Welcome to 2023. 

But what can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? The answer depends on what you were trying to conserve in the first place. In Britain, which has been at the speartip of the modern revolution for centuries, all that was solid has been melting into air since at least since the Enlightenment, and the consequence has been the loss of almost everything that the likes of Edmund Burke, who already had his back up against the wall two centuries ago, would have considered worth conserving. Across the modern world, the process has been the same: something I have described as a great unsettling. 

In this unsettled world, the notion that the West is declining, collapsing, dying or even committing suicide is reaching a crescendo. Multiple reactions are underway to try and shore it up. The chickens of modernity, which the West created and exported, have come home to roost, and we are all increasingly covered in their guano. 

But if you want to argue about how to conserve or defend “the West”, you first have to know what it actually is. And to do that, you need to revisit its origin story.  

This story starts in a garden, at the very beginning of things. All life can be found here: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close that he can be seen “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening’’ an image I’ve always loved. Everything, here, is in communion with everything else. 

At the centre of this garden grows two trees, and one of them imparts hidden knowledge. The humans, the last creature to be formed by the creator, will be ready to eat this fruit one day, and when they do they will gain this knowledge and be able to use it wisely for the benefit of themselves and of all other things that live in the garden. But they are not ready yet. The humans are still young, and unlike the rest of creation, they are only partially formed. If they ate from the tree now, the consequences would be terrible.

“Do not eat that fruit,” the creator tells them. “Eat anything else you like, but not that.”

We know the next part of the story because it is still happening to us on an hourly basis. “Why should you not eat the fruit?” asks the voice of the tempting serpent, the voice from the undergrowth of our minds. “Why should you not have the power that you are worthy of? Why should this creator keep it all for himself? Why should you listen to him? He just wants to keep you down. Eat the fruit. It’s your right. You’re worth it!”

So we eat the fruit, and we see that we are naked and we become ashamed. Our mind is filled with questions, the gears inside it begin to whir and turn and suddenly here is us and them, here is humanity and nature, here is people and God. A portcullis of words descends between us and the other creatures in the garden, and we can never go home again. We fall into disintegration and we fall out of the garden forever. The state of questless ease that was our birthright is gone. We chose knowledge over communion; we chose power over humility.

The Earth is our home now.

This Earth is a broken version of the garden. On Earth we must toil to break the soil, to plant seeds, to fight off predators. We will sicken and die. Everything is eating everything else. These are the consequences of our pursuit of knowledge and power, but we keep pursuing them because we can’t see any other other way out, and anyway we need something to do with our big questing brains. We keep building towers and cities and forgetting where we came from. We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.

There comes a time when the creator takes pity. After so many centuries of humans eating the fruit again and again, He stages an intervention. He comes to Earth in human form to show us the way back home. Being human, we react first by torturing and killing him. But the joke is on us, because it turns out that this was the point all along. The way of this creator is not the way of power but of humility, not of conquest but of sacrifice, and his sacrifice gives us a path back home. If we follow that path, we can come back into communion again, and be as we were intended to be, which is to say holy — a word derived from the Old English halig — which means whole.

That’s the story. Now imagine that a whole culture is built around this story. Imagine that this culture survives for over a thousand years, building layer upon layer of meaning, tradition, innovation and creation, however imperfectly, on these foundations.

Then imagine that this culture dies, leaving only ruins.

If you live in the West, you do not have to imagine any of this. You are living among the ruins, and you have been all your life. They are the remains of something called “Christendom”, a 1,500-year civilisation in which this particular sacred story seeped into and formed every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in this story’s image.

But we can’t live for long among ruins. Humans are builders, and Nature abhors a vacuum. God abhors a vacuum too, I think, and whether we like it or not  and mostly these days we don’t — humans need God. This is why every human culture, forever, everywhere, has directed its gaze towards the divine. 

This is what we should understand if we are going to think or talk about “conserving” or “returning” or “restoring” anything. If you want to “defend the West”, you are talking about defending Christendom and the values it created, and/or the post-Christian liberal culture it gave birth to, which itself was based upon those values.  

Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror. Chesterton, again, took issue with Marx on this one. “The truth is that irreligion is the opium of the people,” he wrote. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” This is the process which Christianity used to condemn as “idol worship”, and today’s West is at it in spades. 

A lot of people who talk about “defending the West” these days are either trying to defend red in tooth and claw capitalism — the system which has done more to destroy culture and eternal values in the West than anything else — or they’re trying to defend free speech, individualism and the right to be rude on the internet. I would suggest that these things in themselves were the results of a settlement designed, in the process now known as “the Enlightenment” to replace the West’s original sacred story with a new, human-centred version. 

This was the liberal settlement. It assumed that humans were disaggregated individuals who could roam the world speaking freely, consuming freely and imposing a rational science-based order on the world, the better to achieve progress. It combined the moral values and universalism of Western Christianity with rights-based individualism and a faith in science and technology, and it brought with it a new origin story, to replace the one about the garden and the snake.

This new story told of how we were saved from superstition and ignorance by the holy trinity of modernity: Reason, Science and Technology. Along the way, we stopped believing silly stories about gods and monsters, which had been made up by our ignorant ancestors before we could see the harsh but bracing reality that the universe is just a meaningless swirl of matter-energy which came from nothing for no reason, and human beings are just gene-replicating machines. Now here we are, working out how to rationally manage the whole show. Now, here we are, a new kind of being: post-religious Man.

I grew up sort of believing this story. I thought religion was over and we had moved beyond its stupid superstitions. I don’t believe that anymore. Now I believe something else: that in a significant sense, everything is religious. 

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The West needs to grow up

By Paul Kingsnorth

I became a Christian — an Orthodox Christian — in 2021, much to my own surprise and initial horror, after a very long search for truth. The subsequent immersion in the Christian story gave me a much clearer sense of what was happening around me in the 2020s. Most of all, they gave me an understanding of the sacred underpinning of human culture. Marx claimed that the history of all hitherto existing society was a history of class struggle, but it looks to me more like a history of religious belief. “Belief”, in fact is the wrong word. A better one might be “experience”, or “immersion”.

The more I attended the divine liturgy, the more I realised that what I had once dismissed as silly superstition was in fact the stuff of life. In the the pre-modern West, as in much of the world today, there was no such thing as “religion”. The Christian story was the basis of peoples’ understanding of reality itself. There was no “religion”, because there was no notion that this truth was somehow optional or partial, any more than we today might assume that gravity or the roundness of the Earth are facts we could choose to engage with only on Sunday mornings.

Again: everything is religious. The only people who believe otherwise, in fact, are a few people in what we liked to call our “secular” corner of the world. We once thought that by abolishing religion we had got ahead of the rest of the world. But suddenly, this story is being told less confidently. The wind has changed, and secular liberal modernity no longer looks like a good bet for winner of the End of History board game. 

So if everything is religious, but our old religion is dead, and the thing we tried to replace it with — rational, secular, humanist progress — is failing because it doesn’t meet real human needs, then where are we? What is coming next?

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Can the nation survive Elizabeth?

By Paul Kingsnorth

A good person to ask is the perennialist thinker René Guenon, a favourite of our new king. Guenon was a Frenchman who became a Muslim, migrated to Egypt and dedicated his life to trying to save the West from its own materialism. He predicted that, save for a turn back to religion, the early 21st century would see the arrival of what he called the “Reign of Quantity”: the age of pure materialism in which we now live, in which every aspect of life would be be measured, quantified and subject to scientific assessment and technological management. 

Crucially, in the Reign of Quantity, religious feeling would become quantitative too. Humanity will never be able to shake off its desire for transcendence, but it will become unable to manifest that desire on any level other than the material. The object of worship during the Reign of Quantity, then, will not be some mysterious, untouchable, numinous force outside of creation: it will be the force of will in the material realm.

This, I think, is where we are today: the religious impulse is manifesting in material form, primarily through the use of technology to promote the human will. This phenomenon, which I like to call the Machine, is a material manifestation of the human desire for liberation through technology, in which all forms are dissolved in favour of the final and only sovereign: the independent rational individual, freed from the obligations of history, community and nature.

In the Orthodox Christian worldview, all of us are icons of God. Humanity was made in the image of the creator, and even though we endlessly fail to live up to this responsibility, it  gives us a clear point of reference. We know what humans are, and what the world is for. Once that story goes, what is the still point of the turning world? Nobody can agree. The only reference point in the post-Christian, post-liberal West is whatever we happen to want or feel. And since consumer liberalism has taught us that desire is not something to be transcended or controlled, but something to be surrendered to immediately and then valorised, reality itself becomes open to endless redefinition. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong or real? 

But let’s go back to our founding story again: back to the garden. What does our current state look like from that perspective? To me it looks simple enough, and I think it would have done to a citizen of Western Christendom too. We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator. This is hardly a new development: the Bible is effectively an 80-book warning against it, and most other religions have their own cautionary tales. Once you reject God, you are fated to try and replace him.

This is where our path is now leading us, and it is, I think, the main reason that the waters of age seem so disturbed. Transhumanism, artificial intelligence, the “transcending” of everything from gender to biology, the growing of food and babies in labs: openly now, we seek to break all given limits, remake nature, build the world anew. We seek to become gods. The people who are building our new digital Tower of Babel are very open about what they are up to. If you don’t believe me, let them explain it for themselves. 

Transhumanist writer Elise Bohan, detailed a conversation she once had with a biologist at a conference on the future of transhumanism. “He looked me in the eye,” she says, “and whispered to me: ‘We’re building God, you know,’ … I looked back at him and I said: ‘Yeah, I know.'”

Similar sentiments are expressed by transhumanist philosopher Martine Rothblatt, who claims, “We are making God as we are implementing technology that is ever more all-knowing, ever-present, all-powerful and beneficent. Geoethical nanotechnology will ultimately connect all consciousness and control the cosmos.” Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head of engineering and philosopher-general of of the robot apocalypse is more succinct. “Does God exist?” he asks. “I would say: not yet.”

To return to where we started, we might say that transhumanism — the silicon manifestation of our new faith — aims not so much to eat from the tree of life, as to genetically engineer a new one, and plant it wherever the hell we like. We are on the verge of a revolution now, and it may make the Enlightenment look like a tea party. The entire basis of reality is being rewritten, or so we tell ourselves. Whole generations are growing up with a closer relationship to screen-based abstraction than to manual work or to the natural world. They have been convinced that the world is our playground, and that everything from history to human nature to sexual dimorphism can be changed at will. 

We are consciously making ourselves post-human, even as we strive to make the world post-natural and post-wild. If the age you live in is starting to take on the flavour of a war over the very meaning of reality itself — which is to say, a religious war — well, that’s because it is. 

What, in this world, can we possibly “conserve”? Nothing. In a culture which does not agree that nature exists, or that we have some basic, shared assumptions about reality, the question barely even makes sense. The challenge now is not to ask what we can “conserve” or “restore”. We have to go much further back. We have to dig down to the foundations. 

Our challenge now is to choose our religion. Try to avoid the challenge and your faith will be chosen for you: you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age: the quest to build the digital Tower of Babel. The attempt to “build god” and replace nature through technology. The path of the snake.

What can we do when there’s nothing left to conserve? Pray.

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.