This is a book of fiction that performs the service for which fiction is uniquely suited — detailing the contours of consciousness — while performing a rather unusual bracketing in a context of higher truth. It comes amid a wider renaissance in horror cinema and literature, with some of the best work often described as “post-horror.” Beginning in the mid-2010s, artists have taken up the genre as a means for exploring the irrational and ineffable dimensions of human life — or to poseideas that, stated overtly, would be seen as tactless or impolitic. This, even as they break its conventions or, as in Lee’s case, blend them with other forms. 

A “prisoner’s cinema,” as we learn in the title story — its longest and best — is the series of hallucinations a person’s mind will produce after he is kept for a prolonged time in complete darkness. In this story, a child rapist waiting on death row engages in a series of verbal jousts with the demon who encouraged him in his crime, and who continues to mock him as he waits out his last days. The moral lines seem clear here, yet the unconventional structure of this long story confounds the reader’s expectations, offering no easy resolution, and a twist toward the end adds a sci-fi element to horror that was previously mostly psychological or ontological. The result is terrifying: the suggestion that the human mind is the most fearsome demon of all.

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By Noah Kumin

As the line from G. K. Chesterton goes: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational mind unbalanced, overheated, and off its tether is the true protagonist of these stories. Characters reason and use logic; they follow a flow of linked theses and fateful decision trees; they rationalize, or they victimize where they have been victimized. The result, far from making sense, is the most fetid tangle of human flesh this side of Hannibal Lecter’s pantry.  

In “Gods and Spiders,” a hypnotist returns a young man to the primal scene of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the Bosnian paramilitary. In “Lovecraft,” a philosophizing butcher allows a tenant who lives below him to tenderize some very suspicious meat as a form of stress relief. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” a disgruntled son of two newly dead parents bashes in the head of an intruding hoodlum. But the real brutality for this young man, Lee suggests, is internal: an animus between the protagonist and his brother that simply can’t be fixed. 

Lee’s compendium of gore is accomplished with subtlety and literary grace. “Never Find Us Here,” a story about a narcissistic young man who decides to volunteer for a day at the Salvation Army, keeps us on tenterhooks by sliding seamlessly between surrealism and psychology. And, as in the most crafty of short stories, an anticlimax serves as the perfect ending. Lee also has a knack for a good metaphor. He writes, for instance, of “the dark lips of ditches”: precisely the right word for the little mounds that might circumscribe a hole one has dug, turning it into a yawning black mouth. And the virtuoso vitriol that opens “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” — “They always have sallow skin, these whores, these meth-heads, wasted high-school beauties, soma-addled slack bodies, all with the same seeping sallow skin carrying Christ-knows-what proud strains of plague in their milky sebum . . .” — is mellifluous bile indeed.

But it is the moral stakes that set Lee’s writing apart. Literary fiction is a genre on the wane — like contemporary art and independent cinema. We suffer from a glut of writers and a dearth of readers, from a surfeit of publicity and a paucity of art. It is no coincidence that the successes over the past few decades have been the products of writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante, who are earnestly grappling with the morality of how one ought to live in a society that offers fewer answers by the day. 

In this sense, the contemporary writer of fiction is no different from the pundit on X (formerly Twitter), but whereas the online pundit is incentivized to provide extreme approbation or condemnation, the novelist may take a longer view. Today the craft of the novelist may not be as remunerative as the pundit’s — a few mega-writers excepted. But by making abstract problems concrete and by playing both sides, so to speak, the novelist offers wisdom no pundit can match.

One can, for example, argue all one likes about what it means for society that some men rob, rape, or kill. But Lee, an editor at the religious journal First Things, has done something much more difficult and important: he has, through imaginative exercises, made such actions concrete. He has told us their tastes and smells. Only a moralist would bother to tease out the thread of immorality with such care. Who else would bother with the mental anguish of such people? Lee thus does the reader the service of taking him somewhere he never wanted to go. Complacency, that most common 21st-century sin, is not an option once you’ve entered Lee’s fictional world.

None of it is easy to read, and Lee has written of an author’s struggle with his subject, in the form of dialogues with the demon “Paul” in three linked stories that make up the series “A Briefer Epic.” In these stories, the demon taunts the author, sophomorically questioning his sexuality, or suggesting that his preoccupation with the dark constitutes evil in itself. The back-and-forth is often amusing, but the scaffolding feels unnecessary, since many of the issues come through in the stories. Moreover, a writer allowing a clever demon to argue against his project may tempt a few too many readers to side with the devil and put down the book. 

But this is a quibble. In an age where art veers between empty entertainment and empty formalism, it is a pleasure to find a new voice deeply interested in how we ought to live. For Lee, that question manifests as a preoccupation with what in our world is most horrific. As in the ancient tragedies, Lee offers a chance to purge ourselves by following his characters down the long path to hell, before we return to the blessed freedom of our day-to-day lives. It is a bracing and, in the end, ennobling trip. I look forward to the next time Lee will lead me to a place I don’t want to go.

He was right about the general state of mind of the artist. I, a writer, could attest to that. But Roman Catholicism, the religion of scolds and prudes and patriarchal oppression, seemed unlikely to help anyone. Little did I know that a few weeks later, I would have my own mystical conversion experience and, in 2023, would become a member of Father Paul’s congregation. 

Nor did I realize I would be part of a trend. Catholicism is hip once again, and writers, artists, and intellectuals are converting in droves. One church that draws such an audience, St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village, has seen 10-fold growth in conversions in just a few years: more than 100 participants signed up for its catechetical program this year, up from 15 just three years ago. Eighty percent of the congregation’s members are in their 20s and 30s, according to Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican Friar who is a priest at St. Joseph’s. Numbers are similar at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, another Manhattan parish that is, for lack of a better word, cool.  

A new book, Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century, by UK-based Irish journalist Melanie McDonagh, addresses a wave of conversions among the artists and intellectuals of the previous century, and incidentally sheds some light on our own time. 

More than half a million people in England and Wales converted to Roman Catholicism between 1910 and 1960, McDonagh reports, including an unusually high concentration of the era’s most influential artists and writers: Aubrey Beardsley, Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Anscombe were just a few of the bold-face names. They were going against their country — where the Church of England reigned, and Catholicism was viewed as the superstition of the underclass — and their era, in which religiosity overall was waning. The trend ended abruptly after Vatican II, which, ironically, was the Church’s attempt to modernize and make the religion more accessible and appealing.

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McDonagh’s book is organized chronologically and by artist, starting in the 1890s with Oscar Wilde, who had a lifelong flirtation with Catholicism and converted in 1900 on his death bed. Wilde’s motivations, she says, were similar to those of many of the fin de siècle artists, in terms of being a mixture of mysticism and rebellion. His cohort may have been drawn to religion, but it was also reacting against Victorian elders, who’d embraced science, reason, and a deadening kind of materialism. If it wasn’t Catholicism, it was theosophy à la William Butler Yeats, or the occult.

Catholicism in the early 20th century was also a form of resistance against the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, McDonagh argues. She quotes art historian John Rothenstein’s theory that since the Catholic Church’s primary concern is the salvation of the individual, and since the Church demands the individual take responsibility for his own salvation, Catholicism worked against the “standardizing tendencies inherent in modern society” and offered adherents a kind of autonomy otherwise lacking in their lives. A commune and back-to-the land movement ran alongside the conversion trend, even back then. 

In many ways, Converts gets a slow start with Wilde and his peers. McDonagh is a workmanlike writer, presenting the biographical details without much peering into her subjects’ souls — the matter of greatest interest in a conversion story. We learn that people entered the Church because their friends did, or because they decided it was “the real thing,” or as a matter of reasoned theology. Many were influenced by Cardinal John Henry Newman (now a saint and Doctor of the Church), a former Anglican priest and theologian who first labored to transform the Church of England to be more like Rome, and then abandoned it, at great personal cost, for Rome itself. Newman died in 1890, but his writings led several of McDonagh’s subjects to conclude the truth of Rome’s claim to being the one true Church, the only one that had “continuity with the pre-Reformation Church,” as novelist and Catholic priest Robert Hugh Benson put it. 

Converts renders this profound transformation somewhat bloodlessly — we understand that Newman was instrumental, but don’t quite catch the divine spark. Newman, more than anyone else in the modern era, made the case for a definitive and exclusionary Catholic truth; by rejecting the Church of England, he rejected the Reformation and all of Protestantism. His claim is historical — the Roman church is the only body that can trace an unbroken lineage to the apostles — and metaphysical: there is one truth, not many, and one institution to interpret it. Modern, liberal thinking often attempts to elide the radicalism here, imagining this as just one of many options that “all lead to the same place,” as the cliché goes. But that isn’t how the Catholics see it.

 Even if McDonagh doesn’t quite bring Newman alive, themes emerge after he appears. The converts are looking for this kind of definitive truth. They leave the Church of England because of its Protestant waffling on dogma, or because they’re inspired by a longing for “spiritual order,” as convert and literary critic Maurice Baring said. To acknowledge “reality” was to become free, he wrote. Writer, convert, and Catholic apologist G. K. Chesterton explained it thus: “As for the fundamental reasons for a man joining the Catholic Church, there are only two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it to be the solid, objective truth, which is true whether he likes it or not; and the other is that he seeks liberation from his sins.” 

I joined the Church for neither reason — at least, not explicitly. I knew little of Catholic dogma. However, much of the joy and glory of the past few years has been in watching the world realign along this axis, as I conform my behavior to God’s truth, not my own. I’ve found answers hiding in plain sight to questions I’ve been asking for a lifetime, and it has been liberating. 

Likewise, the stories in the second half of Converts seem to center on Catholicism’s fundamental claims and challenging structure — though, of course, ultimately they center on God. The religion made significant inroads among the English population during World War I. For Catholics, it matters if you have confessed your sins and received absolution before going into battle; the ritual is more than symbolic. Consequently, the Church sent its priests to the front lines to offer such sacramental ministry, while Church of England policy was for clergymen to avoid the fighting. McDonagh quotes Robert Graves’s observation that the enlisted men had “no respect” for stay-behind clerics, who seemed to have little more to offer than a final cigarette. Graves wrote admiringly of a Catholic priest, who “after all the officers had been killed, ‘stripped off his black badges’ and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.” Elsewhere, we read of priests crawling through the rubble during the blitz, to hear confessions and absolve trapped survivors. 

Poet, painter, and engraver David Jones, whom McDonagh describes as “one of the most significant artists of the 20th century,” was first called to the faith during the war, when he had an epiphany after stumbling onto a Catholic mass in the “panorama of desolation” at the front. Jones discovered a reality to the service that he felt had always been missing during the Anglican office. Later, he wrote that artists had to be Catholic, and that “even if the Catholic religion weren’t true, you’d have to, [as an artist] become one … because the whole notion of art … is frightfully like the doctrine of transubstantiation.” A work of art, he believed, fundamentally was two things: an impression of a thing, and a thing itself. Just as the mass wasn’t a mere symbol or memorial of the sacrifice of Christ, but a portal renewing the real thing.  

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The acerbic novelist Evelyn Waugh believed the religion was equally essential for artists, but understood it differently. If an artist didn’t understand the relationship between God and man, the work would be a failure, Waugh thought. In his view, Henry James was the last of the great writers. And modern, secular novelists, he wrote, “try to represent the whole human mind and soul and yet omit its determining character — that of being God’s creatures with a defined purpose.” If the artist didn’t understand the true grounds of man’s existence, Waugh believed the characters could only be “pure abstractions,” a stakeless and boring task for literature.

It’s not a bad theory of what’s happened to books in our increasingly secular age, though a great Catholic novel revival has yet to accompany the 2020s wave of conversions. To understand the trend today, many of the ideas in McDonagh’s book are useful. As at the fin de siècle, we live in a science-ruled, rational, materialist time, one which often seems to have little to offer the deeper human longings. Techno-feudalism is even more oppressive to our individuality than industrialization was. And of course, in a time of ultimate permissiveness, a devout and restrictive religion is a tiny bit contrarian and rebellious. 

Father Teller floated other reasons for the conversion trend to be happening now. “Gen Z is lonely,” he said, noting that the cohort came of age during the pandemic. “And they’re looking to be told who they are, and who cares for them.” He speaks frequently to young artists, musicians, and intellectuals seeking to convert, though they’re not the majority of his flock. Another reason for the appeal, he adds, is that “all the institutions are breaking apart, but the institution of institutions, the Church, remains.” 

A newly traditionalist bent in some parishes (and notably, the popular ones) — less Vatican II, more Latin and “bells and smells” — may also be playing a role. The final chapter of Converts is a sad one, as McDonagh details what the changes of the 1960s wrought upon many of her subjects. She’s careful to disclaim that many people may have liked the new mass and the more accessible format, but those drawn to the Church by authority and tradition did not. The collapse in conversion numbers is not conclusively because of Vatican II, but after it, collapse they did: to 6,046 new adult converts in England and Wales in 1970, down from more than 15,000 a decade earlier In both 2021 and 2022, the number was under 2,000. Still, McDonagh writes, there has been a modest increase lately, and “the story continues.” More artists and communicators should only amplify the trend. 

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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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.

A businessman with a head so hard that it was difficult to imagine something so soft as hair had ever taken root there; at best he might have had lots of sharp needles sticking out of his scalp, like the cenobite in the Hellraiser movies. I might add that The New York Times exposé a few years back, with its claims of adults crying at their desks, did nothing to dispel the impression of a man driven by an unparalleled will-to-power, a master strategist who made few (if any) mistakes.

Yet, recent events have caused me to doubt the accuracy of this image, and to wonder about Bezos’s judgement. The rot first set in this time last year, when Bezos was forced to engage in a very embarrassing face-off with the National Enquirer over some revealing selfies he had taken and sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which had subsequently fallen into the tabloid’s possession. Surely the infallible god-emperor of Amazon was more intelligent than a horny teenager? Surely he knew better than to snap a pic of his John Thomas and think it would stay private? Well, apparently not.

That said, the way he handled it — a rapid escalation and invitation to war — impressed me; those were some nerves of steel right there, that was the Genghis Bezos I believed in. And the strategy worked, the photo remains under wraps and Bezos’s loins remain an enigma; none of us need ever think about them again and everything makes sense again.

Except that recently I learned something else about Bezos which threatens once again to subvert the image I have of him as a ruthless, logical, master strategist: he takes advice from psychics. At least that’s what his girlfriend’s estranged brother Michael Sanchez claims in a lawsuit he has filed against the Amazon owner for “defamation”.

Suddenly I had an image of Bezos at night, driving his Honda Accord down some lost highway in New Mexico, bald pate glinting in the moonlight, before screeching to a halt by the shack of a roadside psychic, a neon sign of a palm buzzing in the darkness. He steps inside to seek of the medium within the advice of the spirits on this burning question: should he or should he not keep his affair with Lauren Sanchez a secret? The medium closes her eyes, establishes contact with the mystic forces of the Other Side, and then following a long pause, they reply:

“Nah, don’t tell anyone about it, bro.”

Wow, just wow. I mean, he paid for that (allegedly). Yet perhaps I am being unrealistic, and even unfair in my expectation that Bezos be all will-to-power all the time. Love can make fools of kings, as the philosopher Bryan Ferry reminds us. Besides, even that interpretation may be jumping to conclusions; Bezos’s consultation with the psychic may not have been the consequence of an otherwise rational mind scrambled by love.

Who is to say that he doesn’t visit psychics regularly to consult on all manner of things? He wouldn’t be the first powerful person to do so. The Reagan White House had a secret astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was sought on far more consequential matters than running a retail empire, while Hillary Clinton roamed the halls having conversations with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt, although she claims it was a psychological exercise. And what about that time T. Blair and his wife Cherie smeared fruit over each other in a replica Mayan pyramid as part of a “rebirthing” ritual? A trip to the psychic seems pretty tame next to that.

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Meanwhile, Bezos’s behavior is not necessarily an outlier among his peers in the tech world. Many of these hi-tech oligarchs have an interest in the spiritual side of existence. Steve Jobs was a big fan of Paramahansa Yogananda’s book, Autobiography of a Yogi (also the inspiration for the ultra-proggy Yes LP Tales from Topographic Oceans) and also retained a Zen master to serve as his spiritual adviser.

Marc Benioff, the founder, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce, is a devotee of self-actualization and yoga. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter spent a recent birthday on a 10 day silent meditation trip to Myanmar. And Anthony Levandowski, an engineer central to both Google and Uber’s self-driving car programs established his own church (of AI). I could go on, but you get the picture.

It also turns out that my somewhat down-at-heel conception of what a consultation with a psychic looks like is less than accurate, at least when it comes to the super-wealthy. Roadside mediums are for the proles; Bezos’s psychic is reported to have cost “thousands”. In fact, those with a talent for talking to the dead or revealing the future can make good money if they can nurture the right kind of clientele.

For instance Laura Day, a “financial psychic” who advised both Wall Street bankers and the CEO of data storage firm Seagate Technology, charged $10,000 a month for her services, and that was back in 2008. Branding is important with this elite audience; for instance, Robert Ohotto, an astrologer whose clients are reported to include Google executives, describes himself as an ”intuitive life strategist”; David Zarza, who, like Amazon, is based in Seattle, describes himself as a “psychic medium and intuitive life coach.”

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Indeed, the mystic offerings on offer in today’s America have proliferated like the varieties of kombucha on offer in Whole Foods (acquired by Bezos in 2017), as entrepreneurs of the $pirit world have sought to establish a presence in this increasingly crowded marketplace.

A quick Google search for metaphysical services in my local area turned up such options as “profound reading and instant healing”, an “eclectic intuitive”, varying takes on astrology, “wise women holistic services”, “angel readings”, “aura readings”, “intuitive-angelic-reiki readings”, an “intuitive tune-up” consultation, “throat chakra clearing”, “spirit whispering” and “Akashic record readings” based on “theosophy and anthroposophy.”

Thus the language of mediums merges with the language of wellness, a crossover exemplified by episode six of The Goop Lab with Gwyneth Paltrow, currently streaming on Netflix and which I absolutely do not recommend unless you are writing an article about psychics for UnHerd and need to do some research.

And even then, I do not recommend it. In this episode, the queen of this notorious wellness/lifestyle brand (valued at over $250 million) dispatches her millennial, (mostly) female employees to discover their inner mediums by participating in assorted exercises aimed at channeling the dead with a certain Laura Lynne Jackson. What was most striking to me was how aggressively boring the show was; there was no spooky music, no crystal balls, nothing morbid.

The studio was tasteful and brightly lit, some of the activities took place in a lush garden, the graphics were straight out of a lifestyle magazine, the millennials were all young and upbeat (bar one sceptic, who even so still smiled a lot), and the language was of “energy” and “connection” as if communing with deceased relatives was a fairly straightforward matter — a bit like going into settings on your smartphone, finding the afterlife’s Wi-Fi there and pressing “connect”.

This was the world of psychics gone fully mainstream, but it doesn’t end there. For those who like a dash of intersectionality with their “mystical services”, there’s always Chani Nicholas, the subject of one of the most eye-wateringly terrible articles published in the last decade, on the website of the perennially-straining-to-get down-with-the-kids Rolling Stone: “Meet the Woman Bringing Social Justice to Astrology”. And no, that’s not a Titania McGrath spoof.

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As organized religion declines in the US, this all comes with a certain dreary predictability; I am reminded, once again, of the observation attributed to G.K. Chesterton that when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Nature abhors a vacuum and today’s spiritual entrepreneurs are stepping up to fill the gap. Indeed, according to one report, the demand for “psychic services” in the US is growing steadily and the market is worth around $2 billion.

Little wonder, then, that Venture Capital is trying to get a slice of the action. Want to know what the stars have in store for you? There is an app for that; more than one, in fact. For a mere $19.99 a month Sanctuary  will provide you with birth charts, opportunities to talk to professional astrologers and promises “weekly cosmic insights sent straight to your inbox.” Meanwhile, Co-Star promises “hyper-personalized, real time horoscopes” and claims to utilize an AI that “merges NASA data with the insight of human astrologers”. Both have attracted millions of dollars in Venture Capital, according to The New York Times.

But that gives me another thought. What if Bezos is not, in fact, a fool for love, nor as keen on metaphysics and mysteries of the soul as some of his tech oligarch peers? Could it be that his interest in the psychic realm is actually part of his plan for world domination, and that this most relentless of tycoons has his eye on the growing market for spiritual services?

Could spirit mediums and astrology soon join keto-friendly organic kelp granules, data storage and the Washington Post on the ever growing list of products and services owned and/or supplied by Bezos? Will Amazon Prime soon include insight into our fortunes alongside movies and free two-day shipping?

Psychics of America, gaze into your futures. Bezos is coming.