvious enough at this point what our Machine anti-culture has to say about this kind of thing. It has to say: no. At its best, a nation is both a home for a people and a repository of history. At its very best, it may also be built around some spiritual or cultural story that transcends Machine values, and its laws or structures may offer its people something other than participation in the metastasising consumer globoculture. Even if our nation does not, in fact, offer us any of this, it is clear that growing numbers of people would like it to. This explains the rift between “nationalism” and “globalism”, which defines much of our current moment.

That rift is in many ways a pushback against the anti-national sentiment that has been evident amongst Western cultural elites for decades. Throughout my lifetime, a relentless deconstruction of the legitimacy of nationhood has been a constant background thrum, rising in recent years to a devouring roar. The right to national self-determination is a founding principle of international law, and yet speaking up in favour of it today is enough in some circles today to see you accused of blood and soil nativism. As for defending actual links between people and place across time: don’t even think about it, unless you fancy being labelled a white supremacist.

To understand the reason for this attitude, we need to understand that Europe has not yet recovered from the trauma of the Second World War. If the Great War laid bare the failures of the old order, then World War II, for Europeans of a certain generation, delegitimised not simply a ruling class and its worldview, but the very existence of nation-states. European nations had been battling each other for centuries, but fascism, and especially National Socialism, revealed new depths to which a country might sink in pursuit of greatness or purity. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that it was “barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”. For many Europeans, surveying the ruins of a continent demolished by fascism and then carved up by communism, it must have seemed equally barbaric to continue believing in nations.

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It was in the bloody aftermath of this carnage that today’s dominant vision of a post-national world took root. The European Union, seeded in the Fifties, is rooted in this vision of national sovereignty “pooled” (read: abolished) for the greater good. The UN, the Bretton Woods settlement, and the entire structure of “global governance” constructed, under American direction, after 1945: all of it stems from this new post-war consciousness, which had no time for the jingle of spurs and the rattling of sabres. Instead, we were offered a new vision, of a borderless world of technocratic co-operation and peace.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a borderless, utopian world with no national boundaries and no national sovereignty also just happened to suit the interests of transnational capital and its enablers. It wasn’t long before universalist utopianism morphed into commercial globalism. Suddenly, “no borders” seemed less of a promise than a threat. Suddenly, those utopian elites chattering about the need to demolish the “social construct” of the nation sounded more like they were defending their own class interests than ushering us all towards broad sunlit uplands.

Years ago, when I was writing Real England, I had a strange sort of vision as I sat in a roadside cafe drinking a mug of tea. I looked out of the window, across the A-road, and saw the physical manifestation of the world this vision had built. I looked over at a couple of huge white boxes squatting on the landscape — delivery hubs, I think, for some supermarket. I saw them connected by the asphalt roads and the electric wires strung out by pylons, and by the invisible digital currents in the air. All of it was rectangular, straight-edged, dedicated to efficiency and the piling-up of riches. We were all products of this layout, I saw. It hadn’t come from here, of course. It hadn’t come from anywhere. Nothing like that even mattered anymore.

Since then, I have thought of this thing as the Grid. The Grid is a physical manifestation of the values of the Machine on the landscape itself. It is, I think, replacing the nation, just as it is replacing culture and antiquated notions of “tradition” and the like. The Grid does not care about tradition. It does not care about anything. It demeans both time and space, and its language is geometry and profit.

It goes without saying that the Grid is also global. Like electricity or the internet, it knows no borders, and neither do its children. It manifests as an identikit globoculture of sameness, a pipeline of product and corporate-progressive verbiage, and its proponents talk relentlessly about “diversity” because the Grid produces the precise opposite. We all know the bland, correct, corporate Gridspeak we must use to get by in this new country: it is what facilitates Progress, by which we mean uniformity disguised as difference.

In the world of the Grid, a nation becomes little more than a postcode or a glorified airport lounge. Its population is from everywhere and anywhere, its people consume global corporate culture rather than drawing their own from place and history, and its ruling class would always rather be somewhere else.

When I first noticed it back in the early 2000s, the Grid seemed unassailable; the End of History in physical form. Today though, like the End of History, it appears to be mired in the escalating mess of the present. In Europe, the nation is increasingly resurgent, and not just amongst monarchists. The unpopular attempt to replace older nations with newly engineered “multicultures”, combined with unprecedented rates of inward migration has, predictably, led to a political backlash, and a resurgence of nationalism. It is unlikely to retreat any time soon, and much of it might not be pretty either.

It would be easy enough to portray the current war over nationhood, as many do, as some David-vs-Goliath struggle between plucky little nations and dastardly globalists intent on their demise. To me, it looks more like a situation in which nobody is clear quite what they want or how to get it. Proponents of corporate globalism want a borderless, frictionless world that offers minimal “barriers to trade” and movement. Nationalists want prosperous nations without the cheap immigration that fuels prosperity. Liberals want multiculturalism and social cohesion, despite the persistent evidence that one undermines the other. The Left wants a world without borders that somehow also contains welfare states, and the Right wants to defend the traditional ethnic makeup of nations without acknowledging that ethnicity is increasingly meaningless in a globalised world.

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This last point seems to me important. When the phone in your pocket allows you to make more friends in other countries than you can at school, when the whole world is converging on the same digitally-enabled globoculture, when you can log on to Instagram in Austria or Australia and order from Amazon in the Amazon, what does your “nationality”, let alone your “ethnicity”, even mean? Travelling around Europe this summer, seeing this reality in several different countries, I couldn’t help thinking that Machine modernity is, in some ways, an emerging ethnicity in its own right: a global cultural identity that, for many people, seems to be replacing any older, national or regional cultural markers.

It is in this context that so many people see the nation-state as a potential bulwark against unaccountable technocratic globalism. But it is also a reality that the nation-state is what has driven that globalism forward. While some nations are ancient things, nation-states in their modern form are mostly not: their rise coincides with the rise of modernity, and today they rarely represent the actual nations they purport to speak for. Too often, today’s nation-states are a toxic imitation of real nations. They are nodes in the Grid — economic units posing as cultural ones. They pledge themselves to their “people” and then get on with the job of following the dictates handed down by the EU, the WEF, Silicon Valley, the FTSE-100 or the White House, whether “the people” like it or not.

To many, nationalism seems like a reasonable response to this, and I think it can be, under some circumstances. But there are also good reasons to be nervous about what it can do to the human mind. Humans remain human, and it is easy enough for national feeling to shade into xenophobic triumphalism. Personally, I’ve long found myself in the uncomfortable position of valuing nations but mostly being repelled by nationalism.

I’m not sure what to do about this. It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests.

What would the ideal nation look like, and could it act as a collective bulwark against the Machine rather than a driver of it? In the Dao De Jing, over 2,000 years ago, we find a beautiful vision: anarchic, localised, rooted, unobtrusive, soaked in actual, human meaning. It is also — and this is the key — very small. If it has ever actually existed, though, we are certainly a long way from living it now. Western “nations” today are vast, centralised, technocratic entities governed by oligarchies on behalf of big business. In this context, if we are going to talk about nations at all, and certainly if we are going to defend them, the only question that seems worth asking is: what are they for?

René Guénon, with whom our new king is familiar, wrote nearly a century ago in The Crisis of the Modern World that a nation without a spiritual purpose would inevitably be replaced in time by another which had one. Nationalism, he believed, was beside the point if the nation in question was nothing but a human collective in search of glory, or built around nostalgia. Either the West would rediscover the spiritual roots it had abandoned in pursuit of Machine values, or “Western civilisation will have to disappear completely”. As for those who shout about “defending the West”: they should remember that “it is the West that is threatening to submerge and drag down the whole of mankind in the whirlpool of its own confused activity”.

Nearly a century later, we subjects of the digital Grid can understand, perhaps, that Guénon was pointing at us. But it could be that as the global anti-culture trembles and begins to dissolve, our nations may emerge, caterpillar-like, in some new shape. As Guénon also wrote, “the passage from one cycle to another can take place only in darkness”. Perhaps the dissolution of the modern nation state into smaller, more anarchic, less centralised units is both inevitable and welcome. Perhaps then new nations will form, around a spiritual core and a love of their place, which will give to their people the kind of meaning which the nation-states of the Machine era have so successfully imitated while at the same time destroying. Perhaps we will live in real nations again. Perhaps we will build them.

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Whatever happens, I suspect we will always need countries. We want to know where our ancestors came from, and where they are buried; we want to find the place that incubated our stories and our characters. Without a homeland we are always partial people; and when our homelands are taken away from us, or we are forced to leave them, the sense of loss can span generations. How many Americans call themselves “Irish” even when they’ve never visited the country? How many Europeans of Asian heritage are still unsure quite where home is? How many Brexit voters felt their country was changing in ways they didn’t understand and couldn’t control? Why are people furiously battling in the ongoing culture wars about the meaning of history and who gets to write it? For now, we are living through the high age of cosmopolis, and the Grid is its image laid out across the hills and the fields, like the Roman roads before it.

But change is coming. As it does, we might heed the words of the French philosopher Frédéric Bastiat who, writing before Guénon, offered his own warning about the consequences of facing in the wrong direction for so long:

“When misguided public opinion honours what is despicable and despises what is honourable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

Or, if we prefer, we can take our guidance from Leonard Cohen, a more contemporary prophet — guidance which, I think, comes complete with the only hope worth having:

“I’ve seen the nations rise and fall,
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all,
But love’s the only engine of survival.”

***

I was chatting to the log man as we unloaded chunks of dried beech into my driveway from his trailer. Usually he brings me ash, but ash is becoming harder to find now that ash dieback disease, imported into Ireland from Europe, is killing many of the nation’s trees. Our little home plantation, laid down five or six years ago, is not yet mature enough to keep us going for the whole winter, and we need help to make up the shortfall. So, beech it is this year.

Speaking as a former green myself, I’m not without sympathy for at least part of this argument. The mass burning of peat in power stations here, for example, has long been an ecological disaster; one which is, thankfully, coming to an end. Many peat bogs in Ireland have been ravaged over the centuries, and some are now being restored for wildlife, and for use as “carbon sinks”. This is certainly no bad thing. Humans recklessly burning anything in sight on a vast scale is not a story to be defended, no matter how hard some are currently trying.

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In the past, the act of sitting staring into the smoky fire with family or neighbours was the genesis of the folk tale and folk song which tied the culture together. Now we stare at digital fires hemmed into boxes manufactured by distant corporations who also tell us our stories. No song we can dream up around a real fireplace can compete with what these boxed fires can sell us. “Thus,” wrote Michell, “the traditional cosmology is no longer represented by its domestic symbols, and a new, secular, restless, uncentred world-view has taken its place.”

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When you can no longer grow your own wood or cut your own turf to heat your own parlour, you are made that little bit more dependent on the matrix of government, technology and commerce that has sought to transmute self-sufficiency into bondage since the time of the Luddites. The justification for this attack on family and community sufficiency changes with the times — in 17th-century England, the enclosures were justified by the need for agricultural efficiency; today they are justified by the need for energy efficiency — but the attack is always of the same nature. Each blow struck against local self-sufficiency, pride and love of place weaves another thread into the pattern which has been developing for centuries, and which is almost complete now in most affluent countries.

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Even back in 1980, Berry recognised that the home had become an “ideal” rather than a practical reality — precisely because the reality had been placed out of reach for many. What killed the home? Three things, said Berry: cars, mass media and public education. The first meant that both work and leisure could, for the first time in history, happen a long way from home. The second — “TV and other media” — have played a role, since the mid-20th century, in luring us all into a fantasy world of freedom from obligation, and a limitless, fun consumer lifestyle. “If you have a TV,” writes Berry, “your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought.” Finally, the school system is designed “to keep children away from the home as much as possible. Parents want their children kept out of their hair.” Schools exist to train children to fit into individualistic, consumer societies; to internalise and normalise their ethics and goals, and to prepare for a life serving their needs.

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In this sense there is a case to be made that the pre-modern woman, working in her home with her husband and family, had in some ways more agency and power than her contemporary counterpart whose life is directed from outside the home by distant commercial interests. Certainly the feminist movement, in at least some of its iterations, has been thoroughly hijacked by capitalism. The “liberation” of women has often translated into the separating of women from their self-sufficiency, as men were separated before them, and their embedding instead into the world of commerce, whether they want it or not.

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Maybe this is all misplaced nostalgia; or at least, the shutting of the stable door long after the horse has been turned into dogmeat. Perhaps people leave homes, or don’t make them, because they just don’t want them much anymore. Maybe we are all loving our liberation. When I was a teenager, I certainly wanted to escape my family and its values — and I did in the end. But I suppose I always assumed there would be something to come back to. That I in my turn would grow up to be the thing that was pushed out of the way so that the world could be opened up before the young. This is how it should be, after all.

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Back in 1980, Wendell Berry ended his essay by suggesting some actions that could be taken in this direction. As well as the obvious — “get rid of the television set” took pride of place — he suggested that we should “try to make our homes centres of attention and interest”; to make them as productive and nurturing as we can. Once you rid yourself of the propaganda of the corporate media-entertainment complex (“a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household”), you will see new possibilities begin to open up. You will see, in Berry’s words, that “no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves”, whether in the country, the city or the suburb. “All that is necessary,” he suggests, is “the time and the inner quietness to look for them.”

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A longer version of this essay first appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war with itself, killed its king, replaced its monarchy with a republican government and unleashed a religious revolution which sought to scorch away the old world in God’s purifying fire.

Nearly four centuries on, England and the wider West is again being turned upside down. Again, we are living in the aftermath of a system that is dying or dead: then, the last gasp of medieval monarchy; now the Anglo-American Empire — and perhaps modernity itself. Again, we are living in a period of radical technological change: then, the printing press and the end of censorship, which allowed the distribution of radical pamphlets on an unprecedented scale; now, the internet’s enabling of global dissent and chaos. Again, we are living in a period in which the cultural mores of previous centuries are being upended: then, feudal assumptions governing everything from landownership to the meaning of marriage; now, the endless ructions of a tedious and unending “culture war”.

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Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a “white supremacist”, or the more general but still-lethal “hater”. The old world is again running up like parchment in the fire, and nobody who wants to be part of the new one can be seen to defend it.

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The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

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A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

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“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”

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It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

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Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

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! 

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

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And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

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This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

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Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

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This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.

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So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

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The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

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Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

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Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

This piece was originally published in August.

In days that seem unprecedented, we cling to the familiar. I do, anyway, and Christmas has been familiar to me all my life. The excitement and the anticipation that I felt as a boy is felt now by my young son, and I can live vicariously through him: the lack of sleep, the mince pies for the reindeer, the presents waiting, if he’s lucky, under the tree. Christmas has its rituals, and we don’t have many shared rituals left in the modern West.

But the rituals disguise the radical strangeness of the claim that Christmas makes, and the radical strangeness of the religion that makes it. That God took human form, that he was born into persecution and poverty, that he came to put the world back into its right shape. That this God does not demand burnt offerings, but will instead sacrifice himself to correct our errors. That He shows us a path both straight and narrow and leaves it to us to decide whether to follow it. A virgin birth in a cave, a risen corpse and an empty tomb: there is no sense in any of this. None of it is normal, even by religious standards. It is some kind of revolution.

But here we are, celebrating it with turkey and crackers, and yet not really celebrating it, because — well, because this is now, and that was then. We all know that Christmas has become a commercial horror show: complaining about this is another part of the ritual. We all know that most of us will barely genuflect towards the Christ whose mass this once was: hearing bishops lamenting this is also as traditional as watching the Queen’s Christmas message, or refusing to watch it and reading the Guardian in the corner instead.

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The world has been upended these past two years, and it feels to me as if the ructions, which are far from over, are not merely temporal. It feels like we are being shaken out of some slumber; as if the spirit is on the move. Perhaps I feel this way because of the unexpected turn my life has taken, coincidentally or not, during the corona era. Just over a year ago, much to my own surprise (and initial resistance) I became a Christian. Some people might call it a “conversion”, which always sounds a bit shiny-eyed to me, but I didn’t really feel like I’d converted to anything. I felt like I’d come home. I can’t explain it, though I keep wanting to.

It is always ridiculous to write about religion. When I say “ridiculous,” I mean “dangerous”, I think: dangerous in the West, anyway, which is the only part of the world in which the rejection of religion and the denial of God has ever really taken off. This does not seem to be working out well for us, but try talking about that in public. Since I became a Christian, and as the daily practice of the faith has deepened my understanding of it, I have found it harder and harder to relate the Christian worldview to the worldview I used to have, and which the culture around me encourages in us daily. This is not just a Christian problem: everyone I know who follows a faith seems to understand it. It might just be a manifestation of how new I am to this, and how inadequate my understanding is. Still, the gap between the world and the Way — as the early Christians called the path of Christ — seems more and more like a widening gulf.

This will be my first Christmas in the church. The Orthodox church, into which I was baptised just under a year ago, has a deep and old and demanding practice around this festival of light. For the last forty days, we have been fasting: today the fast is broken. A child is born, and everything has changed. The birth of Christ marked the beginning of a new age. The Orthodox church talks of Jesus of Nazareth as the “second Adam”. The first human messed up by rejecting God — by choosing control over communion, and falling into self-love. The incarnation of God in human form corrects the error: we get a second chance to turn from ourselves and look to the greater whole.

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It is, as I say, a strange story: frightening, glorious, thrilling, radical, impossible, repulsive to some. Jesus remains the most controversial man in history, and his followers have always been looked at, like him, through narrowed eyes. Here in the West we are still emerging, both psychologically and structurally, from a period in which Christianity was associated with authority: with power and Popes and state churches and holy wars. Now that this authority has been overthrown, Christians are increasingly regarded again as they were for the first four centuries of their existence: with suspicion, if not open hostility.

Some Christians regret this, and long for the return of a West in which church and state again hold sway in tandem: a world of faith, in which the people live, at least in theory, by the way of the cross. I understand this: it’s an enticing vision. I would like to live, I think, among the symbolic splendour of the high medieval Christian world. Certainly I’ve never felt comfortable in this one. But for better or worse, that world is not coming back, and it seems right that a faith built on sacrifice and renunciation should again require some of its followers. Throw down your nets and follow me. If the world hates you, know that it hated me first. The Way was never supposed to be comfortable. Christ and power don’t mix.

This is how it seems to me, but I am still new. One thing I have learned though — or had brought home to me, because I knew it before I became Christian — is the necessity of ritual in a human life. One reason I joined the Orthodox church, despite being an Englishman who lives in Ireland, was because of its deep understanding and practice of this. We reject ritual in the modern West. We don’t see why we should submit to any authority or respect any tradition. We believe that every one of us can invent the world anew. We are wrong about this, as we are about much else.

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The rituals of the Orthodox church are sometimes florid and always long, and like Christianity itself they can look strange or off-putting from the outside. But the first time I attended a divine liturgy, I knew where I belonged. Something had happened to me that I couldn’t put my finger on. This service, largely unchanged for 1600 years, has a spiritual and psychological impact that can’t be outlined in essays or explained in words at all.

Church rituals, like those of all religions, fit into a wider pattern — that of the ritual year. As a Christian celebrating my first real Christmas, I have come late to the realisation of how much this matters. I think this is why many Western Christians hanker for the Christendom that is gone: not because they desire power, but because of the container, the guiding light, that the ritual year offers, and because they see what we have lost by abandoning it. Christmas, Lent, Easter, Whitsun — we still know the names, but we are long detached from the symbolic pattern they provided, and the understanding of our place in the universe that they formalised in daily life. What comes together in the bread and the wine, changed into the flesh and the blood — this can never be replaced with turkey and sherry.

Something is missing here, and not just for Christians. I have come to believe that humans are above all religious animals. If we do not have a religion, we will make one for ourselves, or substitute politics or ideology for it, to assuage our need for ritual, worship and meaning. But ideology or self-help can’t fill the gap, because what is missing is the thing we are all fleeing from, like the fire it is. The real meaning of Christmas, I think, and maybe the real meaning of all faith, is simply: look up. Raise your gaze. When we lose the religion that made us, and the rituals that contained it, however imperfect those things were, we lose our understanding of the heart of the matter, the thing we turn from and scorn and then are returned to because nothing else will fit into the empty space in our hearts: God.

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Good, say the atheists, about time. I disagree. I think that understanding that there is something higher than us — that we are part of a greater pattern, that a higher intelligence is at work, that we are not in charge and that this is good. I think that without this understanding we find ourselves back in the garden, tasting the apple all over again, every day of our lives. We choose self over other, control over communion, power over sacrifice. Of course we do: we all do. We want to walk that way. But I think we can see now where it is leading us.

Like I say, it is ridiculous to write about religion. Ridiculous for me, anyway. But there is nothing else I can say today. It is deep winter, but some light is rising. It has been rising for a long time. Everybody should celebrate today, whatever they choose to raise a glass to. It has been a hard year. I will try to turn my scattered mind, before the feast and after, to the words that made us, and which still linger in the air, waiting to settle on the holy and the profane, the weak and the strong, the willing and the broken and the unsuspecting:

 Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.

Then I watch interviews with “ordinary people”, and they say that the “unvaxxed” had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the “anti-vaxxers” are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.

Then I look across the border at Germany. I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the “vaccine hesitant”, and are also discussing enforcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s refreshingly honest health minister, Germans will be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. There is apparently no fourth option.

They have been busy in Germany. Recently they put up fences in the streets in Hamburg, to separate the Bad Unvaxxed from the Good Vaxxed at the Christmas markets. Outdoors. Perhaps they will also provide the Good people with rocks to throw across those fences. The mood certainly seems ripe. A cartoon recently published in the mainstream, high-circulation newspaper Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung featured a man sitting on his sofa playing a first-person shooter game in which the targets were unvaccinated people. The caption described it as “a big hit under the Christmas tree.”

Not that Germans or Austrians have any monopoly on the current march towards authoritarianism in the name of public health. It is entirely globalised. The opinion recently expressed by Pulitzer Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz to his half a million Twitter followers was typical of a new form of class hatred that is somehow acceptable in the age of cancellations and hyper-sensitivity. “My latest Covid thought is ‘Let her rip:’”, he wrote. “Meaning, we who are lucky enough to be triple & double vaxed are pretty protected. Let the rest die. I know they pose a danger to us all. But we are more than 97% protected from them. If they want to die, I say let them die. Freedom.”

Across Europe and the wider world, the picture is the same. Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation of a climate of fear and suspicion. The deepening demonisation of the “unvaxxed”. Something terrible is rising around us, and we are only just waking up to it.

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I am watching all this from Ireland, the country which has the highest adult vaccination rate in Western Europe, at over 94% of the population. Here, cases are accelerating so fast that we were all told recently to work from home, and another lockdown is widely feared. New restrictions for children, who are least at risk from Covid, are being proposed, and a midnight curfew has recently been imposed on pubs and nightclubs. This is odd, as only vaccinated people have been allowed into them since the summer, with the scan of a smartphone-enabled QR code being the only way to access much of society.

In an honest society, all of this would have been subject to robust public debate. We would have seen scientists of all opinions openly debating on TV and radio and in the press; views of all kinds aired on social media without fear of censorship; journalists properly investigating reports of both vaccine successes and vaccine dangers; serious explorations of alternative treatments; public debates about the balance between civil liberties and public health, and what “public health” even means.

But we have not seen this and we will not see it, for debate, like dissent, is out of fashion. The media here has not asked a critical question of anyone in authority for at least 18 months. Google’s algorithms are busy burying inconvenient data, while the social media channels from which most people receive their worldview are removing or suppressing critical opinions, even if they come from virologists or editors of the British Medical Journal.

What could possibly justify this? One answer might be: the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is certainly a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. For the elderly and infirm especially, it can be a serious risk. But it is not dangerous enough — if anything could be — to justify the frightening atmosphere which is rising across the world. The authoritarian response to the virus has become the go-to solution for governments everywhere, and the climate of fear in society as a whole has often meant enthusiastic support for such a response. As the vaccines fail to end the pandemic, new variants continue to arise and every promise of “unlocking” ends with the reimposition of restrictions, so the calls grow for more clampdowns, more segregation, more isolation and internment. With each call, a new roughness comes over the culture.

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This roughness is what leads to the persecution, abuse and scapegoating of anyone foolish enough to stick their head above the parapet and question the Narrative, and that in turn leads to more people walking away from those who promote it. The solidarity of the pandemic’s early days already feels like a century ago. Day by day, the combination of breakdown and clampdown eats like acid through the social fabric of a society already riven by a “culture war” that seeks enemies first and understanding very much later.

All of this has descended like a flock of birds on one single technology — “the vaccine” — on which all hopes and fears converge. But the divisions that have opened up in society about the Covid vaccines are not really about the vaccines at all: they are about what they symbolise. What it means to be “vaxxed” or “unvaxxed”, safe or dangerous, clean or dirty, sensible or irresponsible, compliant or independent: these are questions about what it means to be a good member of society, and what society even is, and they are detonating like depth charges beneath the surface of the culture.

In his fascinating Substack newsletter The Stoa, academic Peter Limberg proposes an analysis of the ongoing Covid wars. He identifies two positions on the virus and the reaction to it. Both are generalisations — plenty of people will cleave fully to neither — but broadly speaking, which you identify with will inform your view of who the Other is.

Limberg describes the first position — the Thesis — like this:

Lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work and need to be mandated, vaccines are safe, people should take the vaccine to protect themselves and others, and vaccine passports will help open things up quicker and encourage those who are hesitant to get vaccinated.

The Thesis is the establishment position. It is held, in Limberg’s words, by “legacy media … NGOs, Universities, Western governments, and memetic tribes on the political Left.” In contrast, the opposing view — the Antithesis — is held by a ragtag of political dissidents of all stripes, from rightwingers to anarchists, motivated to cluster for different reasons around an alternative story:

Lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.

What we see around us now, as the Thesis visibly fails, is more and more people looking around for explanations and landing on versions of the Antithesis. As that happens, more of those who support the Thesis feel threatened and angry. The people questioning the Thesis, to them, are not thinking human beings wondering what is going on and not getting satisfactory answers. They are “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” and “far-Right actors”, whose views will lead to mass death.

In response to this intolerance, the more extreme elements of the Antithesis position dig in deeper, offering up intolerance of their own, condemning the “sheeple” who still cleave to the Narrative, and proposing alternative stories which range from convincing right up to frightening. Some of the worst home straight in on old enemies: ‘the Jews’, as ever, are a popular target. This in turn allows proponents of the Thesis to conveniently represent any opposition to their line as dangerous and worthy of censorship. Fear and suspicion reign. Neither tribe is talking to the other, and each assumes the worst of their opponents.

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Take these two positions, electrify them, pour them through the sieve of misery that is “social” media, and you have the current vaccine wars. The rage that swirls around the attitude to the Covid jab is a substitute for something else. Underneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine glides something older, deeper, slower: something with all the time in the world. Some great spirit whose work is to use these fractured times to reveal to us all what we need to see: things hidden since the foundation of the modern world.

Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed the compliance of the mainstream media, and the power of Silicon Valley to curate and control the public conversation. It has confirmed the sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to corporate power. It has shown how ideology, on all sides, can mask itself with the pretend neutrality of “science”.

Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times. In the last month alone, I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about “vaccine passports”. I have watched much of the political Left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless “liberals” campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all.

I have learnt more about human nature in the past two years than in my preceding 47. I have learnt some things about myself too, and I don’t especially like them either. I have noticed my ongoing temptation to become a partisan: to judge and condemn those on the other side of the question, to find a tribe I can join. I have noticed my tendency to seek out only sources of information which confirm my beliefs.

Most of all, though, what the Covid apocalypse has revealed to me is that when people are frightened, they can be very easily controlled.

Of all the stories we are watching play out right now, this is the biggest one: the manipulation of public fear to impose unprecedented levels of control on populations. The ongoing nature of the Covid threat — the endless boosters, the endless variants — means there is no end in sight to this “new normal”. Like the War on Terror before it, the control and monitoring of citizens in the name of “public health”, the segregation of the virtuous vaxxed (or, any day now, boosted) from the antisocial unvaxxed, the internet-wide censorship of whatever Silicon Valley labels “disinformation”, and the widespread obedience of the once-mainstream press to an agreed story towards which they clumsily try to nudge their readers — none of this has any sell-by date.

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The American Right's civil war

By Mary Harrington

This is the story of the times. Across the world we are seeing an unprecedented claim to control staked by the forces of the state, in alliance with the forces of corporate capital, over your life and mine. All of it converges on the revealed symbol of our age: the smartphone-enabled QR code that has, with frightening speed and in near-silence, become the new passport to a full human life. As ever, our tools have turned on us.

The Covid vaccines, whatever their other virtues, have not prevented transmission of the virus, as governments have now publicly acknowledged. If they had, we would not be where we are. For this reason alone, there can be no justification for systems as divisive and anti-democratic as vaccine passports or lockdowns of the unvaccinated. If we were operating, as we pretend to be, from the ground of reason — if we really were “following the science” — then we would be dismantling these systems at this point. Instead we are moving deeper into them.

We are being herded into a future in which scanning a code to prove you are a safe and obedient member of society may become a permanent feature of life, as unquestioned as credit cards and driver’s licences. We are moving towards enforced mandatory vaccination of entire populations — including children — with potential prison sentences for those who refuse.

The Thesis, if left unchecked, leads straight to tyranny. But the danger of cleaving entirely to the Antithesis is a potential descent into paranoia. Both positions thrive on fear of the filthy Other, who must be destroyed with a barrage of claim and counter-claim, backed up by links to studies about ivermectin or vaccine side-effects.

Limberg puts his hope in the possibility of forging a Synthesis of the two positions. But in order to get there, he says, both sides must discover and inhabit the fears of the other: something which looks less likely by the day. As someone who began this pandemic journey cautiously cleaving to the Thesis, but who has tipped towards Antithesis as the Narrative has unspooled and the dishonesty of its proponents has become clear, I can explain my own fears easily enough.

In a short but momentous two years, we in the West, who have spent decades, if not centuries, lecturing the rest of the world about “freedom”, and sometimes trying to bomb them into accepting it, have abandoned ours without so much as a murmur, and begun enthusiastically scapegoating those who question this path. We who invented this thing called “liberalism” are now burying it, and building on the bare soil some technocratic state-corporate hybrid; a China-style social credit society, centralised, monitored, powered by algorithms, emphatically unnatural and unfree.

We are in a revolutionary moment. Societies are being transformed, with no public discussion and no consent, into a version of a Silicon Valley nerd’s wet dreams. Unless we can reach some form of synthesis soon — unless the sheeple can address the fears of the covidiots, and vice versa — then we risk being blinded to where the real power lies, and what is being constructed around us as we bicker and insult and pontificate.

Covid has been both revelation and accelerant. Now the direction of travel is increasingly clear. Unless we actively refuse it, our future looks like a QR code flickering across a human face forever.

But though there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.

We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”

Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the Left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the human need for roots in favour of some universalist flavour of “global justice.” She saw that notion for what it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that was leading the USSR to roll out a tyranny that matched that of fascism, right down to the barbed wire that surrounded the camps designated for those who did not fit into the model.

Weil saw beyond: when she looked at Hitler and Stalin, she saw two tyrants leading nations that had already been uprooted — by the industrial revolution, by Bolshevism, by the Great War, by the depression, by the wider process of modernity. Both men promised a return to, or a forward march towards, security, power and meaning through the imposition of a totalitarian ideology which they claimed would speak for the masses. Both delivered hell instead.

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Weil’s book was commissioned by the Free French in London, led by Charles de Gaulle. It was intended to be a manifesto for the renewal of France, and Europe, after the scourge of Nazism. Her prescription was radical. Europeans, she said, had been uprooted by industry, by the state and by an aggressive form of pseudo-Christianity (Weil was a sometimes reluctant Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases aligned themselves with “the interests of those who exploit the people.”)

Both state nationalism and state socialism were con tricks, according to Weil: exploiters of the people posing as their liberators. The “totalitarian idol” of grand world-saving ideologies such as communism and fascism was the scourge of the twentieth century. The whole game had to be junked, the terms redefined: “The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example,” she wrote, “is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it.”

“A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness”: perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending “growth” built on turning all life into “resources” for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward-motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility. Charles de Gaulle, when he returned to France victorious, was an effective competitor in this game. He never read the book that Weil aimed at him.

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The West has lost its virtue

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What did Weil mean by this “transformation”? Perhaps the answer explains why she is not as widely read as she should be. Her attachment was to the eternal things, and she could never be boxed in. She wrote in praise of God, tradition, roots, peoples and culture; but also of justice, freedom of speech and thought, honour and equality. She could be equally scathing about fascism, communism, established religion, liberal elites, capitalism and mass education.

One minute she is incinerating the “uprooted intellectuals obsessed with progress” who dominated the cultural elite of her time (and who have entirely conquered ours), assailing the Left for its contempt of the peasantry or asserting that “of all the human soul’s needs, none is more vital … than love of the past.” But just when you think you’re dealing with a conservative Defender of the West, you read something like this:

“For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.“

Weil wasn’t wrong. We in the West invented this thing called modernity, and then we took it out into the world, whether the world wanted it or not. Once we called this process the White Man’s Burden, and exported it with dreadnoughts. Now we call it development, and export it via World Bank loans and the War on Terror.

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The West has lost its virtue

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But — and here is the point so often missed, especially by the “progressives” currently leading the charge in the culture wars — before we could eat the world, we first had to eat ourselves. Our states and economic elites had to dispossess their own people before they could venture out to dispossess others. The ordinary folk of the “developed” West were the prototype; the guinea pigs in a giant global experiment. Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other.

Furthermore, this process accelerates under its own steam, as Weil explained, because “whoever is uprooted himself uproots others”. The more we are pulled, or pushed, away from our cultures, traditions and places — if we had them in the first place — the more we take that restlessness out with us into the world. If you have ever wondered why it is de rigueur amongst Western cultural elites to demonise roots and glorify movement, to downplay cohesion and talk up diversity, to deny links with the past and strike out instead for a future that never quite arrives, consider this: they are the children of globalised capitalism, and the inheritors of the unsettling of the West, and they have transformed that rootlessness into an ideology. They — we — are both perpetrators and victims of a Great Unsettling.

This is not to say that “Western” people alone are responsible for the rolling destruction of culture and nature that is overwhelming the world. We may have set the ball rolling, but the culture of uprooting is global now, and was when Weil was writing. You can see it everywhere you care to look. India has been uprooting its adivasi (tribal) people systemically since independence; its government is currently trying to undermine the power and agency of the peasant farmers of the Punjab, and have triggered a rural rebellion by doing so. The Chinese state is increasingly looking like the most efficient machine ever invented for uprooting, resettling and controlling mass populations. The Indonesian state is systematically unsettling the tribal people of West Papua, in cahoots with a cluster of multinational corporations. African governments are corralling the last of the San people. This is what states do, all over the world. It’s the ancient human game of power and control, turbo-charged with fossil fuels and digital surveillance technology.

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For the past several centuries, this intersection of financial power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies has constituted an ongoing war against roots and against limits. The momentum of the “global economy” is always forward: it demolishes borders and boundaries, traditions and cultures, languages and ways of seeing wherever it goes, and it will not stop until the world has been entirely remade. Record numbers of people are on the move as a result, and as the population increases and climate change bites, those numbers will rise everywhere, churning cultures and nations into entirely new shapes — or, worse, no shapes at all — with all the consequent turmoil and conflict. Even if you are living where your forefathers have lived for generations, you can bet that the smartphone you gave your child will unmoor them more effectively than any bulldozer.

Plenty of people, of course, are quite happy with all of this, and have no time for Romantic Luddites like me when we lament it. Even we Romantic Luddites are here on the internet, lamenting, so perhaps the last laugh is on us. But we are, I think, desperately in need of real culture. We want to go home again, but if we even know where home is to be found, we see that we can’t return. And so a void is created, and into the void rush monsters: toxic imitations of our lost roots. Identity politics, newly rigid racial categories, extreme nationalisms, intolerant strains of religion, endlessly multiplying genders and “identities” constructed online with no reference to reality. The mono-ethnic identitarianism of the far Right or the diversity identitarianism of the far Left: take your pick according to your predilections and fears. But these fake roots can never replace the real thing and the result is an orgy of anger, iconoclasm and rising bile. Meanwhile, the machine of techno-modernity pushes on, relentless.

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In all the time I have spent with people who live in genuinely rooted cultures — rooted in time, place and spirit — whether in the west of Ireland or West Papua, I’ve generally been struck by two things. One is that rooted people are harder to control. The industrial revolution could not have happened without the enclosure of land, and the destruction of the peasantry and the artisan class. People with their feet on the ground are less easily swayed by the currents of politics, or by the fashions of urban ideologues or academic theorists.

The second observation is that people don’t tend to talk much about their “identity” — or even think about it — unless it is under threat. The louder you have to talk about it, it seems, the more you have probably lost. The range of freewheeling, self-curated “identities” thrown up by the current “culture war” shows that we are already a long way down the road that leads away from genuine culture.

When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our current cultural — and spiritual — crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not dying — it is already dead. We turned away from a mythic, rooted understanding of the world, and turned away from the divine, in order to look at ourselves reflected in the little black mirrors in our hands. Now, we are living in a time of consequences. Some day soon, we are going to have to look up and begin searching for what we have lost. I have a feeling that this process has already begun.

A longer version of this essay originally appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

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The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

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Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

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Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

A longer version of this essay was originally published at The Abbey of Misrule.

That growth, of course, came with a few side-effects: a changing climate, collapsing ice sheets, mass destruction of ecosystems, the razing of forests and the highest extinction rate in sixty million years; not to mention growing social polarisation and massive economic inequality. Everybody had known about this since the late twentieth century, but they had all presumed, or hoped, that somebody else would sort it out. The World Economic Forum was on the case, after all, and Bono and that Swedish girl, and those weirdos who dressed up as dinosaurs or whatever and chained themselves to bridges. This sort of thing had been part of the furniture for so long that people barely noticed it anymore.

But it wasn’t working: everything had been going in the wrong direction since the Limits to Growth report had correctly predicted, back in 1972, what was on the way. By the 2020s it was uncomfortably obvious that the report’s predictions — mocked or ignored at the time by the great and the good — had turned out to be startlingly accurate. Spiralling global consumption had led to rising demand for resources, which were becoming exhausted as landbases and ecosystems were degraded by human use, leading to increasing prices, social and political strife, ecosystem breakdown and looming civilisational collapse. Limits to Growth had identified the period between 2008 and 2030 as the point at which the collapse would begin to bite, with stalling growth, climatic instability, rising death rates and social turmoil as evidence of overshoot. So it had proven.

Even the most committed apostles of Progress and Development could see the writing on the wall. Something radical would have to be done. The old-school greens who, in response to Limits To Growth, had preached about pie-in-the-sky stuff like “de-growth”, simple living, organic farming or foraging for nettle tops, didn’t have a sellable message in a world of demand, with Westernised consumers all insisting on their right to low-cost WiFi connectivity. Everyone was sick of being nagged by people like that, anyway. The more grown-up environmentalists — the kind who wore business suits and wrote policy papers about the regrettable but realistic need for nuclear power and geoengineering — knew this very well. Solutions had to be big, brave and global.

In the end, as the wildfires, droughts, ice melt and supply chain collapses mounted, a stark choice presented itself: an ambitious plan to Save The Earth, or a collapse into barbarism. That was how the media sold it, anyway, and since it had been long anticipated, nobody really minded much. We were all locked into the machine by now, after all: all reliant on its largesse to eat, sleep and work. The worse things got — and they were getting worse fast — the more appetite there was for bold, assertive, planetary-scale action. And since the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone had got used to obeying the authorities and submitting to behavioural monitoring, in order to prevent mass disaster.

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Is this what a Green world would look like?

By Stephen Pollard

And so, the global empire arrived, largely on schedule. Corporations, well-heeled NGOs, states and regional blocs, trailing a bevy of media and intellectual lapdogs in their wake, consolidated their Green New Reset, or whatever they were calling it today, with impeccable ease. The new world would be progressive, inclusive, open, sustainable, gender-neutral and, above all, intensely profitable. The ongoing assimilation of any ecosystems, cultures, perspectives and lifestyles that conflicted with progress would be implemented in a manner which ensured carbon neutrality. The sustainable global machine — smart, interconnected, perpetually monitored, always-on — would encompass everything and everyone, producing cascading benefits for all. The long-held Western dream would finally be achieved: the world would become one. One market, one set of values, one way of living, one way of seeing.

By the time some of the environmentalists realised who they had sold their soul to, it was too late. But what, in any case, had the alternative been? The small-is-beautiful crowd, with their patchouli-scented jumpers and their 1970s talk about limits and sovereignty, had been cancelled as eco-fascists long ago, exiled to distant smallholdings and housing co-ops with their well-thumbed copies of Tools for Conviviality and other yellowing tomes by dead white men. Now that an actual eco-fascism was on the horizon — a global merger of state and corporate power in pursuit of progress that would have made Mussolini weep like a proud grandfather — there was nothing to stand in its way.

Unlike previous empires, this one knew how to present itself: with wind farms rather than dreadnoughts, pictures of smiling children rather than squares of redcoats. It used eco-friendly, inclusive language as it enclosed land, funnelled wealth upwards and coated wild landscapes in renewable technologies made from rare earth metals (a regrettable necessity, but a temporary one: sustainable asteroid mining was well on the way). But it was curious how the wealth and power seemed to stay in mainly the same hands; odd too that the rolling eco-crisis never seemed to actually go away, however many billionaires and NGOs attempted bright new techno-fixes. In fact, the tighter the empire gripped, the more everything seemed to slip away from its grasp. It was almost as if the techno-fixes themselves were the problem.

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This is how democracy dies

By Jamie Bartlett

Over time, the inevitable happened: the age-old progress trap closed in like a Venus Flytrap patiently digesting its victims. The genetic modifications and the nanotech “solutions” went awry, as Earth’s inscrutable systems refused to behave the way the computer models had predicted. The mass dumping of iron filings into the ocean did not sequester as much carbon as hoped, but it did lead to an unexpected collapse in whale numbers. The Bill Gates-funded sun-dimming technologies had succeeded in lowering the planet’s temperature, but the feedback loops that kicked in lowered it much more than expected, leading to mass crop collapse and famine, which in turn caused riots across the world. The early 2040s saw half of Africa subsisting for several months on locust swarms while Silicon Valley’s finest dined on sustainable insect burgers in their New Zealand redoubts.

Tower farms, superpigs, eco-drones, cloud seeding, space reflectors: everything was tried, but the trajectory didn’t change. Earth’s limits refused to budge. To the Faustian West, “saving the world” had been just another means of trying to control it, but Gaia, like God, would not be not mocked. Life went on, but civilisation, increasingly, didn’t. Cities fell, waters rose, deserts spread. Jeff, Mark, Richard and Elon went into low Earth orbit on separate rockets, all claiming to have got there first, but their head-freezing facility in the Sonoran desert suffered a tragic thawing episode when the solar farm formerly known as Kansas was knocked out by a freak solar flare.

By the late 21st century the oil wells were slowly bottoming out, the rare earth metals were exhausted, and the boundless renewable future of electric cars and limitless green energy had been filed away and forgotten like an embarrassing teenage crush. The asteroid mines never got off the drawing board. The population peaked and started falling, along with the sperm counts. The suburbs and the oceans slowly emptied, and the stuttering Internet became so poisonous that even Mumsnet came with a trigger warning. Everyone told themselves that progress would be happening properly if only those people weren’t in charge.

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Only nationalism can stop climate change

By Aris Roussinos

Most of all, a great disappointment seemed to spread like an ink stain through the remnants of the West, as it dawned on everyone that there was to be no spectacular denouement. There was no revolution and no restoration; no Star Trek, but no Matrix either. There were no robot soldiers to fight and nobody was building a Death Star. The best anyone could manage at this point in industrial capitalism’s downward curve was a weedy little spaceship built by a glorified bookshop manager, which could stay up in space for all of three minutes. The end of the world, it turned out, was less like Terminator and more like a Star Wars prequel: you wait for years in anticipation, and then it’s just a let-down.

In other words, it was history-as-usual, as the latest grandiose human project faced a long, grinding decline. The apocalypse, in the end, had turned out to be… boring. But maybe this shouldn’t have been surprising. The word Apokalypsis, in the original Greek, simply meant unveiling, or revelation. In an apocalypse, something is exposed that we all need to see, but are refusing to look at. What we saw, as our delusions crumbled, was that we had never really been in control at all. We had misunderstood the world, and our place in it. We had come to it as conquerors, boors, abusers, rather than lovers or friends — so obsessed with orbiting Earth that we had forgotten to look at what we were orbiting.

Modern humanity had turned on both creator and creation but our rebellion, as long predicted, had failed. Now the post-apocalyptic skyline belonged to those who had always known that: to the monks, the hermits, the anchoresses and the forest tribes; to the workers on the margins, steadily improving lives human and non-human with no desire to shout about it. To the small nations and the edge-dwellers, the quiet and the unambitious. To the earthworms and the shy hedgehogs, the suckering plants and the ever-flocking birds, foraging in the ruins of the latest fallen empire. To those who had seceded, and who had generated rather than draining the finite pool of life.

By the 23rd century, some of those who still remembered quite what had happened (it was hard to piece the facts together, since everything of value had been stored on the now-obsolete “Internet”) noted with some irony that the society which had grown out of the rubble of the machine age looked curiously like the one proposed by those early eco-fanatics: land-based, low-tech, community-centred, cored around a religious story, and highly suspicious of any grandiose claims. Much of England now looked like the fourteenth century, only with CB radios and better dental work. Over in America, the Amish had bought up most of what had once been New York state, and the remnants of the self-build hippie culture of the Pacific Northwest had begun restoring the deserts created by the megacities of the 2070s. The blades of giant wind turbines were bent into ploughshares. The meek had — after a very long detour — finally inherited the Earth.