'Trump has never been a man to care much about dusty old books.' Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
In the late Eighties, the sclerotic Soviet economy appeared doomed. It seemed to many that Mikhail Gorbachev and his free-market reforms were the only hope of avoiding collapse. But Gorbachev only ever seemed to get halfway. He declared that central planning would no longer be necessary, and that factories could decide for themselves what to make, but he never got around to giving these factories the support they needed to retool themselves. His reforms got so far that they introduced new demands and rules and bottlenecks; they never got far enough that they came up with solutions to the problems they had introduced.
In an ironic reversal of the Gorbachev situation, Trump is trying to turn a globalised, free-market America into a more controlled and locally-based economy. Like Gorbachev, Trump has gone so far as to translate that demand into harsh economic reality: stop importing things right now, or get crushed by tariffs. But the companies now expected to do their patriotic duty for Uncle Sam have absolutely no support from the state.
When push came to shove, Gorbachev didn’t really want much in the way of actual markets; he wanted all the market efficiency while still maintaining Soviet top-down control of the economy. Not able to handle the pull from these radically two different directions, the USSR economy broke apart, and soon the USSR itself went with it.
If Trump were on course to make his programme work, he would be mimicking the way the Chinese government supports businesses that are affected by changes of policy. If the CCP were to decide that aluminium imports were suddenly unacceptable, companies using aluminium would be told where a new mine would be opened, which banks would lend capital to that project, which company would be in charge of construction, and when these companies would have to switch to being entirely domestically sourced. If they do not perform their patriotic duty, or if they actively harm the social stability of China, companies can indeed be destroyed or taken over by the state.
But there is still a social contract there: a deal in which both parties have duties and responsibilities. Trump has now suddenly and violently duplicated all the duties that companies in China might have toward their country, but he has done nothing to assume any of the responsibilities of the Chinese state. The result is a halfway house of sorts; one that is likely to simply destroy much of the American business community unless there is an immediate change of course.
America needs reform — who inside the country would even deny it at this point? On a purely abstract level, there are very few Americans who would oppose the idea of their country rebuilding its manufacturing capacity. But the current execution is akin to trying to do a sharp fighter jet turn while flying a slow and fully laden passenger plane. Whether due to a lack of time, energy, or care, Trump’s reforms are all being made with the chainsaw rather than the scalpel. Reforming the government bureaucracy has turned into firing tens of thousands of workers almost at random, leading to many mistakes and more inefficiency rather than less. Reforming America’s structural trade deficits, on the other hand, now looks like a Khmer Rouge death march for companies that are even partly reliant on components or raw materials from abroad. If you’re an American manufacturer, you should just buy American bauxite from an American bauxite mine, and then send it to an American aluminium smelter. If you cannot (the US currently has no operational bauxite mining) and your business collapses, then that’s not Trump’s fault, that’s your fault.
The practical details here — the fact that it takes 20 years to build a mine, but you’re somehow supposed to have it ready in 48 hours — are treated like they basically do not matter. In this way, Trump’s reforms clearly go way too far: the things he is asking American industry to do cannot be done. You can’t just impose huge penalty fees on a system of trade that America depends on to get its food and medicine and electronics and expect it to work out, and the end result of this policy is likely to be empty shelves and shortages: yet another parody of the late-stage Soviet Union. The systems we depend on have become too complex for us mere mortals to grasp; Trump seemingly neither has the patience or inclination to even try to understand them before transforming them utterly.
When asked what he thought of the ongoing stock market crash as a result of his tariff announcement, Trump recently said that, while he didn’t like the market going down, sometimes you simply had to take “medicine”. The Gorbachev years had its own, similar term: the USSR was to be saved through the application of “shock therapy”. Trump’s “medicine” here is just an inversion of Gorbachev’s own mix of totalising reform and lethal indecisiveness. It’s an interesting choice of words, nevertheless: most kinds of medicine are just as capable of killing as they are of healing, if administered at the wrong dosage or the wrong time. The Soviet Union learned that lesson the hard way in the Eighties; now it may just be America’s turn.
But changing American industry is actually only a part of what Trump now wants to accomplish. His surrogates are starting to talk about the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency as a problem in and of itself. By tariffing everyone at the same time, and essentially taking a sledgehammer to the entire global trading system, Trump could conceivably end the dollar’s reserve status fairly quickly. But this is a truly monumental change that would touch upon the life of every person on the planet. What the effects of doing that would be, though, nobody really knows.
Even more stunningly, Trump is also planning on upending the infrastructure of trade itself, even as he’s declaring a tariff war on the rest of the planet. In just over a week, the US is now set to implement an incredibly radical change: ships that are made in China, or belong to companies who own a ship made in China, will now have to pay large penalty fees whenever they dock at a port in America. Ostensibly, this money will be used to re-create an American shipping industry. There’s just one problem: that industry simply doesn’t exist at present, and more than half of all the world’s ships are now made inside China.
None of what I’ve said is in any way an argument that America shouldn’t have tariffs, or that it cannot be reformed. It is only to say that these tariffs will not do what they’re supposed to do, and that these reforms will end up pushing America toward the very dissolution that people are trying to avoid. But America is now so hopelessly stuck in negative polarisation that making such an argument is almost impossible. Right now, people are either for Trump or against Trump, and no more nuance than that is really in demand. To be against Trump but for tariffs, or for Trump but against these tariffs in particular, is to piss into the wind. Towards the end, the USSR was similarly polarised: the ability to discuss things across the social divide slowly dwindled, until all you could do was to simply pick a side.
Unfortunately for America, the part where everyone simply starts picking sides has only just begun. If one considers the issue of Trump’s 2 April tariffs in terms of American domestic politics, it’s clear that the way in which they are being handled is a constitutional ticking time bomb. According to the constitution, issues of tariffs and taxation belong to Congress, not to the president. Congress has delegated power over tariffs to the president, but this delegation of power was meant to handle emergencies. Trump is of course claiming that the chronic trade deficits of America constitutes a sort of global emergency, but the critical point here is that this argument sits at the razor’s edge of what is even reasonable. One could easily make the argument that by deciding — as a single individual! — to change the entire world economic order and impose massive new de facto taxation on Americans, Trump has now taken the step from being a duly-elected president to being a sovereign and unaccountable king. Ominously, there’s probably quite a few Americans who would be fine with that idea.
Equally ominously, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, recently made noises about how his state might want to simply negotiate a separate trade arrangement with Asian economies rather than go along with Trump’s plans for American autarky. What Newsom is saying here is in fact openly seditious and completely unconstitutional, but to many opponents of Trump, his ideas are now far from unthinkable or even undesirable. It probably doesn’t even need to be said that the issue of tariff nullification played a significant part in the lead-up to the American civil war. In fact, Newsom’s loose talk actually shows us that there now exists a viable, well-ordered path toward some sort of breakup of America. During the height of the Covid crisis, the federal government essentially lost control over the states, which ended up forming various ad-hoc regional organisations to coordinate their responses. These ad-hoc organisations at the regional level aren’t regulated in the constitution and are probably quite illegal, but in the heat of the Covid panic, none of that seemed to matter.
If the end result of these various dramatic Trump reforms is to break parts of the American economy, the pressure on Newsom and other blue state governors to do something will become increasingly urgent. If that happens, then it is not at all unlikely that blue states will once again come together into ad-hoc “confederacies”, which will then coordinate their policies, and even set their own trade policy vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Sure, this would be completely illegal; sure, the founders of America wouldn’t like it at all. But what does that even matter when you can say the same thing about the mad king trying to wreck the global economy? Nobody thought the Soviet Union could break up either, until one day it simply did.
Once a young nation, America is now old. Once the home of optimism, America is now despondent. The 250th anniversary of the great American revolution is just a year away, but who knows whether there’ll be anyone left in the mood to celebrate. There is actually a non-zero chance the entire country might be in some form of bankruptcy or technical default on its debt before then; in fact, all of Trump’s reforms up until this point have only made the deficit situation worse, not better.
Given all this gloom, it is hard to fault Trump for flipping over the table. But in doing so, he’s not truly treading new ground. Today, just as happened a generation ago, a controversial man is suddenly upending an imperial system that has become too slow, too divided, and too indebted to survive for much longer. Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it — and Donald J. Trump has never been a man to care much about dusty old books.
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SubscribeI’m a great admirer of Paul Kingsnorth, but this essay is not one of his best efforts, imo. It is little more than a lengthy restatement of the “God-shaped hole” argument that he, and others, has made many times before.
The somewhat novel part of the essay doesn’t occur until midway with the paragraph beginning, “One notion that is currently doing the rounds is that the post-Christian West is ‘repaganising’.” He then proceeds to debunk that myth. But, as we can all see without the need for deep insight, it’s true that the “pagans” don’t really believe in paganism. Their whole schtick is performative acting out.
Maybe I’m just too jaded.
I don’t think i’ve read anything of Kingsnorth before, but I found this reasonably interesting. There’s an art in stringing these different observation together which makes it interesting reading. But the problem is that at a certain age you’ve seen this sort of thing a hundred times, a lot more in fact. And in the end it’s just entertaining but not very informative about what it’s alluding to, which is always about what might be but never is.
He is certainly a talented writer. If you click on his picture at the top of the article there’s a long list of articles he’s written for Unherd.
Yes – I also very much enjoyed his novels, “The Wake”, “Beast” and “Alexandria” (these actually comprise a trilogy). Worth reading if you’ve not already encountered them.
I rather enjoyed it myself. I thought the comments on that Last Supper parody at the Olympics in particular were bang on.
I kind of believe in Bacchus. In a CS Lewis way. He’s a good guy in Narnia but as one of the kids notes – you wouldn’t like to meet him without Aslan around.
It seems to me the Inklings understood Paganism. Which is more than modern day Pagans do.
Well he is saying some substantial things about the extent our culture is post-Christian, remains downstream of Christianity, is truly on some sort of pagan continuum with Rome, or is just anomic and antinomian.
So it’s broader than ‘God shaped hole’, filled by various substitutes.
It might be the case that current western culture is just extremely fragmentary, rather than an all-encompassing Vaccuum!
All interesting to ponder.
I agree with you. It’s all juvenile cosplay, especially silly when performers are middle-aged.
Maybe we are re-paganising, just not with the old gods – after all, what power does the sun have over us when we can create night, day, warmth and cold without it? More likely our new pagan gods are technology (particularly on the medical side), AI, machines. They inspire awe and a blind faith and a desire to sacrifice (limbs, loved ones etc).
“what power does the sun have over us when we can create night, day, warmth and cold without it”
Well it does do a bit more than give us comfort.
Agreed: without it, we wouldn’t have food or any meaningful energy sources for probably nine tenths or so of our population (if that). I always return to Carl Sagan’s “small blue dot” film: it’s easy to find on YouTube and quite humbling.
It’s a rhetorical question to point out that we have dismissed that “bit more” from our collective consciousness.
That’s right
Excellent point. The article is incomplete without this point. And I would add that these are human inventions, products of the human brain. Therefore we are God, in our conception. We don’t say that explicitly very often because it sounds ludicrous. But we have (we think) taken over the role of the divine.
Opinion: It’s not going to work out well.
“We dwell, rather, among the consequences of our liberation. We got everything we wanted. Now we have to live with it.”
This seems true enough to me. But what did we want? What did this liberation entail? Something like that justice manqué called ‘social justice’, probably, but what we got was the sacralization of the marginal and, willy nilly, the weird.
In the biblical parable, the united human race decided to build a city and a tower to avoid being scattered upon the face of the whole earth. There is speculation that the tower may have been a ziggurat. They never completed the tower because the Lord was displeased at this ambition, so He confused their languages and, true to their worst fears, scattered them upon the face of the earth.
But now we live in inverted times. ( That word had a very different connotation, back in the day. ) So hat tip to Paul Kingsnorth.
According to one of Franz Kafka’s own many wonderful parables, we are not building the Tower of Babel, we are digging the Pit of Babel. Barrel of laughs, sometimes, that K.
But pace both Kafka and the Bible, neither has it quite right. We are building the Ziggurat of Babel, and we are building it upside down. This is not the most stable way to orient a ziggurat or to order a society. It is, however, the inevitable structure of a Hyperdemocracy.
The building of this inverted ziggurat must entail the decapitation, and thence the inversion of all hierarchies, which are the source of all oppression. The people must rule. Wasn’t if foretold that it should be so?
The base of this structure, those layers with the smallest dimensions, support those of ever-broadening girth. It is the supreme irony of an age itself saturated in ironies that it is precisely this state of affairs that is unsustainable.
The purple-haired ‘pagan’, covered in tattoos and bristling with piercings, the Bambi Thugs and the heavy metal bands, are not making a political statement, much less a religious one. They are making a mockery of a hollowed out society that doesn’t even have the conviction to pay them any mind. They are not serious people, of course, but then they don’t pretend to be.
I agree with what you have said, except with regard to decapitating hierarchies. Even after chaotic inversions, and sometimes as the source of them, new hierarchies replace the old if they are to be anything more than an ephemeral event. Most societal protest movements, and all that last any time at all, have a hierarchy that either arises or is disclosed.
BLM adherents quickly organized chartered non-profits to accept tax free donations. Even Antifa has organizational hierarchy at local levels. The belief in any “people’s movements” existing with any size or ability to last for more than a season as a hierarchy free democratic organization that shares power in every member is a fairy tale.
“We’re all in this equally together” good intentions are overcome by the need for organization, logistics, hierarchy, etc. to utilize numbers of people to achieve the stated goals. This sacrifice is initially justified as necessary to achieve the goal and then those at the top of the hierarchy realize they like being at the top, or only they are smart enough, good enough, strong enough leader, etc. to be trusted to be at the top. And a new demagogue is born.
“despite it all, we should be of good cheer. For the Void is, by its nature, a time-limited phenomenon. Precisely because it is empty, it cannot last”
I wish I could believe any form of that: either that the nihilistic filth which is our new culture won’t last, or, that if Paul is right and it doesn’t, that it will be replaced by something worthwhile. I loved this article despite my gloom; thank you for it.
People have replaced their faith and deep feeling for the divine, the transcendant & the sacred with a passing interest in Mickey Mouse
The closest thing the contemporary West has to a religious artefact is the smartphone screen. The modern Western masses just want entertainment to stimulate their increasingly jaded palates, so in a sense, they’re not that different from the ancient Roman mob.
Reflective, devout Christians are a small minority, but really, weren’t they/we always?
Christians are despised because some of them sytidently moralise and use phrases like ” nihilistic filth” and then seek to impose their views on others. Until that behaviour changes your despair will continue.
Christians have no power to “impose their views on others”. Even many of our churches don’t follow the tenets of Christianity anymore.
The institutions that do have that power and use it unrelentingly are the ones stridently forcing their beliefs on others, and they certainly aren’t Christian.
Have faith brother! If you’re the sort who puts stock in science based projections, you might want to google “the religious shall inherit the earth”. Even 15 years back, it was clear to demographers that the “Age of unbelief” was already in its last few decades. Atheists and moderate believers had well below sub-replacement fertility rates, where as deeply religious families often have four children or more. As of 2024 these plaent wide trends are even more pronounced. Already said to be profoundly changing the culture in some parts of the world (e.g. Israel) though sadly may be another 3-4 decades before a new age of faith takes hold here in UK.
Those who have more children will inherit the earth.
A “paganism” that has to do with beliefs and spirituality is just Christianity lite. I serve Hermes and Apollo, who really don’t mind that I don’t “believe in” them. Why would any deity worth worshipping care what the hairless monkeys think? Why would any healthy-minded hairless monkey choose to think that fairy-stories about other worlds are somehow more important than the material world we all inhabit, whether we like it or not?
Perhaps because the hairless monkeys are smart enough to realize that existence does not arise from nothing, and that even the Big Bang Theory assumes a starting point of super condensed/hot matter/energy, for which there is no rational, scientific, material explanation. The rational, scientific and material explanations only start once oyu accept that something already existed. Where did THAT come from?
Indeed, science today, does not posit that in the beginning there was nothing. Almost everyone seems to miss that detail.
Nonsense. Physicists acknowledge they don’t have a theory of “prior to the big bang”, whilst there’s plenty of evidence to support that kind of event (microwave background radiation, etc.)
Those of a religious bent who push their “god” into that space do so entirely out of superstition which arose from a time when none of this was possible to investigate.
The onus will always be on those who claim their god exists to demonstrate it’s anything more than self-delusion.
Surely gods exist in the same way that numbers exist – they’re (personifications of) organising principles which regulate our behaviour and the rest of life in the universe. Baal the god of storms, Maat the goddess of justice etc. As personifications they speak to an emotional, storytelling part of us that isn’t catered for by rational analysis or by empirical observation, which are also valid. Sometimes the imaginative personification makes it easier for us to deal with an empirical situation than an accurate rational analysis alone would. Soldiers have their regimental colours and their regimental traditions which in the end they would die for. These make them a far more effective fighting force than simply the rational requirements of King’s Regulations.
I am not much moved by the essay. Yes, you can argue that organised religion is fading in the West and that ‘Roman’ attitudes persist.
Restate the data available. Romans started out as farmers using spirits of the place as memory aids in an illiterate world to regulate farming activities. Even as these spirits were elaborated into an organised cluster of pagan gods it didn’t stop the Roman state and later empire from doing practical things like building aqueducts rather than just praying for rain. The pagan gods and later Christianity were just cultural froth on top of a very pragmatic outlook.
Nowadays we have a much better (but still not complete) grasp of practical matters like sanitation, medicine, mathematics, applied technology. There is less of a gap for the gods to inhabit.
So what persists is not the Roman attitude to Religion but the Roman attitude to pragmatism.
Very well argued. I never cease to be amazed at the convolutions those inclined to religiosity will go to, to try to maintain their self-deceit. Kingsnorth is merely their arbiter.
Spring Equinox next year: Ekpyrosis
If you’re going for Stoic philosophy, I’d say 13th July next year and 20th Feb 2026, according to the cosmic cycles. (I’m sure the ancient Stoics would have incorporated planet Neptune, which I’m using, if they’d known of it.) The combination of the fiery equinox point and the watery planet on these dates collapses Berossus’ regular alternation of renewal by fire and renewal by flood, as we’ll be faced with both together. Catastrophe theorists might anticipate nuclear conflagration plus a watery deluge – but I think I’ll wait for something more subtle and symbolic, recognisable of course only post facto.
A very long piece but not without it’s insights.
Having lived in countries where ‘actually-existing-paganism’ still flourishes I have noted that there are two abiding signs of paganism taking root. Ancestor worship and Nature worship. Between Poppy veneration and Environmentalism we are well on the way here, across the political divide.
As far as ‘anti-Christian’ rather than anti-religion goes, I think the writer has a point.
With the inverted hierarchy which now dominates public morality we will only truly know we are in a ‘post-Christian’ country when a complaint of ‘offending Christians’ is automatically taken seriously by the authorities.
Then we will know that ‘Christian’ has truly become an ‘out-group’ and therefore deserving of protection. Because of course the ‘in-group’ – the ethnic and cultural legacy majority – is fair game to any and all mockery.
I thought this the other day when I saw ‘Satanic’ jewellery being displayed mockingly on old Bibles in Covent Garden and compared it with the same being done on other Holy Books – the Police would be in attendance quicker than you could say ‘Wakefield and Batley’.
Incidentally you notice a similar phenomenon with church visitors. Women who would respectfully don the hijab in visiting a Mosque or the chunni in a Gudwara often make a point of ignoring similar conventions of dress when visiting a site of Christian worship.
I think it all comes down to a hatred of the father. Or perhaps the Father!
While researching the Wells and Springs associated with early Christian saints in South West England it’s very apparent from archeological evidence that many of them were holy sites long before Christianity arrived on these shores. It seems that many pagan gods simply morphed into Christian saints and local people continued to honor them, with incantations, gifts and sometimes sacrifices as they always had done. Some of these customs, well dressing and so on persist to this day.
Everything written here is pointless because there is no ‘we’. There’s them, and us.
“This is what I have taken to calling the time we live in now, here in the post-everything West: the Void. The Void is our new Colosseum: both bounded and empty, a place of entertainment and terror.”
Kingsnorth had these thoughts while having a drink, in a cafe, with his family, on holiday, in Rome.
I don’t for a second believe that Kingsnorth believes his life now – in “The Void” – is existentially more miserable than that of a pagan or Christian peasant at any time in the last two or more millenia, merely because he or the people around him have less faith.
I must have missed that Kingsnorth said his life was existentially more miserable than anyone else’s at any time.
Try yoga and meditation if you wish to connect to spirit
Why would anyone vote down a simple suggestion like yoga and meditation? Silent meditation, which I practice, is a form of prayer. And prayer in medieval times was much like that; read “The Cloud of Unknowing”. Yoga promotes flexibility and muscular relaxation, which facilitates meditation. Meditation entails no preconceptions or dogmas; it is a good way to make friends with your own mind.
Love this writer.
The pantheon of squabbling and amoral gods of the ancient Greek and Roman Republic were not well suited to the absolute power welded by the Emperors of imperial Rome. One God and a strict set of absolute moral rules reflected and reinforced the hierarchical societies which existed from that time up until the present.
Many of the early Christian testaments did not accord very well with Imperial preference and consequently were removed by the Emperor Constantine, resulting in the doctrines celebrating obedience, patriarchy and unquestioning faith which have persisted for centuries.
It might be that the more democratic, plauralist and anti deferential societies of Western Europe and (parts) of the US have less use for such a structured religion, maybe a looser more pantheistic faith would be a better fit, however a strict fundamentalist version of Christianity appears to be gaining ground amongst those who feel they have something to lose from a less hierarchical fluid society.
There is a theory that Constantine adopted Christianity precisely in order to unify the disparate cultures and ethnicities of the Roman empire. The monism and proto-monotheism of the philosophers was too abstract for the masses, but a simple straightforward slave religion like Christianity had wide popular appeal.
Fantastic article, Paul. In a short space you summed up our strange religious culture (indeed, overall culture) so incisively and dead-on. Please, drink more espresso and make spurious social observations.
I think it would help to inject a spot of Nietzsche: God is dead and we have killed him. Then comes decadence, nihilism, the revaluation of all values. And the Übermensch, the chappie that leads us into a new Promised Land.
In our case, I believe, the universe of mechanism and logic and reason is dead. because relativity, quantum mechanics, uncertainty principle killed it. But the new science has raised the question of the ultiimate reality again, in a new form.
We humans have never known the meaning of life, the universe, everything. That’s why we invented God, as a stand-in.
Nor will we ever know.
I enjoyed the read. The Bible book of Daniel substantiates Kingsnorth’s conjecture that we are Roman citizens.
In Daniel chapter 2, the prophet Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of a giant statue (head of gold, chest of silver, hips of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay) which accurately predicted the subsequent great empires that conquered the world: Babylonian, then Persian, Greek, Roman and divided Roman empire. Then, in the vision, came a rock which struck the statue on its feet and destroyed it (Christianity), then became a mountain that filled the whole earth.
That is what indeed happened.
We are still living in the time of the divided Roman empire. The radical doctrine of Christianity (the rock) has periodically been the driving force of civilization (restorative justice, fair punishment, hospitals, universities, free speech, abolishing slavery, granting universal suffrage, human rights, even technology which lifts people out of menial labor). All these things stem from a NT understanding of society (see Acts 17:24ff ) which were unknown or vestigial in other cultures
Against Christianity stands the ancient foe of liberty, the tyranny of concentrated power (like Rome, like Caesar). Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness to accept lordship over the whole world: a one-world autocracy with Jesus at it’s head, but done Satan’s way, by force. Jesus declined that, and taught a new way, a different kingdom where leaders were servants
. But Satan hasn’t given up. He currently inhabits scientific humanism / Marxism which is the spirit of this age to resist the inward rule of Jesus. It’s not a void. It’s the latest elite-led counterfeit utopia. But it is all built on illusion – lies – deceit – spin – misdirection – gaslighting – censorship. Christian-sounding clothes, but just tyranny dressed up.
The crux of the matter, which Kingsnorth senses but does not quite state, is that our modern industrial civilization does have a religion, which is based on faith in science. Call it Scientism.
Scientism has a lot of empirical evidence in its favor; all sorts of phenomena that once seemed mysterious can now be explained through the regularities of Physics and Chemistry (often these regularities are called laws).
The source of the present difficulty, to which Kingsnorth refers as the Void, is that Scientism is based on tangibility. Everything we know through science, we know through the evidence of repeatable experiences that can be observed and measured. In that sense, science describes the tangible world. And I have heard academic psychologists claim that all psychological phenomena can also be measured, in principle if not yet in actuality. Of course, they say that because they want Psychology to be grouped in the Sciences.
But all the experiences that matter most deeply to us are intangible. I mean, for example, joy, sorrow, fear, courage, gratitude, grief, happiness, and above all, love. Science has nothing to say about these, because they are entirely subjective and not available to observation and measurement.
Scientism is then a false religion, because faith in Scientism leads to the delusion that we are nothing more than our molecules, and Scientism causes those who believe in it to have a reduced, material perception of their own lives, which in turn leads them to seek relief from inner pain in material sources, whether by consumption, accumulation, control, or destruction. Even the new fad of seeking Life Experiences is merely substituting tangible sensory adventures (travel, dining, trekking, skydiving) for ownership of material goods. Kingsnorth’s Void of modern life is the Tyranny of the Tangible.
At the end of the day (or comment), I believe the Fox put it best :
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince)
I like your thinking on this.
Of course the largest fact is omitted here: in Rome last month I was honoured to visit the city’s catacombs, filled with Muslim believers insulted by Meloni’s Christian zeal, their hearts filled with God’s love. In hoc signo vinces!
Chesterton had a lot to say about pagans that needed to be evaluated. Carlyle said a man’s religion is the most important thing about him. Samuel Johnson is the one who had it all right. The dehumanizing World Wars have not been reconned with or accounted for. You basically had a total failure of nominalized phony superficial Christianity which is what we still have. Show me, however, any great countries that can succeed without a religion.
MANKIND’S SHORT 4000+ YEARS OF RECORDED HISTORY IS CLIMAXING IN A CACOPHONOUS CONFUSION WITHOUT THE GOSPEL
The rise and fall of civilizations demonstrated that mankind on its own could not accomplish anything of lasting worth, leaving behind great crumbling works as a sad witness to its utter failure.
THE END OF THE CHURCH AGE IS AT HAND
There is no ancient history.