The New Atheism of the 2000s and early 2010s had serious flaws. And yet Richard Dawkins was surely onto something when he sought to shake religious traditions by their metaphorical lapels and demand that they explain what exactly they are doing when they use religious language. Is it history, proto-science, poetry or something else entirely? For all that Christian commentators enjoyed depicting the likes of Dawkins as wading out into deep theological waters and promptly drowning, this basic question was manifestly a good one — one on which there has long been disagreement among Christians of varying stripes.

This is part of what intrigues me about Paul Kingsnorth’s and Martin Shaw’s conversions to Orthodox Christianity, in both cases via paths that ran through the natural world — Kingsnorth as an environmentalist and one-time Wicca priest, Shaw as a wilderness vigil guide. The two friends claim to be feeling their way towards what they call a “wild Christianity” — which could represent a new turn in our relationship with religion.

Somewhere near the heart of wild Christianity appears to be a powerful sense of numinous presence, within nature and within the Orthodox liturgy, which is at once compelling and strange. In an age of endless cultural recycling, the two men are calling for the cultivation of an attentive silence, in natural surrounds. We have all but lost this ability to listen, but we can re-learn with the help of others: the medieval saints of Ireland, where Kingsnorth now lives, alongside cultures around the world who understand the value of what Shaw calls “putting your great and ancient ear to the dark soil of circumstance and listening”.

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The pair are not the first to make the case for a radical, untethered Christianity, free from the trials of institutional religion. In many respects, Kingsnorth reminds me of an English Benedictine monk by the name of Bede Griffiths (1906-1993). His attempt to revitalise Western Christianity, alongside that of the English philosopher and counter-culture guru Alan Watts, who died 50 years ago this month, turned on the question of how language and inner experience shape one another. I suspect that this may end up being true, too, for wild Christianity.

For Watts, as a child, life’s magic could be found in the beauty and fecundity of the family garden — tomatoes and raspberries hanging off vines like “glowing, luscious jewels” — and later in East Asian landscape painting, Zen Buddhism, and yoga. Griffiths, too, was drawn in by nature — in his case, a spiritual awakening one evening on the school playing fields, set off by the sound of birdsong: “Everything… grew still as the sunset faded and the veil of dusk began to cover the earth… I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel.”

Watts and Griffiths regarded the general drabness of mid-20th century Britain as evidence of a fundamental disconnect from life at this deep level: the funereal black suit that Watts’s father wore for work; the “boxy, red-brick quiet-desperation homes” to which Watts saw such men returning home at night.

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Unsure what to do about all this, Griffiths and some university friends experimented with living a simple life in a Cotswold cottage: no running water; no technology or literature produced after the 17th century; and candlelit debates about whether, if the village blacksmith could somehow craft an X-ray machine, it would be acceptable to use it.

But Griffiths soon realised that his venture failed to get to the real problem, which was the placing of human beings — and, in particular, a discriminating human intellect — at the heart of reality. Having quit the Cotswolds, he spent a traumatic night of prayer in Bethnal Green, where he found his still-tentative personal philosophy — Christianity with a dash of Eastern wisdom — completely destroyed, as an “abyss” of darkness and unreason overtook him. Out on the street the next morning, London’s buses appeared to “have lost their solidity and [to] be glowing with light”. God, he concluded, had “brought me to my knees, and made me acknowledge my own nothingness… out of that knowledge I had been reborn”.

Watts came to a similar conclusion one evening in his boarding school dormitory, where frustration at his failed practice of yoga and zazen boiled over and he decided to drop both — at which point, quite unexpectedly, “Alan Watts” got dropped instead. Anxious little Alan was, he realised, no more than a case of mistaken identity. The real Alan Watts was part of an immeasurably greater and inextinguishable whole. The release was profound, and its memory never left him.

Watts went on to make a name for himself on America’s West Coast in the Fifties and Sixties, as a gifted communicator of Eastern wisdom — to young Americans especially, often on college campuses — and a progressive thinker on everything from psychotherapy to sex and LSD. For a few years before that, however, he served as an Episcopal priest in America’s Midwest. There, he observed that, unlike in India where Shiva dances and Krishna plays the flute, Midwestern church-goers sit amid heavy courthouse furniture — pews and pulpits — apologising to God, “asking him not to spank” them, praising him in formulae, and engaging in enforced folksiness and “fake joy”. An institutionalised pride is at work here, Watts declared. Everyone talks about grace, but most people want to work for their own salvation — and to see it denied to people who don’t put in the hard yards.

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This, he thought, gives rise to a narrow notion of “meaning”: an endlessly deferred happiness. The idea that play might be a more accurate analogy than work for the divine life and our participation in it would, Watts felt sure, strike most congregants as blasphemous. And yet, this was what one of his later LSD trips revealed to him: reality as a giant game of hide-and-seek, with the universe playing at being lots of different things and people. It is not dissimilar to the Taoist philosophy of “flow”, in which reality is akin to breath or water.

Some of Watts’s ecclesiastical colleagues suspected him of being little more than a pantheist with a gift for semantics. And therein lay the challenge. No doubt Watts’s pioneering church services were lots of fun to attend: conversation and jokes, Gregorian chant and piano improvisations, smoking and drinking, sermons capped at 15 minutes. But where was Jesus Christ in all of this? Watts suggested that God is “personal” in the sense of being “immeasurably alive”. Yet wasn’t his image of God just a little too convenient: personal enough to be lively, interesting, and joyous, but not so personal as to make demands of him or censure his behaviour — his “boozing and wenching”, as Watts put it?

Griffiths eventually faced similar questions. Having become a Catholic and a Benedictine in the Thirties, he moved to south India in the mid-Fifties and began to pioneer new forms of monasticism and inter-religious dialogue. He ended up developing a deep fondness and respect for Hinduism, and in particular the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Advaita Vedanta philosophy. His ecumenical work was widely praised and seemed well-suited to the post-colonial era. And yet, asked his critics, was this still Christianity?

Still, Watts’s fanbase seems to renew itself in every generation. Where once they thumbed through his paperbacks on the hippie trail, now they have podcasts and YouTube videos of his talks. Read the comments underneath those videos, and liberation remains the key to his appeal decade after decade.

There is much here that might contribute to a “wild Christianity”: Watts’s warnings about safe, nostalgic religion as a kind of collective clinging; his intuition of a God who is “immeasurably alive”; his self-confessed “rascality”. I’m not sure, however, that liberation by itself is enough. Don’t we soon find ourselves back where we were, and in need of liberation once again? Griffiths, who defined faith as “utter receptivity to the divine”, thought that real liberation was a matter of attentive, committed listening, moving step by step according to what you hear as you go. A Christianity built on that, and capable of generating community from it, is a wild idea indeed.

“To grasp these facts we must patiently and clearly trace the origin and monstrous growth of this régime of little men,” Guilty Men’s authors wrote, whose “half-baked, uncoordinated scheme of economic mobilisation” was driving the country towards defeat. The hard truth was that “the dead bureaucratic hand of the Civil Service, coupled with the complacent willingness of some of our Ministers to relax their exertions so long as they could keep the public quiet by pouring the soft and soothing oil of optimism over their heads, was putting us in peril”.

The analogy with today is painfully clear. Our Government has indeed mounted a wartime response to Covid, in that tens of thousands of fellow countrymen are now dead due to a series of catastrophic errors. The lack of foresight, the inability to plan effectively or marshal the full resources of the state, the incompetent governance and series of defeats snatched from the jaws of victory, all call to mind the series of disasters which characterised Britain’s first three years of the war. So who are the Guilty Men of the Covid crisis?

As the Atlantic journalist Tom McTague observed back in August, the entire British state has been found wanting, as this country “has found a way to be simultaneously overcentralized and weak at its centre”. The problem is not just the Conservative Government, though that has failed entirely: it is the entire superstructure around it, the Civil Service, Public Health England, the media. The British state and its parasitic para-state are both entirely unfit for purpose.

It is the very malaise identified by the pantomime villain of our expert class, Dominic Cummings, when he said, back in 2014: “We do not have a problem with ‘too much cynicism’ — we have a problem with too much trust in people and institutions that are not fit to control so much. When faced with the ‘fog of war’ in nonlinear systems such as the financial system, disease outbreaks, or terrorism, the current system is absolutely bound to respond with sloth/panic, chaos, and blunders.” Working within the heart of the British state, Cummings identified its fatal flaws long ago — so it is no wonder that the para-state’s immune system, the Westminster lobby, spat him out as a threat to its continued survival.

It is unfortunate that his suggestions for its reform suffer from what the writer Paul Kingsnorth identified in his essay on the scythe as an ingrained tendency to hope for technological quick fixes instead of simple, timeworn solutions. Surrounded by hapless administrators, Cummings identified the over-powerful yet ineffective state bureaucracy as the problem, and markets and Big Tech as the solution. Yet the global response to Covid reveals the opposite: surely the state is the solution. The market is as parasitic on the state for its survival as steppe nomads are on settled farmers: not the freebooting corsairs of neoliberal mythology, but entirely reliant on the state to pump taxpayer’s money into correcting their errors.

Back in the spring, distracted by the global crisis of liberalism, the pandemic was presented as a test between liberalism and authoritarianism. The success of East Asian democracies such as Taiwan and South Korea, however, shows that the crucial distinction is in fact simply that between functioning state bureaucracies and inept ones. 

It is noteworthy, perhaps, that Taiwan and South Korea, as well as the also-successful Israel, are neighboured by enemies, and have experience in military mass mobilisation as a result; tucked away on our island at the most pacific corner of the European continent, we have lost a necessary appreciation of threat, like the flightless birds on previously undiscovered islands which waddled heedlessly into hungry sailors’ outstretched arms.

Surely an island nation with few entry points could easily have sealed the borders back in the spring, or at the very least instituted a system of health checks and quarantine for travellers from the outside world — something which, incredibly, has not been attempted nearly a year into the pandemic. Like the prewar government shrugging that “the bomber will always get through”, the British state decided that the virus will always get through, and that there was no point trying to limit its spread. Tens of thousands of people are dead, and thousands more will soon die as a direct result.

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This defeat has many fathers, and among them is the enfeebling culture war that derived from the Brexit vote. Had the Government taken this simple, achievable step back in the spring, the cries of “rainy fascist island Brexit Britain” from our witless comment class would doubtless have caused Johnson some discomfort: his greatest failure is failing to appreciate that the opinions of these people simply do not matter, as the past series of election results show. With a strong majority in parliament, the Government could have taken decisive action swiftly, and been rewarded for it afterwards by a grateful nation. 

The primary function, and duty, of the state is to keep the people safe; all authority flows from this compact with the nation. Yet instead of Hobbes’ Leviathan, the modern British state resembles a giant tutting HR administrator looming over the country, cautioning that decisive action is impossible: borders can’t be policed; volunteers can’t administer vaccines to those at risk, without an official certificate of correct opinions; the Army can’t be brought in; even if they can do it in other countries, we couldn’t possibly adopt such radical solutions here.

It is ironic, then, that the Government is engaged in a simultaneous struggle to defend the British state from Scottish separatism. On the basis of its current performance, there is little evidence that the British state even exists. What we are ruled by is only a negative state, that can pass laws in ever greater numbers to prevent people doing things, but is incapable of actively performing even the simplest and most important acts of governance itself. Who can blame so many Scottish or Welsh voters for wanting rid of this useless system inhabiting the hollow carapace of the British state? The temptation is to allow the Union’s dissolution, in the hope that some better system of governance might arise from the wreckage. But there is no reason to be confident that what replaces it will not be the same broken system in a shrunken form or, as in Scotland, something even worse.

There is a tragic quality — in its Classical sense, of protagonists brought low by an intrinsic character flaw — in observing prominent neoliberal thinktankers correctly diagnosing the British state’s total absence of capacity and pleading for action. The neoliberal logic of eroding the state was to make us freer — but trapped in our homes, nearly a year after the beginning of this crisis, by an incompetent and incapable state, it is clear these alleged freedoms are purely notional. We are now imprisoned by them. 

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Certain organs of British conservatism have been so captured by libertarian thought that their commentators disgrace themselves with Covid conspiracy theories in support of age-old British freedoms. Meanwhile, their brains addled by Right-liberalism, Conservative ministers view the state like a recovering alcoholic views an ice-cold glass of gin and tonic: afraid to give in to temptation, lest it take control and ruin them utterly.

This disaster has gone on too long, and Labour has been too meek not only in holding the Government to account but in proposing radical solutions. Surely the solution is this: to rebuild the capacity of the British state as quickly as possible, through a vast new programme of public infrastructure projects, and an immediate program of nationalisation of key industries and utilities, just as in the Second World War, while carrying out a root and branch reform of the Civil Service to remove the dross. The primary aim would not be to bring public goods back into public ownership, as they were a mere generation ago — that would just be a side benefit. The goal would be to rebuild a class of bureaucrats who are competent at actually administering the state and running major infrastructure projects, instead of merely handing out emergency contracts at inflated prices to friends and randomly-chosen private sector profiteers. 

Starmer’s mooted proposals for radical reform of British governance along radically devolved lines sound promising, and it will be good to examine the details carefully when they are finally presented. What about a form of Tory Anarchism — in truth, a system of radically more localised governance across the country — which is not, paradoxical though it may seem, incompatible with a stronger state. Instead of being simultaneously too centralised and too weak, as Tom McTague noted, the British state ought to be both more decentralised and stronger: strengthened local governance with deeper and wider responsibilities ought to be seen as a real-world school of administration, identifying and promoting talent from the wider populace and incorporating their skills within the greater British state.

In France, suffering from its own Covid failures, Macron has suggested choosing 35 citizens by lottery to advise on rolling out the vaccine, and why not? Literally any 35 people plucked at random from the street would have closed the borders back in March, and exhibited greater urgency rolling out the vaccine than our own sclerotic state functionaries. Britain’s governance is simply too important to be left to its current political class. 

Britain’s essential problem, revealed by the pandemic, is that the state simply does not function. To rebuild capacity, the state needs practice. The French and Chinese build our power stations and run our transport infrastructure not because they have inherited some unique genetic capacity for administration, but because they have preserved their states, which are, as a result, well-practised at actually doing things. Like a developing nation, we rely on others to do things we ought to be able to do ourselves — and perhaps, like a developing nation, we should invite bureaucrats from Taiwan or South Korea to audit our civil service and suggest improvements, like benevolent colonial administrators liberating us from our own ignorance and ideological superstition. 

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But first of all, we need a clear-out of government, which has failed this country at a moment of crisis. Johnson has fulfilled the role granted to him by history, of delivering Brexit. The time has surely come for him to leave the stage, along with those around him, and the incompetent civil servants beneath him. As the authors of Guilty Men wrote in 1940, “the men who are now repairing the breaches in our walls should not carry along with them those who let the walls fall into ruin. The nation is united to a man in its desire to prosecute the war in total form: there must be a similar unity in the national confidence. Let the guilty men retire, then, of their own volition, and so make an essential contribution to the victory upon which all are implacably resolved.” 

The failures of Dunkirk, of Norway, of Malaya and Singapore led, once the battle was finally won, to the total reorganisation of the British state: if the British state of 2021 cannot reform itself after its failures in this crisis, surely it does not deserve to survive the aftermath.

The recent bout of Twitter hysteria prompted by Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, rashly sharing photographs of the family bookshelves, may just have been another pointless skirmish in the culture war, but it illustrated one thing very clearly: our self-appointed censors do not have even a passing familiarity with the political thought they seek to expurgate from the world.

By focussing their outrage on Gove’s ownership of a book by David Irving, Owen Jones and the other intellectual luminaries of Twitter progressivism skimmed over Gove’s far more interesting reading choices, namely works by Guillaume Faye and his partner in the French New Right, Alain de Benoist. One would think an engagement with the political thought of our nearest European neighbours would solicit, if not their approval, then at least their interest: but then there are few political movements as insular or intellectually incurious as late-stage British liberalism.

For their benefit, then, the French New Right, or Nouvelle Droite, began as a movement in the late 1960s to forge a new path for European conservatism, rejecting both the culturally dominant Marxism of the period, and the Atlanticism of the mainstream Right.

Influenced by the Konservative Revolution of pre-war Germany, particular the civilisational pessimism of Oswald Spengler, the merciless critique of liberal democracy assembled in the works of Carl Schmitt and the complex and hard to define body of work created by Ernst Junger, the Nouvelle Droite’s think tank GRECE (Groupement de Recherce et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européene, or Research and Study Group for European Civilisation) established itself, for a time, as an influential body on the French political scene.

In 1979, however, GRECE found itself cancelled by a campaign of demonstrative outrage in France’s liberal Le Monde newspaper, accusing the group of an entryist infiltratation of mainstream conservative institutions, particularly the Le Figaro newspaper. Marginal in electoral politics, GRECE nevertheless gained influence in the meta-political sphere, as part of what we could call the Gramscian Right; understanding that politics is downstream of culture, the Nouvelle Droite aimed to influence a new generation of Right-wing thinkers to reject the worldview of mainstream conservative and liberal thought in place of a standpoint quite outside standard Left-Right divisions.

The Nouvelle Droite rejected the domination of the European continent by what it characterised as an imperialist United States, which spreads capitalism and liberalism across the world through a vulgar and thuggish combination of hard and soft power, destroying individual societies and turning the world into an indistinguishable mush of rootless consumers.

Early enthusiasts of the work of Christopher Lasch, critiquing the emergent class of globalised elites, the Nouvelle Droite in some ways anticipated the current trend in both the United States and Europe towards post-liberal thought, though they followed this line of thought in another direction entirely.

Actively supporting Third World national liberation movements, decrying globalisation for its homogenising effects, and sounding urgent warnings of looming ecological collapse, de Benoist and Faye anticipated the anti-globalisation movement of the millennium, before it petered out into commodified pseudo-protest.

Equally, by warning that mass migration into Europe would lead inexorably to ethnic conflict and mass casualty terrorist attacks, and by railing against the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, the Nouvelle Droite anticipated much of the discourse of today’s populist Right, though they explicitly rejected what they saw as their petty nationalisms in favour of the unification of Europe and Russia into a single civilisational superpower.

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Avowedly anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation and pro-European unification, there is, unfortunately for the online censors, therefore very little evidence of Nouvelle Droite influences on Gove’s personal politics. Indeed, many of its lines of thought can be traced more clearly in European politicians as superficially distinct as Macron and Orban than in any British figure.

Its concerns over the prospect of Islamist terrorism resulting from migration into Europe can perhaps be discerned in Gove’s Celsius 7/7, though even here there is a major point of difference. Gove’s book contrasts global jihadism with a Western liberal tradition he urges us to defend; the thinkers of the Nouvelle Droite, by contrast, saw liberalism as the root problem and jihadism as a natural, if culturally alien response, parallel to their own rejection of liberal values.

Unlike Gove, whose book is situated firmly within the tradition of Western liberalism, Faye echoes Islamist ideologues by asserting that: “The rise of radical Islam is the backlash to the excesses of the cosmopolitanism of modernity that wanted to impose on the entire world the model of atheist individualism, the cult of material goods, the loss of spiritual values and the dictatorship of the spectacle.”

Of the two books by Faye on Gove’s bookshelf, both published by the London-based Arktos publishing house, Europe’s leading disseminator of radical right-wing political thought, the most interesting by far is Archaeofuturism, a collection of essays from the late 1990s republished in book format. Writing at the same time as liberal ideologues were declaring the End of History and politicians were assuring their voters that globalisation would bring with it an endless period of global harmony and prosperity, Faye posited a pessimistic worldview of what is now startling immediacy.

By the year 2020, he claimed, as a result of the inherent fragility created by a globalised financial and political system, civilisation would buckle under a cascading set of interlinked crises. Waves of pandemics, of political disorder and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa, of global financial crashes and ecological degradation would rebound off each other, escalating the pressures upon the international system to the point that the world of the late 20^th century would become impossible to sustain.

In Faye’s words, “a series of ‘dramatic lines’ are drawing near: like the tributaries of a river, and will converge in perfect unision at the breaking point (between 2010 and 2020), plunging the world into chaos. From this chaos- which will be extremely painful on a global scale- a new order can emerge based on a worldview, Archaeofuturism, understood as the idea for the world of the post-catastrophic age.”

Writing before the 9/11 attacks, the last global financial crash, the bloody cycle of wars precipitated by the Arab Spring and the COVID pandemic, Faye’s concern over what he termed the “convergence of catastrophes,” seemed as outlandish and unfashionable then as it now does topical. Yet since the beginning of this century, a greater awareness of what is known as global catastrophic risk has begun to creep into mainstream strategic thought, mostly with climate change in the foreground and Faye’s other fears placed as second order consequences.

The 2007 Age of Consequences  paper, issued jointly by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies and American Centre for New American Security thinktanks, echoed Faye’s apocalyptic warnings in almost every respect, warning that severe climate change would lead to the forced movement of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people from the worst-affected areas, the collapse of liberal democracy in the rest of the world as a consequence, the unchecked spread of pandemics and jihadist terrorism, and the outbreak of wars within and between states as the global order collapses.

In this scenario, the report warns, “nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.”

Furthermore, the report echoes Faye by warning of such “a dramatically new global paradigm that it is virtually impossible to contemplate all the aspects of national and international life that would be inevitably affected. As one participant noted, “unchecked climate change equals the world depicted by Mad Max, only hotter, with no beaches, and perhaps with even more chaos.”

While such a characterization may seem extreme, a careful and thorough examination of all the many potential consequences associated with global climate change is profoundly disquieting. The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life. The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War.”

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Only last year, a major Australian forecast warned that an apocalyptic near-future was at this point almost inevitable, describing its research as “a glimpse into a world of “outright chaos” on a path to the end of human civilisation and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.”

Predictions equally dire as Faye’s have been made in less colourful language though with no less alarming conclusions by the medium-term strategic forecasts of the Ministry of Defence and by the Pentagon, all of which make for unsettling reading.

The European Union, similarly, links climate change to a cascading set of global security challenges , severely threatening both the global and European order. In its 2016 Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign And Security Policy, the overarching mission paper for the continental bloc’s approach to the near future, the EU’s strategists assert that:

“We live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned. To the east, the European security order has been violated, while terrorism and violence plague North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Europe itself. Economic growth is yet to outpace demography in parts of Africa, security tensions in Asia are mounting, while climate change causes further disruption.”

Only last week, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, the Sociology professor Piotr Glinski, took to a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to warn that the COVID crisis was a glimpse into a future of civilisational collapse, explicitly likening the modern West to the late Roman Empire.

While the date Faye settled upon for the apocalypse is a decade or two in advance of these more sober warnings, his doomy vision of the medium-term future, is, unfortunately for us, worried over at the highest levels of British, American and European strategic thought.

But perhaps more interesting, not least for its presence on the bookshelf of such a senior British government minister, is Faye’s proposed solution, the Archaeofuturism of the book’s title. Likely influenced by the American political theorist Samuel P. Huntington, Faye unconvincingly suggests the current global system world will coalesce into distinct civilisational blocs: a Chinese-dominated one, a greater North America, a sub-Saharan African bloc, “a Euro-Siberian unit,” a greater Islamic world and a vaguely defined Pacific bloc for the rest.

Once this is achieved, the scene is set for the total reordering of global civilisation, according to “a revolutionary model based on a self-centred and inegalitarian world economy, which may be imposed upon us by historical events, but which it would be wise to foresee and plan for in advance”.

Noting, as is now a commonplace opinion, that “the utopia of ‘development’ open to ten billion people is environmentally unsustainable,” Faye proposes a system of jaw-dropping global re-ordering, worth quoting at length:

“First off, most of humanity would revert to a pre-technological subsistence economy based on agriculture and the crafts, with a neo-medieval demographic structure… Communitarian and tribal life would reassert its rights… Even in industrialised countries- India, Russia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Argentina, etc- a significant portion of the population could return to live according to this archaic socio-economic model.”

Secondly, Faye asserts: “A minority percentage of humanity would continue to live according to the techno-scientific economic model based on ongoing innovation by establishing a ‘global exchange network’ of about a billion people.”

“Finally”, he notes, “these vast neo-archaic economic blocs would be centred upon a continental or multi-continental plan, with basically no mutual exchange between them. Only the techno-scientific portion of humanity would have access to the global exchange. This two-tier world economy thus combines archaism and futurism. The techno-scientific portion of humanity would have no right to intervene in the affairs of the neo-medieval communities that form the majority of the population, nor — most importantly — would it in any way be obliged to ‘help’ them.”

In a short story at the end of the book, Faye paints a vivid if outlandish picture of this proposed future, where a small, global technocratic global elite pursues rapid technological and scientific advances, while the majority of the world’s population lives in subsistence farming communities at a level of technology broadly equivalent to that of the Dark Ages.

Developing his ideas further in the wildly imaginative series of short science fiction tales which make up his follow-up work Archaeofuturism 2.0, Faye’s vision darkens. Some societies can survive, for a time, by fending off the encroaching chaos and maintaining the rudimentary technology of the early 20^th century. But, over time, the darkness settles and mankind is destroyed utterly.

The excellent academic introduction to Faye’s life and work by Stephane Francois in the recent Key Thinkers of the Radical Right notes that Archaeofuturism entails “the dismissal of modernity, born from the Enlightenment, and conservatism, since modernity shows signs of fracture and conservatism leads to nothing.” Summarizing Faye’s vision, Francois notes that:

“To avoid civilisational and ecological collapse, he proposes putting in place an authoritarian regime under the auspices of a “born chief,” a dictator defined as a providential man who knows how to set his peoples in motion, and protects his peoples’ identity and ancestry.”

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It is perhaps partly for this reason that Faye’s work has proved so popular with Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Azov Movement, an armed brigade fighting Russia in the contested regions of the country’s east as part of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which also provides policing functions — both officially, with the state’s blessing, and unofficially, as a competitor to the state — in the cities of Ukraine’s western heartlands.

Last year, shortly after Faye’s death, I interviewed Azov’s international secretary Olenya Somenyaka in the group’s headquarters just off Kyiv’s famous, central Maidan Square. Surrounded by bookcases filled with the works of the esoteric ultra-right writers currently undergoing a revival among disaffected Western conservatives, Semenyaka emphasised how central Faye’s work was in developing her worldview. In the world according to Somenyaka and Azov, Ukraine will play a starring role as a springboard for the reconquest of Europe from what she viewed as a collapsing liberal order, and lead the continent into a neo-pagan, Archaeofuturist dawn.

Presumably it is due to their unexpected popularity with a powerful armed force and challenge to liberal democracy in Ukraine that Faye’s works secured a place on Michael Gove’s bookshelf. Their placing next to an academic work on modern Ukraine would seem to indicate the politician’s interest in the country’s social and political development, laudable given the deployment of British soldiers there.

Indeed, Faye’s darkest warnings are echoed in British parliamentary politics only by the Green Party, one of whose most senior figures, the University of East Anglia’s professor of Philosophy and Extinction Rebellion spokesman Rupert Read, warns that: “We need to think about what comes after the likely collapse of this civilisation and plan accordingly. There are of course many sub-possibilities within this possible future, and some of them are very ugly. The successor civilisation could, for instance, be largely a reign of brutal warlordism. We have to try to do what we can to prepare our descendants for survival and for one of the better sub-possibilities.”

But even if we accept the proposition that Guardian columnists have the right to determine what books may and may not be read, it is unclear that Faye’s works deserve a place on their Index of forbidden knowledge. On the contrary, it is an encouraging sign that our senior politicians are reading obscure and outlandish works of political thought, given the times in which we live.

For good or ill, we are living in a springtime of ideologies, Gramsci’s “time of monsters”, where strange and unlikely political creeds proliferate on Twitter like sexual identities on Tumblr. Whatever the likelihood of our societies soon emulating Faye’s Archaeofuturistic vision — and it is presumably very unlikely — it is equally unlikely that we will return to the world of the near past.

The post-war global order enabled by American hegemony has gone, and will never return. The dominant category of books on Gove’s shelves, the autobiographies of American centrist politicians, represent a world as lost and irretrievable as the biographies of Europe’s absolute monarchs would have seemed exactly one century ago.

If we accept, as post-liberals as well as thinkers of far-left and far-right do, that the ideology of liberalism has exhausted itself, broken by its weak correspondence to reality, then we must accept that some successor ideology will eventually appear to replace it. Whatever that ideology will be, it most probably already exists, like Communism a century ago, as an obscure fringe belief waiting for a crisis in which to assert itself.

In the United States, discussions over the merits of Catholic Integralism are raging through mainstream conservatism, despite the minuscule likelihood of the American state reordering itself in such a direction. In Britain as well as continental Europe, citizens have been slaughtered by adherents of Salafi Jihadism, another radical challenge to liberal beliefs which posits itself as a successor ideology.

The merits and challenges posed by fringe ideologies such as these, rather than the petty concerns of party competition, are the grand matter of political thought, and it is reassuring rather than disturbing that our elected representatives are alert to them.

Some of the shrillest Twitter analysts of Gove’s bookshelves have spent years agitating for the political success of devotees of a murderous 20th century fringe ideology, itself now jettisoned on the wreckage of history. The radical left-wing publisher Verso — as far to the left of centrist thought as Faye is to the right, though more socially acceptable — has published all manner of strange and unlikely manifestos in recent years, from demanding the abolition of the family  to asserting that we can live in a world of endless growth and consumption derived from mining asteroids.

Both ideas are absurd, but while we can be grateful that the last election saw their advocates firmly shunted away from political power, neither book should be banned, only considered on its own merits and then ridiculed. The existence of eccentric works like these is, however, broadly positive, in that it shows people are giving serious consideration to what should replace the intellectual and political framework dying all around us.

We should be pleased that our political representatives are reading offbeat ideas, not necessarily because they believe them, but because they represent the strange intellectual and political ferment of the early 21^st century. The idea that There Is No Alternative to the neoliberal consensus is long gone. There are, if anything, too many alternatives, and they represent a future as dangerous as it is exciting.

As well as reading Faye, Gove and other British politicians should be investigating a wide variety of radical thinkers of left and right, from the post-anarchist work of Murray Bookchin to the idiosyncratic Marxist cultural criticism of Mark Fisher, the Catholic critiques of liberal democracy of Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, the rejection of modernity wrought in fiction by Michel Houellebecq and Paul Kingsnorth, and whatever other responses to what we can call the crisis of the 21^st century are now circulating in the marketplace of ideas. After all, as Faye himself archly notes in Archaeofuturism, “modernity already belongs to a past that is over.”