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

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

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

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

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

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By contrast, positive freedom is the sort of liberty that various forms of un-freedom make possible: the freedom expressed by your fingers dancing up a keyboard is made possible by years of disciplined practice; the freedom of running a marathon is made possible by years of not smoking or drinking or lazing about on the sofa. As the lonely commitment-phobic bachelor may someday come to realise, you can pay a very heavy price for choosing the wrong sort of freedom.

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Why won't Remainers talk about family?

By Giles Fraser

Liberalism is the politics of negative liberty. And it cuts Left and Right — broadly speaking, going Left on culture and Right on economics. On culture, it seeks to dismantle the cultural impediments to minority flourishing and emphasises the importance of individual choice. It is pro-gay and pro-choice. Many are comfortable with all this, but become distinctly less comfortable when words such as “family” and “motherhood” are considered to be a part of the whole apparatus of oppression and in need of deconstruction.

On economics, liberalism seeks to dismantle the barriers to free trade. With free-market capitalism, the human subject has broken free of the restrictive chains of tradition and religion, those of place and community, those of the family, even of one’s own biology. And with the inevitable forward march of globalisation; the collapse of restrictions on capital flows and financial deregulation; the disintegration of nation state borders, soon the values of the unencumbered self would stand victorious over the whole earth.

A few years after the collapse of the Berlin wall, Francis Fukuyama was so confident that Western liberal democracy had become the only show in town that he declared history to be over — and at its zenith stood the liberal subject triumphant.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

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He spoke too soon. Whether history will record its crisis as the financial crash of 2008 or the Trump/Brexit revolts of 2016, liberalism is no longer as cocky as it used to be. Despite its many undoubted gains, liberalism is now recognised as coming with a heavy price tag. In the name of negative freedom, it hollowed out many of the conditions of human flourishing: the solidarity of community, the importance of place and roots, spirituality and religion, the family, the nation state.

Post-liberalism is the attempt to resurrect many of these ideas, not because it is hostile to freedom, but because it seeks to articulate a deeper sense of freedom: positive freedom.

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Call yourself post-liberal?

By Peter Franklin

The peculiar thing about post-liberalism is that even though it aligns with many (perhaps even the majority of) people in the West — Right-wing on culture, Left-wing on economics — few, if any, mainstream political parties have moved in to occupy this space. Gramsci could so easily have been talking about the present moment when he said that a political crisis “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.

The following is an attempt to stake out something of an intellectual tradition for post-liberal thought, as it has expressed itself over the last 50 years or so. These are, for me, the top 10 texts that could help us consider the present moment in post-liberal terms.

1. After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Top spot must go to Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981). A former Marxist turned Thomist, MacIntyre argued that the moral inheritance of the Enlightenment — the crucible of liberal values — was to strip human life of a sense of purpose or teleology. When morality is rendered merely a question of individual choice, the moral life becomes grounded in nothing other than subjective opinion. And on this flimsy basis, it has struggled to survive.

The choice we have before us, MacIntyre claimed, was Nietzsche or Aristotle (or St Benedict). He prophetically expresses the Gramscian moment as us waiting not for Godot but for a new “doubtless very different, St Benedict”. By which he means, the “construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness”.

Another book worth reading alongside After Virtue would be John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake. Having been a J. S. Mill scholar for much of his academic life, Gray knows the enemy better than many of its proponents (Mill is a poster boy of classical liberalism). Given the preponderance of religiously minded people in the post-liberal quadrant, it is worth noting that atheists like Gray can equally flourish in this space.

2. Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen

Second spot is shared by two very contrasting approaches, one from the Right and one from the Left. Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (2018) is a bracing attack on the borderlessness of the liberal self. It argues that what was designed to promote freedom instead undermined the very conditions — social, educational, religious — that made genuine freedom possible.

Deneen defends the importance of social institutions, from unions to churches to the family, that sustained human flourishing. And he points out that as human beings come to see themselves as fundamentally separate from each other, only the increasing power of the state can impose order on anarchy. Ironically, then, in the name of (negative) freedom, liberalism stimulates the state into greater acts of control.

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Liberalism: the other God that failed

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By contrast, Nancy Fraser’s essay in American Affairs ‘From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond’ (2017)  carefully articulates how progressive liberalism came to form an alliance with neo-liberal economics, to create what she calls the progressive neo-liberalism of the Clintons and Blair.

Not only does she show how the populism that catapulted Trump into the White House was built upon a dissatisfaction with this alliance, but also, more philosophically, how Left and Right liberalism are brothers-in-arms — a fact that is currently most obviously expressed in the woke capitalism of Silicon Valley and Big Tech.

3. The Road to Somewhere, by David Goodhart

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017) is credited with the introduction of the important terms ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’ to distinguish between those who are bounded and rooted in place, and those who are mobile and rootless. Many smarted at this distinction, with its implication that those who have benefited from social mobility — or, at least, geographical mobility – have expressed some fundamental lack of loyalty to their community.

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Theresa May’s well known comment: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere” presses further on this sensitive spot. But there is little doubt Goodhart’s terminology illuminates a central aspect of the populist complaint against liberal politics. This book can be usefully paired with Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, first published in English in 1952.

4. Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance

The defence of these ‘somewheres’, often derided as small-town, small-minded ‘deplorables’ is vividly captured by J. D. Vance’s brilliant Hillbilly Ellegy (2016), a sympathetic portrait of his upbringing in the Ohio rustbelt.

Likewise, Christophe Guilluy, in his The Twilight of the Elites (2019), describes how France has been fundamentally divided between the economically successful metropolitan centres and the un-chic periphery — a distinction he uses to explain the whole gilets jaunes phenomenon.

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5. Red Tory, by Phillip Blond

In the UK, the post-liberal moment was anticipated by Phillip Blond in his Red Tory (2010) and later by the Blue Labour movement. In the old terms of Left and Right, both were seen as political cross-dressers. Both regard capitalism and socialism as equally flawed, preferring instead something more like an economics of distributivism, where economic activity is subordinate to human interest — see Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State (1912). For a quick guide to Blue Labour you could do worse than listen to Maurice Glasman’s Confessions or read Adrian Pabst’s The Demons of Liberal Democracy (2019).

A post-liberal reading list

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6. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, by Michael Sandel

Earlier philosophical attempts to expose the limits of liberal politics included the development of communitarianism, associated with thinkers like Charles Taylor and (his student) Michael Sandel. Sandel’s Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982) is a more difficult book than one might expect from Radio 4’s user-friendly ‘public philosopher’, but it is an important milestone in the tradition — not least in the way that Sandel takes on John Rawls, in many ways the master thinker of 20^th century liberalism.

And, qua Rawls, a special mention here must go to Katrina Forrester’s recently published In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019). But for my money the two great books of this tradition are Taylor’s magisterial Sources of the Self (1989) and his brilliant little polemic The Ethics of Authenticity (1992).

7. Theology and Social Theory by John Millbank

There is no doubt that post-liberalism — in contrast with many other 20^th and  21^st century ‘isms’ — has an influential and functioning theological wing. John Millbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1990) is a formidable statement of the argument. It is noteworthy that Phillip Blond began as a theology academic, Red Tory being in many ways an extension of the whole Radical Orthodoxy school that included people like Millbank and Rowan Williams.

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Within the church itself, it is Catholic social teaching, growing out of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) and latterly expressed by Benedict XVI, that has proved to be especially influential. From Dorothy Day to Rod Dreher, it is not possible to capture the influence of Catholic social teaching in simple Left/Right terms. These are all Christian references, but pretty much all systems of religious belief carry both pre- and post-liberal convictions.

8. Why Love Matters, by Sue Gerhardt

Family life is often the entry point of former liberals into a more post-liberal sensibility. Having children often necessitates a certain rootedness, but also the lack of choice involved in who your children are or who your parents are exposes the limits of the liberal idea that we are all contractually related.

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (2004) by Sue Gerhardt is an important take on the science of early mother/child relationships. Pretty much anything by Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby on attachment would fit well under this category.

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9. The World Beyond Your Head, by Matthew Crawford

The tradition which follows up on John Ruskin’s emphasis on beauty also feeds into post-liberalism. Roger Scruton on architecture, Jane Jacobs on the importance of neighbourhoods, and increasingly those who try and capture something of the dignity and spirituality of work.

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head (2015) is a brilliant diagnosis of the way in which the liberal Kantian self finds it hard to concentrate in a world of perpetual distraction.

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10. Prosperity without Growth, by Tim Jackson

Finally, the environment. Here, above all, the liberal idea of continuous and perpetual growth runs up against the distinctly post-liberal idea of the existence of limits. Tim Jackson’s Prosperity without Growth (2011) is of particular interest here. But the person I would read first is the Kentucky poet/farmer Wendell Berry. The World-Ending Fire (2019) is an astonishing collection of essays; The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (1977) is a work of genius.

This list is very much my own. Others will point to how much has been missed out. But if I were to design a kind of post-liberal curriculum, this is where I would start. In the UK, probably the most successful attempt to translate these ideas into some sort of political programme is that of the SDP’s New Declaration.

But despite the fact that many people exist within the quadrant it describes (Left on economics, Right on culture) it is still struggling to break through. It’s perhaps because it’s easier for the Right to break Left on economics than for the Left to break Right on culture — which is why the Conservative and Republican parties may be more amenable to this sort of thinking than their opponents. But even this is not a natural fit. Which brings us back to Gramsci. The old is dead. The new is yet to be born.