Grant wrote Lament for a Nation in anger at the fall of Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, who was defeated in his re-election bid due to backlash over his refusal to accept US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil. According to Grant, Diefenbaker’s “actions turned the ruling class into a pack howling for his blood.” It was no ordinary political defeat, in Grant’s view. He believed that it signaled the end of Canada as a distinct political and moral project.   

But the lasting significance of Lament for a Nation rests not with its analysis of the forces that orchestrated Diefenbaker’s downfall — “the concentrated wrath of the established classes” — nor even with the author’s prognosis that Canada was fated to disappear, if not formally annexed by its neighbor, then so culturally and economically integrated with the United States as to lose its distinct identity. What has caused it to retain its relevance for more than half a century is what emerges in its later chapters, as it shifts gears from parliamentary drama to political philosophy and Canada’s fate becomes a case study in a much larger story about the modern world’s direction of travel.

Born in Toronto in 1918, Grant was destined to become one of Canada’s best-known philosophers, his reputation built largely on the fame of Lament for a Nation. He was educated at Oxford and served as an air-raid warden during World War II. Reeling from the horrors of war, he was led to Christianity by a profound religious experience in the English countryside. After earning his doctorate, he returned to Canada to begin his academic career as a self-described Christian Platonist, persuaded that it was the task of philosophy to analyze modern civilization from the perspective of the eternal moral order that our modern dynamism obscured.

When the Diefenbaker debacle unfolded in the summer of 1963, Grant was teaching philosophy and religion at McMaster University in Ontario. He was in the midst of research on the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, about whom he planned to write a book. Grant was so incensed by how the “wealthy and clever” Canadian elites had capitulated to American pressure that he put aside that never-completed Weil book to turn his full attention to writing Lament for a Nation. But one of the central themes of Weil’s mature thought became the pivot of his argument.

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For Weil, a clear-eyed view of the world must recognize the distance between necessity and the good. Even if certain historical events are necessary, she argued, that doesn’t make them good. Grant took this to repudiate a crucial tenet of modern progressivism: the belief that the forces driving history — including those forces driving Canada ever more tightly into the orbit of the United States — inevitably carry civilization toward higher stages of development. “If history is the final court of appeal,” Grant wrote, “force is the final argument.”

This point mattered to Grant because he believed the Diefenbaker affair had revealed the necessity of Canada’s disappearance, due to “the impossibility of building a conservative nation in the age of progress, on a continent we share with the most dynamic nation on earth.” Yet widening his gaze beyond the particularities of Canadian politics to examine the deeper currents of Western civilization, Grant concluded that Canada’s fate was sealed by the inner logic of modernity itself.

Around the time of Diefenbaker’s defeat, Grant wrote a major essay on the then-recent debate between the philosophers Leo Strauss and Alexander Kojève on ancient and modern tyranny. Strauss’s argument was another major philosophical influence on Lament for a Nation. Strauss dreaded the advent of what he took to be the ultimate modern tyranny, which he, borrowing Kojève’s language, called the universal and homogeneous state. This term names what Grant took to be the true end of modern politics, in both its Marxist and liberal guises.

This state is universal because it aims at a single, unified global order that renders international conflict impossible. It is homogeneous because all people enjoy formal equality, are essentially interchangeable, and serve a common purpose: the limitless expansion of human power over nature, including human nature. In Lament for a Nation, Grant argued that this state is the highest object of striving for the modern project. The United States occupies a central place in his analysis. As the nation most committed to open-ended progress, it is the “spearhead” of the universal and homogeneous state.

Western capitalism, in Grant’s view, was much more “progressive” than Marxism, since the followers of Marx still assume that human flourishing has a determinate shape that technological progress ought to serve. Liberal capitalism, in contrast, tolerates no checks on technological dynamism, which is why Grant anticipated the eventual victory of the West in the Cold War. Since liberalism holds the human essence to be our freedom to remake both the world and ourselves, any doctrine that imposes limits is rejected.

The universal and homogeneous state promises to deliver us from suffering, scarcity, and grueling toil through technological science. Yet its promise is double-edged, warns Grant, for a civilization whose highest purpose is technological mastery must culminate in global tyranny.

Local communities are among the first casualties. “Liberalism,” he observed, “is the ideological means whereby indigenous cultures are homogenized.” Along with these cultures goes the possibility of genuine excellence. Authentic nobility, he believed, can flourish only in societies shaped by traditions that orient us toward something higher than ourselves, but liberalism recognizes nothing higher than the human will.

Even so, the much-vaunted freedom liberalism promises can be exercised by most of us only in the private sphere. “Nobody minds very much if we prefer women or dogs or boys,” Grant wrote, “as long as we cause no public inconvenience.” But permissiveness in private is coupled with coercive uniformity in public, as politics in the classical sense disappears and debate over competing goods gives way to impersonal administration. Questions that once required political judgment are reclassified as technical problems to be solved by experts.

Grant couldn’t have known the particulars, but the logic is familiar to us from the Covid lockdowns. Genuinely political questions — such as how to weigh the protection of the vulnerable against the harm done to school children, community life, and people’s livelihoods — were displaced by the injunction to “listen to the science.” Disagreement was pathologized, debate was suppressed, and administration triumphed over politics.

Grant also foresaw that the project of mastery would inevitably turn inward, as modern science no longer confines itself to the transformation of non-human nature. It seeks control of heredity, psychology, and social life itself. Advances in biochemistry and the behavioral sciences give administrators a “prodigious power to universalize and homogenize.”

Long before the term “transhumanism” became fashionable, Grant foresaw a world in which human nature becomes raw material, as we “transcend ordinary humanity and produce creatures half flesh and half metal.” His argument dovetails with C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, another work that influenced him: the conquest of nature ends in the conquest of some human beings by others and ultimately in the abolition of the human.

Grant’s conclusion was bleak: conservatism is impossible in the modern age. Conservatism once meant guarding goods not subject to perpetual change — virtue, tradition, and a stable account of human nature. But technological civilization depends on continuous upheaval. Those who call themselves conservatives cannot govern without allying themselves with the very forces that dissolve what they claim to defend. Any hope they may have of political influence requires them to genuflect before a technological project that “produces such a dynamic society that it is impossible to conserve anything for long.”

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Given Grant’s somber pronouncement of the death of Canada, it’s ironic that the publication of Lament for a Nation in 1965 sparked an intense revival of nationalist sentiment. For a while, he became a darling of these new nationalists. Yet Grant disclaimed such a motive for his book. He insisted that it was not a political tract, but a work of philosophy, an attempt to understand the present in the light of truths that our present moment occludes. He later expressed regret that it “was written too much from anger and too little from irony.”

That Lament for a Nation still unsettles readers 60 years on is a measure of Grant’s prescience about the society he saw taking shape even then. The specific quarrels he anatomized have faded from memory, but the logic he uncovered has only intensified. The universal and homogeneous state is no longer merely a philosophical hypothesis. We encounter evidence of its coming to be at every turn.

Grant’s diagnosis is uncannily contemporary. In an era of global platforms, algorithmic governance, transhumanist visions, and a polarized but uniformly liberal political class, his account clarifies why our debates feel increasingly superficial. We conduct our arguments within a horizon that treats technological expansion as destiny, expert administration as neutral, and dissent as irrational. Lament for a Nation endures because the world it diagnosed has only become more fully realized in the intervening decades.

Yet Grant no longer stands quite as alone as he did in 1965. As the modern project he described becomes more fully realized, its costs become harder to ignore. There are signs of a renewed unease with a world that recognizes no goods beyond limitless technological expansion and the libertine possibilities it enables. There are revolts in the name of what has been lost.

Ironically, as the United States grows more nationalistic, Canada has moved the other way, its political identity defined by loyalty to the globalist order that Washington now challenges. Does that mean that the United States has ceased to be, in Grant’s phrase, the “spearhead” of the progressive modern project? Or has that project merely changed its institutional form, as the universal and homogeneous state now advances through the private power of corporate interests, based in the United States but with transnational reach, shaping speech, commerce, and social life with minimal public accountability?

No longer can the questions that Lament for a Nation presses upon us be dismissed as reactionary grumblings from a grumpy philosopher nostalgic for a vanished past. They articulate the disquiet felt by growing numbers of us as we survey the world around us.

In the United States, especially, church membership is soaring among the young. The assassination of Christian evangelist Charlie Kirk poured fuel on the fire, but the spark kindled well before that horrific event, and it’s the more conservative churches that have welcomed the bulk of the newcomers. It’s not accidental that young men make up the vanguard in this movement back towards traditionalism. Every social movement with a future worth watching starts by attracting young men, who always seem to be the vanguards of enduring social change.

Why, though, is this shift benefiting conservative Christian denominations? There are plenty of other options for disaffected young men, some of them far more threatening to the status quo than attending Mass, finding Jesus by way of Wednesday night Bible classes, or indeed watching Charlie Kirk videos. Very few of them are making bombs, for example, or shooting at politicians they dislike — in the United States, at least, that has been far more common on the Left in the last few years. I can see several reasons for this state of affairs.

The first, put simply, is that these days conservative Christianity is perhaps the best available way for a teenage boy to shock his mother. I don’t mean this as a joke. A core part of the process by which teenagers define their own identities in contrast to the expectations of their parents is the quest for new and enticing ways to spark parental outrage. Young people half a century ago could still do that by moving further out toward the notional cutting edge than their parents were willing to go. This they accordingly did, and cultures thus lurched Leftward generation after generation.

Now? If a teenage boy says “Mom, I think I’m gay,” he’s likely to be told, “That’s nice, dear.” The same is almost as often true if he says that he thinks he’s transgender, while if he announces that he’s decided to worship some strange pagan cult, his mother may just invite him to the local Wiccan circle next time there’s a full moon. It’s hard to imagine anything more crushing to the teenage ego than being patted on the head and told that your mother approves of your attempted act of rebellion.

By contrast, imagine what happens if that same teenage boy comes home wearing a MAGA hat and announces that he’s just found Jesus. In most of today’s middle-class households, that would evoke a truly satisfying display of parental hysterics. Meanwhile, those teenagers who aren’t quite willing to face so epic a tirade from their liberal parents can pursue a less overt version of the same rebellion, swapping conservative Christian memes with their friends online in much the same spirit that led their parents to smoke cannabis with their friends after school. Cannabis itself and the other erstwhile trappings of Leftist radicalism are now too socially acceptable to fill that role. In our present culture, radicalism has become the conventional wisdom, and so the conservative has become the transgressive.

There’s a second dimension of this shift, which inevitably gets left out of simplistic linear notions of “progress”. Glance back over the history of the Anglophone world and what emerges is a curious alternation of public morals over the course of roughly a century. After the rollicking Elizabethan bawdiness of the 16th century came the Puritanism of the 17th, with its Roundheads and its colonizing Pilgrims. After that came a return to looser morals in the Georgian era of the 18th century, which was among other things a golden age of pornography and saw London get a reputation as Europe’s capital of prostitution; following that, the 19th century made “Victorian” a byword for strident moralizing, and this was reversed in the usual way by the exuberant decadence of the 20th.

Now the 21st century has arrived. The moral license of the 1900s has already undergone sharp restrictions at the hands of feminists, while conservative Christians are taking things further. None of this is accidental. Moral rigidity and moral laxity, in sexual and other contexts, both have their pathologies; there is a middle path of balance between them that avoids the problems of both, but humanity being what it is, this is rarely reached except as a transient stage between one extreme and the other. People of good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of Victorian morality, set the process in motion that led to the Sexual Revolution; people of equally good will, appalled by the noxious consequences of that revolution, are setting processes in motion that are giving the pendulum a good hard push the other way.

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Conservative Christian churches have a great deal to offer those who see the value in moral restrictions, partly because they have so long a history of aggressive puritanism, and partly because they are among the few institutions in the modern world that have consistently pushed back against the liberal moral tides of the last century. It thus makes perfect sense that, as public attitudes swing back toward puritanicalism, conservative churches should become attractive again.

Yet there may be another process at work in all this, one playing out over a far greater timespan. Over a century ago, it was anatomized with mordant clarity by Oswald Spengler, the most accurate and therefore the most angrily dismissed of the 20th century’s students of historical cycles. What we are seeing is the early stages of what Spengler called die zweite Religiosität. The usual translation of this phrase is “the Second Religiousness”, but for reasons I will explain shortly “the Second Religiosity” is a better fit. To understand the way this is taking shape behind today’s headlines, it’s necessary to trace the outlines of Spengler’s unfashionably perceptive theory of history.

It’s crucial, in approaching Spengler, to realize that he was discussing morphology, not causality. Like Newton, he “feigned no hypotheses” to explain why history unfolds the way it does; his quest was simply to show what happens, and to seek a comparative morphology of great cultures that can be used as a basis for prediction, in much the same way that Newton’s theory allowed the accurate prediction of planetary motions. Spengler sought to line up history’s great cultures side by side, and look for the common patterns, in the same way that a comparative anatomist puts the bones of a bat’s wing, a dog’s forelimb, and a porpoise’s paddle side by side, to show that each has the same underlying structure as a human arm. Did he succeed? The jury’s still out, but his predictions so far have proved accurate, while those of his critics have generally flopped.

The Second Religiosity is a core element in both Spengler’s theory and his predictions. Every great culture starts out under the sway of a distinctive religious vision, one that embodies and frames the culture’s understanding of the cosmos. As the culture moves out of its springtime era into maturity, the mythological language of its religious vision gives way to a secularizing trend. The result is an age of reason, in which the old vision is pried loose from its religious setting and turned into an assortment of rationalist ideologies.

The pathbreakers and cheerleaders of the age of reason inevitably convince themselves that society has put its superstitious past behind it, but their ideologies turn out to be far more fragile than the faith they supplanted. Eventually, as the age of reason crashes to ruin around them, people find themselves confronted by chaos, and flee for refuge to the one resource that remains: the traditional religious forms of their culture’s springtime. This is the Second Religiosity, the return to religion that marks the fading of every great culture. The revival of Confucianism as a religious ideology in imperial China after 1100 and the return of India to Hindu faith around the same time are examples well documented in the history books. As for the Western world, Spengler expected the Second Religiosity to arrive sometime soon after the year 2000.

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Whatever the culture, the Second Religiosity always presents itself as a return to the source of a culture’s early greatness. In a crucial sense, however, it’s nothing of the kind. The religion of a culture’s springtime is forged of the shattering impact of transcendent realities on individual human prophets and visionaries. It is accordingly rough-hewn, unruly, and comfortable with contradictions that look like absurdities to the later, more logical consciousness of a later era.

The religion of the Second Religiosity, by contrast, is ordered, formal, and reasoned: all the hallmarks of religiosity, as distinct from religion in any deeper sense. Its goal is to provide a bulwark against inward and outward chaos, and it does this by relying on history rather than on the terrifying transrational shock of direct religious experience. Where the original religious impulse faces the future, the Second Religiosity is always oriented toward the past. The winds of autumn can always be heard whistling through it. Eventually they will tear it to tatters, leaving the ground cleared for the newborn religious vision of some future great culture, but that time is still far off for us.

Just now, by contrast, there are good reasons why the flight from chaos into the Second Religiosity is in the ascendant. The most important of these is the accelerating failure of faith in progress, the unacknowledged pseudosecular religion of our time. Barbed jokes of the “I believe I was promised a jetpack” variety are merely the cutting edge of a broader collapse of faith in progress. This doesn’t merely impact what we may as well call the “Tomorrowland future”: that world of fading daydreams in which flying cars, fusion power and interplanetary colonization all have their natural habitat. Rather, it embraces the entire belief that history must move in whatever direction we think we want it to go.

At the moment, that faltering faith is being propped up by the overblown hype surrounding large language models (LLMs), which are currently being marketed under the misleading label of “artificial intelligence”. This label is a misnomer: LLMs aren’t intelligent. All they do is string together statistically likely sequences of words or other symbols in response to a prompt. Computer scientist Emily Bender has described LLMs as “stochastic parrots”. The phrase isn’t quite apt, because parrots are highly intelligent birds, but the metaphor still has value. LLMs, like unusually stupid parrots, repeat strings of words without any connection to the realms of meaning, purpose, and value that underlie the phenomenon of intelligence.

Yet right now, blind faith in LLMs is propping up more than the mythology of progress. Rather, these overhyped programs are propping up one of history’s great speculative delusions, with the usual concomitants of wildly inflated stock prices and equally distorted investment decisions. Readers who don’t yet know how this ends may find it useful to consult John Kenneth Galbraith’s wry history The Great Crash, 1929, or Charles Mackay’s classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

We are already starting to see close equivalents of Irving Fisher’s famous insistence, nine days before the 1929 crash, that stocks had reached “a permanently high plateau”. While it’s true that the market can stay insane longer than most investors can stay solvent, a speculative bubble on this scale has only one possible outcome. It’s just a matter of when the crash finally hits.

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Here again, though, it’s not just the technological side of progress that has crumpled in recent years. One of the odder features of contemporary political life is the way that so few political parties on the Left offer proposals for the future that differ in any noticeable way from the present, and the ones that do — Marxist parties come to mind here — harken fondly back to the dreams of a past era just as enthusiastically as any conservative. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, this shows the twilight of an age of reason that once put grand dreams of the future at the center of its cognitive universe.

The opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States just now is a case in point. The Democratic Party has stopped talking about anything but their opposition to the Trump administration and its policies — this at a time when a huge share of Americans are bitterly unhappy with the state of the country and the government policies that shape their lives. “Vote For Us So Life Will Continue To Suck” isn’t exactly a compelling election slogan, but it’s a fairly good summary of the Democratic platform these days. Trump’s populist movement, by contrast, has specific proposals for change, and is enacting them at a respectable pace despite the concerted opposition of the Washington establishment. This likely accounts for a good share of Trump’s popularity, even among those who don’t necessarily share his opinions.

The same weird sense of stasis appears throughout today’s industrial Western cultures. Consider our popular movies, dominated by remakes of decades-old franchises and dreary morality plays. As another example of the same exhaustion, there was a time when the goal of activists working on racial and gender issues was to heal once and for all the social wounds inflicted by various bigotries. Martin Luther King Jr. was far from the only one to speak movingly of a future in which people of all colors would live together in peace, harmony and equality. That sense of a potential for change has all but vanished from the rhetoric of today’s activists. What they offer instead resembles nothing so much as an unusually dour sort of secular Calvinism, in which the Original Sins of racism and sexism bear down immovably on humanity.

At least Calvinism offered the promise of redemption; today’s activist culture does not. Eternally cursed with the burden of privilege, due to the actions of some few of their ancestors, those who happen to belong to the wrong race, gender, and on and on through an ever-proliferating swarm of categories, can look forward to nothing but endless humiliation and repentance, with no hope of any change to their sinful condition. Thus it’s hardly surprising that a growing number of people so stigmatized are backing away from ideologies of this sort and seeking out a different setting — that of the nearest conservative church — where, whatever else they may find, they can at least hope to encounter a Redeemer.

As this suggests, there is a very real sense in which the vagaries of popular culture in recent years, unbeknownst to their creators, have been setting the stage for the coming of the Second Religiosity. This comes as no surprise to readers of Spengler, or for that matter to anyone familiar with the phenomenon of the return of the repressed. Religion — not in the sense of ideology, but in its deeper and truer sense as the confrontation of human consciousness with transcendent experience — was for several centuries rigidly repressed by the mainstream currents of Western industrial society. Now it is back in force.

Yet it bears remembering that the coming of the Second Religiosity is to a very great extent a leading symptom of that return, not its full expression. In the heyday of the Roman Empire, as the age of reason set in motion by the rise of Greek philosophy imploded in a shower of failed dreams of the world made rational, people across the empire turned back to the established religions of their time, making the traditional offerings to Jupiter, Juno, and the rest of the polyglot pantheon of the ancient world. That was their Second Religiosity, their refuge from the tremendous chaos of their age, and it played an important role in maintaining classical society during its latter centuries.

It did not last, however. While incense billowed upwards to the gorgeous marble statues of the gods and goddesses, new beliefs wholly alien to classical polytheism spread through the crawlspaces of Roman society. A few centuries on, one of them would rise up to overthrow the temples and clear the ground for cultures yet unborn. From the rise of the cult of Osiris in Egypt’s First Intermediate Period to the predominance of Amidist Buddhism in early modern east Asia, it’s a familiar story.

The first stirrings of the same process are doubtless under way, though it would be just as impossible to point to the faiths of the future now as it would have been for a Roman intellectual to pick Christianity out of the turbulent religious underworld of the Roman world and identify it as the inheritor and destroyer of the classical world. It will be a century or more yet before it becomes clear which beliefs seize the imaginations of the dispossessed and disaffected, overthrowing the institutions of our Second Religiosity in their turn. Dealing with that is a task for future generations. What we face now is the resurgence of traditional religion in Western societies that had dismissed it as an outdated relic of a barbarous past. Dramatic changes for good and ill can be expected as that process continues, and the future in which so many thought we would spend the rest of our lives goes whistling down the wind.

Since then has bloomed the youthful field of “Progress studies”, which hopes to unleash cheap energy, plentiful housing and daily technological breakthroughs. Progress studies has some presence in academia, but exists principally in think tanks, blogging and journalism (I have made some modest contributions regarding geothermal energy) and is part of an ecosystem that is beginning to acquire political influence. The field owes much to economists such as the recently anointed Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, who has argued that year-on-year enhancing of prosperity is not a law of nature; rather, it must be deliberately brought about. And so the Cowen crowd has tried to do exactly that: finding obstacles to progress — bureaucracy, Nimbyism, legalism and so on — and looking for ways society might circumvent them.

In recent years, the world has benefited from some amount of technological freshening up. Reusable rockets, large language models, self-driving cars, mRNA vaccines, cheap solar power: these are the kinds of innovations that excite technophiles. Yet China is pulling ahead, and the Gordian knots remain. At last weekend’s Progress Conference, in Berkeley, California, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — never one to knowingly understate the galaxy-shaping potential of his product — told Cowen that AI alone would not be able to solve the housing crisis. Even God-like intelligence, in other words, would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.

Altman’s presence at the conference betokens the intellectual clout that the progress scene enjoys in both technology and, increasingly, politics. Progress thought now comes in a variety of flavors, with each carrying different political valencies, and with each having different ramifications for industry and society alike. Usefully for its survival prospects, progress thought is syncretic: that is, able to attach itself to existing ideologies rather than needing to defeat them. It is worth paying attention to the question of which flavor is likeliest to win the day.

So far, one of them has achieved particular prominence. In May, two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published Abundance, a book that argues that their country has spent decades prioritizing process over progress. The book is now well thumbed among Democrat staffers, and its style of thinking was visible in the planning reforms signed by Gavin Newsom, governor of California, four months later. This is the state, of course, whose flagship high-speed rail project has produced an even more outrageous and ineffective boondogglethan HS2. In this context, where post-Seventies California has been entirely unequal to the task of building housing and infrastructure to accommodate its population boom, some regulatory streamlining might be no bad thing.

Whether the Democratic party is the optimal vessel for the progress movement, though, is debatable. Other political scenes seem more infused with vigor. Both the Right and non-mainstream Left are developing their own versions of abundance. In August, the political scientist Steven Teles made an early attempt at taxonomizing these new schools of abundance, which we can think of as flavors of progress. “As abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse”, he predicted, these new varieties “will increasingly structure political identities”.

In the Teles taxonomy, the Left-most entry was “Red Plenty”. Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who beat the centrists to the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of New York City, falls into this camp. Under Red Plenty, the state would lead economic development. Your power plants would be built with union labor, as would your housing. High rents would be solved by, er, banning landlords from charging high rents.

The “Red Plenty” approach will make economists roll their eyes, but it has the virtue of speaking to a more visceral part of human psychology than does the “Abundance” school. In socialist thought, there is an “us” and a “them”. Red Plenty offers to stick it to the landlords, to the wealthy, to the extractive capitalists. Abundance, in contrast, is rigorous and illuminating, but will not stir your passions. In classic liberal style, the book is carefully triangulated so as to avoid controversy. When Klein and Thompson discuss California, for instance, they make little acknowledgment of the fact that the state’s neglect of public transport might have something to do with the kind of people you encounter on it. (If you encounter anti-social behavior on the subway, as often happens in large American cities, then you will be less inclined to take the subway in future, and less willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on improvements to the subway.) Similarly, the authors are much more interested in the constraints on Californian housing supply than in recent decades’ gargantuan and immigration-driven increase in demand. Abundance, in their view, is universalist.

We can observe an intriguing contrast in the “American Dynamism” aesthetic, which valorizes modern American technological and architectural achievement. The coinage derives from an essay, published in 2022, by an investor who argued that America’s best hope is in “technologists building companies that support the national interest”. On X, accounts like “Based Americana” post appropriately bombastic images: Starship’s Raptor engines spewing blue flames, arrowhead silhouettes of B-2 bombers lowering in a hangar, the neoclassical magnificence of the long-lost Penn Station, American astronauts beholding the curve of the Earth, and Trump watching fighter jets soar over Mount Rushmore. The curation of these images amounts to propagandizing rather than policy prescription. But it speaks to something that the Abundance movement would rather avoid: chauvinism. By this I mean that, as with Red Plenty, American Dynamism is for a particular group of people. It has a brash patriotism to it. Universalists, by definition, cannot be chauvinists, but they might nevertheless note the intrigue stirred up by another of Teles’ categories, the provocatively named “Dark Abundance”.

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Within the Dark Abundance category are the think tankers and MAGA personnel who, like the Klein and Thompson crowd, want to reinvigorate American industry and improve American living standards, but, unlike the Klein and Thompson crowd, are inclined to do so via means that are more aggressive and, in their way, more chauvinistic. Dark Abundance, in the Teles taxonomy, is alarmed by the decline of America’s industrial base relative to China’s, and willing to take a Milei-esque chainsaw to the institutions it deems to be failing. (DOGE, in all its anti-bureaucratic fervor, is cited by Telos as an example.) Champions of Dark Abundance, whether or not they identify as such, are likely to be supportive of, or part of, the new generation of defense-adjacent tech firms — SpaceX, Anduril, other creators of Based Americana — and unsentimental about the use of fossil fuels en route to new forms of energy production. One might even classify Trump himself as a proponent of Dark Abundance. In an open letter to Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, Trump wrote in March that the US needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets”. The US, wrote Trump, is in competition with other nations, and on a quest to become “greater than ever before”. Prosperity, in this view, is tied to security. “We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.”

There is geopolitical safety, and there is day-to-day safety. Teles touches only glancingly on crime, but Dark Abundance was to take on new resonance in September. To the horror of the American Right, widely circulated CCTV footage showed a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, being fatally stabbed in the neck by a man who had been sitting behind her on a bus. “The Abundance crowd has no solution for this,” wrote Drew Pavlou, a high-profile Gen-Z political activist. Referring to the transformative, but severe, former prime minister of Singapore, Pavlou wrote: “This is why we need to combine Abundance with Lee Kuan Yew Thought: extremely harsh penalties for crime and public disorder.” Dark Abundance, in Pavlou’s subsequent framing, is not just about introducing gleaming subway carriages, but about ensuring those carriages are safe — even if to do so requires punitive measures.

Liberals, naturally, are scandalized by Dark Abundance. Jerusalem Demsas, the editor of a prominent new liberal journal, The Argument, wrote that Teles’ description “sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism”. The accusation is overblown, but Demsas was right to note that the conventional Abundance crowd is better on detail, is more collegiate, and can point to a growing body of patiently accumulated legislative achievements that the Dark Abundance crowd cannot.

Still, the Democrat flavor of abundance has little to say about the reality that some forms of technological progress are being held back by urban disorder. Every time an autonomous taxi in the Bay Area is vandalized, the technology becomes more expensive. It was announced last week that autonomous taxis will come to London next year, and we can quite reasonably hope that our own level of urban misbehavior, being lesser than the Bay Area’s, will leave these new taxis, defenseless as they are, generally unharmed. Other forms of robotics, such as pavement-trundling delivery robots, will be more vulnerable, especially in a city where phone theft and shoplifting have skyrocketed. Public goods depend on public order.

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The death of Progress

By John Michael Greer

It’s curious, then, that Dark Abundance is so-called. Should people who want lean and functional institutions or clean and safe public transport willingly identify as “dark”? One reason is that those ends require some unsavoriness: long prison sentences, intrusive surveillance, mass sackings, a devotion of our industrial energies to weaponry. This principle of unsavoriness applies even to construction, where to get rid of proceduralism is often to deny people the opportunity to object to a new housing estate or train line. The compromises are even more stark when it comes to crime.

But another answer is that the Right has been so often framed by the Left as morally wrong, as being on the dark side of a Manichean binary, that some of its disciples have developed some quasi-ironic contrarian relish for the role. There is a long and amusing history of Republicans professing support for, of all causes, the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe. In May, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, delivered a defense of Emperor Palpatine on CNN. “He took on an entrenched deep state [in] the Jedi Council… he wanted free and fair and reciprocal trade around the galaxy. [He] protected law and order.”

As another guest pointed out, Palpatine blew up an inhabited planet. But Jennings dug in. “Some could argue that it was warranted given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”

Which brings us back to Trump. “I think the Trump administration is less interested in sunshine and rainbows than, say, Ezra Klein is,” an attendee of this year’s Progress Conference told me. She reported that there was much more discussion of nationalism than there was at the same conference in 2024, which I attended, and plenty of pragmatic discussion of how to work with the MAGA White House. One success in this regard is Blake Scholl, whose company, Boom Supersonic, has built the first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. Boom was the principal beneficiary of an executive order (EO), signed in June, that was designed to reduce the regulations holding back supersonic air travel. As the EO put it: “This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation.”

In this case, then, chauvinism has propelled progress. A knot has been cut, and it might once again become possible to travel from London to New York within three hours. We can expect that Boom’s airliner, the Overture, will feature heavily in the next generation of “Based Americana” imagery.

So where will we be in another 50 years? If Dark Abundance wins the contest of ideas, and if the result is that supersonic airlines fill the skies above a wealthy, safe America, then its corner-cutting might appear to be justifiable. There remain many corners that Dark Abundance is unwilling to cut, many eggs that it hasn’t cracked into an omelet: eugenics, autocracy, wars of conquest, El Salvadorean prisons, and whatever it takes to wrench the birth rate back up. Each of those measures could, theoretically, enhance a country’s material progress; each requires significant moral compromise. Darker Abundance, as we might call it, would make Dark Abundance seem tame. The habit of corner-cutting is not always for the best, and nor is the habit of relishing the mantle of darkness.

It’s important to note what is and isn’t being said here. When Roszak wrote the line quoted above, there were still many millions of people kneeling in churches every Sunday, and some of them were having powerful spiritual experiences. In the same way, the death of progress does not mean that new discoveries will no longer be made in laboratories or that new technologies will stop finding their way to the marketplace.

What it means, rather, is that these, and the rest of the odd assortment of things currently lumped together under the label of “progress”, will no longer benefit from the aura of inevitability that popular culture assigned them in the past century. The once-widespread faith that what is newer must be better, just because it is newer, is already looking decidedly shopworn.

A newborn skepticism shows up in many contexts. Calvin Trillin got a nervous laugh a few years back when he pointed out that “upgrade” has become the most frightening word in the English language. We all know from bitter personal experience what evoked that laugh. Nowadays, far more often than not, a software upgrade means that the program becomes less convenient, less effective, and more burdensome for the user. There are good reasons why Microsoft, for example, has to give away its latest version of Windows for free.

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Is there anything left to conserve?

By Paul Kingsnorth

In fields where complexity for its own sake can be more obviously fatal, the same process has led to an even more striking set of outcomes. Consider the bomber fleets of the United States and the Russian Federation, the world’s two largest nuclear powers. Both nations rely on strategic bombers that first entered service in the Fifties: the B-52 Stratofortress and the Tu-95 Bear. Both nations have built and tested other strategic bombers since that time, but the B-52 and the Tu-95 remain in service three-quarters of a century later, because no more recent aircraft does the same job with the same effectiveness for the same or lower cost.

More broadly, it can be fascinating to compare the changes that swept over the industrial nations between 1825 and 1925 with the changes that followed between 1925 and 2025. The earlier century saw the introduction of nearly all the technologies that still shape modern life, from indoor plumbing and electric lights to telephones, automobiles, diesel shipping, airplanes, radio communication, and the list goes on. The century since then, by contrast, has seen only one new technology on the same revolutionary scale — the digital computer. We may get another, or we may not; the jury’s still out on whether AI will turn out to be a revolution or one more flash in the pan like nuclear power. The rate of technological change has turned out to be much slower than most people expected.

Granted, our telephones no longer have wires, our automobiles and airplanes are faster, and a variety of other incremental changes have taken place. Someone who went into suspended animation in 1925 and was thawed out this year, however, would be shocked by our social customs but would find it easy to adapt to the updated versions of familiar technologies. Compare this to the utter bafflement of a person who spent the period from 1825 to 1925 in a similar state, and had to make the leap from horsedrawn carriages and sailing ships to air travel, radio broadcasts, movie theaters, and the cultural impact of the automobile.

What makes the difference in the rate of change so difficult for many people to grasp is that by and large, the slowdown hasn’t been caused by technical difficulty. Consider the revolutionary changes that were supposed to happen by now: space travel, nuclear power, flying cars, and the rest of it. Most of these things are well within our technological grasp. The problem is that none of them are affordable. Fission power makes a good poster child for this problem. Nuclear power plants have been technically viable since the Forties; the difficulty is that they never pay for themselves, and a society that builds them has to choose between making electricity unaffordable for most people and paying out lavish government subsidies forever.

Space travel, the obsessive focus of so many daydreams about the future since the time of H.G. Wells, is another case in point. It’s technically feasible to get human beings to the Moon, or Mars, or even the moons of Jupiter. The problem is that it’s insanely expensive. The United States had to pour 15% of its national budget for a decade or so just to send a handful of men across what, in interplanetary terms, is the whisker-thin gap between the earth and the moon. A nation that set out to build a permanent settlement on the moon, or put a manned lander on Mars, could very easily bankrupt itself in the process. Nor is the financial return on any such investment commensurate with the more than sky-high costs.

This, in turn, points up the great and unmentionable problem we face. That progress is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

The classic metaphor of the apple tree is useful here. If you only want one apple from a tree, nothing could be easier: you walk up to the tree, reach up for the lowest apple that is ripe, pull it down and take a bite. If you want more than one, up to a point, it’s just as easy, because there is (quite literally) a certain amount of low-hanging fruit. Once you’ve picked all the apples within easy reach, however, getting more becomes more difficult — and getting the apples at the very top of the tree may be so difficult that it is no longer worth the effort.

The same thing, it turns out, is true of technology. The great inventions that revolutionized life in the industrial world were made with tools and instruments that seem impossibly simple these days. Wilbur and Orville Wright, the brothers who invented the airplane, did it in their spare time with the tools they happened to have in the bicycle shop that paid their bills. Compare that with the gargantuan sums governments had to spend in order to put human beings into orbit and you have a good first approximation of the way that the law of diminishing returns is tightening its grip on the throat of technological progress.

Whenever the law of diminishing returns comes into play, the only rational strategy is to find the point at which the returns are still large enough to justify the outlay. That’s what our civilization needs to start doing at this point: backtracking to the last point at which the results still justify the investment. Most of our technology is either near or already past the point at which diminishing returns give way to negative returns.

The stakes involved may be quite a bit higher than most people realize. In his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter argued that one of the things that the failed civilizations of the past all have in common is that they pushed the complexity of their societies and technologies past the point where further complexity made any sense at all. Then, just as we are doing, they kept on pushing — and collapse followed promptly. It’s quite believable that our civilization could end up in the same predicament, pouring so much of its available wealth, talent, and resources into technologies that will never pay for themselves that it becomes unable to maintain essential infrastructure or provide adequate food, housing, and other needs to its citizens. A case could be made, in fact, that this is already beginning to happen.

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Thus, it may not be any kind of accident that so many people, in so many fields, are backing away from the latest hypercomplex technogimmickry and turning instead to simpler technologies that do a better job of meeting their needs. Most of us still recall, for example, when ebooks first hit the market, and corporate media was bursting with confident predictions that books printed on paper would soon be as obsolete as Babylonian clay tablets. Since then, millions of readers have defied the predictions and kept on buying printed books. At this point ebooks have claimed a handful of market niches, but sales are stagnant and only the most incremental improvements in ebook technology are forthcoming, while printed books still hold the place among readers that they won in Gutenberg’s time.

In exactly the same way, but even more dramatically, vinyl records are staging a comeback decades after they were consigned to the dustbin. The issue here is simple enough: analogue recordings have a richness of sound that digital formats can’t match. As a result, classic albums are being produced again and sold at premium prices, while more musicians every year are releasing their new albums on vinyl. Now that direct and indirect subsidies for the internet are starting to fall away, and web-based music services have to find some way to monetize themselves and pay for their share of the internet’s vast infrastructure, it is by no means certain that digital formats will hold onto their temporary dominance. The supposedly outmoded analogue stereo LP may turn out to be the wave of the future after all.

If we were rational about the future of our societies, applying this same principle generally would be the obvious choice. Across the board, from cars and planes to household appliances, it would be easy enough to replace complex devices that don’t work well with older, simpler, and more reliable technologies that do. Microsoft, for example, could regain some of the reputation it’s thrown away in recent years by taking one of the older and more reliable versions of Windows, and reworking it just enough to make it handle current computers and programs. (Although I doubt they’ll do anything of the kind — the myth of progress is particularly strong in the computer-geek subculture.) Among its other advantages, that strategy would lower consumer prices, raising the standard of living measurably for many people, and especially for the poorer and more vulnerable among us. For that matter, since none of those older technologies would have to be invented, and all their strengths and weaknesses are already well known, such a project would encounter few if any technical challenges.

The difficulties are cultural in nature, not technical or economic. Comparing the death of progress to the death of God, as I did earlier, is far from absurd, for progress has taken on the same kind of cultural aura in our time that religions have in ages dominated by more obviously theological faiths. A great many modern people have taken their hopes of salvation and their dreams of a utopian future out of their natural habitat in theology and applied them to progress instead. You can see this clearly enough in the way that advocates for space travel insist that if humanity never settles other worlds, our species will have failed in its “cosmic mission”. The stealth theology underlying claims like these is clear for all to see.

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What Pagans can learn from Christianity

By John Michael Greer

So the revival of God tells us something about the death of progress, and also about the slow, unwelcome dawning of public recognition that we really have gone far down the rathole of diminishing returns in response to that crumbling secular faith. It does seem to be true, after all, that people cannot live without a religion. If they abandon one, they’ll find or make another, even if they have to build it out of so absurdly untheological a theme as infinite technical complexity. The turn back to more obviously theological forms of religion is part of that same story; it’s the normal response when secular pseudofaiths falter.

Of course the ersatz religion of progress is far from the only example of this type. Marxism is another. It used even more unprepossessing material to create an even more exact imitation of Christian theology, with the eventual utopia of true Communism hovering in the air like a mirage, filling the same role that the Second Coming plays in so many Christian sects.

Yet the god of dialectical materialism fell over and died once he too obviously failed to make good on his promises. The god of progress is clearly headed the same way. The sooner we reshape our technological choices on reasonable grounds instead of forcing them to conform to the failed pseudoreligion of progress, the better for everyone.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Writing those words as the introduction to his 1995 anti-technology manifesto Industrial Society and its Future, Ted Kaczynski couldn’t have known that they would someday spawn an entire genre of memes. But so they have.

Eighty years old and serving eight consecutive life sentences in federal prison for his career as the Unabomber, Kaczynski has been revived as an online folk hero. Spend enough time online and you’ll stumble across the ‘Ted-pilled’ community, where “Uncle Ted” is a prophet who predicted the Silicon Valley-created dystopia we live in.

Kaczynski’s online popularity has coincided with a flurry of Unabomber-related content in recent years, including three separate TV or film projects: a four-part Netflix documentary, a dramatised Manhunt series on the FBI’s investigation, and Ted K, a feature-length biopic set on location near the infamous Lincoln, Montana cabin where Kaczynski built the bombs he used to kill three people and injure 23 more.

This spring saw the publication of a book by Kaczynski’s neighbour in Montana, and this summer Apple TV released a podcast on the case. He’s also been name-checked by Right-wing influencers clearly trying to keep up with the zeitgeist, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters. Carlson last year praised Kaczynski’s “smart analysis” of systems and large organisations, while Masters recommended Kaczynski’s manifesto in a podcast interview in March, saying “there’s a lot of insight there.” Over 25 years after he was arrested, there is no end to our interest in the Unabomber. Why do we still find him so compelling? And why is Kaczynski cool now with very online types, from Right-wingers on 4chan to “anti-woke” leftists on Reddit?

While the recent Unabomber retrospectives mostly rehash his life and the facts of his case, the current zeitgeist revolves more around his ideology. Kaczynski’s manifesto argued that technological progress — the “Industrial Revolution and its consequences” — posed an existential threat to humankind by turning people into “engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine”. Stripped of their autonomy by a faceless, unaccountable system, humans endured psychological suffering as they were forced into “over-socialization”, Kaczynski’s term for a state of being in which the industrial society’s codes and mores have replaced a person’s innate selfhood.

Zombified in this way, people blindly applauded technological advances which spelt societal and environmental doom. There was no hope of fixing the current system. The only option remaining, in Kaczynski’s view, was to overthrow it completely through revolution — by any means necessary. Though Kaczynski repeatedly emphasises the non-political nature of his revolution, he has a lot to say about political movements, particularly Leftist ones, which he saw as cadres of over-socialised do-gooders preoccupied with irrelevant identity concerns. Conservatives weren’t much better: they were “fools” who failed to understand that technology was destroying the traditionalism they prized.

Gen Z and younger millennials see the truth in Kaczynski’s central critique of technology, and its deleterious effects on society. Surrounded by screens from early childhood, addicted to near-constant media consumption, often lacking basic in-person social skills, many sense a broader problem in their own individual capture by the tech borg. They’ve grown up in an era marked by mounting terror about climate change, and in which conventional politics seems woefully insufficient to solve any problems. So Kaczynski’s manifesto resonates.

Though he could never have imagined such horrors as TikTok in the Nineties, the society he describes — atomised and materialistic, one that has forfeited freedom in favour of technological progress we’ve been tricked into wanting — chillingly resembles our own. Sure, he cribbed a lot from French philosopher Jacques Ellul, whose book The Technological Society deeply influenced Kaczynski. But there’s a disquieting reason why Kaczynski is a household name and Ellul, outside of academic circles, is not. Fans tend to either be defiant about the terrorism itself — what better way to offend normies? — or they view it as an unfortunate side plot, perhaps not realising it’s the only reason Kaczynski’s ideas ever attracted notice. “I honestly wish Uncle Teddy wasn’t a terrorist and instead just published the manifesto and let it get popular decades later,” wrote Reddit poster “nabberstonguemyanus” earlier this year. “Then we could openly endorse it and not be called incel psychos.”

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Kaczynski’s recent popularity also corresponds with an epidemic of isolated, socially unskilled young men, many of whom appear to be living mostly online. The term “NEET” — not in education, employment or training — has spilled out from the realm of economics research into common usage. The proportion of NEETs who are young men has been increasing in both the US and the UK. Despite sterling credentials and a promising academic career, Kaczynski chose the lifestyle of what would now be called a “NEET”. In doing so, he became free to enact his revenge on a system he hated and from which he’d felt alienated even as a child. Few of today’s NEETs could, or would want to, deploy Kaczynski’s methods. But they admire his refusal to be judged by society’s standards and relate to his inability to fit in. Few have the wherewithal to leave society entirely, but many may dream of it.

Kaczynski grew up in a working-class Chicago suburb, one of two boys. He was a gifted student and enrolled at Harvard at age 16. Lonely, awkward Ted struggled socially and participated in a cruel series of experiments run by a psychology professor with ties to the CIA. Kaczynski and the other participants were subjected to degrading interrogations disguised as intellectual debates and aimed at breaking their confidence. Kaczynski later called it the worst experience he’d ever had. Traumatised and increasingly paranoid, Kaczynski went on to obtain his Ph.D from the University of Michigan, then to a prestigious professorship at the University of California-Berkeley. Kaczynski’s disillusionment with society hardened at Berkeley, where he decided he could no longer countenance studying or teaching mathematics since it contributed to scientific and technological progress. He left Berkeley in 1969 and floated around for much of the Seventies, sometimes living with his parents and holding down temporary blue-collar jobs, before moving permanently into his 10×12 cabin in Montana.

Beginning in 1978, he planted or mailed 16 bombs mostly to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He sent his manifesto to the New York Times and the Washington Post (and Penthouse, though that always seems to get left out) promising to end the violence if they published it. With encouragement from the government, who thought publishing the document could help crack the case, the Post did so. Kaczynski’s brother David and his wife Linda recognised Ted’s writing and alerted the FBI, who arrested him at his cabin in April 1996. Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus. He spent 25 years in ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison in Colorado known for housing high-profile or particularly dangerous inmates, before being moved to a medical facility late last year.

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There’s a strange thrill to the story. How many of us believe so deeply in our philosophical principles that we would give up all our modern comforts? American culture is strongly influenced by the myth of the frontier loner, fiercely independent and living on his own terms. We fear this type, but we also respect him. What makes Kaczynski unique is that he had it both ways, finding freedom in seclusion while also fulfilling that other very American compulsion: to be noticed. Unlike other wilderness hermits such as Christopher McCandless, the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Kaczynski influenced society even more by dropping out of it than he would have otherwise. McCandless’ Kerouackian journey ended grimly in a broken down bus in the Alaskan woods where he died of malnutrition. Kaczynski made himself world-famous and forced the public to reckon with his ideas. He hasn’t even seemed to mind prison, from where he has exchanged letters with supporters and even fallen in love with a female pen pal. He’s continued to influence politics; a 2018 story in New York Magazine described his dealings with a faction of radical environmentalists.

That view — of the Unabomber as a John Brown-esque maverick driven by a higher ideal — is one way to look at it. Another way is to consider Kaczynski as a deeply lonely man driven to violence as much by personal grievance as by principle. He was unable to form relationships with women, an incel in other words. Kaczynski’s bonds with his family were strained and he eventually cut his parents out of his life entirely, blaming them for pushing him to attend Harvard before he was mature enough to handle it. His brother David’s 2015 memoir is an often gut-wrenching read.

It’s hard not to feel for young Ted, so unprepared and unformed. “His confidence in his intellect was not matched by any visceral confidence in his worth as a person, and over time the divide would only grow larger,” David writes, describing Ted on his way off to Harvard. “His self-confidence became infected with doubt, recoiled, and then redoubled toward arrogance and grandiosity.” It’s poignant to read, in a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation Kaczynski underwent in 1998, that as late as age 45 he still held out hope of meeting a partner and even contacted a local psychologist in Montana to help him learn to build a relationship. Apparently the bombing campaign wasn’t enough to fill a deep emotional vacuum.

Knowing this history gives a new dimension to the Ted trend. In valorising him, fans get to feel edgy and subversive for portraying him as a freedom fighter. But they can also relate to the bitter, friendless individual Kaczynski really was. Some are aware of this. “Ted Kaczynski AKA The Unabomber was one of our brethren,” wrote poster “Redpill Robert” on a large incel forum in 2020.

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It’s difficult to empathise with Kaczynski as a person, even if one were willing to set aside his murders to do so. David Kaczynski writes of Ted’s cruelty towards their parents, of hateful letters written over a period of years as he minimised contact. He didn’t attend his father’s funeral after the elder Kaczynski killed himself. Wanda Kaczynski coped by concluding that Ted had been warped by trauma stemming from a hospitalisation as an infant. Ted refused to reconcile with her even as she lay on her deathbed. His resentment towards his parents is an obvious subtext to his manifesto, in sections where he deplores modern child-rearing and schooling. “It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study,” Kaczynski complains.

Even in his journals, Kaczynski acknowledged the personal nature of his plans. “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge,” he wrote in 1971. “ I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.” He considered the possibility that his crimes would “stimulate public interest in the technology question”, but equally mused that they would “repel” most people and cause a backlash. In the end, of course, they did both. Kaczynski came across as morally repugnant and arrogant, but he succeeded in forcing his ideas into the mainstream.

There’s a mini-Ted inside all of us. Fumbling at an automated self-checkout kiosk while a computerised voice chirps at you; clicking impotently to make a YouTube ad go away; receiving an email about one’s information being compromised in a widespread data breach; being served a targeted Instagram ad moments after googling something related: we all know the kind of helpless rage these moments inspire. For members of the younger generations, whose development and social lives have been shaped to a degree unprecedented in human history by technology, Kaczynski represents a lost alternative. Most of them will never commit a violent act; Tedposting will have to do for now.

More and more, it’s becoming conventional wisdom that our constant exposure to screens and digital stimuli is bad. Efforts to do something about it crop here and there: some Silicon Valley parents forbid their children from using the very same devices that industry sells to others, and the Chinese government announced last year that it would limit children to three hours of online gaming per week. Among adults, phone addiction is so commonplace that people have begun to lock their phones in boxes to get even a small respite from them — the necessity of this an example of the kind of technological servitude Kaczynski feared. There’s an increasing sense of having lost touch with nature, a sense of the world and its societies being diseased. The Unabomber nostalgia wave is a symptom.

The first thing to renounce is thus any notion of the global linear progress of humanity, whether formulated by Karl Marx, postulated by liberals like Francis Fukuyama (who declared the end of history) or dominated by Enlightenment dialectics. Marx’s overall vision of history is that of a linear succession of “progressive” modes of social development from primitive societies through the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism, capitalism to socialism and communism. Problems arise almost immediately with the historical dynamic Marx envisioned; to start with, the notion of an “Asiatic mode of production” is clearly problematic (it is an empty category into which Marx threw whatever didn’t fit his Eurocentric logic of history, and thus in itself a receptacle for squashed dead birds). As for socialism, Rosa Luxemburg’s claim that “the future will be socialism or barbarism” proved to be wrong also: what we got in Stalinism was a socialist barbarian, and the corpses are still being counted. As for liberalism, its state of crisis is obvious, so much so that even Fukuyama has renounced his notion of the end of history.

There should be no holds barred in the pursuit of squashed birds. Russia and China like to present themselves as partisans of a new multi-centric world order in which all ways of life will coexist as equal and in which Western colonial economic and ideological domination will finally be swept away. In this rhetoric we might see whole cages of squashed birds swept aside with the West, not only economic and political but also the flattening of feminism, gay rights and general human freedoms. A fairly recent example might be the debate that took place in the Ugandan parliament in February 2023 as the legislature contemplated a further toughening of the anti-gay law — where the most radical proponents demanded the death penalty, or at least life imprisonment, for those caught in the act. Anita Among, speaker of the parliament, stated: “You are either with us, or you’re with the Western world.” We live in an era of unholy alliances, collaborations and conjunctions of ideological forces which disrupt the standard binary of Left and Right. Feminist, gay and trans struggles are denounced as an instrument of Western ideological colonialism used to undermine African identity. If this type of thinking continues to be allowed to define the debate, the possibility of being a gay Ugandan, a feminist Ugandan, a trans Ugandan can be redefined out of existence; another casualty of a narrow definition of “progress”.

The miserable reality is that the promise of decolonisation can be co-opted as a screen for other processes, its liberatory potential caught in the vice-like grip of a too-rigid definition of what moving forward means. The people of numerous African countries, from Angola to Zimbabwe, exist under more or less corrupt social systems in which the gap between the “masters” and the poor majority — the gap in wealth, in power, in privileges and freedom — is arguably even wider than under colonial rule. “Decolonisation” in these circumstances can function almost as a metaphor for the emergence of new class-based hierarchies. While there are, of course, a myriad of arguments that one can advance against any suggestion that things were “better” under colonial rule, if we fail to recognise the potential for decolonial movements to be absorbed into problematic regimes, the new Right will do it for us (as they are already doing in the case of South Africa, bloviating about the inability of black people to run the country “properly”). Mao said: “Revolution is not a dinner party.” But what if the reality after the revolution is even less of a dinner party? This in no way implies that we should abandon progress — we should rather redefine it, and the first step towards doing so is to be able to acknowledge uncomfortable realities, even those which appear squalid and mangled, and especially those we find shameful and grievous. We need less squashed birds hidden in trunks while we applaud the false living bird distracting us from capitalist corruption and authoritarian power.

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Julian Assange is no fool

By Slavoj Zizek

The two articles Marx wrote on India in 1893 (“The British Rule in India” and “The Future Results of British Rule in India”), usually dismissed by postcolonial scholars as embarrassing cases of Marx’s “Eurocentrism”, are today more interesting than ever. Marx outlines, without restraint, the “profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism” of the British colonisation of India, right up to the systematic use of torture prohibited in the West but “outsourced” to Indians (really there is nothing new under the sun — these were the Guantanamos of 19th-century British India). All he adds is: “can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” 

Despite the mention of “destiny”, one should not wholly dismiss the notion of the “unconscious tool of history” as naive teleology, an ends-justify-the-means fatalistic “trust into the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress”. The point Marx is making is simply that the British colonisation of India created conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonisation itself. Today, of course, such a standpoint appears all too naive — now we know how the British colonisers destroyed local industries in India and provoked havoc with tens of millions dead. Of course, we would never say that the horrors of colonisation were worth the price of progressing towards some nebulous utopian future. A much more modest stance should be adopted: Great Britain’s actions in India were inexcusable and the direct outcome a devastating catastrophe; however, once this catastrophe happened it opened up a new path for India. That “however” is an uncomfortable adverb to dwell in, but it remains open to hope as neater historical narratives do not.

When Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer delineate the contours of the emerging late-capitalist “administered world” (verwaltete Welt), they are presenting it as coinciding with barbarism, as the point at which civilisation itself returns to barbarism. A kind of negative telos of the whole progress of Enlightenment, as the Nietzschean kingdom of the Last Men: “One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” At the same time, Adorno and Horkheimer nevertheless warn against the more direct catastrophes (different forms of terror, etc.). The liberal-democratic society of Last Men is thus unimaginably awful, the only problem being that all other societies are worse, so that the choice appears as one between bad and worse (or a rock and a hard place). The ambiguity here is irreducible: on the one hand, the “administered world” is the final catastrophic outcome of the Enlightenment; on the other hand, the “normal” societal path is continually threatened by catastrophes, from war and terror to ecological disasters. We are required to battle these catastrophes while simultaneously bearing in mind that the ultimate catastrophe is the apparently “normal” structures and rhythms of the “administered world”. In other words, we are walking a kind of Moebius path: if we progress far enough on one side, we reach our starting point again. Does the same not hold for progressivism in general? After centuries in which visionaries of all stripes dreamed of what humanity might achieve together. The only indubitable “progressive” goal that humanity can pursue today, in view of ecological and other threats, is to simply survive.

The possibilities and pitfalls of technological and scientific advancement have been the stuff of centuries’ worth of dreaming about human progress, yet here too we find ourselves treading a viciously circular path. Free development, experimentation and research leads to Artificial Intelligence, which not only threatens to supplant the human mind but is intended specifically to overcome its limitations, to replicate humanity without its frailties. Leaving aside more abstract questions about what this would look like and mean should it be achieved, one does not have to look very far for the dead birds littering the path to “progress” like autumn leaves, from the astronomical energy costs burdening a burning planet to the people whose jobs will increasingly be done by AI. This is what blind commitment to an uncritically adopted idea of “progress” looks like; proponents of AI talk about the freedom it brings, but are vague on freedom from what, for who and what for. Freedom for humanity to dedicate itself to leisure, art or meditation? Or freedom for an oligarchy of technocrats from the slightest tethering to the social contract, in exchange for reducing humanity to a cog in the endless self-reproduction of AI?

This brings us to the relationship between progress and freedom. The axiom of modern philosophy is that progress is, at its most fundamental, progress in freedom. (This is how Hegel conceives the development of the entire history of humanity: in Oriental despotism only the despot is free; in antique slavery only the few are free; and with Christianity all are free.) However, problems with the definition of freedom explode here from the very beginning.

Within the Enlightenment tradition, there is true freedom only if all are equally free, while for conservative liberals equality limits freedom; then there is the opposition between individual freedom and collective freedom (freedom of a nation advocated by fascism). For socialists, freedom is actual only when its material and institutional conditions are present (free education and press, healthcare), while for liberal conservatives, such measures already limit the full freedom of individuals (recall how US Republicans opposed Obamacare, claiming that it will limit the freedom to choose your own doctor).

The issue is further complicated by the post-Sixties shift away from economic and political freedom to cultural freedom. Why, after the Sixties, have so many problems come to be perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation and injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation or political struggle? The immediate answer is the “culturalisation of politics”, in which political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation and so forth are neutralised into “cultural” differences, different “ways of life”, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely “tolerated”. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat or failure of direct political solutions, such as the welfare state. Tolerance is the post-political ersatz of these solutions: “the cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection of politics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, a domain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation.”

The squashed dead bird here is politics itself. And this bird remains squashed even after the rise of the Rightist new populism.

How, then, should we orient ourselves in this mess? Our starting point should be that there is no such thing as progress in general. But true progress must aim at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses — not redeeming them in reality, but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.

***

A version of this essay appears in Slavoj Žižek’s latest book Against Progress, part of the new Žižek’s Essays series, published by Bloomsbury on 31 October.

At the opening, Burtonport’s mayor cut the ribbon. The community expressed pride. But the school wasn’t for children: it offered adult women — paying guests — the opportunity to roleplay as schoolgirls for a holiday.

The story of this strange establishment isn’t just about ooh-la-la play-acting. The house was home to the “Silver Sisterhood”: a female separatist subculture so reactionary they wore Victorian clothing, rejected electric lighting, and refused to listen to music except on a wind-up gramophone. And yet, its members were in some ways 50 years ahead of their time: forerunners of reality-warping contemporary phenomena such as BDSM, cosplay, computer gaming — and also the weird online Right.

The roots of this sect reach back to mid-century counterculture Oxford — and, still further, into the febrile occult subcultures of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe. There, a group of eccentric scholars and antiquarians began positing a syncretic “Perennialist” or “Traditionalist” doctrine of eternal, immutable, spiritual truth, evident throughout all traditional cultures – but that had been in decline since the Renaissance. The principal exponent of this outlook was the French writer René Guénon (1886-1951), whose The Crisis of the Modern World (1946) sets out his doctrine of modernity as decline.

Where Guénon’s work is relatively apolitical, Traditionalism’s other leading light was the aristocratic Italian writer and one-time Dadaist painter Julius Evola (1898-1974), a pagan monarchist and esoteric race theorist so far to the Right that in 1942 his passport was confiscated by the Italian Fascist party for political extremism.

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Traditionalism’s legacy has spread in some strange directions since. Those influenced more by Guénon today include King Charles, for example, and, on the more Evola-flavoured side, Right-wing figures including Trump’s one-time strategist Steve Bannon, and “Putin’s Brain” Aleksandr Dugin.

That legacy also includes the Silver Sisterhood. According to a 2022 BBC interview with one of its founders, who now goes by the name Mary Guillermin, it all began at an Oxford feminist consciousness-raising group in the Seventies, exploring ancient goddess worship. Presumably that was also where Guénon got into the mix; in any case, what emerged was an all-female Perennialist group, keen to put their Goddess-tinged ideas into practice.

This they did this first at Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, where they tried to live as though men and modernity had simply never happened — even coining their own pseudo-ancient dialect, “Rhennish”. This group then found its way to Atlantis House, via a previous social link to the “Screamers”, to pursue spiritual withdrawal from modernity. An American radical women’s magazine recounts the experience of visiting, in early 1984, what sounds like a devout, low-tech pagan feminist sect: “I enjoy praying, wearing skirts among women, living in a structured household with a low technological level, and dissolving somewhat the accumulated patriarchal grime in my brain cells”.

But with money constantly an issue, the group’s commitment to formal hierarchy seemed to offer a more lucrative business opportunity than craft shop and tea room — and thus a disciplinarian retro-roleplay establishment was born: St Bride’s School for Girls. With Guillermin (then calling herself Brighe Dachcolwyn) as headmistress, the prospectus promised a “total experience” of vintage-themed, all-female schoolgirl roleplay. Journalists descended, fascinated by the surreal combination of Victorian dress and lifestyle with discipline so strict as to hint at the fetishistic.

Guests, meanwhile, extolled its immersiveness, with one telling the BBC: “It’s an entire world. It envelops you.” This is the consistent theme in the bizarre history that followed. Guillermin, in her 2022 interview, describes their creation as a key spiritual practice for the early community: a practice she calls “living theatre”.

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Along with exploring the mind-altering effects of action roleplay, the group also pursued another emerging form of world-building: text-based adventure gaming. For paradoxically, despite ostensibly rejecting modernity out of hand, the women of Atlantis House also made pioneering contributions to early gaming, developed by the mysterious “Priscilla Langridge”, a founding Silver Sister who often appeared veiled, and refused ever to be photographed by the press. The two most noted of Langridge’s games were “The Secret of St Bride’s”, published 1985, (you can play it online here) and a “Jack the Ripper” game, the first such creation to receive an 18 certificate.

According to some reports, the mysterious Langridge was a Sixties Oxford theology scholar, who played a key role in developing the group’s founding “Aristasian” religious outlook: a blend of Perennialism and Seventies feminism with both esoteric and exoteric components. The esoteric dimension of this worldview was most clearly set out some years later, in The Feminine Universe, where the probably-pseudonymous author “Miss Alice Trent” argues that very earliest instances of Perennial Wisdom were feminine, because “the original Creator is feminine”.

Since then, though, the world has declined from the primordial eternal truth, and expelled the divine feminine principle from mainstream culture. This decline reached its nadir in “the cultural collapse of the 1960s”, which Aristasians call “the Eclipse”. Everything since that time is referred to as “the Pit”: a hellish apotheosis of patriarchy “in which the Masculine Principle has come to dominate the culture absolutely, extirpating femininity even from the heart of woman itself”.

For its original adherents, Aristasianism was a self-contained esoteric outlook, with a practice of “living theatre”, ritual goddess-worship, and technological simplicity. For those who didn’t go home again, the immersiveness could be too much. One woman, “Sophia”, spent nearly a year as a “maid” in the house, where she was frequently beaten; in the end she escaped and later brought criminal charges against Guillermin for assault.

But by then things were already coming apart for the larger experiment. In 1992, not long after “Sophia” departed, so too did the Aristasians. Amid a dispute over property ownership, two of the previous Screamer owners broke into Atlantis House, where they found a dark, musty interior with almost no modern appliances or conveniences — and in a room upstairs, a row of tiny desks and a blackboard, complemented by willow canes leaning against the wall. According to reports at the time, the house was also strewn with antisemitic and sadomasochistic literature, along with correspondence between Guillermin and then-BNP leader, John Tyndall.

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Even after this scandal-ridden dissolution of St Bride’s, though, “Aristasia” lived on: as reactionary as ever in its aesthetic, and increasingly BDSM-flavoured in its income streams. In 1993 Guillermin (now calling herself “Miss Partridge”) and Langridge cropped up again in Oxford, this time supporting an anti-metric campaign, hosting “Romantia” retro soirees, and offering discreet corporal punishment experiences. By this point, the more exoteric Aristasian mythology appears to have solidified: a kind of female-separatist high fantasy, with anti-technology retro styling and a side order of BDSM. In this world, Aristasia-in-Telluria is the corrupt, earthly imitation of the real world: Aristasia Pura, a parallel universe, world, existing on a different planet sometimes called “Herthe”. There are no men, and the two sexes are blondes and brunettes, respectively submissive and dominant.

Around the same period, the group founded Wildfire Publishing, which produced female-centric BDSM literature, including a title called The Female Disciplinary Manual, which is much what you’d expect. According to press reports of its 1995 launch, at that point there were several full-immersion Aristasian houses dotted around England, where members lived out the Aristasian reality including its practice of corporal punishment.

Certainly, at least one such establishment existed in 1996, when Channel 4 made a documentary about it. Guillermin, now styling herself “Miss Martindale”, features heavily, teaching lessons and disciplining “girls” for minor infractions. At Wildfire Publishing, meanwhile, fantasy, reality, and Perennialist theology found their most effective delivery mechanism yet: not video games, but fetish literature. The 1996 Children of the Void informs readers: “Morally and culturally, civilisation has ended, just as completely as it would physically have ended if it had been obliterated by atomic bombs.” Meanwhile the narrative mixes expositions of Aristasian feminine essentialism and slightly leaden dialogue with a hefty side-order of spanking porn.

It ought to surprise me that mashing up Right-wing reactionary occultism with Seventies radical feminism should produce mystical cosplay seasoned with BDSM. But somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps the extremism scholar Jeffrey Kaplan is right about the “cultic milieu”: that what matters for fringe ideologies isn’t their place on some imaginary political compass, but how far they are from the mainstream. But more than trying to place Aristasia politically, their enduring interest lies in the dedication they showed to testing just how far you can warp reality through force of play-acting.

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“You can call it therapy,” Guillermin said in 2022 of the group’s “living theatre” practice, “or you can call it magic”. Was there really something occult going on? Or were they just kinky weirdos? Guillermin happily acknowledged in 2022 that Jack the Ripper, which despite its 18 certificate focused more on occult and Masonic subplots, was designed for “philosophical education”. And she repeatedly dismissed regular “kink” devotees as “silly monkeys”.

Whatever the original intent, though, the richness of Aristasian experiments in parallel realities collapsed with the ascendancy of the central, technological alternate reality that today structures nearly all of culture: the internet. By the end of the 2000s, Aristasia had largely lost its hold in “Telluria”, becoming an online-only fandom that finally imploded in a dispute over anime. Guillermin now resides in California, where she works as a therapist espousing the same “divine feminine” spirituality as ever.

But perhaps it didn’t fail. For Aristasia’s immersive practices — if not the aesthetic — are now almost as mainstream as the internet. The group was well ahead of the curve in realising the potential of computer gaming for those who dream of other worlds. And multiple reports suggest that Langridge was actually male, implying another type of personal interest in seeking to alter reality through performance.

More generally still, Aristasian “living theatre” anticipated cosplay. Internationally popular today, and usually viewed as a fun, it also attracts a minority who, like Guillermin, treat the hobby as a kind of consciousness-altering magic. Meanwhile, the notion that one can alter the world by “LARPing” — acting as if your version is already true — has become a crucial political concept in a world that appears increasingly unreal.

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Meanwhile, Wildfire Publishing and the broader Aristasian fixation on power, hierarchy and corporal punishment has now become so normalised today that some even claim it’s reasonable to ditch a partner for not being kinky enough. And like cosplay, BDSM also attracts a minority who view it as something altogether more mind-altering.

So Aristasia succeeded beyond measure, in propagating previously mystical practices into mainstream culture. But it failed, just as signally, to have any effect on post-Sixties culture, except in pioneering the virtualisation of reactionary politics. For while the group’s actual links to the Right are ambiguous, the Aristasian route from efforts to do Traditionalism “IRL”, all the way to purely virtual fandom, reflects a broader contemporary tendency among the weird Right. Here, even as the liquefaction of “traditional” social forms seems ever more complete, nostalgic visions of bygone ages flourish: visions that, however, never seem to make it out of the digital realm.

What, then, is the lesson of Aristasia — whether for reactionaries, or anyone else? It is surely an ambivalent one: that the easiest dimension in which to create your own reality is the internet. But this comes at the price of being ever less able to realise your vision in real life. For that, you still need charismatic leadership, quasi-religious doctrine, real-world community, and a willingness to look silly in the eyes of the world. For those who embrace this more difficult path, though, the story of Aristasia offers a backhanded kind of hope: that if you roleplay hard enough, then even in apparent failure you end up shaping the future.

The plasticity imperative was aimed at everyone, but some were quicker to adapt than others. Women, we were reminded, had been multitasking for years — and suddenly this made us marvellous. “Plastic Woman” was the protagonist of Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The End of Men: and the Rise of Women: during the past century, Rosin wrote, Plastic Woman has “performed superhuman feats of flexibility”, going from “barely working at all to working while married and then working with children, even babies”. She has embraced her liberation from “ladylike standards” to engage in everything from sexual adventurousness to demanding better salaries. Trailing far behind her was “Cardboard Man”, who “hardly changes at all”. Men have “lost the old architecture of manliness”, argued Rosin, without replacing it with anything more solid than “’mancessories’ — jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on TV”. Welcome to Kendom.

Rosin’s book expressed the insights of academic “crisis of masculinity” literature, and for all its oversimplifications, it had a point. Deindustrialisation had not only made the skills demanded by traditionally “male” jobs redundant by the late 20th century, but it had set the scene for a new kind of worker role that women seemed to glide into. This had less to do with a specific type of work, and more to do with a type of worker prized by the new deindustrialised economy. People have often assumed that women are better suited to service-sector jobs and care work than they are to the factory floor, but this doesn’t stack up; women for centuries have engaged in back-breaking physical labour in the fields, the home, and indeed in factories. Instead, in all sorts of workplaces, women fulfilled the criteria of the new model employee: one with a host of generic skills, whose expectations of continuity and stability were less firmly rooted than for the “job for lifers” of old, and whose workplace demands were tempered by gratitude that we were encouraged to be there at all.

For women in the Nineties and 2000s, working was seen as a privilege that our mothers had fought so hard to win. If work didn’t allow us to self-actualise to the degree Betty Friedan had promised, it was still better to be out in the world than suffocating in the “comfortable concentration camp” of the home. Or was it?

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We are no longer so sure. Now perimenopausal and dreaming of retirement, the archetypal Nineties Plastic Woman finds herself “just so tired” by the demands of everything, everywhere, all at once that she has begun to wonder if it was all a bit of a con. Meanwhile, younger women are opting out of various aspects of the game, boasting of “lazy girl jobs” or deciding to remain childless. A new breed of “conservative feminist” argues that (other) women should re-focus their attention and affection back on the family and the home, reclaiming the fulfilment of motherhood from the bad press given to it by the Women’s Liberation Movement.

But amid this furious backlash against Girlboss feminism, the deeper problem with the cult of plasticity is obscured. It’s not about all the things we have to do, but about who we think we are. The promotion of Plastic Woman did not come at the expense of men — who, as many pointed out when Rosin’s book was published, were already well on their way to being plasticised. It came at the expense of the ideal of self-determination, which lay at the core of both the labour movement and the campaign for women’s liberation. What drove both movements, albeit often in different directions, was the desire for more control over one’s life: you might have to do a lot of hard and boring stuff, at work or at home, but that did not define who you were.

In paid work, the authority of the boss stopped at the end of the working day, and your personal “well-being” was your own bloody business. For stay-at-home mothers, it was more complicated: the boundaries between the work of childcare and the role of motherhood had been mashed together, such that women often struggled to work out where the role ended and “I” began. That’s why feminists demanded social childcare: not because they thought all mothers should get a paid job, but because it placed a conceptual boundary between the understanding of oneself as a woman and mother, and the tasks involved in caring for children.

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The cult of plasticity turns this boundary-setting on its head. Constantly “juggling” a range of tasks and commitments is prized, because it keeps people on their toes and weakens the stubborn pride that comes with doing one thing properly. People who are confident about what they are doing — whether that is raising children, or being skilled in a particular kind of work — are less amenable to being pushed around than those who find themselves constantly unsettled by demands to do things in a new way. So, on one level at least, the promotion of plasticity allows Human Resources departments and parenting “experts” alike to manufacture a culture of compliance.

In this vein, diminishing the boundaries between home and work — a trend shamelessly accelerated during the pandemic, via the embrace of “hybrid working” — may not be doing great things for productivity, but it sends an effective signal that even when we are not at work, the company is still with us. Yet the hybrid working fiasco points to a contradiction: it seems pretty obvious that surveillance and micro-management do not encourage people to work more efficiently or effectively. When ticking boxes and jumping through hoops become the job description, employees end up bewildered, defensive, and distracted from the task at hand.

The sensible course of action would be to back off. Instead, HR departments seem to be doubling down in their quest to create the new model employee, by further breaching the boundary between work and our internal lives. The latest incursion on self-determination is the growing demand to declare our pronouns. The symbolic replacement of “I am” with “refer to me as” represents far more than a clarification of office etiquette. Gender-critical feminists have rightly pointed to the obliteration of “woman” or “man” as meaningful categories, once anyone can claim to be either (or neither, or both). Once these categories become free-floating flourishes in an email signature, the pretence that “we” are the ones choosing them will be short-lived. In practice, this is already being revealed — the use of gender-neutral language to avoid misgendering means that we are all rapidly becoming “they”: non-binary, non-specific, generic, plastic.

At least to this, fantastically, Plastic Woman seems to be kicking back. In the untidy coalition of Terfs, Hags, conservative feminists, and colleagues muttering quietly in corners, we see the holding of one important line: the desire to determine oneself, rather than submit to being endlessly moulded. It’s a reminder that people will bend only so far; as Weird Barbie shows us, we can be played with “too hard”.

In the eyes of sceptics, Mill has lost his relevance. The campaigns in which he fought have been won, and the ideas he defended — namely, free speech and female suffrage — have become widely embraced, elaborated, refined and transcended. Furthermore, aspects of his writings grate on current sensitivities. To many, his career in the East India Company reveals not only a thoughtless acceptance of colonialism but also a complacent conviction of the superiority of British society. His proposals to grant extra votes to the well-educated demonstrate a casual elitism, as does his emphasis on higher pleasures: on poetry rather than pushpin. What’s more, the negative picture of liberty he defended — focused on insulating people’s lives from outside interference — can be used today by libertarians and other boosters of minimally regulated markets; perhaps Mill was even a closet libertarian himself. Clear-headed charity should allow him to fade gracefully into the (Victorian) wallpaper.

All this, I believe, is profoundly incorrect. Mill was a far deeper thinker than many of his readers today recognise. He was a progressive, not a neoliberal, someone who has much to teach us about our own society and its conflicts.

These common misconceptions of Mill will no doubt be articulated in a future canonical text entitled Mill for Dummies. When this book is written, it will tell us what “everybody knows” about him. First, he was a utilitarian. To act rightly, he claimed, is to maximise happiness. Following Jeremy Bentham in this thesis, he added a new twist: some pleasures are “higher” than others. Reading poetry supplies more units of bliss (hedons) than you derive from playing childish games in your local tavern. Second, he was an ardent defender of individual liberty. The most important freedom, he tells us, consists in your choosing and pursuing your own good in your own way. Intervening in other people’s lives is warranted only to prevent their harming other folk. These two ideas are the major themes of his most important works: Utilitarianism and On Liberty.

Unfortunately, Dummies probably won’t address the obvious question: How do these two ideas fit together? To find an answer you’d have to go back to On Liberty, where Mill tells us that his defence of freedom will not involve any concept of rights that are independent of utility. He continues by explaining what he means: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.” The authors of Dummies, who identify utility in terms of happiness with an elitist additive, will see this as obfuscation rather than clarification — a lapse into flowery Victorian rhetoric.

Yet the thought of human progress, together with a commitment to promoting it, is all over Mill’s writings. It is expressed in the closing pages of A System of Logic, in The Subjection of Women, throughout On Liberty, and in the Principles of Political Economy (a work roughly four times as long as Utilitarianism and On Liberty combined, and which went through eight editions in his lifetime). In fact, whenever Mill takes up any issue of social policy, he always asks first about how to make progressive changes in individual lives and in the conditions of society that foster or impede such advances. If he mentions happiness at all, it is an afterthought.

The “only freedom which deserves the name” — the ability to choose and pursue your own good in your own way — is at the core of his concept of progress. People’s lives are better when they have more opportunities for figuring out what kind of life they want to lead, more developed cognitive and emotional capacities for making choices about their aims and aspirations, more support in trying to attain their selected goals. When societies restrict options — when, for example, they deny women any chance to obtain university degrees or to own property or to engage in public activities allowed to men — they are interfering with human progress. Advances come when these kinds of restrictions are abolished. It is hardly surprising that Mill would oppose de jure restrictions on the kinds of activities women can pursue; he is, after all, the apostle of non-interference.

Once progress is understood in terms of freedom (real freedom), however, things get more complicated. A poor but talented black American child may dream of becoming a lawyer, perhaps even a judge, or a Supreme Court Justice. But if that child is being raised by a single parent, sometimes homeless, often hungry, and sent to a dangerous and underfunded school staffed by a rotating corps of disillusioned teachers, he may in principle have a chance to realise the dream of giving eloquent speeches in a courtroom, but, even with the most determined effort, his chances of success are slim. What the law allows is negated by the facts of the child’s life. In the absence of public goods — education of the quality available to their more fortunate contemporaries, or a “safety net” that protects against severe poverty and homelessness — the odds are against success for even the most gifted and diligent of children.

Despite popular assumptions, Mill’s conception of human progress does not write off the children of the poor. Throughout his entire career, he advocated Bentham’s famous dictum, “Each to count for one, and none for more than one”, elaborating it in a conception of human well-being that went far beyond his predecessor’s limited focus on momentary pleasures. To ground utility in “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” is to demand providing resources to support the many members of affluent societies who are allowed to fall by the wayside.

Mill’s educational commitments go even further. If someone is to make a wise choice about how they want their life to be, they must be able to discover their talents and to understand the options for developing and exercising them. They require the emotional and social capacities to understand how their aims might have a positive impact on the lives of others. To improve individual lives is thus to fashion educational institutions that develop self-understanding; and to produce citizens who can work cooperatively together. A Millian society emphasises two kinds of liberty: not only freedom from the interference of others, but the freedom to become reflective and sensitive people as well.

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Mill’s emphasis on the “cultivation” of the individual is evident in On Liberty, especially in its third chapter. There, the idea of “making the [human] race infinitely better” is tied to “furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race”. Similarly, The Subjection of Women argues that allowing women “the free use of their faculties” and “the free choice of employments” makes social progress both through correcting an injustice and through doubling the power of individuals to contribute to society. Yet Mill’s most obvious break with libertarianism, and, indeed, with the dominant socio-political conceptions of our day, comes in the work in which he figures as one of the great predecessors of contemporary economic thinking: the Principles of Political Economy.

His purely economic writings are pervaded by judgments about what is most valuable in human life. For Mill, political economy consists in engaging the best ethical thought with investigations in the social sciences. Although that engagement appears in the work of other classical political economists (notably Adam Smith and Karl Marx), nobody pursued it more deeply than Mill. It figures prominently in Book 2 of the Principles, with its astonishing title and theme: “Distribution”. From the perspective of prior political economy, there should be no need to discuss how income and wealth should be distributed: the task is to understand how aggregate wealth is amassed and how societies prosper. After that, the chips — the bullion and the banknotes — fall where they may. For Mill, that is not good enough. The distribution of wealth must allow for as many individual lives as possible to flourish.

Hence, he is an early advocate of what contemporary libertarians call “death taxes”. With his respect for liberty, Mill gives inheritance law an interesting twist: the amount any person can gain via inheritance is to be limited; donors can decide how to spread their prosperity among a large number of recipients (Mill conjectures that they will often opt for providing public goods, apparently foreseeing the coming of Andrew Carnegie and his like). In each generation, he believes, differences in talent, industry and, he points out, luck will produce inequalities in wealth. But, as resources pass down the generations, a death tax results in more equal distribution, benefiting both those whose ancestors had little to leave them and the potentially pampered children of the rich, whose motivation to exert themselves would otherwise be sapped.

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Nor is Mill obsessed with productivity and growth as primary economic imperatives. The progressive interests of humanity are not fostered by intensifying competition. In the section of Mill’s Principles entitled “Of the Stationary State of Wealth and Population”, he wrote: “I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.” If capitalism is superior to socialism — and that is a question Mill takes very seriously — it must be capitalism with a human face.

The narrative that will be contained in Dummies, then, sells Mill short. He is neither a peculiarly elitist utilitarian (indeed, it is doubtful whether he is any kind of utilitarian), nor is his concern for liberty consistent with even the slightest move in the directions that libertarians favour. Instead, he draws on a rich and complex approach to human progress, suggesting reforms both for his own society and for our own.

Were he alive today, Mill would remind us that freedoms are for all, not simply for a privileged few; that democracy requires taking the perspectives of all people seriously; that minimally regulated markets produce consumer goods cheaply at enormous personal and social costs; and that ethical inquiry should be the foundation of socio-political decisions. Much contemporary political “thought” would be subjected to the rebuke he directed at Bentham: politicians and pundits today see in human life “little but what the vulgarest eye can see”. In this, Mill belongs at the progressive end of the progressive parties of the modern world. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should welcome their ally — Mill the progressive.

But though Talichad won the insurgency, could he still lose the peace? Young Taliban fighters, whose daily life has been transformed by victory, have been interviewed for a new report — and it turns out many don’t like it. Put to work in Kabul’s bureaucracy, they find office work dull and restrictive, and they miss the excitement, fellowship and lofty moral purpose they felt as insurgents. Not only do they loathe office work every bit as much as the West’s much-discussed “quiet quitters”, but peacetime urban life appears to be making them soft and, well, less Taliban-ish.

This, in turn, raises some questions for the online masculinist Right in the West: the men who made a totem of Talichad. For the Taliban’s predicament now offers a counterfactual to a doctrine from these circles, that’s now leaking into the mainstream: that every facet of modern male malaise is the fault of women, and especially of feminism.

This idea circulates, in condensed form, via the term “longhouse”. This originates with the now-notorious internet anon Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), author of the influential 2018 Bronze Age Mindset. Ironically, the term accepts wholesale a set of revisionist claims made by feminist archaeologists, such as Heide Göttner-Abendroth, who argue the very earliest societies lived in collective “longhouse” dwellings — and were matriarchal.

For Göttner-Abendroth and her fellow feminists, these longhouse-dwelling matriarchies were characterised by egalitarianism and sharing of resources and caring obligations, traits they viewed as positive and worthy of revival. From the perspective of Bronze Age Pervert and his online followers, though, such societies are beneath contempt, dragging the natural excellence of some into the feminised morass of the many.

And, contra the feminists, such matriarchy isn’t something we should revive — because it’s already here. For BAP, the modern world is already one huge metaphorical “longhouse”. In it, we are told, Western men have grown contemptibly soft, relinquishing a life of confident vitality in favour of a weak and resentful mass culture of collectivism. BAPists assert that under this suffocating order, masculine excellence is resentfully nipped in the bud at every turn by a stifling, safety-obsessed egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, whose enforcers act like burrowing termites to hollow out everything good about our civilisation, leaving behind only crumbling ruins to be picked over by whiny, feeble, and increasingly asexual moral pygmies.

And this is all women’s fault. When the “longhouse” meme completed its transition to familiar jargon recently, in an explainer on the term published by First Things, the author ‘Lomez’ linked it explicitly with the growing prevalence of women in public life. In BAP’s view, “feminism and the liberation of women” is “both the proximate and the ultimate cause” of this nightmarish world, which Bronze Age Mindset characterises luridly as presided over by “some kind of half-human half-cockroach creature resplendent with horrid eggs like a big Amazon centipede…this seeks to re-absorb you”.

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As the “longhouse” concept has percolated out of group chats and Discord servers, so too has this correlation grown more accepted, between emotivism, safetyism, suffocating egalitarianism — and the rising prevalence of women in public life. Essays now come thick and fast: political scientist Richard Hanania tackled the relation between female-typical social patterns and changing norms of political debate and conflict, and the journalist Heather Mac Donald argued that the feminisation of American academia is now “almost complete”. She suggests that this has been accompanied by a transition away from norms of truth-seeking and open debate, toward a culture characterised by emotional volatility, anxiety and a fixation on vulnerability.

Conservative campaigner Christopher Rufo developed Mac Donald’s arguments to suggest that a public culture that over-emphasises “trait empathisation”, which is to say a more female-typical style of relating, has negative downstream consequences including normalising psychological disequilibrium, and leaving young people permanently infantilised. A consensus is emerging on the Right, then, that the feminisation of public life is causing (or at least linked to) a great many things the Right views as disagreeable. As these arguments bleed into mainstream discourse, though, few have the forthrightness of your average internet anon. The anti-woke activist James Lindsay may say “woke is a woman”, for example, but he’s lighter on what that implies in policy terms. Mac Donald and Rufo are likewise at pains to make clear that they aren’t saying female-typical traits and preferences are bad or in need of elimination.

Meanwhile, the anons mutter that surely the solution to a problem that started with the feminisation of public life is, well, defeminising it again — or just walking away to start something new. BAP advocates exiting the “longhouse” for life as a “Bronze Age pirate”; it’s not wholly clear what this means, but the overall impression is of all-male groups, perhaps mercenaries, or something not dissimilar to bands of Taliban insurgents. In any case, it’s clear enough that many cheered on the Taliban for evicting women from schools and workplaces, in no small part for achieving what they only fantasise about: a public square purged of women.

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But, speculating wildly, imagine the Talichad celebrators got their way and booted women out of public life. Would that result in a return of manliness? The first-person accounts of Taliban fighters now working in Kabul’s bureaucracy suggests: possibly not. For it appears that no matter how manly your mujahideen, when you transpose them to a high-tech metropolis and put them to work in Excel spreadsheets, they’ll begin to drift toward the social and psychological conditions deplored by BAPists in the West.

Bronze Age Mindset chafes against a sense of life lived in captivity, where all space is already “owned” and freedom of action always already circumscribed. And we find an echo of that same sense of constraint in the grumbles of Huzaifa, 24, about his post-victory loss of freedom: “The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”

City life seems to drive alienation and moral degeneracy, too: several fighters lament how atomised everyone is there, and deplore the sight of their comrades succumbing to temptation: drug use, hot girls, material possessions. And cubicle-drone life is so boring and repetitive that many spend their days slacking on social media instead: “Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter,” admits Abdul Nafi. Social media addiction thus completes the transition of these young men, from “Talichads” admired by alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in the West into alienated, underpaid, extremely online urban “quiet quitters” in Kabul.

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And in this case, it’s indisputably not women’s fault. As is well-documented, to mainstream lamentations and 4chan glee, there are no Afghan women in these workplaces. For the Taliban, then, the exchange of masculine camaraderie and freedom for alienation, constraint and moral degradation has not involved the female HR managers, DEI administrators and the like whom the masculinist Right generally blame for their woes. And this suggests that at least some of the “longhouse” phenomena now being reflexively blamed on women may be less a malign byproduct of literal workplace feminisation than a consequence of working an office job in a high-tech, 21st-century urban environment.

The notorious anti-technology terrorist Ted Kaczynski made a version of this point in his manifesto, arguing that modern men and women are “oversocialised” into neurosis, powerlessness and anxiety as a byproduct of the distorting effect industrial society has on human nature. Today, “Uncle Ted” is himself a popular underground literary influence, and source of internet memes. But he was arrested before the mass spread of the internet, and to my knowledge has not commented on its contribution to the conditions he deplored. Yet perhaps the bitterest irony of all is that the internet acts as an accelerant on all the phenomena Kaczynski described. Thus, as the Taliban have taken to the internet — whether to promote recognition of their regime or just ease the boredom of cubicle life — they’ve been drawn, by degrees, into the most captivating “longhouse” of all.

The struggle sessions, cancel culture and purity spirals routinely blamed by the Hananias of this world on political feminisation happen among anonymous Right-wing body-builders too. And this is because, as I’ve argued before, social media itself forces even the most committedly masculinist groups into female-typical social patterns: covert aggression, public scolding, punishment via ostracism and so on. When your principal means of interaction incentivises endless talking, even as it forecloses physical confrontation, how is anyone meant to navigate disagreements except via stereotypically feminine social patterns such as “calling out”, backbiting, emotional drama or cancelling wrongdoers?

Things are rarely monocausal, and social and material feedback loops are complex. I don’t doubt that the presence of more women in the workplace makes some contribution to the tone of public life. Indeed, I’ve made that case myself, though needless to say I don’t think this is an argument for Taliban-style purges. But I suspect that for those very online males currently fantasising about making everything less longhouse-y, and wishing they could do so by just getting women to shut up, actually succeeding would make less difference than they imagined.

For probably the only way the online masculinist Right could exit the “longhouse” entirely would be by passing the Taliban in the opposite direction, and exiting the modern world. And, especially, exiting the internet. And it seems not even the Taliban is willing to do that.

Deets wasn’t exactly deceiving her fans. She left older, less manipulated images available, and described her work as “art”. Even so, some accused her of “pedo-baiting”. But just last week, a story that seemed a perfect 21st-century blend of self-commodification and AI-assisted digital unreality took a darker note, when news broke that Deets had taken her own life.

The callous response by extremely online rubberneckers to someone’s obvious suffering exposes two recurring themes in current-day culture.

First, that we have wildly underestimated how completely the shift to a digital-first culture is unmooring us — or, at least, some of us — from material reality. And second, that this has accelerated a transformation that has been under way for over 50 years, in which commerce and innovation turn inward from exploring (and exploiting) the world towards doing the same in the human body, and the human soul: the transhumanist revolution, that began with the contraceptive pill.

In Feminism Against Progress, which is published today, I have argued that these revolutions take aim at aspects of embodied human experience that were previously treated as natural and immutable: for example that men and women exist, and can’t change sex; that most are heterosexual, and the point of sex is, ultimately, making more people. It even takes aim at the fact that only women can have babies, or that puberty is “natural”.

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Instead, since the contraceptive revolution, “progress” increasingly entails waging war on human nature as such. And this is justified on the utopian basis that it is a fallacy to claim that anything about us is “natural”, and these claims mostly serve the patriarchy, or white supremacy, or some such boogeyman.

But doing so doesn’t actually free us from human nature, so much as open up aspects of that nature to the market. So, for example, in theory the sexual revolution freed women from pregnancy risk, liberating us to be as sexually voracious as men; but, in practice, men and women still approach mating differently. And if separating sex from its reproductive consequences enabled us to treat sexual behaviour as a purely private matter for the first time, so with that came the defence of pornography and prostitution on libertarian grounds.

We’ve been taught to view such changes as “progress”, and as inseparable from “feminism”, understood as the pursuit of ever greater freedom, underwritten by (usually for-profit) technology. I bought into that myself, until I had a child. But as I’ve set out to understand the under-counted costs of seeing women’s bodies, and women’s interests, in these terms, I’ve come to see the costs of setting out to emancipate ourselves from our own bodies as especially steep for women — especially women outside the elite.

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Feminism Against Progress looks at this through the prism of sex, a basic organismic pathway for many species as well humans, and yet now under all-out assault by those who would liberate us from it — such as trans activists, campaigners for “fertility equality” or scientists hunting for ways to create embryos without gametes. Meanwhile, male desire and female beauty haven’t gone away so much as been marketised; and in Deets’s tragic story, this marketisation fused with another irreducible fact of the human condition, also under all-out transhumanist assault, but also as yet immutable: ageing.

I was never more than average-looking, even in the flush of youth; even so, the ravages of time on my face still cause the odd pang now I’m middle aged. What is it like for someone whose face and body are their fortune, to see this happen? Here, too, the market wants to help: many celebrities with the money to do so respond by leaning into for-profit “freedom” and going under the knife — sometimes with eerie results. Further down the food chain, “tweakments” are now so normalised, that women are left feeling like freaks if they don’t get on the train. And if this all began decades ago, it’s been wildly accelerated by the digital transformation — for with this has come the power to sculpt our own ideal “selves”.

Last week, for example, the internet was full of videos of women crying because they turned on a TikTok filter that did, in essence, what Deets was doing to her own images with the Coconutkitty persona: turned their faces back to a “teenage” version. This gap between customisable virtual selves and unfiltered “IRL” existence is now a well-documented source of distress for many — especially young women.

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One poll reported that 71% of respondents would never post a photo without editing it. Others show a straight line between editing your virtual self, and longing to do the same thing to your flesh. Some plastic surgeons report “they now regularly have patients come in with photos of themselves that have been so heavily Facetuned they would be anatomically impossible to replicate”. In other words, the seeming ability to dissolve and re-make our appearance, online, is normalising a belief that we can do so in the real world as well.

Twentieth-century cultural theorists saw this coming a long way off — or, perhaps, encouraged it. In an influential 1949 paper on the “mirror stage”, the psychoanalyst and cultural critic Jaques Lacan argued that we arrive at adult selfhood by coming to recognise idealised “mirrored” versions of ourselves, whether literally reflected in a mirror or as “reflected” in another’s gaze.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” wrote TS Eliot in 1935 — words echoed in Lacan’s 1949 paper, where the real, material world was described as only ever indirectly accessible. Encountering the Real was, Lacan thought, always traumatic: a perspective that makes sense, perhaps, in the light of the brutal realities Europe had only recently endured. And while Lacan’s theories don’t feature heavily in modern psychotherapeutic practice, the psychological flight he theorised away from reality into mirrors, language and identification has been wildly influential, via someone even less willing than he to bear very much reality: the queer theorist Judith Butler.

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Judith Butler argued that there’s never a point when we can encounter material reality save through language and ideal — and that language and ideal also shape material reality. And this has implications even in the supposedly “natural” and irreducible domain of sex: something that, Butler argued, isn’t “natural” at all but as it were performed into existence.

A much-reduced pop-Butlerism has long since percolated from the academy into popular culture — not least because our increasingly digital-first social lives make it seem plausible. Online, everything really is so disembodied you can feel as though it might be possible to “LARP” anything into existence in the real world; and pretty much everyone younger than me has been socialising partly (or in some cases almost exclusively) in virtual spaces, some since childhood. Online, we all live in Judith Butler’s world: a space where “performance” and reality are, effectively, the same thing.

Increasingly, wave after wave of young people reaches adulthood armed with pop-Butlerism via university and Tumblr alike. No wonder growing numbers long to edit their meat avatars as they might their online ones, and that this isn’t confined to young girls pursuing unattainable beauty ideals. Reddit hosts anecdotal reports from individuals who decided to transition after using the digital funhouse mirror to feminised themselves, and deciding they liked that look better.

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But the trouble is that this is only true until you log off. The digital age holds out a promise of total emancipation from material reality — one that, in politics, is now driving an increasingly bitter divide between those who can sustain this illusion and those still forced to deal with the real world. And, implicitly, we’re told we can apply this digital Prometheanism to our bodies, too. But it doesn’t work: the gap between protean sex-swap fantasy and sutured, bleeding, often complication-filled reality can be the stuff of nightmares — one that’s now prompting a surge of lawsuits. All that happens is that we open up a new, futile (but still highly profitable) war of attrition against our own nature.

The multimillionaire transhumanist and trans activist Martine Rothblatt may claim that the results of sex change surgery are “so persuasive that rarely can a “new man” or “new woman” be distinguished from a biological original”. But even if this were true (and it generally isn’t), no amount of Woman of the Year awards will change the fact that the individual formerly known as Bruce Jenner remains male down to the cellular level.

Today, Big Tech billionaires are throwing vast sums into the war on death — while the middle classes, and women in particular, find ourselves pressured to submit to expensive procedures aimed at approximating our flesh to the digitally-tweaked ideal in our pocket funhouse mirror. But no amount of “you go, girl” celebration of Madonna’s increasingly bizarre look alters the fact that it’s no more possible to halt the passage of time than it is to change sex.

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Lacan envisaged a world where our reflections structure our worlds, and reality is at best a shadowy intermittent interruption. But he never imagined a situation in which we don’t just receive the reflections that shape our self-images, but claim the power to control them. In this world, the magic mirror offers unreal ideal selves to order: the “me” we would like to be, whether thinner, prettier or the opposite sex. And the upshot is that humankind can bear ever less reality — even as we throw ever more of our resources at paying to defy it. Now, with young people reaching adulthood having never known an age before the editable online mirror, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many believe the only compassionate response to an unwanted reality is to dissolve it — digitally, or medically, or both.

But it’s a scam. In practice, “liberating” ourselves from the reality of our bodies amounts, without fail, to increasing our dependence on for-profit services. As 51-year-old fashion director Anna Murphy points out, in explaining why she’s rejected “tweakments” route, it’s a “one-way street”. One procedure leads to the next, and eventually “your face becomes a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together any more — unless you pay someone else to do it for you”.

And for those who can’t quite afford the payments, there’s always the digital-only filter option. But this comes at a terrible cost. For as the gulf between mirror and matter widens, many find the gaze of the other reflects a reality they’d rather not bear.

Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress (Swift) is out now!

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 need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

He had his own reasons for evoking a spirit of that kind. Even so, it remains good advice today, when comparable discords press toward what promises to be an equally explosive resolution. As 2022 stumbles blindly to its close, the clarity of mind Yeats sought is a condition worth cultivating. Listen past the barnyard gabble of the mass media and the porcine gruntings of politicians rooting at the public trough, and you might just hear the events of the last year sounding the notes of an ancient melody.

Books published in the midst of today’s clatter lack the distance from current contentions to make that melody audible. This is why the book that comes first to mind as I reflect on 2022 is Yeats’s longest and strangest prose work, A Vision. There are several good editions of this work available; those that take the second (1937) edition as the basis for their text are best, since Yeats revised the work substantially after the first edition of 1925.

It used to be fashionable to ignore the massive role that occultism played in Yeats’s life and poetry. Like many other creative minds of his era — D.H. Lawrence and Hilda Doolittle among them — Yeats found in the teachings of occultism a potent source of inspiration. He and his wife Georgie were both members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential occult organisation of their time, and both achieved the rank of Adeptus Exemptus, the highest level of initiation the order offered. Georgie Yeats herself was responsible for the core ideas and imagery in A Vision. Working out the details of the system and putting it in vivid prose was her husband’s task.

A connection between occultism and the creative arts may seem improbable to those who lack exposure to the occult traditions of the Western world. To those not so hindered, it is obvious. Occult training teaches the ability to recognise in the seemingly prosaic events of daily life the presence of myth and symbol. The chattering classes of Yeats’s time thought of progress, as ours think of it today, as a simple objective reality out there in the world. Occultists like the Yeatses recognised (and their equivalents today still recognise) progress as a deeply ambivalent mythic narrative that may or may not have anything to do with the facts on the ground.

A Vision is, among other things, an antidote to the mindless acceptance of that myth. Like the hexagrams of the I Ching or the cards of the tarot, it presents a sequence of archetypal patterns as a model for the events of human life. Yeats’s sequence comprises 28 stages modeled on the symbolic 28 days of the lunar cycle, from new moon to full moon and back to new. Each stage is defined by the two fundamental relationships of the human spirit; that between the will and the object of its desire, on the one hand, and that between the mind and the objects of its understanding, on the other. The first two are Will and Mask in Yeats’s terminology, the latter two Creative Mind and Body of Fate. These paired faculties move in complementary cycles around the wheel of the 28 phases, giving each phase its distinctive character.

Each human life completes the cycle of the phases between birth and death. Each human soul completes the same cycle on a broader timescale as it passes from life to life — the Yeatses, like occultists generally, accepted reincarnation as a matter of plain fact as well as a source of mythic symbols. Each political, cultural, literary, or artistic movement follows the same course, and so does each civilisation as it rises and falls.

Always there are the first inchoate fumblings, drawing toward coherence as the person, the soul, the movement, or the civilisation passes through childhood and approaches its coming of age. Always there is the struggle to achieve unity of being around some half-understood theme. Always, once the full moon is past, the struggle to bring the theme into manifestation descends into pantomime, going through the motions replaces meaningful effort, and words that once set minds and hearts aflame turn into meaningless catchphrases. The inner life trickles away into empty form, and the outworn form dissolves into a void from which some new phenomenon of opposite tendency will emerge.

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All this doubtless sounds very abstract. In Yeats’s hands, it is anything but. The book begins with an introduction, “A Packet for Ezra Pound”, a lively prose poem that weaves together the surroundings of Yeats’s last years with an account of the book’s conception and writing. There follows “Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends”, which presents the entire structure of ideas in the form of a lively fiction with comic elements. (It really is a pity that Yeats never did anything else with comic prose; he was very good at it.) In the chapters that follow he outlines the structure of ideas underlying the 28 phases, and then proceeds through the phases one at a time, using as examples biographies well known in his time.

From there, another philosophical chapter puts the phases in context. Afterwards comes a chapter on the soul’s journey from death to rebirth, and then the two chapters that speak most precisely and unforgivingly to our condition in the waning days of 2022: “The Great Year of the Ancients” and “Dove or Swan”. Here he sets out the way of looking at historical change implicit in A Vision in uncompromising terms.

Today’s popular thought likes to imagine history as a straight line, either ascending from the primitive squalor of the past to some Hollywood destiny or other out there among the stars, or descending from a vanished Golden Age toward some equally cinematic doom that is always about to arrive but never quite manages the feat. Now and again someone suggests instead that history moves in cycles, and is promptly shouted down by all right-thinking people. Yeats also recognised the cyclical nature of history, but saw it as a process that moves one way and then the opposite way, driven back and forth by contending forces.

As Yeats knew well, the Greek philosopher Empedocles got there more than two millennia ahead of him, and William Blake put the same vision into his Mental Traveller and his prophetic books. Yet the insight still has power to shock. “What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Siena and Michelangelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw?” Yeats wrote. “What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish?”

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Yeats remembered that Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex was written and performed for one of the most sacred religious festivals of the Athenian year, received in much the same spirit that European audiences a century ago directed toward the Passion Play at Oberammergau. He knew just how great a reversal of religious feeling took place when Christianity and Islam in the western half of Eurasia and Buddhism in the eastern half supplanted the faiths of the two millennia preceding them. A reversal of a similar kind awaits every movement in human society, politics, and the arts, just as it awaits our civilisation in due time. The supposedly straight line of history does not just bend, it curves around and heads in the other direction.

That way of thinking allowed Yeats moments of startling prescience. He wrote, “What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity — only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle — which is the decadence of every civilisation?” Those discords are a matter of history now, and the bundle will join them in due time. More generally, the blank incomprehension shown by today’s privileged classes as they face a world that refuses to behave according to plan comes as no surprise to readers of A Vision. Those baffled looks show up reliably in the very late phases of a civilisation, as the last sliver of moonlight gives way to a fertile darkness where something new and very different will be born.

Our position in the wheel of the phases was no mystery to Yeats, for that matter. He identified 1927 as the beginning of the 26th phase, and sketched out briefly what lay ahead. The dissolution of our collective discourse into furious bellowing of empty slogans is as typical of the last phases of the cycle as it is familiar to us today. Yet the great difficulty readers will have in approaching A Vision is precisely that it flies in the face of all our modern assumptions about history and change. Yeats was under no illusions here:

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvelous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.

Surely moral progress has stamped out such vicious, childish status games? Alas, no. “Contagion” provides the best explanation for why Italy’s new Prime Minister, a figure generally described by her own country’s press as “centre-Right”, has been widely described as “far-Right”. Never mind reporting accuracy, the aim is disciplinary: entire moral territories can be designated as low-status or unclean. If you touch them, you will incur Contagion.

The same dynamic also underpinned a rash of disputes last week, over the moral hygiene status of women who assert that humans can’t change sex. Such women were denied a stall at the Labour Party conference, prompting a furious salvo on Monday from Labour-supporting writer Joan Smith. Elsewhere, Arianne Shahvisi imputed recently in the London Review of Books that even otherwise impeccable Left-wingers are “in league with the far-Right” if they cling to the notion that humans are born either male or female.

And Shahvisi’s response to a letter protesting this framing recounts how a teacher shamed her by comparing her views to those of Margaret Thatcher. Shahvisi approvingly describes internalising the following lesson in political groupthink: “if you don’t like the fact that you share a view with someone objectionable, consider revising that view”.

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Contagion, you see, is a radically movable feast. There is no person, principle or — as evidenced by the expulsion of basic biology from acceptable Labour Party discourse — objective fact that can’t be rendered beyond the pale, if someone with enough social clout makes it the butt of a Contagion game. And those (such as, by her own account, Arianne Shahvisi) who are both socially attuned and morally ductile will fall uncomplainingly into line.

This poses a conundrum for those women who find themselves unable to follow Shahvisi across the line of principle-free tribalism into fairy-tales about the total malleability of our sexed bodies. These “gender critical” feminists are often otherwise fiercely, passionately Left-wing — or at least were, until the Contagion game abruptly re-designated them as fash.

Some bridle at having been thus infected, and seek to clear their own names — not least by launching drives to expel any taint of “the far-Right” from among their own ranks. The latest such skirmish, in a long-running battle, concerns a recent Brighton rally for women concerned about trans activism, organised by “Posie Parker”. Real name Kellie-Jay Keen, Posie is a punchy and highly recognisable activist, whose approach to campaigning against gender ideology has had considerable viral impact. The difficulty arises in her — for some — inexcusable willingness to share airtime with the Right.

But despite all the furious debate Posie Parker’s approach has occasioned over the years, efforts to insulate gender-critical activism from accusations of being anti-progressive may be futile. For a step back from the accusation and counter-accusation reveals that for those who still know biology exists, the enemy really is progress.

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Of course when adults play Contagion, its impact goes far beyond classroom jockeying for status at the expense of a low-status scapegoat. Real, material decisions, alliances and consequences arise depending on who is considered part of the in-group, and who can be scapegoated and excluded. In terms of how it’s played by the now-dominant progressive class that controls access to so many of those resources, defending yourself from contagion means accepting the implicit premise that there exists a substantive positive set of values, towards which Progress is, well, progressing. Aligning yourself with these purported positive values makes you one of the Good People.

What, then, does this look like where women are concerned? The women’s movement is of course rich and fractious, but when we look at the big-picture changes generally trotted out as the story of feminist progress — from gaining the vote, through leaving domesticity for the workplace to controlling fertility — it’s difficult to infer any governing theme except “freedom”.

Is this just a story about values, though? You can trace much the same narrative in terms of economic transitions and technological advances: changing work patterns, labour-saving devices and — crucially — control over reproduction. All of these, too, constitute “progress”, more convincingly from some perspectives than others: on closer inspection, most of the tech-driven changes that powered women’s march toward freedom are not unambiguously beneficial, but rather produce their own winners and losers. And often, the only party for whom “more freedom” has no trade-offs turns out to be commerce: the sexual revolution, for example, delivered pros and cons for both sexes, but only benefits for the sex industry.

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“Progress”, then, is the name we give a replacement of natural limits by technological control, to the benefit chiefly of commerce. And for some time now it’s been plausible (at least for a bourgeois woman in the developed world) to act as though feminism, freedom and technology are in perpetual lockstep, as facets of “progress”. But cracks are beginning to appear.

For having freed women from a number of biophysical limits, science has rolled right on. Now, following the same broad trajectory of freedom and progress, many believe we should apply the same liberatory logic to all sexed limits. And why, indeed, should only women have the right to tinker with our endocrine systems, and only in the context of fertility? If we have the technological means, and you accept the basic premises that we’re entitled to free ourselves from sexed physiology and that liberation is generally good, why not extend radical bodily autonomy to everyone, so we can remodel ourselves as we see fit?

But it’s increasingly obvious to anyone who is paying attention that this tech transformation will — just like previous ostensibly feminist tech transformations — also come with winners and losers. And feminists were the first to notice, not least because a great many of those casualties are female, while many beneficiaries are male. The difficulty, for feminists, lies in challenging any of this without taking aim at the wider hydra of technology and progress — the very hydra that gifted us feminism in the first place. For today that hydra has an iron grip on the terms of the progressive Contagion game.

And if you look, after all, at the growing list of things recently dubbed “far-Right”, most of them are in fact assertions that we should place some limits on the forward march of commerce and technology. When you adopt the “far-Right” argument that national identity should be protected against globalisation, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can — or should — remodel the polity in the interests of growth. When you oppose natural food and health to Big Ag and the vaccine-industrial complex (two discourses which over my lifetime have migrated from Left to “far-Right”), you’re saying there are limits to how far the junk food and pharma industries should meddle in our food chains or bodies. And when you defend sex dimorphism, you’re saying there are limits to how far we can allow the biotech industry to offer (for-profit, highly lucrative) self-customisation options for our meat avatars, and to extend those options even to our kids.

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In this context, feminists find themselves in an awkward position. Because it doesn’t matter if you’re revolted by actual racism, or hardline misogyny, or radical hatred of Islam, or any of the other (actually pretty fringe) opinions held by tattooed thugs in big boots. Most people dubbed with the “far-Right” contagion don’t, in fact, hold those views. But if you’re even vestigially uncomfortable with the ongoing, tech-powered liquefaction of everything, in the name of commerce — if you show the slightest sign of questioning its self-evident moral goodness — then you’re already “aligned with the far-Right”. It’s just a question of degree.

The function of the great game of Progressive Contagion is making every possible counter-argument to the onward march of tech-enabled commerce intolerably low-status and radioactive. As such, the whole argument about whether or not gender-critical feminists are “aligned with the far-Right” is happening within a space that is already defined, by Progressive Contagion, as “the far-Right”.

No wonder, then, that Giorgia Meloni has been tarred with this brush, even if her substantive politics will, as several commentators have suggested, turn out to be quite moderate. For Meloni has positioned herself explicitly against the tech-powered liquefaction of everything in the name of commerce, thundering in her acceptance speech that “everything that defines us” — a list that for her includes faith, nationality, sex and motherhood — is now “an enemy” to “those who would like us to be perfect consumer slaves”. On a smaller scale, too, we might argue that Posie Parker’s principal crime has been refusing to disavow the possibility that there may be other limits to the liquefaction of everything, alongside sex dimorphism.

It’s of course true that people of good faith can disagree about what those other limits may be. But the other side will just call it nitpicking. No amount of protesting that you’re revolted by actual racists and the like affords any defence against this. It doesn’t matter how hygienically anyone sticks to defending sex and motherhood against Progress, or how strictly those who stray outside this narrow territory are disciplined. It’s all resistance to the juggernaut — and that, by the ever-moving goalposts of Progressive Contagion, is already “far-Right”. Those still trying to avoid infection by rushing to expel what they perceive as the real “far-Right” are, in practice, serving only to enforce a frame of reference controlled by their political enemies — and that will, in due course, be used against them.

There is no longer anywhere to stand that’s safe from Contagion. Nowhere, that is, except in accepting (like the world’s Shahvisis) that your principles, your body, and even your basic grasp of reality may be subject to dissolution and remodelling at a moment’s notice, in the name of Progress.

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.

When he’s not serving as the object of fantastical (and sometimes James Bond-themed) progressive demonology, Thiel is a Silicon Valley legend. He co-founded PayPal, and was the first outside investor in Facebook, on whose board he sat from 2005 until this year. He invests in new enterprises via the Founders Fund. He started the big data firm Palantir, which successfully sued the US Army in 2016 over an intelligence analysis system procurement process, and subsequently won the contract to deliver that system. He is worth an estimated $4.9 billion.

He’s also, famously (or notoriously, depending on your political priors) interested in culture and politics. As such, in our emerging post-liberal world of lords and princes, Thiel is a prime mover across many fields, and his interests and priorities affect a great many people. And this is perhaps the trait that, above all else, invites parallels to premodern figures such as Lorenzo De’ Medici, the Florentine statesman and banker who was also his era’s foremost patron of the arts.

For Thiel, this extends to personal as well as financial interventions, and I met him in such a context. We were both on the teaching faculty for a week-long seminar at Stanford in Palo Alto, with the magnificent title “The Machine Has No Tradition: a seminar on technology, revolution and apocalypse”. We sat down together after a day spent with Stanford grad students, Silicon Valley whizzkids and young DC politicos, wrestling with the question of what technology is. Thiel had just led a four-hour session on the French thinker René Girard.

The grand themes of technology, revolution and apocalypse hung in the air. So, too, did the parallel facts of my having enough common intellectual preoccupations with Thiel to land us both on the same academic roster, while remaining separated from him by an incommensurably vast power asymmetry. Against that backdrop, I wanted to understand the interests and priorities of this sociopolitical titan, on his own terms. More plainly: how does Peter Thiel view his own project?

The overarching answer seems to be: real as opposed to illusory progress. Post-liberal thinkers such as Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, argue that many contemporary social ills are an effect of the way the liberal project cannibalises social goods, such as family life or religious faith, in order to pursue narrow metrics such as (on the Left) personal freedom or (on the Right) economic growth. Thiel sees many of the same ills as Deneen, but offers a strikingly different framing: we’re consuming ourselves not because the fixation on progress is inevitably self-destructive beyond a certain threshold, but because material progress has objectively stalled while we remain collectively in denial about this fact.

In Thiel’s view, this has been the case since the mid-20th century, except in digital technologies. “We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomising and inward-focused.” Over the same period, he tells me, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms”.

Thiel characterises this stagnation as a long, slow victory of the Club of Rome, a nonprofit founded in 1968 to drive political change premised on the belief that infinite growth is impossible. As Thiel sees it, this tacit postwar abandonment of the growth aspiration has resulted in “something like a societal and cultural lockdown; not just the last two years but in many ways the last 40 or 50”. There’s “a cultural version, a demographic version, and a technological version of this stagnant or decadent society,” he suggests. And the upshot of this paralysis has been “a world of technological stagnation and demographic collapse”, along with “sclerosis in government and banal repetition in culture”.

He’s been making the case for real-terms tech stagnation for 15 years now, he tells me, against a mainstream Left and Right that doesn’t want to know: “it was always striking how much it went against the stated ideology of the regime.” Perpetuating the fantasy of progress, against a backdrop of its actual stagnation, is at the heart of delusions on both Left and Right, he argues: “the Silicon Valley liberals don’t like it, because they think they’re driving this great engine of progress”, while social conservatives “have conceded the ground to the liberals, because they believe the Left-wing propaganda about how much science and technology are progressing”. And against this backdrop of cross-party denial, institutions and the wider culture are increasingly shaped by real-terms stagnation.

In his view, much of what passes for “progress” is in truth more like “distraction”. As he puts it, “the iPhone that distracts us from our environment also distracts us from the ways our environment is unchanging and static.” And in this culture, economy and politics of chronic self-deception, as Thiel sees it, we tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”

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In this context, Thiel argues, much of what passes as “progress” in economic terms is actually an accounting trick. For example, much of what looks like GDP growth since the Fifties was simply a matter of changing how we measured the value bundled up in family life. If, he points out, “you shift an economy from a single-income household with a homemaker to one with two breadwinners and a third person who’s a child-carer, statistically you have three jobs instead of one and therefore you have more GDP, and you will exaggerate the amount of progress that’s happened”.

That is: if what you’re calling “progress” is not so much a change in the activities taking place, but rather a change in how you’re measuring those activities, in what sense has anything really changed, let alone improved? After all, he points out, between 1880 and 1960 automation so far reduced working hours that analysts predicted by the year 2000 the average family would subsist happily on the wage of one worker putting in seven hours a day, four days a week, with 13 weeks’ paid holiday. But then “it somehow went really into reverse”.

Since then, many goods once common to America’s middle class have been cannibalised to preserve the illusion of progress. “We are much less of a middle-class society,” he points out, in the sense of “people who think their children will do better than themselves”. And this growing scarcity, coupled with denial of that scarcity, has profoundly corrupted once-trusted institutions. Even the Club of Rome was, in his view, “not pessimistic enough about how badly a zero-growth world would work, and how much it would derange our institutions”. For most of our institutions “depend on growth; and when the growth stops, they lie and they become sociopathic”.

In this context, what Thiel dismissively refers to as “the woke religion” is less a driving force in contemporary politics than part of this vast collective displacement activity. Notably, it’s often a delivery mechanism for resource competition, for example in universities where student numbers are ever-rising even as paid positions shrink, a pinch that “brings out the worst in people”. So much of what looks like an unhinged new ideology is actually the brutal office politics pursued by too many academics competing for too few paid positions? “Yes,” he says, “and maybe there’s some way to get people to be nicer to one another in a world of limited resources. But we never seem to be even able to talk about that.”

If, he suggests, it were more obvious to people that we now live in a stagnant world, more might be said and done to address it. But the key reason this isn’t happening is “that we’ve been distracted from the lack of progress” by “the shift from exteriority, from measurable things” such as “faster speeds, supersonic airplanes or longer life expectancies” and re-oriented on “the interior world of yoga, meditation, psychology, parapsychology, psychopharmacology, psychedelic drugs, video games, the internet et cetera”.

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The governing thread in Thiel’s interventions in culture and politics, then, seems to be re-orienting the wider direction of travel away from what he views as displacement activities, back toward more concrete forms of progress of the sort that might translate into a return to this kind of widespread optimism. This includes a streak of political philanthropy that has recently leaned toward supporting candidates who campaign on the material interests of America’s languishing middle class.

Blake Masters, who co-wrote Thiel’s bestseller Zero to One, is now running for the Senate in Arizona with Thiel’s support; recent polling has Masters as the frontrunner in the Republican primary. Another politician with Thiel support is Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who received a $10m Thiel donation that some credit with bumping Vance to victory in May’s primary for the US Senate in Ohio. Both Masters and Vance make the increasingly bleak state of America’s once thriving and prosperous middle class a central part of their campaigning platform. One Masters campaigning video takes as its central premise the argument that it should be possible to support a family on a single income — something that, for a growing swathe of the middle sort, hasn’t been the case for decades.

Importantly, though, he doesn’t see restoring middle-class aspiration as a matter of returning to the past, but of seeking new real-world advances in science and technology. Along with Thiel’s own investments, which include many futuristic projects such as biotech and space exploration, the principal vehicle for his efforts to drive this change is the nonprofit Thiel Foundation, which promotes science and innovation. Its programmes include the Thiel Fellowship, which gives 20-30 young people aged 22 or under $100,000 each, every year, to drop out of college and work on an urgent idea. Graduates include Austin Russell, who founded Luminar and is the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, and Vitalik Buterin, who co-founded the cryptocurrency Ethereum.

Those among us temperamentally sceptical of never-ending progress and growth may be shifting nervously in our seats by this point. Thiel seems unfazed by the idea that technology may infringe on what’s “natural”. How do we prevent runaway tech changes dragging us into some monstrously inhuman dystopia? Can we retain our humanity, I ask Thiel, in the context of just how transformative technology can be?

He seems to view this as a largely academic question, and not really in keeping with his understanding of Christian civilisation as fundamentally oriented toward the future. “I think of Christianity as deeply historical. Some sense of a certain type of progress of history is a deep part of Christianity.” And from this perspective, the notion that there exists an unchanging human nature doesn’t really fit with the Christian outlook, but belongs — as he puts it — more “in the classical than the Christian tradition”.

“The word ‘nature’ does not occur once in the Old Testament,” he tells me, while “the concept of ‘nature’ as something that’s eternal and unchanging” isn’t a Christian one either. “It seems to me that the Christian concepts are more things like grace or original sin.” From this perspective, Thiel argues, the problem with transhumanism isn’t that it seeks to remake humanity, but that it isn’t ambitious enough in this regard: “the Christian critique of transhumanism should be that it’s not radical enough, because it’s only seeking to transform our bodies and not our souls.” It appears, in other words, that while Thiel is unflinchingly realistic about what’s immediately achievable, he doesn’t see any given or self-evident limits to what we could set our sights on.

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What if the Club of Rome is right, though, and we really have reached the limits to material growth? I put to him for a number of reasons — culturally and materially — it seems more than possible that we’ve irretrievably passed the point of Peak Progress. If this is so, he tells me, the first response should be frank realism. We should, he suggests, “at least be able to talk about it, and figure out ways to make our society work in a low-growth world”. But he sees this attitude less as realism than a cop-out: “I think that sounds like a lazy excuse of people who don’t want to work very hard. It sounds too much like an excuse.” Far from being a matter of humans bumping up against natural limits, he argues, “I want to blame it on cultural changes, rather than on us running out of ideas”.

What, then, does he see as driving the cultural side of stagnation? Thiel thinks the decline of Christianity is a major factor. To him “a more naturally Christian world” was “an expanding world, a progressing world” that hit its apogee in late Victorian Britain. “It felt very expansive, both in terms of the literal empire and also in terms of the progress of knowledge, of science, of technology, and somehow that was naturally consonant with a certain Christian eschatology — a Christian vision of history. Then somehow the stagnant ecological world that we’re in is one in which there’s been a collapse of religious belief. I want to say they’re somehow sociologically linked.”

I put it to him that many historians date the slow implosion of Christianity from the emergence of just the kind of scientific enquiry Thiel wants to encourage in the name of a Christian-inflected tech progressivism. Was it ever plausible, I ask him, that we could hold the worlds of faith and of science and technology in equilibrium? He appears to view this, once again, as a largely irrelevant academic question; the real implosion of mass religiosity in Britain, he suggests, coincided with the end of the British Empire.

“If you had an expansive view and you were going to make disciples of all nations, and send missionaries to the world, and somehow that project no longer made sense, then would this somehow also lead to a collapse within your own society. I think my sense is that Britain was still very Christian in the Fifties, then it had somehow completely collapsed by 1980. So it maps onto the end of colonisation.”

He sees a parallel process at work in the stalling and retreat of American empire: “I would map America in 2000 onto Britain in 1950, and America in 2020 onto somewhere like Britain in 1975 or 1980, where somehow the expansionary part of America has very much faded.” America has abandoned its mission of imperial evangelism: “in 1999 or 2005 there was still this sense that you were proselytising the world, and I think that has strangely collapsed. I’m not sure what the causation is, but there’s some way that the growth of Christianity was linked to it and when it stops expanding it’s in very serious trouble.”

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What’s missing from the world now is a clear vision of the future — or even any vision. Reviving Christian faith might help, he thinks: “if we were more Christian, we would also have more hope for the future, and if we’re less Christian we’re going to have less hope. And there’s probably less action.” Failing this, any vision of the future at all would help, especially if it’s an optimistic one. Though he doesn’t particularly like science fiction, he says, more upbeat stories on this front might help: “If one could produce science fiction that were less uniformly bleak that might help on a literary level.”

Failing other options, Thiel thinks even bleak or apocalyptic visions are better than no vision at all. The picture of European climate catastrophe associated with Greta Thunberg is, as he sees it, one of only three realistic European futures; the other two are “Islamic sharia law”, and “Chinese Communist AI”. He views the social-democratic models typical of contemporary European politics as variations on the theme of stagnation: “a sort of eternal Groundhog Day”. And while Greta’s vision is “in some ways too apocalyptic, in some ways not apocalyptic enough”, it is at least “a very concrete picture”, and represents the least worst of the three alternatives to stagnation.

Failing a mass revival of Christianity, what political or material levers does Thiel think we should pull to restart some kind of future? “Zoning laws and the FDA,” he tells me. One of the biggest issues is housing, which he notes “is linked to family formation” — and, he suggests, another field in which scarcity and resource competition is fanning the flames of political derangement. “Real estate prices doubled and people got a lot crazier.” Fixing this would be a good route into addressing our sclerosis, because “it’s not pure technology. You’d think it would be easy to change the zoning laws, but in practice it’s extremely hard to do.”

As for the FDA, Thiel points out that even the pessimists in the Club of Rome thought healthcare could go on advancing. And again, as with zoning laws, he argues that if we’re stuck on this front it’s not because we’re running out of resources. “I’ve done some investing in biotech over the last 15-20 years. It’s very strange; my sense for the science is that we could be making a lot more progress, and then in practice it’s extraordinarily difficult because of regulatory constraints and other things. So biotech is an area where I think it’s not quite resource-constraints; my read on it is that’s more cultural than natural. Again: we don’t have to talk about limitless human life, but just: can we have a cure for dementia? Is that absolutely impossible? I would claim we don’t know enough about science to know that’s absolutely impossible.”

He acknowledges that there are implicit risks in forging ahead with new discoveries. “I think there are dangers to science and technology, but there are also great dangers in stagnation,” he tells me. In his view, though, the only way out is through: the fantasy of returning to some form of vanished past is just that, a fantasy. “We can’t go back to the Paleolithic era, we can’t go back to an agrarian economy, we can’t even go back to a 19th century industrial economy. And then it seems to me that we don’t know how to make a zero-growth society work.”

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In that context, we need to base our vision of the future on something: “And maybe science and technology aren’t that much, but I would say if we stop believing in the teleology of science and technology it’s not that we go back to some Thomistic or medieval concept of teleology. We become fully epicurean.”

Is Thiel an uncompromising materialist and realist, or a visionary idealist? It’s hard to say, and what I say would make little difference anyway. “Speaking truth to power” has always been, ambivalently at least, a fantasy of print-era writers; less acknowledged, though, is the fact that such pugnacious independence was always premised on the writers themselves being able to make a living direct from a paying audience. And in the digital era of information super-abundance and flimsy copyright, this is a luxury available to an ever-shrinking roster.

In almost all other contexts, the lot of writers is once again shaped by the intellectual and political preoccupations of the 21st century’s lords and princes. It would be absurd to pretend that I could force an account of the Thiel worldview according to the print-era fantasies of writerly independence, or even to hold him to some “objective” discursive standard (a conceit which all sides treat in any case as increasingly outmoded). Rather, like Lorenzo de’ Medici, Thiel reorders the cultural world around himself, like iron filings responding to magnetism.

And in this, if little else, he represents a return to tradition. Those still committed to the democratic vision of politics may be tempted to treat figures such as Soros or Thiel as exemplars of dangerously untrammelled power, exerting a malign influence over a political process otherwise characterised by democratic checks and balances. But I’ve come to think that this has it backwards. To my eye, Peter Thiel isn’t an aberration in an otherwise seamless march of democratic progress, but a reversion to the historic norm. Or to put it another way: I’m coming to suspect the democratic era was a flash in the pan, and what’s now emerging is a 21st century variation on an ancient form of power, more monarchic or feudal in character than “populist”, let alone democratic.

And as I’ve argued, the alternative to such figures may not be democracy but governance by a decentralised post-democratic swarm (analogous, perhaps, to what Thiel calls “Chinese Communist AI”). Given these options, we may yet conclude that the political return of human lords and princes — however unnervingly untrammelled their power, or remorselessly tech-optimist their worldview — is far from the worst option currently on the table. The premodern world of aristocratic patronage was far from being a cultural desert, an achievement that contrasts sharply with the militantly anti-aesthetic (and anti-human) character of post-democratic swarm politics. If I’m right about the prognosis for liberal democracy in the digital age, the available options for our future may be culturally vibrant human-led neo-feudalism, or aggressively anti-cultural swarm governance. And in this case, even those of us who mourn the passing of the liberal world may yet find ourselves, however ambivalently, on the side of Caesar.

Thrasymachus is directly acquainted with Athenian justice. He was a citizen of Chalcedon, one of over 100 subject-cities of Athens in the late 5th century. The imperial yoke so chafed the Chalcedonians that they revolted in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. The results were predictably bad.

Besieged by Athenian forces, the Chalcedonians were saved in 408 by the satrap Pharnabazus, who paid off the aggressors with Persian coin. In the Republic, which unfolds against the backdrop of these historical events, Thrasymachus is brought to a hard boil of indignation by the ridiculous spectacle of two Athenians, of all people, agreeing that it is never just to harm anyone. He interrupts the philosopher Socrates — for he is one of the Athenians — with astonishing belligerence.

Thrasymachos (Bold in Battle) knows that politics is nothing but domination and servitude, and that everything is political. He also thinks Socrates and his interlocutor are either fools or hypocrites, and Socrates in any case deserves scorn as he is a lowly craftsman, a stonecutter and intellectual amateur, whereas Thrasymachus’s professional knowledge and political office — he represented Chalcedon in diplomatic negotiations with the Athenians — place him in the ranks of the elite.

Thrasymachus polices Socrates’ language, forbidding him to offer certain answers to the question “What is justice?” An expert in the field of politics and an early practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion, he is certain that Socrates aims only to obscure the truth with specious arguments. He is therefore perfectly entitled to restrict his means of doing so.

Thrasymachus is quite the familiar character. Our highest-ranked universities have been training and credentialing his descendants for decades. He is more aggressive than inquisitive. His ideas are more precise than accurate, more critical than enlarging. His embrace of intellectual fashion springs in no small part from ambition. His combination of indignation, cynicism, social and intellectual elitism, and proclivity to abstract and totalising constructions is today unavoidable. He is the ancient ancestor of the contemporary ideological technocrat; types like him have recently flooded the political mainstream, altering the character of virtually every part of American life. They are the bitter fruit of an illiberal education.

By ideology, I’m referring to a reductive political theory that, when implemented, is incapable of securing the free and informed assent of the governed and so must rely on extensive fraud and compulsion. By technocrat, I mean someone belonging to a regime in which claims of scientific or technical expertise override traditional kinds of political authority and substitute for political debate.

Technocracy and ideology are intimately connected. Technocracy is necessarily ideological, for while the management of abject slaves may perhaps be reducible to a science, the governance of a political community — one in which free citizens share in the determination of public affairs — is not. Politics, a continual process of public deliberation and negotiation in the light of the available facts, engages and exercises the capacities of practical reason. It is a school of virtue, capable, at its best, of dignifying and ennobling human existence. Technocrats, though, regard human existence as a problem to be solved or a sickness to be cured; knowledge and agency belong almost exclusively to them, who approach the ignorant like surgeons preparing to operate on a patient.

Equally, ideology is very often technocratic. It is almost invariably so in late modernity, an era infatuated with what is unreflectively called Progress — the advancement and practical application of science. But the mixture of ideology and scientific expertise generates pseudo-sciences, such as Leninist dialectical materialism, which are used to consolidate and justify despotism. In this, as in other respects, modern ideological tyrannies trace their ancestry, as Karl Popper showed 80 years ago in The Open Society and its Enemies, to Callipolis, the Republic’s infamous city of philosopher-kings.

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The prototype of all scientific tyrannies, Callipolis deceives, manipulates, and constantly surveils its citizens; its very name, Noble and Beautiful City, is a lie. The regime claims to achieve perfect justice for all, offering what Karl Marx, in another context, called a “solution to the riddle of history”. Although radical technocratic and ideological responses to that riddle seem to lead only to final solutions, the nightmare of total scientific control in the name of justice and human liberation continues to stalk the West like a zombie horde.

The United States remains a constitutional republic, but technocratic progressivism threatens its future as a representative democracy. It is telling that, in the mouths of the governing elites, the word “democracy” no longer refers to government of, by, and for the people, but to progressive policies that are endorsed by credentialed experts yet have little popular support. And now we must contend with a monstrous union of science and politics that lames and deforms both.

Consider government responses to Covid. At the outset of the pandemic, a handful of unelected public health officials immediately began to advise and direct policy decisions of enormous consequence. Our elected officials in the US, trembling before these scientific experts, have followed their recommendations with little consideration of the cost that lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and the like exact on the economic and political well-being of the country and the mental and physical health of its citizens. Similar measures were adopted across the globe.

Americans have from the beginning been told to follow the science, but the science has mostly followed politics. In June 2020, for example, over 1,200 medical and health professionals signed a letter arguing that, despite the high risk of viral transmission, prohibitions then in force on small gatherings like church services should not apply to large (and frequently destructive and violent) demonstrations protesting what the authors called “the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. And when the science pointed toward the likely origin of Covid in a Wuhan lab, top health officials conspired — for political reasons — to smother that news.

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More ominously, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and most of the corporate media have acted, and continue to act, as willing handmaids of our public health officials. They have eagerly embraced the role of Covid censors, monitoring and restricting debate, dissent, and the flow of information — the lifeblood of all knowledge, and, in Tocqueville’s view, the last bulwark against complete servitude to the new form of oppression he called “administrative despotism”. Public speech is now substantially mediated by digital technology, whose constantly expanding and probably irreversible influence on our lives is a unique feature of contemporary technocracy.

Digital technology has amplified and accelerated the politicisation of almost everything, including scientific inquiry. Researchers who publish findings or explore questions that run afoul of progressivist ideology are regularly attacked by social-media mobs and can expect little support from the leaders of their universities and academic organizations, some of which, like Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, have formally institutionalised censorship. The situation has drawn thoughtful and informed comparisons with the Soviet Union, where engineers, physicists, geneticists, linguists, and others were purged from the academy for practicing “bourgeois science.”

This is not all. For technocracy and technology exacerbate the worst characteristics of late-stage democracy, a transitional period that Plato illuminates with prophetic clarity. His description of the growth of tyranny in the midst of democracy cuts close to the bone today.

In the Republic’s grand arc of political decline, democracy emerges from oligarchy, a regime ruled by stingy and avaricious money-makers. Oligarchy contains the seeds of its own destruction. The children of the wealthy are “used to luxury and unaccustomed to labors in body and soul, weak in resisting pleasures and pains, and idle”. The old misers are furthermore happy to make loans to this spoiled cohort. This produces a class of indebted and dishonored young men “hating and plotting against those who acquired their property, and all the rest, and longing for political change”.

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The revolutionary longing of these frustrated and dispossessed elites finds fulfillment in democracy, which is characterised by freedom and free speech, personal license, the indulgence of criminals, the neglect of education, and the equality of equals and unequals alike. License and leveling go hand in hand, because the acknowledgment of fundamental differences between what is noble and base, good and bad, hinders the unrestricted satisfaction of individual desire. The democratic man turns a deaf ear to the admonishments of older relatives and banishes shame and moderation, calling them foolishness and cowardliness.

The desire for limitless freedom eventually becomes insatiable, especially among the young, who attack customary restraints with sacred fervour. Rulers who resist are accused of being religiously polluted, while obedient citizens are vituperated as willing slaves and nonentities. Anarchy pervades the polity and enters the household. Fearing vilification, fathers capitulate to their sons, while sons have no fear or shame before their parents. Rulers imitate the ruled and the old come down to the level of the young, flattering them “so that they won’t seem to be unpleasant or despotic”. The condemned carry on like free men, foreigners are treated like citizens, and the souls of the people become soft and tender and unable to bear anything that smacks of servitude.

In the end, ancestral customs and written laws lose all authority, and the city is governed by the most ferocious among the idle sons of the oligarchs — the ones who had longed for political change under the regime of their fathers. These rulers seize the wealth of the money-makers, the class that is most invested in civic order, keeping the lion’s share for themselves and distributing the rest to the poor.

In the Republic, we see the present in an ancient mirror. The radicalisation of the children of the elites; the repudiation of ancestral customs, political traditions, parental and educational authority, and the very idea of sacred order; the normalisation of previously illicit pleasures; and the weakening of civil rights are all features of contemporary American life. So are the vehement shaming and scapegoating of political opponents; clemency toward criminals amid a surge of lawlessness; the enrichment of the ruling class, destruction of the middle class, and increased dependency of the poor; the fragility and unwonted aggressiveness of the young; and the fatuousness and cowardliness of the old. Is this not astonishing?

But these ills are now supercharged by technocracy, which is perfectly compatible with democratic passions even if it is incompatible with representative democracy. There is currently no shortage of “scientific” support for the liberation of human beings from the constraints of nature and custom alike.

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Wesley Yang recently used his Year Zero substack to draw attention to a 2019 USA Today article that cites policies adopted by the American Medical Association in 2018 to substantiate its claim that feminists who resist the inclusion of transgender women within female-only spaces, including restrooms and athletic competitions, “deny transgender people their full humanity and go against what the medical community today has accepted as scientific fact around gender and sex”. The arguments of these “transphobic” feminists get no mention; the exclusionary position is summarily dismissed on the ground that it violates an implicit and newly minted right to “full humanity”— a term that can mean whatever those who claim that right want it to mean.

This example illustrates the invidious political dynamic of our time. Having begun to condemn great masses of Americans as scientifically illiterate bigots, our self-appointed guardians find themselves on a road from which there is no exit. Turning political disagreements into occasions for public shame and vilification has failed to produce the desired alignment of public opinion. It has only emboldened the opposition, whose refusal to be silenced has been met with increasingly heavy-handed controls. Extreme democratic passions have paradoxically fuelled the anti-democratic takeover of the public square.

Read in the twilight of the present, the great books of the past disclose new meanings. The Republic’s Cave Image offers a chilling prophecy of the human terminus, the total triumph of ideological technocracy in the age of advanced technology.

Chained prisoners facing the bottom of a cave watch a play of shadows on the cold wet wall beneath them. The shadows are cast by puppets manipulated in front of a flickering fire by men above and behind them, players in a rigged game of whose existence the prisoners know nothing. Living in social quarantine, they cannot move their heads and have never seen a human face, never directly encountered another existing individual. All they know of themselves and one another is mediated by the shadows of artificial things: dark, flat, uniform, fundamentally negative shapes, abstract forms not of light but of its absence.

These shadows — today limned by an electronic glow — tell only the official story, the thin and impoverished “narrative”, that the puppet masters, competing for money, power, and honour, wish to project.

This whole human tragedy will be complete, the dying embers will sputter and smoke, when not a single person in this dank and gloomy underground — not one prisoner or puppeteer — has any remaining inkling that, on the sunlit uplands above and beyond their poor constructions, there is a warm, vibrant, colourful, three-dimensional, naturally ordered organic world. The one that was once called reality.

Sometimes, the derision is deserved; in the English-speaking world, the new “liberal” mania for political and ideological purity is causing ancient liberties to be sacrificed in the name of new “rights”. And the pursuit of liberal individualism is thought to be in conflict with ideas of community. These apparent failings of the liberal idea are leading some to gather together under the banner of “post-liberal”.

But the problem is not that liberalism has passed its sell-by date; rather, it has lost its moorings.

These can be traced back to the emergence of British Liberalism with the Glorious Revolution and the 1689 Bill of Rights — which enshrined many of the liberties that Parliament and the people had fought for during the previous century.

The Liberalism of 1689 was grounded, in particular, in the Christian (and more specifically) Protestant faith, born of the fight to produce an English translation of the Bible and to defend freedom of conscience.  There was much intolerance and more than a few beheadings along the way — William Tyndale died for the cause of publishing his translation — but the settlement of 1689 required and established a new understanding of tolerance and freedom.

In all the great struggles of the 17th century, the calls for freedom were inseparable from the deep Christian faith of the protagonists, whether we are talking about the Parliamentarians, the Levellers or Oliver Cromwell himself. John Milton, driven and defined by his faith, wrote what is probably the foundational text in defence of free speech Areopagitica at the peak of the Civil War. It contained an impassioned argument against the introduction of the new Licensing Order (1643), which required government approval for any published work. All these calls were anchored in a shared understanding of meaning, knowledge and virtue. Meaning came from God, knowledge from the Bible and virtue from following the teachings of the Old and New Testaments.

The importance of liberalism’s moorings were not lost on the American Founding Fathers, who shared the same inheritance. In First Principles, Thomas Ricks describes how dedicated they were to assessing the problem of “virtue” — of determining that their new Republic would be anchored in a shared understanding of morality so that civil society and freedom would be able to flourish. Adams and Jefferson looked as much to Ancient Rome for these virtues as they did to the Christian faith, but in practice American society was grounded overwhelmingly in the shared values of Christianity.

De Tocqueville understood this better than most. In Democracy in America, he plants the character of “Anglo-American civilisation” firmly in two elements: “the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty”. For him, religion and liberty were kindred spirits. In America, they were indeed kindred, arriving together with the pilgrims. But in England, religion was the parent of liberty rather than sibling. And in both cases, the flourishing of liberty would depend on the stability and strength of her Christian moorings.

In 19th-century Britain, Classical Liberalism carried all before it in the pursuit of great causes — widening the democratic franchise, opening the economy to free trade, educational reform, laying the foundations of the welfare state, eradicating the global slave trade. But just as it seemed to be all-conquering, its roots were being poisoned.

That poison stemmed from the Enlightenment itself. A new, anthropocentric way of thinking arrived in the 18th century, bringing with it an alternative understanding of human nature, a new theory of human knowledge and a new calculus of virtue. While Enlightenment Liberalism was aligned with the Christian worldview on certain principles of freedom, the two traditions diverge in key ways – and it is this divergence that is now proving toxic to liberalism as we know it.

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Traditional British liberalism rests on the Judaeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures. The writings and speeches of the great heroes of liberty in the 16th and 17th centuries came with a deep sense of humility, of mankind’s brokenness and of the Fall.

Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness. Ayn Rand embodies the new way of thinking with her theories of rational egoism and “the virtue of selfishness”. Encouraged, no doubt, by evidence of technological progress, she assumed moral progress would move in lockstep with technology. She has many modern disciples, wittingly or unwittingly, especially in California, with its strapline of “move fast and break things”. Her Libertarianism is very different from traditional British Liberalism, despite the tendency of many to confuse the two, because of her different assumptions about human fallibility (or lack of, in her case), and about virtue.

Allied to the Enlightenment sense of human perfectibility and rationality is the belief in Progress. The origins of this go all the way back to Thomas Macaulay and the Whig interpretation of history. But Macaulay saw progress essentially in political terms – in the extension of the franchise and other associated political freedoms such as freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. Sadly, the creed of Progress has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature. For Progressives, humankind’s moral progress is on a perpetual upward curve in parallel with technological progress. The history of the 20th century does not give much support to this conceit — it would be fairer to say that technology simply amplifies the expression of our moral fallibility.

Enlightenment liberals also built their own theories of morality, independent of a god, starting with Benthamite Utilitarianism, and extending all the way to John Rawls. Morality became a mathematical calculus, shorn of compassion or community, let alone repentance and forgiveness. According to Jeremy Bentham, “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do.” No reference to morality here, just pain and pleasure. One of Bentham’s disciples, William Jevons, even went as far as to develop a “felicific calculus” whereby all pain and pleasure could be quantified.

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Enlightenment thinkers also developed their own theories of knowledge. One built on the empiricism of Hume and Adam Smith, the other built on the Rationalism of Descartes and Rousseau. The former, with its inherent modesty, is compatible with the Christian understanding of human fallibility, the latter is not.

Hayek describes the two schools of epistemology in The Constitution of Liberty. He warned that the latter, which he called the French tradition of liberty, with its “flattering assumptions about the unlimited powers of human reason” could lead to “totalitarian democracy”. His warnings were all too well-founded and it is the Rationalist version of epistemology which has taken particular hold with today’s cult of science.

Belief in the power of science has never been stronger. It has climaxed amid Covid, with politicians increasingly wrapping themselves in “the science” to justify ever more stringent intrusions on our freedom. Scientism, in the wrong hands, can become dangerous. And the worst hands are those of politicians and civil servants too easily tempted to use the authority of “experts” to infringe on our liberties.

This type of politician, Matt Hancock being the best example, fails to understand the limitations of science, fails to understand the nature of risk and uncertainty and fails to understand the difference between observable historical evidence and predictions of an uncertain and hypothetical future.

These different understandings of the theory of knowledge, of meaning and of virtue have led  to a corruption of liberalism at its source.

What we are seeing today being enacted in the name of liberalism is not liberal at all. Instead, let’s call it by the name which its proponents are prepared to use — progressivism. This is the creed which unites Tony Blair, Nick Clegg, most of the US Democratic Party, most of the British Labour Party and the New York Times. These are not traditional Liberals in any understanding of the term. They are Progressives. They believe humankind is on a permanent upward path of progress. They believe in the rule of experts and in the authority of “the science”.

So where do genuine classical liberals go, faced with the corruption of the creed? Ironically, the attacks on our most ancient freedoms such as freedom of speech, conscience and assembly, make it more important than ever to assert the foundational understanding of liberty. “Classical liberals” need to unite and stand up for their tradition. It has never been so relevant.

Meanwhile, to those who do embrace the term “post-liberal”, and believe it applies to our new era, I would just say this: be careful what you wish for.

Decades later, and Britain seems a more hospitable place for foreign ideologies, importing America-style culture wars over “wokeism”. Or at least, this is the finding of a major study released this week by American pollster Frank Luntz. Based on three nationwide surveys and two focus groups, Luntz argues that post-Brexit Britain is rapidly following America into the abyss of highly-polarised culture wars over populism and wokeism.

“It’s not what the British public want”, Luntz told historian Niall Ferguson at one event this week, “but it’s coming anyway”. The research has already attracted a storm of criticism, mostly from British pollsters and academics who, as Nate Silver can testify, have always taken issue with American analysts daring to intervene in Britain’s domestic debate.

The case against Luntz’s thesis is not a hard one to make. The first and most obvious point to make is that most British people do not even know what “woke” or “wokeism” mean.

Recent polling by YouGov finds that while nearly 60% of British adults have heard of the term “woke” they have no idea what it refers to. Luntz himself found that not even 40% of Britain is familiar with the term and only 15% feel “proud to be woke”.

The second argument against Luntz is that, contrary to what many liberal progressives would have you believe, Britain is not America. We live in a society where debates about class are more important than debates about race. While the British continue to debate the legacy of Empire they have not had to contend with the dark legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. The parameters of our debate about race are completely different from the ones in America.

Our political culture, as Almond and Verba argued, is defined by our history. Unlike the highly-charged, emotional, divisive and resentful politics that took root across the Channel, Britain’s civic culture was long hailed for prioritising the critical importance of tradition, consensus, moderation, tolerance, compromise and pluralism.

From one generation to the next, this civic culture left the British hard-wired to feel proud of their institutions and traditions, to instinctively see the best in their country and to be sceptical of radicals whose shrill, dogmatic, messianic and angry politics were seen to threaten this precious inheritance.

Much of this was reinforced by a significant barrier, which is that Left and Right offered broad and unifying narratives of belonging that transcended appeals to individual groups. Throughout the 20th century, Labour and the Conservatives certainly appealed along class lines but they also stressed national citizenship, a moderate patriotism and a sense of obligation to the wider (national) community. On both Left and Right, politicians were not afraid to celebrate Britain’s distinctive identity, its achievements and contributions to the world. Being born in Britain was not a marker of shame; it was the greatest privilege of all.

But how much of this is true today, after four decades in which academia has gone from leaning Left to being overwhelmingly progressive? Wokeism might not yet be a term used by the masses but it is rapidly going mainstream. Take last week as an example. Excluding references to Luntz’s study, the terms “woke” or “wokeism” appeared in a large number of articles across a diverse array of UK media, from debates about sustainable investing, employee training, William Shakespeare and television advertisements to debates about local councils, Alien, Love Island, university reading lists, the England team and trigger warnings for university students, to name only a few.

As training sessions inspired by critical race theory continue to cascade out of universities and into corporations, government departments, councils, media, schools and religious institutions, as British people continue to debate football players taking the knee, the role of white privilege and the causes of racial disparities – all of which originated in America – the salience of these debates will only increase, pushed on by striking generational divides. The idea, popular on the Left, that wokeism is merely a fringe obsession among right-wing culture warriors appears increasingly absurd.

Britons who argue that wokeism is exaggerated ignore the generational tides shaping the country’s future. While YouGov found that “only” 41% of British adults had ‘heard of the term woke and know what it means’, this spirals to 63% among 18-24-year-old Zoomers. This group are also more than three times as likely as older Baby boomers to say they are woke and three times more likely to say that this is a “good thing”.

Anybody who has spent any time on Britain’s university campuses knows that wokeism and its associated ideas – white privilege, decolonisation, unconscious bias – are already part of everyday vocabulary (and not only among students). Academics are frequently asked to decolonise their reading lists and participate in unconscious bias training, even though the methodology for the latter has been shown to be flawed. Unsurprisingly, recent surveys suggest that one in four university students are self-censoring in class, feeling unable to express their views.

More from this author

The Blue Wall won't save Labour

By Matthew Goodwin

The sharp political divide that Luntz finds, whereby Labour voters are more than twice as likely as Conservative voters to describe themselves as woke, is magnified in Britain’s higher education institutions where Labour supporters outnumber their conservative counterparts by a ratio of about 8 to 1 among academics.

The idea that Britain’s traditional class divide will act as a buffer to the importation of these debates is also for the birds. One big lesson from the last decade of British politics is that class no longer has anywhere near as much explanatory power as it once had. The reason why education and age, not class and income, have become the main drivers of politics is because of the much greater influence that people’s cultural values are wielding over their decisions at the ballot box: immigration, multiculturalism, diversity, Europe, Britishness, Englishness, Islam, teachers in hiding and competing interpretations of our history have all become far more central.

A large pile of research supports Luntz’s core argument, namely that these values-based conflicts over culture, identity and belonging are wielding far more power over politics. They are the vessel in which more specific debates over statuecide, Empire, anti-racism, Englishness, Black Lives Matter and academic freedom are carried. Detailed studies at Kings, the University of Manchester and elsewhere chart how Britain is now on the same road as America, albeit a few miles behind, heading into polarised debates about “who we are”. Luntz is not the first to make this argument and will not be the last.

“Woke versus Not Woke” increasingly looks set to become the latest proxy of this deeper fault line, much like Remainers versus Leavers became a more recent proxy of the older divide between social liberals and cultural conservatives. You can already see this in the data, which points to how these groups are oceans apart not simply on Brexit but many of the debates that hang off wokeism: anti-racism, free speech, diversity and equality.

More from this author

Why Keir Starmer is doomed

By Matthew Goodwin

Even today, five years after Brexit, while 52% of Remainers think that immigration has been good for Britain, only 9% of Leavers agree; while 63% of Leavers think that people are ‘less free to say what they think’, only 37% of Remainers agree; while 65% of Remainers support the Black Lives Matter protests only 22% of Leavers do, a similar figure for whether footballers should take the knee before kick-off. Britain might have moved on from Brexit but it has not moved on from the underlying divide that could easily restructure itself around Woke-Not Woke.

This transformation looks set to be encouraged by something else that has changed from the old era: the inability of our leaders, especially those on the left, to offer the broad, unifying narratives that once held earlier generations of Britons together. The British like to joke that they are haunted by the 52:48 divide which delivered Brexit, so here is another 52:48 divide to consider: while 52% of Labour voters believe that Britain is ‘an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation’, only 48% see it as ‘a nation of equality and freedom’. Conservative voters, unsurprisingly, opt overwhelming for the latter.

For the first time in our history, one of Britain’s mainstream parties has become a vessel for an ideology which encourages people to, put simply, dislike their own country. Labour has increasingly turned in on itself and away from the wider country, indulging in narrow appeals focused on the holy trinity of gender, sexual and racial diversity while failing to offer the broad and unifying appeals that used to actually win elections.

Suggested reading

The West's cultural revolution is over

By Ed West

This is entrenching the new divide, separating people who are on balance more willing to see the good than the bad in their country from those who see only the bad. It is also quickly becoming a huge problem for the Left, further severing its link with more culturally conservative workers and leaving it even more dependent on progressives who congregate in the cities but are simply too small in number to deliver election victories.

It is indeed no coincidence that as this ideology as moved from the margins to the mainstream, the centre-left has suffered some of its most dramatic electoral losses. As Ronald Reagan once reminded Jimmy Carter, people do not warm to movements that appear to despise their own nation. If Luntz is right and wokeism is going mainstream, then the ultimate loser won’t be white privilege or the patriarchy but the Labour Party.

The modern world is defined by “progress”, be it social, economic or technological. We demand change, strive for growth and promote development. To a great extent we’ve succeeded. Most of us live lives which are wealthier and healthier than our ancestors could have imagined.

Further reading

What do post-liberals really want?

By Peter Franklin

And yet progress means abandonment. While we can do without the dirt and drudgery of pre-modern life, that’s not all we’ve left behind. Our ancestors were poor, but increasingly we feel the absence of the things that enriched their lives: A connection to nature; the satisfaction of craftsmanship; the support of a strong community; time and space for family; a world still enchanted with spiritual significance. These are things we associate with the past much more than the present, which is why some of us want to get back there.

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The question, though, is how. Time travel is obviously not an option. And even it were, few people would take it. Only the most dedicated traditionalists would take the past as a package deal. Baking your own bread is fun; extracting your own teeth, not so much. 

Most “trads” are selective. They don’t want to recreate the past, but learn from it to build a better future. However, there’s no getting away from their technological scepticism. Consider the case of Katharine Birbalsingh — “Britain’s strictest headteacher”. She argues that parents should take away their children’s smartphones and replace them with cheap “brick phones” that have basic voice and messaging functions, but allow very little else — and certainly not immersion in social media.

I think she’s absolutely right, but what she proposes is no small thing. It’s not just counter-cultural, but counter-historical — a deliberate decision to turn back the clock on one of the most important technological developments of the 21st century. 

For an even more significant example, read this essay for UnHerd by Aris Roussinos — who wants us to go “back to the land”. To be clear, this is not a Year Zero manifesto. It’s not even “knit your own lentils”. His modest proposal is that Britain needs a million more farmers. This would take an agriculture policy that supported smallholders not barley barons, but if the opportunity were available, I wouldn’t be surprised if something like a million Britons took it up. I’d expect rather less than that number to succeed, but overall I think we’d be better for it.

Further reading

Why Britain needs a million new farmers

By Aris Roussinos

But while what Aris proposes is doable, it’s also deeply subversive. The move from the countryside and farming to the cities and non-agricultural occupations isn’t just an economic trend, it is the economic trend. More than anything it describes our transition as a species from the long millennia of pre-industrial stasis, to the breakneck developments of the last two hundred years. In this sense, going back to the land is to go back in time. 

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Previously, I’ve argued against accepting technological progress as a fait accompli. We should never incorporate new technology into our lives just because it’s new. Rather, like the Amish, we should only accept what genuinely serves our personal and collective goals. In fact, in some cases — like eugenics for instance — we should actively and unapologetically suppress the application of scientific discoveries. 

And yet a discriminating approach to technological progress doesn’t have to be a subtractive one. It’s true that removing technologies from your life will probably bring you closer to a traditional way of living, but there’s a limit to the number of people who are likely to follow you. 

I’m a traditionalist too, but an optimistic and ambitious one. For me it’s not good enough to be part of a mere sub-culture, living off-grid, somewhere up the Dark Mountain. I want a wholesale healing of the damage that modernity has done to my country and to the world. New technology got us into the mess we’re in, but it is also has the potential to get us out again. 

In imaging the future we compare the present to the past and extrapolate. Therefore we assume the future will be like the present only more so. It will be faster, stronger, bigger, smarter. And, if the good things get better, then, by the same logic, the bad things will get worse: climate change, inequality, anomie and the loss of privacy. 

But history, while always moving forward, doesn’t do so in straight lines. What we think of as modernity is not an ever-increasing intensity of the same thing, it is subject to phase changes in which it can transform into something else altogether. 

Just look at where our energy comes from. Our ancestors relied on their immediate environment — gathering firewood, cutting peat, building windmills. But with industrialisation, motorisation and electrification, energy became evermore centralised and remorselessly polluting — the price we’ve paid for abundance. That was supposed to be our future too: a Bladerunner world of resource wars and environmental catastrophe.

Further reading

The things we do for growth

By Peter Franklin

So what’s this then? It’s the latest UK government cost estimates for different energy sources. The cheapest (and hence fastest growing) technologies are now wind and solar power. They’re cheaper than gas, cheaper than coal and much, much cheaper than nukes. Suddenly, our energy future looks decentralised and unpolluted. 

Of course, this future isn’t quite like the past either. Today’s windmills are nothing like their medieval predecessors. For a start they’re the size of the London Eye and you’re more likely to find them out to sea, not by the village pond. Still, it’s better than Bladerunner, isn’t it? 

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This isn’t the only example of the future changing for the better. 

For all the bad news we’ve had this year, lockdown has opened our eyes to a different way of working and living. It turns out that millions of us can work from home without the economy collapsing. Obviously, we’ve discovered this the hard way, and the cost will be enormous, but in rebuilding we don’t have to go back to the way things were. A lot of us will decide that subjecting ourselves to stupidly-long commutes and stupidly-high rents is, well, stupid. 

A piece of modern folk wisdom is that the internet makes physical proximity all the more important, but this isn’t as true as it used to be. We’ve spend the last decade having endless debates about social media, not noticing that the underlying architecture of the internet is becoming more capable as a platform for useful communication. Zoom-style online meetings are still far from seamless, as I’m sure you’ve noticed; but in 2010 they’d have been impractical and, in 2000, unthinkable. So just imagine what might be possible by 2030. 

The cliché that there’s no substitute for face-to-face contact just isn’t the case anymore. There literally is a substitute. It’s glitchy, but improving all the time and great swathes of the workforce are getting used to it.

And in case you think that doesn’t sound very traditional, just think what’s getting disrupted here. There’s nothing trad about the concentration of opportunity in a few global megacities. As a trend it was ripping apart our economic geography, dividing entire nations between the overheated metropolis and the left-behind hinterland. If technology unbundles the megacity, allowing people to prosper within their own towns and villages, then we can begin the process of rebuilding economic and social capital within all our communities. 

Then there’s the potential for an even more important development: the re-bundling of the household. Our homes used to be places where everything happened: not just sleep and a bit of quality time with the kids, but also work, education, entertainment, worship and the self-provision of all sorts of goods and services we now outsource to others elsewhere. It was occupied throughout the day, not just at overnight and at the weekends. And it was multigenerational: children didn’t spend all day in school, young adults weren’t sent away to distant cities and the elderly weren’t isolated.

Further reading

How WEIRD are you?

By Peter Franklin

As I argue here, the old way of living wasn’t all good, but it wasn’t all bad either. A new study has found that teenagers have become less anxious during the lockdown period — contradicting expectations of a mental health crisis. Perhaps the reason why is that they’ve had the opportunity to spend more time with family members who actually love them instead of the bully bear-pit that we call “school”. 

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Perhaps the most anti-traditional thing about modern life is its anonymity. It’s astonishing just how much of our time we spend with people we barely know or don’t know at all. We pass them on the street, commute sat next to them, have arguments with them online. We might live next door to strangers, work with strangers, even have sex with strangers. It’s an odd thought — and certainly would be to our ancestors — that we don’t know the names of most of the people we share our lives with. 

All of which suits the sociopath. Why treat others with respect if you don’t know them and they don’t know you? In the absence of a moral code or a calculated fear of being caught, why not treat other people and their property as if they’re entirely yours to do with as you will? 

We’re told that the fear of crime is exaggerated. In fact, we greatly under-appreciate just how hemmed-in our lives are by the constant need to guard against the predators among us. Those tales about an earlier time when people left their front doors unlocked or money for the milkman out on the porch aren’t fantasy — that’s how things really were (and still are, in a few places). 

When who you are — and what you do — is common knowledge, you behave differently. That’s not an unalloyed blessing, but on the whole I think it’s a better way to live. Which is why I’m in partial disagreement with Elizabeth Oldfield’s condemnation of facial recognition technology. Yes, there is something sinister about machines looking at us. But what about our anonymous cities, the crowds through which one can pass unrecognised — isn’t that creepy too?

Further reading

Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Elizabeth Oldfield

A future in which people won’t be able to thieve or harass or vandalise without being seen and held accountable isn’t some unprecedented dystopia, it’s just going back to the way things used to be.

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Okay, enough with the law and order — how about some tech that might enhance our ancient liberties? Self-driving cars, for instance. If we ever get them, they’d be great news for country pubs. No need for a designated driver — just let a computer take the wheel instead, while you sleep off the evening’s enjoyment. 

Meanwhile automated delivery drones could be a boon to all those extra smallholders that Aris Roussinos wants to see. A distribution network that’s open to all would allow farmers and artisan producers to sell direct to consumers, bypassing the greedy supermarkets. Whereas modern logistical know-how has allowed a small number of large companies to exert growing control over the food chain, all that could change once the ability to coordinate distribution becomes a dispersed commodity. 

And that’s not the only new technology that could transform rural economics. For all the advantages of traditional farming methods, the fact is that it relied upon the back-breaking labour of of a now non-existent peasantry. Even our supposedly modern agriculture is dependent on poorly-paid, and sometimes exploited, migrants. 

Advances in agricultural robotics and AI could open up a new set of possibilities — for instance controlling weeds without chemicals or tending to livestock without factory farming. It’s another paradox, but we need automation to de-industrialise the countryside.

Further reading

Environmentally-friendly farming doesn’t have to be technologically backward

By Peter Franklin

The same applies to the built environment. As much as much we might appreciate traditional architecture, many of its features — such as richly carved masonry — relied upon the availability and affordability of an army of craftsmen. With the modern age came new materials and methods of construction that favoured the crude and repetitive forms of 20th century architecture. But, again, we now have the possibility of a phase change — through automation that doesn’t replace the true craftsman, but greatly enhances his or her productivity. If we can transform the economics of construction, then what gets built might just follow suit. 

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I’ll admit I’ve presented a series of best-case scenarios. It is just as possible that we could be dragged further away from truth and beauty than ever before — and all in the name of progress. Far from a traditionalist restoration, we could be headed for a future of tech-enabled abominations.

But that makes it all the more important that we stay engaged, that we don’t give up on science and technology, but fight to push it in the right direction. 

We must harness the power of innovation to restore the natural world and to defend human dignity. Traditional values will not prevail if we carry them off onto some low-tech reservation.

The only way back is forward.

Suggested reading

What would 'living with less' actually look like?

By Peter Franklin

So, if you could snap your fingers and wish those years away, would you? I’m placing the decision entirely in your hands. There is a catch however. If you do decide to turn back time, you don’t get any younger. Nor do the people in your life. The dearly departed don’t come back, but on the other hand any children you might have aren’t erased. Rather, it’s the state of the world that goes back by two whole decades: politics, society, culture, technology — that sort of thing.

By the way, if you’re currently doing a job that didn’t exist at the Millennium, this is magicked into the nearest equivalent. Thus if you’re an Uber driver then you’d be working for a regular taxi firm instead. If you’re a journalist at a current affairs website, then you’d be working for the dead tree press. You get the idea. That said, I’m not sure what a social media ‘influencer’ would be doing in my scenario — but let’s pretend it’s something useful.

Anyway, for the purposes of this thought experiment, assume that your personal circumstances are more or less as they are now, it’s just the bigger picture that’s been reset to the 1st January, 2000.

With all that understood, do you still snap your fingers? I’d imagine those of an optimistic disposition definitely wouldn’t. Why wish away 20 years of progress? But the pessimists might ask: what progress?

At the start of the 21st century, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We hadn’t ploughed into Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, George W Bush had yet to be elected President. And even if the hanging chads were still to swing the same way, we shouldn’t forget that Dubya was elected on a foreign policy platform of non-interventionism. In re-setting history, there’s a chance that the hijacking plot would be foiled. Failing that, the response of the US (and UK) governments might not be to invade a country that had nothing to with 9/11.

Obviously, the Middle East featured a pretty horrible set of governments in 2000, but they’re still pretty horrible now. Certain groups — such as the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites — are less downtrodden, but other populations have been devastated by civil war and brutal persecution. Would things have been as bad had the Second Gulf War never happened?

However, I’m getting into the realms of alt-history here and my purpose is much simpler: to ask whether we’re better off now than in 2000.

Suggested reading

Don’t sweat the small stuff, or why the ‘New Optimists’ are only half right

By Peter Franklin

For most of the developing world, the answer is definitely yes. Across a range of issues, including poverty, malnutrition, disease and illiteracy, there’s been real progress. It’s not all good, obviously — the blessings of development must be weighed against the curses, for instance traffic deaths and industrial pollution. But, on the whole, humanity (if not the natural world) is better off than it was 20 years ago. This is the strongest argument — indeed, an overwhelming one — for not hitting the reset button.

Okay, but what if the question was limited to the developed world? Just how good has the 21st century been for us in the UK and the West more generally.

Well, it’s certainly not all bad. Cancer survival rates have improved, for instance. Since the mid-1990s there’s been a long-term decline in crime, including violent crime. Indeed, young people in the 21st century are generally more sensible than previous generations at the same age, with lower levels of drug use and teenage pregnancy. The Post-Millennial generation appears to be especially cautious — almost to a fault. However, patterns do vary from country-to-country — with America’s multi-generational opioid epidemic and the rise in ‘deaths-of-despair’ casting a shadow over the last decade.

In many ways, western societies have become more tolerant over the last 20 years, with big shifts in social attitudes on issues like same sex marriage and associated changes in the law. But, again, there’s a countervailing tendency — support for populist political movements is now at a level that would have shocked us 20 years ago.

At the start of the 21st century, liberal internationalism was all but unchallenged. Bill Clinton was still President in the US, Tony Blair Prime Minister in the UK and Gerhard Schröder Chancellor in Germany. The Euro had been launched the previous year, but Greece wasn’t a member yet. In both Russia and China, those in charge were assumed to be reformist and well-disposed to us. The ex-Communist countries of central and eastern Europe were in the process of integrating with the West, and in the world as a whole globalisation was the order of the day. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, published in 1992, looked like a pretty good guide to the future.

Suggested reading

How to beat the politics of punishment

By Peter Franklin

But there were early signs of trouble: on 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned to be replaced by Vladimir Putin. Earlier that year, an obscure political party called UKIP won its first MEPs in the European Parliament, including a chap called Nigel Farage. The US presidential election of 2000 was unusually divisive, culminating in a bitterly polarising battle over the Florida result. 2000 also saw the dot-com crash — an advanced warning of the bubble-prone weakness of 21st-century capitalism.

However, the cracks in the system went unnoticed — not least due to the external shock of 9/11. And yet the warnings kept coming. In 2002, there was a major upset in the first round of the French Presidential election — when Jean-Marie Le Pen knocked-out the Socialist candidate to make it through to the run-off. He was then trounced by Jacques Chirac, but the result prefigured a new pattern for western politics — the rise of the populist Right and the decline of the centre-Left.

Pre-occupied with the Middle East and an economic boom back home, political establishments across the West didn’t see themselves as under threat. The Le Pen thing was written off as a French aberration. But then came disaster after disaster: The Iraq insurgency. The Afghan quagmire. The credit crunch. The banking crisis. The Great Recession. The Eurozone crisis. The Syrian civil war. The rise of ISIS. The refugee crisis. Brexit. Trump. Populist revolts in western Europe. Populist governments in the east.

This wasn’t just bad luck, but the result of errors of judgement and lapses in responsibility on the part of the rich and powerful. Furthermore, people can feel this failure in their daily lives: the weakness of wage growth, the unaffordability of home ownership, the escalating cost of higher education. Despite the deepest recession in living memory, most economies have grown since 2000. But for a lot of us — especially the young and those left behind by the geographical concentration of economic opportunity, things haven’t got better — and certainly not 20-years’-worth of better.

Suggested reading

What if we were to lose the last ten years of technological progress?

By Peter Franklin

Oh, but what about technology? Would you really want to swap your iPhone 11 for a BlackBerry 850? Your Samsung Galaxy A50 for an original Nokia 3310? Would you want the squat mass of CRT monitor sitting on your desk again? Do you miss the weird sounds made by a dial-up internet connection? Or download speeds that would make a tortoise blush?

Digital is one area where progress is unmistakable — and everyday life is different as a result. And yet, in 2000, the internet was still a hopeful place — we genuinely believed that tech would enable a great decentralisation of power. But that, of course was before Facebook and Amazon conquered the world; before the nastiness of online debate poisoned politics; before China began building its techno-totalitarian state.

In 2000, we had the convenience of mobile communication — minus the downsides we’ve come to discover since. There being no smartphones, we’d yet to be zombified by them. But what about the upsides of unlimited access to the global store of human knowledge? Well that, perhaps, is the most depressing thing about the 21st century so far. Previous breakthroughs in communication have triggered breakthroughs in science, industry, culture and philosophy. But what does the West have to show for the Internet? Science is slowing down and productivity is faltering. As for a 21st-century Renaissance or Enlightenment, where is it? (And, no, the Great Awokening doesn’t count).

Suggested reading

Why I've reported Douglas Murray to the police

By Titania McGrath

I don’t want to be too much of a grump here. Taking a global view, I wouldn’t want to go back to the year 2000. Thanks to trends set in train decades previously, the last 20 years have improved conditions for most of humanity. As for the developed world, we shouldn’t deny the progress made this century — let’s count our blessings and be grateful for them.

And yet we could have, should have, achieved more. We’ve every right to be disappointed — both in our leaders and ourselves.

And it’s not just silly students and activists. The next time you see a historical novel or short story adapted by the BBC, note how much contemporary political judgement is crow-barred into the plot and characterisation – as if the purpose of period drama is to revile the past not reveal it.

But is it really wrong to judge the people of earlier decades and centuries by the standards of the present?

Further reading

In theory, you’re a racist

By Peter Franklin

It is, if we misrepresent the actions and motivations of previous generations – for instance by interpreting Remembrance Day traditions as a glorification of war, instead of a solemn respect for the fallen. And yet that still leaves numerous examples of historical heroes who really did say or do something that we, today, find repulsive. How are we to deal with that?

Is explaining away a foul thought or deed as ‘of it’s time’ a kind of moral relativism? Does it, moreover, expose cultural conservatives, who are suppose to believe in moral absolutes, to charges of hypocrisy? If something is morally wrong now hasn’t it always been wrong?

Well, you don’t have to be a moral relativist to see that context matters. You can believe that theft is always wrong and yet judge a starving person less harshly for stealing a loaf of bread than, say, a wealthy financier for defrauding a pension fund. Life was harder in the past – and people more likely to be faced with harsh decisions. I wonder how liberal today’s liberals would be without the resources available to the 21st-century welfare state.

When wrestling with history, it’s not just conservatives who risk hypocrisy. Progressives, who have so much to say about ‘privilege’ in our own time (male privilege, white privilege, cis privilege, etc), need to remember their own ‘temporal privilege’ – i.e. all the unearned advantages that come from being born in this day and age and not a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand years ago.

Further reading

'Open' London is built on exploited labour

By James Bloodworth

There’s an eye-opening perspective on our place in time by ‘eukaryote’ on the LessWrong blog. The author argues that while biologically modern humans have been around for 50,000 years or so, most of human experience is much more recent than that. That’s because the quantity of human experience isn’t just a function of the passage of time, but also the number of people around to experience it. For instance, one person alive for 80 years would clock-up 80 years of human experience, while five people who all live to be 70 would collectively accumulate 350 years of human experience.

The author does the sums and reaches a remarkable conclusion:

“It turns out that if you add up all these years, 50% of human experience has happened after 1309 AD. 15% of all experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now. 

“I call this ‘the funnel of human experience’ – the fact that because of a tiny initial population blossoming out into a huge modern population, more of human experience has happened recently than time would suggest.”

Looking at history this way, it’s not surprising that the rate of technological progress was so slow for so long. Our ancestors took their time inventing things because there weren’t that many of them around to put in the necessary hours. If most of humanity’s collective experience has been lived from 14th century onwards, then that’s the window in which you’d expect most things to happen.

Further reading

What if we were to lose the last ten years of technological progress?

By Peter Franklin

Of course, it’s not just the quantity of human experience that counts, but also what we can do with it. If anything, the temporal distribution of humanity’s total economic output and preserved knowledge is even more skewed towards the present than its collective waking hours. The modern age not only has a disproportionate amount of time to play with, but also all of the economic and intellectual resources that have ever existed. Here’s just one aspect of that privilege:

“FLI reports that 90% of PhDs that have ever lived are alive right now. That means most of all scientific thought is happening in parallel rather than sequentially.”

Instead of retrospectively shaming our forebears, we’d be better off pondering whether our own achievements – whether technological, cultural or moral – are commensurate with our opportunities.

We might also wish to contemplate our civilisational inheritance and wonder how those before us created so much with so little.

Further reading

Human progress is real but so is our vulnerability... because the same tech drives both

By Peter Franklin

He concluded his 14 minute address with a reference to a Catholic priest who died in 1955:

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was arguably one of the great minds, great spirits of the 20th century —a Jesuit, Roman Catholic priest, a scientist, a scholar, a mystic. In some of his writings, he said… that the discovery and harnessing of fire was one of the great scientific and technological discoveries in all of human history…

“He then went on to say that… if humanity ever captures the energy of love, it would be the second time in history that we have discovered fire.”

It is fascinating to see Teilhard’s work continue to exert an influence – and not just within a Christian context. His most famous writings occupy a space somewhere between theology, philosophy and scientific speculation. Their ambition is to fuse Christian thought with evolutionary theory. The central argument is that the universe, including humanity, is evolving through different stages of increasing complexity and consciousness towards the ‘Omega Point‘ – a state of perfect unity that draws all of existence into itself.

Further reading

Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

This is not exactly mainstream science; it’s not mainstream Catholicism either. Indeed, the church authorities stopped Father Teilhard from publishing his work during his lifetime – and, when they were published posthumously, the Church officially placed them under a monitum (a warning).

The whiff of heresy that surrounds Teilhard doesn’t put off his biggest fans, especially not those in the ever-expanding ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ category. What they might find rather more disturbing, however, is the evidence presented in an article by John P Slattery for Religion Dispatches.

Slattery presents quote after quote that show that Teilhard was a racist who believed that some ethnic groups are more advanced than others. He believed that “as not all ethnic groups have the same value, they must be dominated” though not, he added, “despised” (well thanks, Pierre, that’s mighty big of you!).

Further reading

Could genetically selective societies breed themselves into crippling uniformity?

By Peter Franklin

Furthermore, he was a eugenicist who argued that what he called the “advancing wing of humanity” should use scientific methods to further its biological evolution. Here’s another direct quote:

“We must recognize…the vital importance of a collective quest of discovery and invention no longer inspired solely by a vague delight in knowledge and power, but by the duty and the clearly-defined hope of gaining control (and so making use) of the fundamental driving forces of evolution. And with this, the urgent need for a generalized eugenics (racial no less than individual) directed, beyond all concern with economic or nutritional problems, towards a biological maturing of the human type and of the biosphere.”

Slattery is careful to put Teilhard’s most objectionable ideas within their historical context:

“…before World War II, much of the Western World was, what most of us would now regard as openly racist. Anti-Semitism, anti-blackness, anti-immigration, anti-disability, and misogyny dominated the populations of the United States and Europe. Leaders in science and industry coupled such racism with Darwin’s conception of evolutionary progress to produce horrific decades of enforced eugenic practices.”

Prominent eugenicists of that era include Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, Margaret Sanger, Sydney Webb, John Maynard Keynes, William Beveridge and Julian Huxley – all of whom are held in high regard by progressivies to this day (though not for their eugenicism). Let’s also not forget that nice, liberal, social democratic Sweden had a post-war programme of compulsory sterilisations that didn’t come to a halt until 1975.

Is this the attitude we should take to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin – dismissing the bad stuff as ‘of its time’ and focusing on the good stuff?

Further reading

Don't monkey around with the borders of humanity

By Peter Franklin

No, because the ‘good stuff’ provides the basis for the bad stuff. Teilhard’s ideas have something in common with all visions of progress towards an Earthly utopia – the inherent perfectibility of humankind. That might sound like a good thing, but it allows for the idea that some people are fundamentally more advanced than others. It also implies that to make further progress, the inferior specimens have to be upgraded, bypassed or in some way dispensed with. This can be seen in Nietzsche’s concept of the Superman, the communist ideal of the New Soviet man and, of course, the Nazi belief in a master race. In a non-totalitarian form, it is there too in contemporary transhumanism and the Silicon Valley religion of the Singularity.

Further reading

The most influential religion you’ve never heard of

By Peter Franklin

It’s telling that what got Teilhard in trouble with the Catholic Church was his apparent denial of the doctrine of Original Sin. The idea that we’re all flawed (and born that way) is probably the least popular of the core Christian beliefs, but also the one for which the evidence is most glaringly obvious. It is also incompatible with Earthly utopias. If we’re all fundamentally sinful – and irredeemable except through divine grace – then there are no ‘advanced’ and ‘unadvanced’ classes of human being, and no self-propelled evolution towards perfection.

This is why Teilhard had no room for Original Sin in his philosophy. It is also why there should be no room for his philosophy in Christianity.

I’m glad to say that someone else has noticed – John Harris of the Guardian is also less than impressed:

“Back in 1999, Google hit 1bn searches a year. Wifi began to make an impact about two years later. Thanks to the pioneers of Facebook and Twitter, the age of mass social media dawned between 2004 and 2006 – and non-stop posting, messaging and following was soon enabled by the iPhone, launched in 2007. These things have changed the world… But the revolution they represented is old now, and nothing comparable has come along for more than a decade.”

Further reading

Alexa, how do we disrupt the tech lords?

By Peter Franklin

Harris goes on to excoriate the hype surrounding the tech giants’ increasingly insignificant product launches :

“Every now and again, at some huge auditorium, a senior staff member… will take the stage dressed in box-fresh casualwear, and inform the gathered multitudes of some hitherto unimagined leap forward, supposedly destined to transform millions of lives. (There will be whoops and gasps in response, and a splurge of media coverage – before, in the wider world, a palpable feeling of anticlimax sets in.)”

Tech optimists will be able to quote all sorts of figures about advances in processing power, bandwidth and other metrics for the size, speed and reach of the digital world. They’ll also be able to point to online products and services that just weren’t available ten years ago.

However, it’s not the growing capacity of the technology that Harris is calling into question, but whether it’s been used to do anything that’s both new and useful. There’s a key distinction to be made here between new products that change society because of what they enable us to achieve and those that change society merely because they’ve got better at grabbing our attention.

Further reading

Many in the tech industry are avoiding their products. Should we do the same?

By Peter Franklin

Imagine you could wave a wand and magic-away the last ten years of technological progress – specifically, progress in digital.

Waving that wand in, say, 2008 would have wiped out the iPhone and mass market smartphones generally – though mobiles of a more basic nature would still be common (game of ‘Snake’ anyone?). The internet would survive in a just-about-recognisable form, but it would be painfully slow. There would be no YouTube, no Twitter, no Facebook, no MySpace even. Social media as we know it would be gone.

However, the effect of waving the wand in 2018 would be… underwhelming. Smart phones wouldn’t as advanced or as ubiquitous, but they’d still be there, as would social media. Streaming of music and video would be back to its infancy (as a mass consumer product), but it would still be a thing. In fact, in terms of all the fundamental things you can do with digital tech, it’s hard to think what we’d lose.

There are a few bits and pieces we’d miss. Language translation these days is actually useful, though far from flawless. Voice recognition is breaking through as a technology that people use in their living rooms – definitely one to watch. Facial recognition systems are also making an impact; though more so in some places than others. Virtual reality has finally become a consumer product, but, thus far, a niche one – not much more significant than the 3D TVs we’re not rushing to buy.

Further reading

Who’s that watching your every move? Don’t worry, it’s only everyone...

By Peter Franklin

Personally, I’m very grateful for the combination of the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil and MyScript software, which converts my onscreen handwriting to text with near miraculous accuracy. However, I’ve yet to meet a single other person using the same to liberate themselves from the keyboard – maybe they’re all too young to have ever used anything else to write with.

Harris does admit that we may be on the brink of some genuinely significant breakthroughs:

“Amazing and sometimes life-enhancing innovations, I dare say, are being worked on by tech geniuses across the world. In fields such as driverless transport, virtual reality and blockchain technology, new inventions may eventually transform our lives, and fulfil the cliched big-tech promise about making the world a better place.”

As always, there’s a path to be trod between boundless optimism and hopeless pessimism. Knee-jerk cynicism is also to be avoided. However, before asking whether new technologies are good or bad for society, we should ask whether they matter that much one way or the other.

Forget the fact that we now use over three times as many antidepressants as we did when Tony Blair first came to power in 1997[1.  ‘Record number of antidepressants prescribed…‘, The Guardian, 29 June, 2017], there are still those who are humming along to that tired old D:ream anthem that heralded Blair’s victory: ‘Things can only get better’. And look how that turned out.

Recommended reading

Britain should decolonize the Commonwealth

By Oliver Kamm

Oliver Kamm’s ‘optimism’ is political, of course. In his head, science, liberalism, capitalism and progress form an unassailable pact, driving the human race inexorably onwards from ignorance and poverty towards knowledge and wealth. It is the dream of the 18th century Enlightenment, but it is also one that borrows heavily – though usually without acknowledgement – from religious ideas about history having some sort of in-built direction. Here, for instance, is a hymn that we often sing in church:

God is working his purpose out,
as year succeeds to year,
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea[2. ‘God is working his purpose out’, Arthur Campbell Ainger, 1894].

Neo-liberal optimism is a secularised version of precisely this philosophy of history. And, as an underlying assumption, it allows neo-liberals to depict those who oppose their philosophy as not just disagreeing with them, but also of standing in the way of history itself – as though such people are involved in a conspiracy against the very nature of things.

It is no coincidence that those most associated with this ideology of progress are also those who were among the loudest cheerleaders of the Iraq war, for instance. For if the project of continual progress is to keep on advancing, then those who stand in its way must be destroyed. That is why Islam is often depicted by neo-liberals as ‘medieval’. To those who believe in constant progress, ‘living in the past’ almost constitutes some sort of moral objection, and certainly as something to be overcome. And here is the source of the real danger of this philosophy of history.

The 20th century was littered with the corpses of those who were deemed to oppose progress. For both Communism and Nazism were influenced by this hideous Enlightenment d:ream, employing pseudo-scientific rationalism as justification for their brutality.

In 2010, the American author and socialist Barbara Ehrenreich published ‘Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking fooled America and the World’. She explains that the book was a reaction to the ideology of positive thinking that was being applied to people who were “downsized from the corporate world”, those who were told that being sacked wasn’t bad; that it was a “growth opportunity”; that they will come out of it stronger if only they had the right attitude.

This is where the oppressive nature of ‘smile or die’ optimism kicks in. Its message is basically this: “Put on a smiley face and don’t complain”. In other words, if you don’t find a job – indeed, if you don’t become a millionaire, says the American d:ream – it’s really your fault because you have set yourself against the very nature of things.

In 1952, Norman Vincent Peale published his book ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’. It was 186 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and sold five million copies. And it was to the Marble Collegiate church on Fifth Avenue, where the Reverend Norman Peale was the Lead Pastor, that the Trump family went for Sunday worship and spiritual guidance. Norman Peale’s “believe in yourself” philosophy found the perfect student in young Donald.

Rule one, writes Peale: “Formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself succeeding” and keep this picture before your mind’s eye “no matter how badly things seem to be going”. In other words, just tell yourself things are going well, even if they are not. At the very least, here is a philosophy of optimistic self-deception that is terrifying as the basis of a world-view for the President of the United States of America[3.  ‘The Power of Donald Trump’s Positive Thinking‘, Politico, 13 October, 2017]. Not just narcissistic but, worse: delusional.

Under the aegis of metaphysical optimism and positive thinking, we can convince ourselves that the climate is doing absolutely fine and nuclear weapons are just for keeping the peace. From this perspective, it matters not that robots have started to take our jobs and that weapons will soon have a mind of their own. Stay positive. Things can only get better.

Instead of listening for the wisdom in these words, and indeed the opportunity in them, the vanguard forces of the Enlightenment d:ream look on death as just another problem to be solved. And the deus ex machina of technology will one day address even this central feature of the human predicament, they predict. One day we will be able to upload our consciousness into software – or something like that. We will become trans-human, better than human, almost mini-gods.

Pah. All is vanity. And striving after wind.

Whether it’s the murder rate, trends in teenage pregnancy, the number of foreigners in our jails we are far more negative than we need to be – and things are better than we think they are.

Trust is not in inexorable decline – in fact our 2017 Veracity Index found that trust in experts like scientists, professors, the police and even civil servants are all at a historic high.

Looking further afield, our view of what has been happening in much of the world is also too pessimistic;

• There has been a fall of 137,000 people in extreme poverty EVERY DAY for the last 25 years – but only two out of every ten people realise that poverty is reducing around the globe…
• …by contrast, 52% think it has increased.
• And although 85% of one-year-olds have been vaccinated against at least one disease, again, most people think the number is far lower.

So while there are plenty of problems, as we review 2017, let’s remind ourselves that actually the world is becoming a better place in many, many ways – and certainly better than most of us think it is. It’s even the case that other people are generally much happier than we tend to think they are.

Happy New Year!

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

So I had chance to chat at length to several voters who shifted to the populist billionaire Republican. They included a senior public official who, when I talked about visiting Damascus and reporting on the refugee crisis, asked me what Syrians were really like; he had obviously overdosed on Fox TV. But for all their myopic hostility to some outsiders and hatred of distant elites, these were decent people living in often-distressed communities that felt a long way from Washington.

I talked to Joe about his support for Trump, about serving in the Marines, about the opioid crisis, about life in his home town. He was warm and well-informed, still supportive of the president but wishing Trump would shut up on social media. Then the subject of gay rights came up. Joe admitted that he used to joke with his buddies when he saw ‘faggots’ in the street, having been brought up in a world that viewed homosexuality as an aberration like so many in Middle America. This is, remember, a far more religious country than our own.

Joe told me that about six years ago, a family member invited him to a civil union with her partner. He recoiled at the idea and refused to attend such an diabolical event. But then he began to talk more with her and to hang out with a gay man at his workplace. ‘This guy was the funniest guy I ever met and so good at his job,’ he said of his colleague. Slowly but surely, his hardline views shifted as he saw there was nothing to fear from people with differing sexuality to his own. That they were just ordinary men and women.

So much so that when his relative invited him recently to her same-sex wedding following a change in the law, he was happy to attend. So what would he do if he heard someone make a homophobic comment now? ‘I guess I would shrug it off at work, maybe mention it, maybe not – but if it was to my relative’s face I’d punch them,’ he replied. By the end of our conversation he confessed to having even been to a drag show, smiling as he told how his wife was so amused by the star flirting with him to his squirming discomfort.

Joe’s story in many ways underlines the march of gay and lesbian equality. It may have felt frustratingly slow for campaigners as they struggled against bile and bigotry. Yet in societal terms, change has come astonishingly quickly. I remember the hideous jokes made on this subject in my childhood playgrounds, the crass caricatures deemed acceptable on prime time television comedies, the tabloid newspaper coverage when an Aids epidemic exploded, the ban on ‘promotion’ of homosexuality as ‘a pretend family relationship'[1. This was the language of a British law, known as Section 28, introduced in the late 1980s and repealed in 2003 (BBC report).].

Public opinion has moved decisively in favour of legalising homosexuality… and same-sex marriage

Three decades later, battles remain but the war is being won. Some reactionaries keep fighting, of course, thinking they can still stop or at least slow the sea-change. But Joe’s rapidly-changed attitudes mirror those of his nation. A decade ago, his fellow citizens opposed same-sex marriage by 54% to 37%. The latest Pew survey found roughly two-to-one support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, support jumping seven points over the past year [3. From Pew Research, June 2017 – ‘Support for Same-Sex Marriage Grows, Even Among Groups That Had Been Skeptical‘]. This reveals a massive leap forward in tolerance – and all within less than a generation.

It is a similar story in Britain. There were 45 openly gay MPs elected at last year’s general election, with equal numbers on Tory and Labour benches[4. PinkNews lists the number of MPs, including 19 Tories and 19 on the Labour benches] – an increase of six on the previous parliament and claimed as highest proportion anywhere in the world. How absurd that right-wing furore over same-sex marriage now seems, not least when even opposition to gay adoption is fast dissolving. When misanthropes such as the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg argued that extending marriage opportunities to all alienated ‘traditional’ supporters, they merely underscored how out of touch they were with the wider public.

This speed of change in face of fierce opposition underlines why we should not despair on one of the critical human rights issues of our age. Yes, the horror stories continue: people accused of being gay thrown off buildings in Iraq, hanged in Iran, tortured in Chechnya, jailed in Egypt. From Russia to Uganda, conservative and nationalist politicians whip up hatred against gays and lesbians that result in abuse and attacks. Tanzania is the latest exponent of this sordid politics, with threats of expulsion against gay rights campaigners and the president bizarrely claiming ‘even cows disapprove’ of same-sex relationships.

Yet the global picture is improving each year. The most recent edition of the annual ‘State-Sponsored Homophobia’ study revealed there are 72 countries that criminalise same-sex consensual activity. Clearly this is 72 nations too many – and in eight of them the death penalty is used to punish people falling in love with someone of the same sex. Yet even these figures indicate rapid global progress: when the survey began in 2006, there were 92 nations where homosexuality was a criminal offence [2. The 2006 report from the International Lesbian and Gay Association – ‘With the government in our bedrooms‘].

It was only at start of this century that Holland became the first place to sanction same-sex marriage. Already 24 others states have followed suit, with Malta – a predominantly Catholic island – the latest. These advances may have been led by Europe but this is far from just a Western picture of progress. Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay allow same-sex marriage while South Africa legislated seven years before Britain. Nepal – a place where members of the LGBT community were once mocked as ‘social pollutants’ – was hailed earlier this month by Human Rights Watch as a global beacon on this front.

The next looming battle is for transgender rights, as proved by Trump’s cruel ban on serving in the military and murders in many places. From public services to sport this throws up some tougher questions, but solutions must again be founded on principles of decency, equality and respect for individuals. Already we can see signs of society fumbling its way towards to a more progressive place, despite predictable furore over each small step forward from healthcare to identification and schools. These transformations show how fast both Ordinary Joes and wider society can move when challenged – and how behind the headlines, humanity can progress with astonishing speed.