Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

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On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

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Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

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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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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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.

Over the last two decades, it has become increasingly clear that plastic is everywhere. While the material is largely resistant to decomposition, it does degrade and shed small fragments, known as microplastics, which vary in size from millimetres down to microns and nanometres. These are now part of the fabric of our physical world. They have found their way into fresh Antarctic snow, and are accumulating in the deepest regions of the ocean. They are present up and down marine food-chains, and in agricultural soil. In Florida, plastic accounts for more than 1% of the body weight of some hatchling sea turtles.

The alleged microplastic discoveries extend deep into our own bodies as well, in a morbid list of nouns: lungs, heart, liver, intestines, blood, semen, penises, testes, placenta, breast milk. Most recently, their presence has been reported in the olfactory bulb of the brain. And the build-up of plastic is only going to grow. We produce more than 400 million metric tonnes of it every year, and that is predicted to increase by 70% by 2040. Plastics are now used in an enormous range of products — in clothes and carpets, paint and pipes, buildings and roads, tea bags and cigarette filters. Very little is recycled: less than 5% in the United States, which is by some margin the biggest consumer of plastic on a per-person basis. In any case, it would be more accurate to say down-cycled, since most discarded plastic can only be reconstituted in lower-grade forms. According to a widely cited estimate, the equivalent of a truckload of plastic waste enters the ocean every minute.

If some of this will end up in our bodily tissues, the question, naturally, is how harmful it is. The answer is that we aren’t sure. Various pathologies caused by plastic ingestion have been observed in wild animals, such as the scarring of sea birds’ digestive tracts. Plastic shreds can also act as vectors for toxic, hormone-disrupting chemicals such as Phthalates and Bisphenol A, which are used in the fabrication process. Lab studies have linked microplastics to a range of nasty-sounding effects, but the extent to which these are occurring inside the body is still unclear. Microplastics may help to explain falling sperm counts, neurodegenerative diseases and rising cancer rates in young people — but then again, they may not.

For the time being, then, microplastics are as much a cultural phenomenon as a medical one. With so much uncertainty surrounding their effects, they tell us more about the anxieties that lurk in our minds than the health of our bodies. In fact, they tell us something important about our relationship with the modern world itself.

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Plastic has a claim to be one of the great human achievements of the past century. In 1941, two British chemists anticipated the coming age of “Plastic Man”, who would live in a world where “man, like a magician, makes what he wants for almost every need”. In the following decades, as scientists learned to arrange hydrogen and carbon atoms in long chains of molecules, known as polymers, they gradually made this vision a reality. For the first time, human beings could make materials with properties of their choosing, whether firm or malleable, wearable or tearable, waterproof, heatproof or indeed bulletproof.

As consumer culture flourished in the Sixties, plastic was marketed as fun, colourful and disposable, signifying a miraculous affluence after decades of depression and austerity. Researchers found many useful applications for plastic too, discovering, most notably, that polyethylene packaging could extend the shelf life of fresh food. Lightweight, mouldable, durable and affordable: this combination of properties, unique to plastic, has made it indispensable to all kinds of products we use on a daily basis.

But if plastic marked the ultimate triumph of human beings as artificers — allowing man to “make what he wants for every need” — then this is also, today, what has given it a sinister quality. Throughout the modern era, the development of increasingly complex, artificial societies has produced an undercurrent of reverence for the purely natural, the “unspoilt”. Even as we enjoy the products of science and technology, we designate certain spaces as natural, and seek to protect them from the corrupting forces of modernity. These natural domains include not just wild and bucolic places — places like that Scottish beach, for instance — but also the human body, childhood, and vestiges of traditional culture. Ironically, while capitalism is broadly understood to endanger these sacred domains, it also encourages us to worship them, with its health foods and organic cosmetics, its tourist industries and escapist entertainment.

If we know one thing about plastic, it’s that it is unnatural. And so, even before an awareness of microplastics gave “Plastic Man” a terrible new meaning, the burgeoning prevalence of plastic things had become a source of anxiety. Writing in the Atlantic some years ago, Jamie Passaro described the struggle that parents face in choosing products for their children. The villain of the piece is her daughter’s favourite doll, which Passaro took an instant dislike to. “Everything about her plastic body seemed artificial,” she wrote, “Her skin was a peachy shade like a spray tan. Her painted-on blue eyes seemed startlingly wide, like someone slipped her an energy drink… Her body was too hard to bend, though her arms and legs and neck could swivel all the way around.” In the appropriate context, plastic is reassuringly clean and sterile; but when it invades a natural realm, such as the innocence of a child, it can suddenly appear garishly fake, even obscene.

And therein lies the peculiar horror of microplastics. These invisible particles, spreading like an infectious disease, render everything vulnerable to our unhealthy, synthetic culture. They do not simply pollute; they contaminate. Reporting on the subject, even in dry factual newsprint, pulses with an almost lurid revulsion as it relates how another precinct of nature, whether inside us or around us, has been violated by plastic. As Mark O’Connell has observed, microplastics cross the political divide as few other issues do, haunting progressives with a new phase of ecological destruction, and conservatives with a chemical threat to fertility and masculinity. Yet these are just different expressions of the same modern neurosis about the contamination of the natural.

Such fears are not necessarily misguided — microplastic pollution may turn out to be as disastrous as the pessimists suspect — but they do suggest a failure to comprehend the artificiality which pervades the modern environment, for better and for worse. Our distinctions between natural and unnatural, though sometimes useful, are usually inconsistent and arbitrary, based on aesthetic preferences more than anything. Thus Passaro found out that her daughter’s doll might be made of PVC, in which case it really could be dangerous; yet she was surprised to learn that the more “natural” toy she bought as a substitute, a Swedish-designed cloth baby, was also plastic in its polyester form.

Plastics are made using petrochemical by-products from the fossil fuel industry, but so too are the pharmaceutical substances that keep us healthy, and the fertilisers that grow our food. Many of those crops also require chemical pesticides, just as our water requires chlorine to be drinkable. Alternatives to plastic, such as paper, glass and cotton, often use more resources, produce more carbon emissions, and create their own forms of pollution. Asbestos, lead and mercury turned out to be toxic; but so did smoking tobacco and cooking with firewood and crop residues. Hormonal interference is widespread in the form of birth control. Tiny metallic particles, small enough to enter the bloodstream, waft through the London Underground in much the same way as microplastics.

To live in the modern world is to be a deeply artificial creature, a monstrous hybrid of biological processes, synthetic chemicals and industrial pollutants. It has been decades since any significant number of people on the planet have lived otherwise, and those who come closest tend to be extremely poor. Microplastics simply underline the totality of this condition; however fastidiously you try to carve out a more natural existence, however far you run, you will still be at risk of inhaling and ingesting substances designed in laboratories, used to fabricate shopping bags and Coke bottles.

And this will, presumably, be the case for many generations. Next month, in South Korea, the United Nations will discuss a treaty to reduce global plastic production. But even if this comes to fruition — unlikely, since it lacks Chinese support — the plastic we have already made, and continue making, will still be with us. So we will learn to live with this plague, not because we should, but because we have no choice. No doubt it is precisely to cope with such strange circumstances that we cling to our simplistic ideals about natural places and natural bodies.

It was small by modern standards, and the site now known as Göbekli Tepe is about two dozen acres. It is a complex of 20 circular compounds and limestone T-shaped pillars richly decorated with pictograms of animals, insects and humanoid figures (some headless) who may be humans — or gods. Alongside the large enclosures huddle smaller domestic structures. For reasons that we will never fully comprehend, our Stone Age ancestors had created the world’s oldest urban settlement. Archaeologists are certain of one thing, however — the site was sacred for the worship of gods and the fulfilment of holy duties.

About 4,000 years later and 400 miles to the south east, the first urban civilisation arrived in the swamps of ancient Mesopotamia. Uruk was probably their first true city. Much about Uruk is also lost to time. But its archaeology, and the ancient Sumerian poem, The Epic of Gilgamesh, both tell a tale in which settlements such as Uruk began life as holy sites created on island mounds in the marshes. Sumerian cites continued to be defined by their temples. People met there to trade, but they came there to pray.

Most urban creation myths have similar patterns. Divine or heroic intervention is localised, enshrined and worshipped. In the process a specific place or an entire city is imbued with sanctity and, via pilgrimage, ritual or festival, the very patterns of travel and trade that boost prosperity are nurtured and encouraged. Ancient Rome had multiple myths. The temple of Saturn was located at the base of the Capitoline Hill (where Saturn was supposed to have founded the pre-Roman city) and also on the edge of the forum. The festival of Lupercalia to secure Rome’s health and fertility was held each February in the holy cave of the Lupercal beneath the Palatine Hill, in which the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus.

Across time and continents, holy cities celebrate the location of a physical interaction between man and god. Jerusalem, which suffers from a surfeit of competing sanctities, is too obvious to discuss. Varanasi in India is where Brahma’s head was dropped into the ground. Lhasa in Tibet literally means “the place of the Gods”. Medieval Europe was bejewelled with shrines deified by a vision of Christ or of the Virgin Mary, or by the births, acts and martyrdoms of Christian saints. Shrines and trade, pilgrimage and travel, were all interwoven just as the sanctity of God and of the city were stitched together.

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Sometimes the very process of reconstruction was sacred, as appears to have been the case in the ancient Peruvian city of Caral, with its pyramid temples. Love of place was real not abstract. In 431 BC the Athenian statesman Pericles beseeched his fellow citizens to love their city in his famous funeral oration: “I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens, until you become filled with the love of her.” The word for love that he used, eραστά or erastai, was the word for erotic not chaste love.

So far, so ancient — but what do Lhasa or Periclean Athens or Göbekli Tepe have to do with us? Here’s the point. If you regard your towns as places of moral and religious purpose then you don’t just build nice churches, you create better places, more resilient and more beautiful, more worthy of the eternal, not just the here and now. For most of our history hôtels de ville and Rathäuser, town halls and market places, parliaments and public baths, almshouses and hospitals, were built not just to perform a transaction but to elevate our service to each other: a civic temple in the town square, not a featureless box on the ring road.

From Rome’s Baths of Caracalla to Palladio’s Basilica Palladiana in Vincenza, we have historically created our buildings and streets to be as good as we can afford — not as cheap as we can bear. That is why the 500-year-old Fuggerei social housing in Augsburg, Bavaria is better than nearly any social housing built in the last century. That is why until 70 years ago we created places which, today, we visit for the sheer pleasure of being there. Perhaps it is no surprise that one of the world’s most beautiful modern cities, Singapore, has, uniquely among former colonial cities, raised statues to their colonial founder, Sir Stamford Raffles. They are in communion with the past, the better to look to the future.

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My favourite example of the (to modern eyes) needlessly magnificent is the glorious Piece Hall in Halifax, Yorkshire. I will never forget the first time I saw it. Emerging through that dark small door into what must, on a sunny day, be one of the most gloriously luminous urban enclosures in Europe, stole away my breath. A quadrangle of delicately Doric arcades behind which 315 merchants’ rooms sat ready for business, a heady mix of souk, forum and fell. What lifts it from the superb to the sublime is the location, the gently sloping topography which results in three arcades to the east and two to the west, with the Pennines rising headily behind. That a building created purely for commercial purposes 240 years ago should be so joyous tells us something important about the culture of our past. Here is the capitalism of the merchant-prince and “civic pride”, not of robber barons and “devil take the hindmost”.

And yet today our towns and our cities, our streets and our squares, are designed to a narrow purpose. They are meant to be efficient and safe; they pay their way; they minimise liabilities. Windows are too high to fall out of, or too small to waste energy; cladding is robust enough to survive the warranty period but never intended to last through the centuries. Generosity is wasteful, stewardship for the naïve. Almost every planning discussion I have descends into a discussion of viability, unit density and efficiency ratios. We live, in short, in utilitarian places. We have lost sight of the fact that while the city has always been a market and a crossroads, a bridge and a city wall, it also used to be a sacred place.

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Even though we are richer than ever before in human history, and even though we have at our instantaneous command powers and technologies undreamt of even a century ago, we are somehow conspiring to create places which are less loveable and more perfunctory than would once have been considered civically acceptable. The utilitarian approach to city-making is failing us, creating throw-away places with throw-away meanings. This is bad for the planet, but it’s also bad for us. Create places to last a little longer and we might burn a little less carbon every year. Create places which aspire to, even if they do not achieve, divine beauty, and we may all find the ineluctable hardships of life that much easier to bear.

Empirical research consistently demonstrates that people are happier when they are religious, surrounded by beauty, and intrigued not depressed by their neighbourhood. Meanwhile longevity is plateauing and depression is rising, particularly among the young. In an ironically utilitarian twist, rediscovering the holy in our world would be a good way to help us lead happier and healthier lives. We need to rediscover the language of the sacred city, of creating a place that speaks to our desire for purpose and our innate sense of the divine. Of course, our sacerdotal will not be the same as our forefathers’. More street trees, and less stained-glass I would imagine — less purely Christian, more ecumenical. Less “the faith”, more “faith”. It’s a trick that the British Monarchy have been pulling off for years.

Why don’t we try? For the lives of our fellow citizens, for the re-weaving or our civic life, and for the delicacy with which we tread upon the planet.

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.

In his review of a 1993 book on the history of masculinity by one E. Anthony Rotundo, Christopher Lasch writes that boys “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

Such patterns of self-directed activity persisted into young adulthood in informal associations such as debate societies. “The clash of wits between friends recalled the physical combat of loyal playfellows in boyhood… mixing affection with attack.” Such associations could serve as a substitute for college. “We educated each other by criticising and laughing at each other,” one informant recalled.

But by the end of the 19th century, such autonomous organisations of young men were fading away. “Education was increasingly confined to the classroom, agonistic rivalry to the playing field. Formal pedagogy replaced spontaneous play and self-culture.”

Lasch continues: “The expansion of extracurricular activities, at every level of the school system, reflected the expansion of pedagogical authority over young people formerly left to their own devices. The dead hand of the educator reached deep into childhood, redesigning life as a “learning experience”.

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This was part of a larger pattern in which previously unsupervised domains of life were subject to systematic study and control. The domains of women were no less subject to this process. It was an era that saw the birth of home economics, sexology, the academic study of childhood development, social work, and professionalised training in the new sciences of pedagogy. The intimate and the spontaneous became subject to therapeutic mediation in the service of various social goods.

If the “life-world” means the background patterns of life that are taken for granted, within which one can dwell unmolested, here was a new determination to leave nothing taken for granted, nothing unstudied. What this meant in practice was the colonisation of the life-world by organised expertise, corresponding to institutional money and power.

Life under these conditions feels a bit off — like the opposite of vitality. One’s own powers of making sense of the world are somehow disqualified. These are powers that develop naturally through action in the world. As the legitimacy and confidence of common sense is eroded, the field of meaningful action that is open to an individual seems also to shrink. Action is reduced to making choices from a menu of presented options, as in shopping, as opposed to a generative activity by which some mental conception of one’s own is brought forward into the shared world. The shared world is already saturated. It is fully known and mastered; your task is merely to get yourself properly aligned to it.

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Some of us chafe against this, and I believe this is the subterranean source of an ornery political energy that we call populism. Populism often states its opposition to power in epistemic terms, as sceptical hostility to experts. What gets lost in all the screeching is that the basic impulse at work here is a positive one.

Lasch writes that the new patterns of administered life at the turn of the century were experienced by many as “subjection to routines that drained the joy out of work and play and wrapped everything in a smothering self-consciousness”.

Taking issue with the interpretation offered by Rotundo, Lasch wrote: “Surely it was this feeling of suffocation, much more than the need to prove something about masculinity, that explains the idealisation of the strenuous life at the turn of the century: the attraction of imperialism and war, the longing for wide open spaces, the new interest in the primitive and exotic, the nostalgia for simplicity and lost innocence.”

Those restless adventurers of Teddy Roosevelt’s time had no idea how far the colonisation of the lifeworld had yet to progress. With Covid, we acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert-like supervision into every domain of life.

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But I think it would be a mistake to focus only on such episodes of heavy-handedness. In his book, Little Platoons, Matt Feeney details the workings of institutions that cluster around the family and feed off it, turning our most intimate loyalties to bureaucratic purposes while reshaping parents and children alike into compliant drones. To take one example, the college admissions process in America has extended its poisonous reach deep into childhood (apparently it starts with getting into the right pre-school) for the upper-middle class, requiring children and parents to collaborate in the crafting of a particular kind of self — one that will appeal to admission officers.

“Holistic admissions” downplay grades and test scores to make room for intangibles, so it is the whole person that is laid bare to the scrutiny of bureaucrats steeped in the moral vapours of their own professional formation. They sift through stacks of applications seeking people who have demonstrated… what, exactly? To begin with, a willingness to shape themselves to send whatever signals are wanted by those with power over them. To know what is wanted takes a certain intelligence. At stake is the question of whether Johnny will be able to afford his own house one day. Thus is the professional managerial class (PMC) formed into a posture of complaisance.

But nobody likes to think of himself as a cipher. The young man’s (or woman’s) complaisance is overlaid with a compensating view of himself, made available to him by the simple fact of his having passed the gatekeeping: he adopts an identity centred on his smartness or knowledgeableness. The content of the knowledge that marks one as part of the PMC consists of the organised expertise through which money and power extend their dominion. They do so by seeking out those remaining pockets of the lifeworld where unselfconscious, vernacular practices may persist. Such un-mined pockets offer opportunity for further systemisation and profit — if they can be brought into the fold of expert-like supervision. “There’s an app for that.”

In certain red-pillish-tending pockets of the PMC, there seems to be a growing awareness of and unease with their role as agents of this push. The shakiness of various systems of organised expertise, and the enforced character of the “consensus” that they are used to anchor, has grown more apparent as the system flails against populist challenge. This can lead to nagging questions of a cui bono nature, which may reflect on the young man’s identity as a “knowledge worker” (to use a term from a more innocent time when these ideological structures were more secure). If we may put this in the vernacular: the young man may begin to feel that his bullshit job is not only parasitical on the real economy, it is part of a system of social control that is basically anti-human. In retrospect, the long process of sitting in school (against his own nature), forming himself into something pleasing to those college admissions officers, may take on a different look: it was a process of paying for the privilege of making himself an instrument of power. This is serious alienation.

Lasch rebuked Rotundo for injecting the question of gender into his discussion of vitalism, which Lasch insisted was a unisex, human response to the over-administration of every aspect of life. “The rationalisation of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery.” (For a compelling brain-centred account of why this emancipation from household labour can induce depression, see the psychologist Kelly Lambert’s work on “effort-driven rewards”.)

The imperial presumptions of moral-therapeutic supervision are more advanced today than they were in Roosevelt’s time, and Lasch is surely right that you don’t need to look on the contemporary landscape with a hyper-vigilant concern for emasculation to see that the human spirit is in danger of being smothered to death, for men and women both.

But in fact, the therapeutic para-state is today staffed disproportionately by women and routinely addresses its expectations to us in gendered terms, sometimes casting dissent from the programme as an expression of toxic masculinity. So it is to be expected that such dissent will likewise make the legitimacy of the male a thematic concern. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in a sexual holy war, but the sexual holy war is interested in you.

Daily life is shot through with an ambient pedagogical project that works to create the modern subject, a creature who internalises the social discipline required by the modern state. In one of his choicest formulations, Michel Foucault referred to “the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics”. They are found in corporate HR, the Office of Student Life in universities, mandatory “Relationships and Sexual Health Education” in schools, lifestyle magazines and countless other sites of adjustment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71% of human resources managers are women. In the University of California system, to take one example, 70% of non-academic staff are women, and in American universities generally, the ratio of administrators to faculty has nearly doubled since 1990. Sixty-seven percent of those who hold a journalism degree are women. In psychology, female graduate students outnumber males by about three to one, and have done so for more than a decade. Seventy-seven percent of sociology majors are women, and women have received about two-thirds of all masters degrees since the early Eighties. If the norm-setting, psyche-tending, world-describing, and narrative-generating professions are staffed predominantly by women, does anything follow from this fact?

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It does if you grant that there are such things as male norms and female norms, as social psychology indicates there are, and if you further grant that this difference must show up in the flavour of institutional life. Jonathan Haidt says that among women you get “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offence by mobilising social resources to ostracise the alleged offender.” This concern with offence, which tends to maintain social cohesion, also tends to come detached from the question whether the hurtful thing said was true or not.

This introduces an element of arbitrariness, an invitation to caprice. Notice that in this dynamic, a “hurt” may be attributed, a victim identified, as an act of aggression against the putative offender. The great majority of women do not seek power within an institution under the banner of woke activism. But most of those who do seek power in this way are women, Richard Hanania observes. More broadly, due to important asymmetries between male and female modes of conflict, “women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas”. Such winning often results in the further extension of bureaucratic supervision into realms where harms might be found.

I believe one reason the feminine mode of competition has become so prominent in institutions is that it is in harmony with our overarching political frame. Earlier I referred to a particular kind of “modern subject” that is required by the modern state. Who is this character? We get some insight from a recent article by the political theorist Mark Shiffman. He offers a re-interpretation of the “state of nature” myths that ground the liberal doctrine of rights, turning its basic logic upside down. In doing so, he casts a clarifying light on the present: “It is not the case that because [by nature] we have rights to protect we are potential victims of their violation. Rather, the myths cast human beings in the position of victims and deploy the rhetoric of rights to capture this sense of violation in a way that simultaneously points to what we ought to hope for from the modern state…. Liberalism is premised from its mythic beginnings upon victimhood.”

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If I may extrapolate from Shiffman’s argument: unless you can identify with some “vulnerable population”, you are not a full citizen. (Allyship would seem to express an anxious recognition of this fact.) That is, you are not the type of subject upon whom the authority of the state rests. Such is the underlying logic of Leviathan, fully realised only with the advent of the civil rights regime of protected classes. This logic has lately achieved a kind of totality in its reach, precisely because it has devolved from the state proper. It is expressed in the vigilance in detecting harm that holds sway in the public and private bureaucracies that make up a kind of sprawling para-state. These take on the task of cultivating and managing the “identities” that serve as markers of oppression in designated client groups, requiring moral orthopaedics for all.

Today’s Leviathan conceives its subjects as fragile beings afloat in a field of incipient traumas. Such a governing entity will look with suspicion on the unsupervised play of boys who “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

That is not at all what is wanted.

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What is at stake here is the conditions for the possibility of achieving adulthood, for men and women both. The process of development from childhood to adulthood requires departure from the safety of parental protection and affirmation, through confrontation with hard reality. It is through such confrontation that a person escapes the solipsism of unearned self-esteem, enters the world of objective standards, and begins to develop competence in some field of endeavour.

If it is to be an adequate response to the forces of infantilisation, today’s vitalism will have to go beyond the boyish rebellion of the online Right and articulate a positive picture of what it means to be an adult. Even, dare we say, what it means to be a man.

Whatever else it means, being a responsible man today would seem to involve a tricky double task: to be respectful and protective of women in private, and to confidently disregard women’s tears in public. This would be made easier if women — the silent majority of them who probably value self-reliance — did likewise, forming an alliance with men against a metastasising force of moral orthopaedics that diminishes us all.

Listen to Matthew Crawford’s UnHerd lecture. 

We feel gratitude when someone does something for us outside the realm of exchange. One wants to mark it, this arrival of something that overflows what is expected, and recognise the source of it. In acting outside necessity, our benefactor shines.

Or one may feel gratitude without a counterparty to receive it, in response to some fortunate condition that could have been otherwise. Having good health or good looks, for example. Life itself. Something for which we are not responsible, a gift.

Whether in response to good fortune or to some identifiable benefactor, in taking note of this gift one feels that one has regained a proper coordinate system. It is a calm feeling. One shucks off that irritable, constant background sense of not receiving one’s due — the sense of a self inflated beyond its true proportions. For it does feel like a little dose of truth, this moment of reorientation. Seeing oneself from the outside as one who receives rather than demands is also liberating — from resentment, entitlement, grievance. You feel lighter, as well as smaller. And more ready to act with grace toward others; that is, to be larger. For grace and gratitude have the same root, whether one is speaking etymologically or psychologically.

I think our condition as modern people makes the experience of gratitude especially elusive, so when we feel grateful it has an effect that is all the more powerful, bumping us out of a deep spiritual rut. I believe that is because it is an experience that cannot be made sense of in a way that accords with the grand metaphysical picture that we live within most of the time. If we can understand why this is so, it will give us a critical vantage point from which to view our historical moment. It may also help us identify the source of our sourness, and point the way toward something better.

Most simply, gratitude requires that there be another, an outside world that is not under one’s control and not of one’s own making. Of course, it is simply the case that there is such a world. But there are different ways of responding to this fact.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote two essays which, if you put them side by side, offer a contrast between two personality types, one he called the rationalist and the other he called the conservative. Here, “conservative” does not refer to a political ideology. Instead, it names a disposition. What distinguishes the conservative is not hankering after the past, but rather affection for the present; for what actually exists. He has an eye for all the ways his surroundings afford a good life, or provide raw materials for the building of such a life. He wants to preserve the present world, not out of fearful, small-minded rejection of the possible, but because he has a greater awareness of the resources of the actual, which may be lost if we are not careful. In other words, he feels gratitude for the world, and a sense of obligation to it.

The rationalist by contrast looks at the world and is offended by the waste, the inefficiency, the chaos, the suffering, the grotesque failures of optimisation, and wants to set it right. He has a vision of a better world, and that is where he lives, in devotion to his vision.

Probably you need both types, to have a healthy society. But in the present order, one of these types is full of confidence and speaks well into a microphone, while the other is apologetic and defensive. One has the wind of history at his back, and is well capitalised. The other sometimes doubts his own sanity.

Our own time has seen the emergence of a third type, the transhumanist, who is perhaps just an over-the-top caricature of the rationalist. Like most caricatures, it brings into relief the defining features of the original through exaggeration.

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Here is a quote from a prominent transhumanist, speaking to Paul Kingsnorth (via the Substack Upheaval by N.S. Lyons):

“I’d like to bring your attention to the issue with nature and biology that transhumanists have: that it’s fundamentally flawed, and likely even immoral to perpetuate, given its tendency to predation, disease, and death. Simply said, all nature and biology, from plants, to wildlife, to people, are something to be overcome and totally replaced with the synthetic. No one with even the slightest bit of compassion would ever create a world like ours, filled with so much suffering. It must all be undone, and remade with technology, justice, and equality.”

Clearly there is a theological point at issue here. It is not clear to me if this transhumanist is saying there is a creator (and he is a real bastard), or there is no creator, and nature itself is a real bastard. In any case, the so-called created order is no order at all, but a filthy and cruel chaos. He says it would be “immoral to perpetuate”.

So, the transhumanist speaks as a moralist. He appears to be animated by what Nietzsche called ressentiment, the opposite of gratitude.

In the Gnostic heresy, the world was created, not by God, but by his evil twin (roughly). It must be rejected and overcome through human effort. Doing so requires special knowledge, gnosis, which is to be cultivated in a priestly class. This finds its equivalent in today’s technocratic managers and moral visionaries of equality, aflame with a vision of life beyond suffering that will arrive when the givens of life are “totally replaced with the synthetic”, as our transhumanist put it. The point is to bring about salvation here in this world — Voegelin’s famous “immanentising the eschaton”.

As many have noted, the transsexual ideology is a version of transhumanism, pungently named by Mary Harrington as “meat Lego gnosticism”. From the beginning of the modern rationalist project, the body has been the thorn in the side of it. The creative freedom of the will is compromised by its entanglement with a body subject to natural necessities not of one’s choosing. But if we reconceive the body as raw material — meat Legos — and make man himself a technological project, then we can escape this subjugation to necessities that impinge from outside the will.

But you don’t have to look to the exotic fringe of transhumanism to see this. The whole movement of the present is to bring the world under rational control. For example, substituting algorithms and mechanised certainties for the frailties of human judgment (as in the push for driverless cars and whatnot), or replacing the unclean clamour of democratic politics with expert administration.

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We may even take up this approach in relation to ourselves, for example when we seek to eliminate the element of chance and serendipity in love through dating apps that [computer voice:] optimise through personalised search criteria and cross-platform social media integration.

This isn’t quite the madness of Eros, the divine folly, a consuming flame one is cast into by the god despite oneself, to be magnificently destroyed at the feet of one’s beloved, giving thanks all the while from a heart that is glad. Compared to that, life on the dating apps looks like a half-life of prudish solipsism, however many orgasms it may yield. A life fully under control is a life of solitude, from which the possibility of serendipity has been excluded. Serendipity is perhaps the secular name for grace.

The push for rational control has been with us for some centuries, but has lately entered an especially frantic phase, and a jealous determination to leave no area of life untouched by this libido dominandi. Indeed, to trust in fate, or divine providence, or fortuna, is to be downright irresponsible. It’s not safe, for one thing. There is a fearful timidity to the rationalist soul.

***

One way we try to bring the world under our control is by substituting representations for reality itself. The difference is that representations are addressed to us. They are for us; they place each of us at the centre of a little “me-world”, as Thomas de Zengotita points out in his beautiful little book Mediated, whereas dumb nature just sits there, indifferent to us. Nature is genuinely other, a real outside-the-self.

Of course, we are inherently self-centered, quite literally. We inhabit bodies, in particular places, and this gives rise to the spatial categories we use. One carves up the surrounding world along an axis of proximity and distance. The world within reach is the most salient to us. This idea of orientation around a bodily centre helps us to see how the attentional environment that has emerged in contemporary culture is novel and somehow centreless. The basic concept at the root of attention is selection: we pick something out from the flux of the available. But as our experience comes to be ever more mediated by representations, which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things, it is hard to say what the principle of selection is. I can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing, or of the deepest underwater caverns, nearly as easily as I glance across the room. Every foreign wonder, hidden place, and obscure subculture is immediately available to my idle curiosity; they are lumped together into a uniform distancelessness that revolves around me.

But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any non-arbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself — a zone of relevance — by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. To be present with those I share life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment. It’s hard to be grateful for loved ones when they keep interrupting my feed.

Accepting limits to one’s reach and to the size of one’s world may be necessary if one is to see the gifts that are at hand, if only one has eyes for them. I curse myself for every cheaply squandered opportunity to look into the eyes of my children with the fullness of attention that sees good. That is what is called love.

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***

Consider a different kind of attention, which likewise sees good. In a skilled practice, whether it is martial arts, music, or some craft tradition, one enters into an ecology of attention in which one’s perception is tuned to affordances that show up only within this practice. An affordance is a relation of fit between an agent and his or her environment, often mediated by some tool. These affordances are good in the narrow pragmatic sense of being good for some purpose of the agent, not in an ethically laden sense. But they provide the points of contact between the world and a human being who strives for excellence in his or her practice. They create the field of possibilities within which such striving is structured and given form.

If we give due attention to the experience of skilled action, it can give us some critical distance on the ideal of autonomy. Consider music, for example. One can’t be a musician without learning to play a particular instrument, subjecting one’s fingers to the discipline of frets or keys. The musician’s power of expression is founded upon a prior obedience; her musical agency is built up from an ongoing submission. To what? To her teacher, maybe. But there is such a thing as the self-taught musician. Her obedience rather is to the mechanical realities of her instrument, which in turn answer to certain natural necessities of music. For example, halving the length of a string under a given tension raises its pitch by an octave. These facts do not arise from the human will, and there is no altering them. Progress in excellence is only possible if one is capable of enduring a lot of tedium and frustration. I believe the example of the musician sheds light on the basic character of human agency, namely, that it arises only within concrete limits that are not of our own making.

These limits need not be physical; the important thing is rather that they are external to the self. Consider the experience of learning a foreign language, beautifully described by Iris Murdoch:

“If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal.”

In the Platonic tradition, one speaks of such striving as an erotic phenomenon. We are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty. I am reminded of my friend Talbot Brewer’s description of listening to Billie Holiday sing. She tries different phrasings in a given passage, combining them with subtle inflections of pitch, reaching toward some ideal that isn’t fully clear to her as yet, as it comes into view only in the course of her pursuit of it, progressively — in rehearsal presumably, but even during a performance, in real time. To witness this from the audience is exhilarating. The beautiful thing we feel privileged to witness is the music itself, but also the presence of a human being engaged in this striving toward the music that wants to be born. Offstage, as it were, outside the focus of her own attention which is entirely on the music, but visible to us from the audience, we see that she strives also toward a better version of herself, the one who has approached closer to the perfection of her art by pushing beyond the realm where she is certain of the outcome. You feel you are watching a high-wire act.

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The risk of failure is intrinsic to the nature of play. Here I am talking about the most serious kind of play, such as music or sport. In his indispensable book Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga convinces us that in play lie the origins of civilisation. He writes: “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension — these are the essence of the play-spirit.” Thus understood, play sits uncomfortably with the contemporary taste for order, and our attempts to bring the world fully under rational control.

One way we do that is, again, by filtering reality through representations. The deep origins of this tendency lie in early modern thought. Very briefly: Descartes worried about the very existence of an external world. The only secure beginning point for knowledge is awareness of one’s own process of thinking. This is a turning inward. The ensuing revolution was perfectly captured and compressed by Giambattista Vico, who said, “we know only what we make”.

This epistemological anxiety about what we can know was resolved by turning it (tacitly) into an ontological posit about what is. Makeability is the ground of intelligibility, and anything lying outside this circle dops out of consideration. If we can’t make it, then we can’t know it and we have no power over it. It may as well not exist. This was a fundamental shift in man’s relationship to the world.

The most powerful expression of this revolution is mathematical physics. Mathematics is a pure product of the human mind. To do math on nature requires that the world first be rendered more intellectually tractable, by passing it through idealisations such as the frictionless surface, the perfect vacuum, the point mass, and the perfectly elastic collision. As Heidegger put it, this may be understood as “a projection of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things”.

What is made has primacy over what is given directly to experience. That is, what is received. Human beings have always used tools and made things through techne (skill), transforming their environment. The word “technology” names something new. It is a way of grasping the world in which knowing and making are one.

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All of this is perhaps very abstract. Let me illustrate it with an example from children’s television. In the old Mickey Mouse cartoons from the early and middle decades of the 20th century, you still get a depiction of the world in which reality has some stature of its own. By far the most prominent source of hilarity is the capacity of material stuff to generate frustration, or rather demonic violence. The tendency of things to thwart the human will is exaggerated, and through exaggeration a certain truth gets brought forward. The slapstick sufferings of Donald Duck acknowledge, and thereby seemed to affirm, the human condition as it is, beneath the various idealisms that would transport us out of that condition.

The Disney cartoon franchise now has many departments. One of them, Mickey Mouse clubhouse, on the Disney Junior network, retains the same characters. But the difference in how material reality is presented could not be more stark, and in this difference a shift in the relation between self and world becomes evident as well.

The clubhouse is filled with amazing technology that always works perfectly. Each episode is built around solving some problem. One does this by saying, “O Tootles!” This makes the Handy Dandy machine appear, a computer-like thing that condenses out of the Cloud and presents a menu of four options on a screen, by the use of which the viewer is encouraged to be a “Mouske-Doer”. There are four problems per episode, and each can be solved using one of the four tools. This assurance is baked into the initial setup of the episode; no moment of helplessness is allowed to arise. There is never an insoluble problem, that is, a deep conflict between the will and the world. I suspect that is one reason these episodes are not just unfunny, but somehow the opposite of funny. What we are watching is the substitution of manufactured experience for a direct encounter with the world. With this comes the construction of a more fragile kind of self, and a more manipulable one. He makes things happen in the world by pressing a button. Which means that his will has been channeled into some “choice architecture” that has been constructed for him by unknown others.

To be a Mouske-Doer is to abstract from material reality as depicted in those early Disney cartoons, where we see the flip side of affordances. Perhaps we should call unwanted projectiles, demonic springs, and all such hazards “negative affordances”. The thing is, you can’t have the positive without the negative; they are two sides of the same coin. The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the frustrations of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping this through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology as magic for the possibility of real agency.

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How does any of this bear on the question of gratitude?

Affection for the world as it is could be taken as the motto of a this-worldly ethics. There are, in addition to the slapstick, moments of real physical grace in those old Disney cartoons. When Donald Duck is skating on a frozen lake in one episode, he recruits overhanging branches and snow drifts, incorporating their affordances into a ballet-like performance in which he is able to do amazing things. His skating is amazing, but not fantastical or magical; it is a heightened version of what you admire when you watch a real skater. To watch it is to be surprised and delighted by the real. At such moments, the possibilities for beautiful human action in the world as it is — the undiscovered possibilities of fit — seem inexhaustible.

This can inspire wonder and gratitude; intuitions we associate with religion are available within a this-worldly ethics of attention. For there does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us. Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities, and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.

Such experiences mark the primacy of receiving over making, and require a kind of courage. It is that of entrusting oneself to that which has not been made by oneself, and never could be made, but which supports and makes possible all of our making and doing. If we call such entrusting “faith”, notice that it has the same spirit as play: “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty.”

I like the example of surfing because the ocean is something truly alien and inscrutable. The surfer throws himself into it. Every wave is unique, a gift that can never recur, and they are exquisite. The surfer receives it and does what he can with it. Rarely does he feel adequate to its possibilities. He is not in the right spot when it arrives, due to a failure of paddling strength. Or, if he does catch it, he doesn’t adequately perceive what this particular wave is going to do and he botches it. Or he has a failure of courage, if the wave is big and murderous, and he hesitates. Surfing is 95% frustrated eros, for me at least, due to my own limitations. Oh, but that other five percent. To watch a Kelly Slater is to be forced to recalibrate one’s sense of what a human being can do.

So there’s one datapoint, surfing. Another would be, quite simply, the existence of women’s breasts. Now we have two datapoints, each of which by itself offers full and sufficient proof that there is a God, and that he loves us very much.

The accusation against religion is that it removes us to a different, invisible realm, and is for that reason corrupting. But sometimes you have an experience of God’s love saturating this world, and it is essentially psychedelic. You feel you are gaining perceptual access to the most fundamental layer of reality, the ground of grounds. Quite preposterously, this turns out to be something like love. The effect of such moments is to place you more fully in the actual. With this comes a renewal of our faculty of gratitude. For I do believe it is a faculty, one of those endowments by which a person grasps his true situation.

Matthew Crawford delivered his UnHerd lecture at Old Queen Street on January 9, 2023

Back in 1994, Charles suggested that when king, he might become Defender of Faith, instead of Defender of The Faith, the title given to him as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. There was a storm of criticism, and some years after, he clarified what he meant: he would keep the royal title while also protecting other faiths. His openness to those faiths — especially Islam — did lead many to question his commitment to the Church. On the surface, at least, he seems to veer towards syncretism or even a covert form of secularism; an appeal to a multicultural Britain no longer willing to assert Christianity as the one true faith.

But the story is more complex. Charles — who might just be Britain’s modern-day philosopher king — has long been affiliated with Perennialism, a school of thought which holds that there is one universal truth which is present, to varying degrees, within all traditional religions. As the patron of the Temenos Academy, an educational charity dedicated to the study of Perennialism, Charles has done more to cultivate this philosophy than any other modern thinker. Unconventional as that philosophy might sound, it is one fit for a hereditary monarch: its purpose being not to subvert tradition, but to revive it.

Charles has expressed particular sympathy with the Traditionalist School, a branch of Perennialism. Led by the French philosopher René Guénon, the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon, and the Ceylonese philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, the Traditionalists emerged in the 19th century in reaction to the materialist ideologies of the Enlightenment. Its proponents believed that modernity had left humanity bereft of its spiritual dimension, and thought that this could be remedied by the metaphysical teachings contained within traditional religions.

For Guénon, pre-modern civilisations had oriented themselves “vertically” towards transcendence, with every aspect of life, from politics to art, corresponding to the order of the cosmos and the nature of God. But with the proliferation of “profane philosophy”, the dimensions of existence had become purely horizontal, extending only to things of this world. The result is what he famously called “The Reign of Quantity”, in which all human activity is rationalistic and utilitarian, focused on material progress rather than man’s ascension toward the divine.

Charles, who has himself invoked the concept of The Reign of Quantity, also seems to lament a world which no longer reaches for God. He has devoted himself not only to the reconsecration of nature, as is evident in his environmentalism, but also the reconsecration of art. In promoting the mastery of traditional crafts through the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, he echoes Guénon’s view that creativity should not be a mode of mere self-expression, but a vessel of transcendence. The students at his school “can experience the beauty of the order of nature — a spiritual, sacred beauty, connecting the whole of creation”.

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Protecting hedgerows, trees and ancient crafts is all very well. Where Charles’s philosophy becomes controversial is in the fact that he, like Guénon, is willing to draw inspiration from the religions of both East and West. His suggestion that Islam “can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost”, for instance, appears to reflect the Perennialist position that it is possible to illuminate one’s own tradition with the light of others, for nestled within all of them is the same universal truth.

Does this suggest that Perennialism, if allowed to flourish, would one day lead to the merging of all the world’s belief systems into one? Those sceptical of Charles’s openness towards other faiths fear precisely that: a “one world religion”. In our postmodern age, it is not hard to envision a world which has dissolved all particularities to make way for an ideological monoculture.

One hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton imagined what the beginnings of such a world might look like. His novel The Flying Inn is set in a future England where the elites, romantically inclined towards the idea of a universal religion and politically motivated to unite East and West, embrace a strange, progressive form of Islam which they see to be less superstitious than Christianity. The end result is something that resembles neither traditional Islam nor Christianity, but a ghastly syncretism which destroys the country’s identity (and its pubs).

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But Chesterton’s dystopian England is not what the Perennialists had in mind. In fact, they were more critical than anyone of syncretism — with Guénon writing sharp polemics against New Age spirituality and its subversion of tradition — and would certainly have feared the coming of a “one world religion”. They emphasised the need to be firmly rooted in one faith in order to attain spiritual insight, and were highly critical of the homogenisation of cultures promoted by a globalising, secularising world. This, Guénon believed, caused the “flattening” of knowledge and ultimately sealed off higher truths.

We can rest assured that Charles has no intention of subverting Christianity. But he does believe, in the spirit of Perennialism, that glimmers of its light can be discerned elsewhere — perhaps in places less dimmed by modernity. That’s why he may draw inspiration from Islamic or Dharmic thought, and yet still remain the steadfast defender of the Christian faith.

Admittedly, Charles’s attitude to defending that faith is somewhat unorthodox. But in the 21st century, where there is no choice but to accept religious pluralism, it might be the only way to go about it. Perennialism has the virtue of being able to welcome multiple faiths, while also maintaining a conception of absolute truth. Whereas other leaders might surrender their truth in the name of inclusivity — instead allowing each religious group to have its “own truth” in true postmodern fashion — Charles’s philosophy allows for religious difference without slipping into relativism and the eventual abandonment of the sacred.

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The path from pluralism to relativism is all too easily taken. When Nietzsche remarked that “there are various eyes… and as a result there are various truths, and as a result there is no truth”, he foreshadowed the postmodern response to pluralism that ends in the denial of objectivity. Today, this takes the form of states privatising religion and reducing it to an aspect of cultural diversity rather than a source of insight that could benefit us all. Likewise, when identity politics calls to “represent” religion, it too often reduces it to a point of intersectionality on par with race and class rather than something which points to a shared eternal truth.

But Charles, our philosopher king, is a firm believer in eternal truth. He is able to respond to pluralism in such a way that results in neither syncretism nor secularism. Instead, his philosophy allows religious difference to go beyond the secular paradigm of inclusion and reintroduce a much-needed spiritual dimension to public life — for everyone.

He is, of course, in the best position to do so. The symbolic function of monarchy is to point to something higher; to be the “vertical” axis which reaches for transcendence above “horizontal” reality with all its diversity and conflict. Perhaps his reign might strive to overcome The Reign of Quantity in this way, made all the more possible by the fact that his kingship allows him to respond to modernity from a station that is not political, but spiritual.

While some seek to tear the modern world down in a way that is distinctly post-modern, Charles — in returning to the primordial foundations of existence — represents something pre-modern. Far from betraying tradition, King Charles III might just save it.

The French mystic and thinker René Guénon, who was doing his best work nearly a century back, was one of them. In his two books (The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times), Guénon laid out his notion that the modern world had deteriorated into a realm of pure materialism as a result of what he called the “Western deviation” from eternal truth. He called this the “reign of quantity”, and predicted its future collapse. But Guénon was not simply talking economics or politics. What was going on, he said, was something akin to a spiritual war, and as a Sufi Muslim he wasn’t shy about naming its antagonist. To this age, he wrote, “the word ‘Satanic’ can indeed be properly applied”.

Presenting disorder as order and truth as lies — this, wrote Guénon, was the way that Satan rolled. The “more or less direct agents of the Adversary”, he explained, using the Biblical name for what Europeans would later come to call the Devil, always aimed to invert reality. Right is wrong, black is white, up is down, there is no truth, do what thou wilt: this has always been the Adversary’s line, and today it is prominent in all quarters.

The heterodox Catholic philosopher Ivan Illich, who died in 2002, also believed we were living in the time of Anti-Christ, but for different reasons. For Illich, any claims that we lived in a “secular age” were nonsense. The modern West was still Christian, he said, but it had disastrously attempted to codify the spontaneous expressions of love which Christ had shown to be God’s desire for humanity within systems and institutions. First the Church, and then the supposedly “secular” liberal states which had succeeded it, had attempted to transmute Christian love into obligation and enforce it by law, thus twisting it into a new form of oppression. His biographer David Cayley explained in a recent essay that Illich’s work “emphatically rejects the idea that ours is a post-Christian era. ‘On the contrary’, he says, ‘I believe this to be the most obviously Christian epoch, which might be quite close to the end of the world.'”

A decade or so before Illich was writing, the Jewish Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also attending to the dark spiritual undercurrent of the age. He had a different interpretation of its source — or perhaps he was just using a different name. In Howl, he identified the forward march of industrial modernity — and especially the hypocrisy and brutality of the American empire — with the pagan god Moloch, who demanded human sacrifice from his devotees:

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! …

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! 

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Ginsberg, it seemed, could also sense that the spirit of his age was not under human control, either out in the world or in his own soul and mind. Usually this is easier to talk about in poetry or fiction, for the age doesn’t look kindly on anything which can’t be quantified. It can deal with Ginsberg, but it doesn’t want to talk about Moloch. It can just about cope with Christ if he has been brought down to our level — made into an activist or a defender of culture or a “cosmic” manifestation of the self — but it has nothing to say about Anti-Christ, who blows the whole story sky-high. As for St Paul’s famous notion that the world is subject not only to nature but to “principalities and powers” which wish us ill: this kind of talk was supposed to have been wrecked on the shores of the Enlightenment, never to be seen again.

But the powers and principalities didn’t die in the shipwreck of the old world, they just took on new forms. Today we can, in fact, still talk about these strange, underlying forces as long as we use the correct language. Take, for example, the Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly’s pet notion that technology has its own mind and its own purpose: that through the web of what he calls “the technium”, something is using us to create itself. Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explained in his book What Technology Wants: “It may have once been as simple as an old computer program, merely parroting what we told it, but now it is more like a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.”

Other breathless Silicon Valley mavens, from Mark Zuckerberg with his Metaverse to Ray Kurzweil with his Singularity, regularly talk in the same register about where the technium is taking us. Our job, they seem to imply, is simply to service it as it rolls forward under its own steam, remaking everything in its own image, rebuilding the world, turning us, if we are lucky, into little gods.

They never consider where this story has been heard before. They never confront, or seem to even comprehend, what Illich or Guénon or even Ginsberg would have known, and which many a saint would confirm if they could hear the technium’s new story: that “AI”, on the right lips, can sound like just another way of saying “Anti-Christ”.

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Maybe it’s just me, but the ongoing and rapid inversion of so much we have previously taken for granted increasingly seems to be happening independently of human action. It is as if something else has become manifest in some way we can’t quite put our finger on, and has stimulated the craziness of the times. Perhaps it has become self-aware, like Skynet; perhaps it is approaching its Singularity. Perhaps it has always been there, watching, and is now seizing its moment. Or perhaps it is simply beginning to spin out of control, as our systems and technologies become so complex that we can no longer steer them in our chosen direction. Either way, this force seems to be, in some inexplicable way, independent of us, and yet acting within us too.

Let’s give this force a name: a less provocative name, for now, than Moloch or Anti-Christ. Let’s keep it simple. Let’s just call this force Progress. Then, à la Kevin Kelly, let’s ask ourselves a simple question: what does Progress want?

The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce saw the modern era as a thorough and permanent revolution — a radical break with the human past. He defined a modern person as “someone who thinks that ‘today it is no longer possible’”. We do not tend to see our time as continuous with what has gone before, he said. Instead, we believe we live after a “violent break with history”.

In the story of Progress that informs us today, the revolutions of the modern age — industrial, political and intellectual — are assumed to have radically changed the world. By sweeping away old ways of thinking, seeing and living, modernity has produced “a type of violence capable of breaking the continuum of history”.

What Progress wants is the end of history.

Del Noce seems to be having something of a moment at present, provoked by a recent collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s seeing, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters: “what is excluded is the ‘supernatural’, religious transcendence … For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process … has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.”

The modern epoch, explained Del Noce, guided by science, reason and the self, rejects the notion of anything “unseen” or “beyond”. From the 18th century onwards, philosophy swept away religion: the world was now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything became immanent: literally, down-to-Earth.

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All of this, said Del Noce, marks a radical transformation in human seeing. It is, for example, a “sharp break with respect to the Greek and medieval periods”. Both the followers of Plato and the followers of Christ (not to mention every other old culture on Earth, in their own particular way) believed that truth was transcendent, eternal and uncreated, and could be known through some combination of faith, practice and reason. 

No longer, said Del Noce: the only “transcendence” that our age will permit is that which we create ourselves. With no ultimate truth or higher story, there is now nothing to stop us bending the universe to our desires: indeed, to do so is our duty. This, in Del Noce’s telling, explained 20th century history. Having replaced religion with philosophy, we then tried putting philosophy into practice on a grand scale, with terrible results.

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? According to Del Noce, “the spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church … today can be exercised only by science”. In this “totalitarian conception of science”, “every other type of knowledge — metaphysical or religious — expresses only ‘subjective reactions’, which we are able, or will be able, to explain by extending science to the human sphere through psychological and sociological research.”

But the rise of science did not lead to the end of religion, however much Richard Dawkins might like it to be so. Instead — as noted by Illich — religion responded to the challenge by becoming immanent itself. Western Christianity progressively abandoned its commitment to transcendence and was “resolved into philosophy”, allowing itself to be brought down to Earth, into the realm of social activism, politics and ideas. “The conversion of a large part of the religious world to the idea of modernity”, said Del Noce, “accelerated the process of disintegration” that the modern revolution had unleashed.

What Progress wants is the death of God.

But Man cannot live by immanence alone. Religion meets a human need, and when it is gone, or corrupted, the hole it leaves will have to be filled by something else. What will that be? Del Noce’s answer is: revolution. Modernity, he suggests, could be defined as a permanent, ongoing revolution.

The desire to build Utopia on the bones of the old world has been the consuming fire of Western thought for 300 years. Jacobins, Bolsheviks, communists, socialists, Fascists, Nazis, neoliberals and many more have all attempted to scour the ground clean and start again, and we are not done yet. “The revolutionary attitude of creative violence”, writes Del Noce, “has replaced the ascetic attitude of seeking liberation from the world”. If once society’s refuseniks imitated St Anthony, now they copy Che Guevara. All that is solid melts into air: this, in the words of its most consequential revolutionary mind, is the best description of the age of immanence that we have ever had.

What Progress wants is permanent revolution.

The two world wars of the 20th century — which Del Noce prefers to view as a single European conflict, lasting from 1914 until 1945 — spread this revolution against transcendence and tradition all around the world. After 1945, America, unchallenged monarch of the reign of quantity, took on the global responsibility for waging “the Enlightenment’s war against their own past”. Del Noce agreed with another prophet, Simone Weil, that “the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world” — and so it has proven. But Europe, by pursuing the path of pure immanence, had in any case already doomed itself, by turning on itself the weapons it had long used on others and hollowing out its own historic culture in the name of Progress: “Colonisation can be achieved by only one method: by uprooting a people from its traditions. Europeans have a long history of extensively practising this method (and this was Europe’s greatest historical fault). Now — oh, wonder! — in order to feign regret they are applying the same.”

Where would all this lead? The ultimate result of the revolution of modernity, predicted Del Noce, would be fragmentation, nihilism, and “the death of the sacred”. The twin revolutionary engines of the postwar era, he suggested, were scientism and sex. The first usurped the role of religion and culture, reducing all life to the level of the measurable and controllable. The second, via the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the resulting “permissive society”, unleashed a radical individualism cored around sexual desire, which would lead to the fragmentation of everything from nationhood to the family — but leave capitalism and its attendant class, the bourgeoisie, intact.

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Modernity, in the final accounting, took aim at all authority, all tradition, everything rooted and everything past. Del Noce’s prediction, made decades ago, was that the end result of modernity’s revolutions would be the rise of a “new totalitarianism”. This time around it would not involve jackboots and uniforms. Instead, it would be a technocracy built on scientism and implemented by managerial elites, designed to ensure that order could continue after modernity had ripped up all former sources of authority and truth. Ironically, wrote Del Noce, “the rejection of authority, understood in its metaphysical-religious foundation, leads instead to the fullness of ‘power'”.

Create a void, in other words, and into it will rush monsters.

The new totalitarianism, suggested Del Noce, would “absolutely deny traditional morality and religion”, basing its worldview instead on “scientistic dogmatism”. It would negate all “spiritual forces”, including those which, in the 1930s, had been used to resist the totalitarianisms of Hitler and Stalin: “the Christian tradition, liberalism, and humanitarian socialism”. It would be a “totalitarianism of disintegration”, even more so than Russian communism, which had presented itself to some degree as a continuation of national tradition. This time around though, “the complete negation of all tradition”, including that of “fatherlands” — nations — would lead to rule by the only large institutions still standing: global corporations.

Faced with this challenge, Del Noce insisted that “current political formulas are completely inadequate”. Neither Left nor Right were equipped to understand what was going on: both, instead, would typically retreat to their historic comfort zones, with the Left blaming “fascists” and the Right blaming “communists” for the ongoing disintegration. The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine.

What Progress wants is liberation from everything.

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Progress. The Machine. Moloch. Anti-Christ. The Technium. We are all grasping here, trying to name something we cannot see, but whose impacts we can feel undermining the foundations of everything we have known. Augusto Del Noce’s analysis of the modern revolution — and the rootless, spiritless, immanent world it had produced — pointed to the ultimate destination as both totalitarianism and nihilism.

Kevin Kelly, of course, would disagree. For him and his fellow tech idealists, the clearing away of the transcendent realm is only a precursor to building another one — and getting it right this time: “Technology is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.”

Del Noce is often referred to as a conservative or even a reactionary thinker, but he didn’t accept either label. Simple “reaction”, he said, was no solution to what was unfolding. Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance. If permanent revolution, and the consequent disintegration, is the baseline state of a world that denies transcendence, then the alternative is clear: a return to the spiritual centre. A rediscovery, or a reclamation, of the transcendent realm and its place in our lives. This, and only this, is the alternative to the reign of quantity and its attendant cast of gods, demons and machines.

What Moloch wants — Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks — is sacrifice. We must sacrifice ourselves and our children to the robot apartments and stunned governments. What Anti-Christ wants is the opposite of transcendence. If the coming of Christ represents the transcendent breaking into the temporal in order to change it, then His opponent will herald a world of pure matter, uninterrupted by anything beyond human reach. Everything in that world is up for grabs. Anything, from rainforests to the human body, can be claimed and reshaped in the interests of advancing the realm of the human will. It is the oldest story.

The rushing power that runs beneath the age of Progress, the energy of the modern world, the river that carries us onwards — where is it taking us? We know the answer. Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people — they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands now. We know what to do.

What Progress wants is to replace us.

Perhaps the last remaining question is whether we will let it.

A longer version of this essay first appeared at The Abbey of Misrule.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

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I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

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There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

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If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.

And so the father rocks his son back and forth, holding him safely with one hand. Now fully awake himself, he pulls out his phone, and falls into the abyss. His complete attention is on the screen, its blue light seeming like a balm but acting like a bomb, destroying any natural tiredness. The baby, unable to find his father’s gaze, reaches for the phone. The father, jarred into consciousness, pulls up an animated show created for infants. He puts it in his child’s view. The baby looks. He laughs. The characters on the screen do not respond. The baby frowns. He has no friends here. It is a long time before he falls back asleep.

For all its conveniences, the modern age has not removed the challenges of parenting: the exhaustion, the constant demands, the necessary subordination of one’s needs. In fact, in many ways it has intensified them. Parents’ lives are busier — both with necessary things, like work, and tempting distractions, like Instagram. And so to get through the night, we turn to technological solutions like breast pumps, or the expensive advice of sleep trainers. Meanwhile, we spend our days in front of screens, eating food so processed it barely resembles food anymore, and so brings less nutrition and more risk into our lives.

In our new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21^st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, Bret Weinstein and I argue that humans are the ultimate generalists, with such incredible capacity to create new niches for ourselves that we have created a rate of change even we cannot keep up with. And so our brains and bodies are out of step with the 21st century. This mismatch has given rise to all sorts of conditions and diseases that would have been unknown in antiquity — from the widespread need for orthodontia to obesity. A lot of these disorders have their roots in our earliest years.

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As a species, we are social and long-lived, with generational overlap and long childhoods. Some other animals are similar to us in these regards — elephants and orcas, parrots and crows — but humans seem to do everything more. We live in larger groups, with the longest post-reproductive lives, and have the longest childhoods.

If a foal can gallop within a day of its birth, why does it take a human baby months just to learn how to roll over? Childhood is not an error, or a waste of time. It is when we learn to be human. Our giant brains, and our ability and need to connect with other human beings, take years to mature. Very early, we need to be assured of our safety. Soon after, we need to be tested, stretched to our limits.

But the baby introduced earlier may rarely be taken outside, never feeling the sun on his face, or experiencing the minor discomfort of being momentarily cold. That experience can offer not just valuable evidence that discomfort can be recovered from, but also enables the reassuring embrace of his mother as she holds him close, warming him, protecting him. As the baby grows, he learns to self-soothe, to a point. But on a path that is cleared of all challenges, he will not learn what real risk is. Nor can he know the true depth of his parents’ love. They have so successfully cocooned him, including from their own selves.

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Imagine a baby from 15,000 years ago, or 150,000. Before the advent of farming, but after we were fully modern at the anatomical and physiological level. We had language and fire and tools, were cooking our food, living in community, exploring ideas around campfires. Sometime late in that time span we began to make art, to hold funerals, to have rites of passage.

Such a baby would have been snuggled close in the embrace of family and friends, never alone, never isolated. A baby alone in that environment was at high risk; he would have been in actual contact with his mother, or another caregiver, for most of his early life. But as he grew, he would have been allowed more and more freedoms. He would have watched the older children, and played around the fire, and handled sharp tools. He would not have been completely protected from harm, but he also would not have been completely protected from exploration. When his body achieved adulthood, his mind would too: he would be anti-fragile, unlike today’s 18-year-olds.

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide, we argue that though modernity has made us healthier in many ways — and expanded our minds — there are exceptions. We do not argue for a return to a simpler time — such a prescription has many problems, but it’s also impossible to fulfil. But we do argue for some caution in adopting all the modern advances, as many of them bring hidden costs, which become visible with an evolutionary lens.

Do not expect tiny babies to sleep alone. It sends a confusing and terrifying message: nobody has your back. If you provide utter reassurance, while they are tiny, that you are there for them, then — far earlier than their coddled counterparts — they will be confident enough to explore on their own, to take and manage risks. They also sleep better — which means you will, too.

Do share parenting as much as possible; early on, this may mean pumping breast milk to save for later. This tool of modernity is so freeing for many women. A mother’s milk is best for nutritional, immunological, and bonding reasons, but the pressure to provide it at all hours can be a burden; sometimes allowing a baby’s father, or another caretaker, to provide it is a gift.

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But here is an example of where moving away from our ancient ways may have hidden costs. What else besides nutrition is stored in that milk? There’s some evidence that breast milk contains circadian cues. If true, then milk delivered at 2 am, straight from the breast, would not only satiate the baby, but also send the signal that it is now time to sleep. Milk expressed at noon, in contrast, would send the opposite signal. When feeding the baby at night, then, it’s best to provide nighttime milk. It won’t hurt, and may very well help.

Do not put screens in front of children, especially screens that have animate objects on them. As Bret and I posit in our book, babies and young children who are entertained by screens will learn to flatten their emotional range; they do not expect humanoid forms to respond to them.

Do eradicate all blue light from the space where you and your baby sleep. Early morning sunlight is so very blue, and those who are regularly exposed to bright outdoor light early in the day are more productive, and more fit, than those who are not. But expose yourself to blue light late at night, when our ancestors would have been gathered around a campfire — or navigating by the pale light of the moon — and find yourself struggling with sleep, and therefore with productivity, creativity, and health.

Do feed your children real food, tempting though it is to lean on processed meals. A healthy person has an incredible diversity of gut flora, obtained from the consumption of whole foods, with as short a supply chain as possible. An unhealthy person ingests shelf-stable products containing multi-syllabic ingredients synthesised in a lab. In house sparrows, eating a diet that is out of whack makes the birds slower to learn, quicker to anger, and generally more stressed. What are the chances that humans are completely unlike house sparrows in this regard?

Do move your body, and encourage your children to move theirs. We are embodied beings. Our screens may compel us to believe that we are mere brains in jars that can manage to type sarcasm and anger and emojis — but we are in fact more, and far better, than that. And it is during our long, lovely childhoods that we find out how connected and creative we can be.

On a T.A. course, over a decade ago, in the officer’s mess of Prince William of Gloucester Barracks in Grantham, a hungover colleague complained at breakfast of being woken during the night by a figure in RAF uniform. The mess staff, glancing at each other, alerted us to the story of the base’s purported ghost, an RAF airman killed in a wartime accident, whose presence, it transpired, was only ever experienced in my friend’s room.

That last tale is perhaps unsurprising: ghosts, should they exist, seem to be curiously institutionalised figures, adhering to schools, hospitals and museums, the London Underground and military installations. The Army, in particular, has a surprisingly rich and detailed ghost lore about its various historic barracks across Britain and, formerly, Germany. In this, we can say there’s something particularly British about ghosts: like our establishment, they seem doomed to wander forlornly across one Gothic quadrangle or another for eternity.

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The essential Britishness of the ghost is worthy of consideration: this country, and all its constituent nations, shares with Ireland an extremely rich and highly evolved corpus of ghostly tales and claimed sightings compared to our European neighbours. No wonder, then, that the writer Peter Ackroyd claimed, in The English Ghost, that “the English see more ghosts than anyone else.” And yet, while “the word is of Anglo-Saxon derivation… curiously enough, the Anglo-Saxons did not see ghosts.” Is our ghost tradition a distant memory, suspended in the nocturnal gloom, of our island’s Celtic past? Through it, is England still, in some ghostly fashion, a Celtic nation? After all, as Ackroyd notes, boggart — the traditional northern English term for ghostly apparitions — like  bogeyman, the Cornish Bucca and Shakespeare’s Puck all derive from the Brythonic word for ghost, bwg.

Perhaps it is more relevant to note, as Ackroyd does, that “the English are also in many respects obsessed with the past, with ruins, with ancient volumes. It is the country where archaeology is placed on national television, and where every town and village has its own local historian.” The ghost, then, can perhaps be understood as the unconscious national understanding that the past is not dead, nor even truly past. We are haunted by our history, with a pleasing frisson, like no other nation on earth. Perhaps we can go further, and ask: are ghosts reactionaries? Suspended between past and present, retreading the forgotten ways of history, they are not simply residual echoes of the past, but exist purely in tension with modernity.

This tension between past and present, tradition and modernity can most clearly be seen in the tales of England’s greatest writer of ghost stories, M. R. James. The son of an East Anglian curate, his life’s path circumscribed, through his own choice, by the quadrangles of Eton, King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton again, Montague Rhodes James haunted the institutions of Edwardian England at a time of great and unbearable change. Like the fussy dons or stolid sons of the East Anglian squirearchy who peopled his tales, James was troubled by a dimly perceived force at the very edge of his vision which threatened to bring great horror to his world: modernity.

In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of James’s ghost stories, the professor of English literature Darryl Jones observes that James’s stories “give articulation to a particularly English longing for the past, perhaps unsurprising for a writer who understood himself to be a Victorian, sometimes at sea in, and often at odds with the modern world.” In his professional life, “across a long career as an increasingly influential academic and university administrator, James seems to have opposed, and attempted to block where he could, every piece of progressive legislation and every really modern thinker that crossed his path, increasingly seeing (and using) Eton and King’s as bulwarks against secular modernity.” And no wonder: “Modernity is terrifying, monstrous, demonic.”

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James himself was aware of this dynamic, observing that he preferred modern settings for his stories because “the more remote in time the ghost is the harder it is to make him effective… roughly speaking, the ghost should be a contemporary of the seer.” The ghost is not a ghost because it is old: what makes it ghostly, what grants it its power, is precisely that it haunts the present and its rationalist assumptions with deeper, older passions. The ghost is the past, which will not stay buried, whatever we may wish. Such a tension between past and present, and the fear of a hazily-seen, monstrous future, is not unique to James’ stories, but is a thread that runs throughout the genre. 

In The History of the British Ghost Story, the literary critic Simon Hay observed that “the ghost story is, unlike the historical novel, a failed modernity narrative.” He goes on to write:

“The modernity on display in the ghost story has not successfully distinguished itself from its past; indeed, the whole point of the ghost story is that the present cannot wrench free of the past and so has not become fully modern. The ghost story, in other words, holds to a model of history as traumatically rather than nostalgically available to us.” 

But there is nevertheless something uniquely English about James’s pained wrestling with these tensions. After all, the classic vampire story, the product of the Anglo-Irish writers Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, encapsulates the anxieties of the residents of the mouldering Big House living parasitically on a superstitious and unhappy peasantry.

Certainly, James’s works are deeply rooted in the landscapes of England. The most common setting of his stories is a small, lonely, neoclassical manor, in an eerily flat and windswept East Anglia. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” (1903) James writes with wistful power of the Suffolk shoreline, with its “squat Martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden groins, the dim and murmuring sea.” These are the edgelands, the lonely Saxon shore, “the lands of invaders and colonizers, the Angles who drove out or intermarried with the previous inhabitants of the area,” notes the literary critic Derek Johnston, where “the connection to the local soil and landscape runs generations deep, but it has also been built upon the remains of earlier populations, with earlier connections to that landscape, overrun by the incomers.”

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By 1925’s “A Warning to the Curious”, the Suffolk landscape of “marshes intersected by dykes to the south,” with its “flat fields to the north, merging into the heath, fir woods, and above all, gorse, inland,” is haunted by more modern threats. The drama revolves around the buried crown of the Saxon king Raedwald of East Anglia (whose real-life ship burial, discovered in 1939, recurs in later fictional explorations of Englishness, from Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to the BBC’s Detectorists). The crown is hidden along this lonely shoreline to protect England from the outside world — one of three “buried in different places near the coast to keep off the Danes or the French or the Germans.” The excavation of this protective talisman summons up dark forces, turning the familiar landscape uncanny, the Heimlich into the Unheimlich:

“calm sea dead in front, faint barking of a dog at a cottage on a gleaming dyke between us and it: full moon making that path we know across the sea: the eternal whisper of the Scotch firs just above us, and the sea in front. Yet, in all this quest, an acute, an acrid consciousness of a restrained hostility very near us, like a dog on a leash that might be let go at any moment.”

As Johnston notes, this is the “dark heritage” understanding of Britain’s landscape, a peculiarly “English tradition… of accepting the comfort in which one currently exists and pointing out that it is surrounded by potential horrors.” In James’ stories, “the rural landscape is not a reassuring indicator of permanence, nor a comforting example of man’s dominance over nature… but rather a symbol of the thin skin of civilisation that covers the deep and ancient horrors of the world.”

Similarly, in each story, as the literary critic Julia Briggs noted, “the hero is mildly culpable in that he wilfully rejects, because of his scepticism perhaps, the advice of wiser or older men.” As the bluff retired colonel “of prounouncedly Protestant views” in “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” warns the central character, an unimaginative Professor of Ontography who literally unearths an ancient threat from the sandy Suffolk shoreline, “there’s generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations.” 

The cursed whistle, inscribed in Latin, dug up from the ruins of a Templar preceptory, is of course a relic of England’s buried Catholic past, as the colonel notes, warning the professor that “he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you never knew what they might not have been up to.” Through the tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism that run through James’s work, from his earliest tale “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook” (1893) onward, a case can even be made for James as an Anglo-Catholic writer, whose rejection of modernity and desire to imbue the present with the sacred, awful mysteries of the past align him with those other critics of modernity in English early twentieth century genre writing, Chesterton and Tolkien. 

For the Catholic writer Daniel Frampton, James is “an especially poignant example of an English sensibility that regained, or perhaps even retained, a degree of Catholic feeling that was at its core medieval” and his ghost stories “are themselves a ghostly manifestation of the English, not always Catholic, sensibility that has come to realise that something vital really was lost as a consequence of the Reformation, and that this was to be regretted, since it also led to a process of secularisation.” 

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Tolkien's mythic plan for England

By Peter Franklin

Is there a clearer metaphor, then, than James’s corpus of ghost stories for the conservative worldview? James’s attachment to the English landscape, his obsession with England’s very soil and the secrets buried within it, and his understanding that the deeper, non-rational passions of the past are more powerful than the bland assurances of modernity are the central currents that run through English conservatism. Writing at the height of literary modernism, James’s fixation with the past’s dark and seductive threat to break into the present can be read as a form of wish-fulfilment, a desire to see modernity and the forces it unleashed sent scurrying away in chastened terror.

Unfortunately for James’ equilibrium, modernity could not be kept at bay in the world outside his Cambridge study. As Mark Fisher observed, even the Lowestoft hotel James used as the setting for “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” was burned down by suffragettes in 1924. More profoundly, that great engine of modernity, the First World War, saw Cambridge converted into a finishing school for the trenches, and the King’s College playing fields into an overflow hospital for the Flanders wounded.

Perhaps the single most-read text of James’s entire writing career was the sober message of remembrance he penned, at the government’s request, to accompany the “death penny” memorial plaques sent to the war dead’s next of kin: 1,355,000 were sent to grieving families. Deeply affected by the deaths of so many of his students in the war, James retired as Provost of King’s College in 1918 to return to the Eton of his childhood, until his own death in 1936.

In the end, James could no more fend off the 20th century than could the static, unchanging England he loved. Perhaps it is only now that modernity is itself in crisis, challenged by the re-irruption of the passions of the past into the disordered present, that we can reassess James as an explicitly conservative writer, whose critique of progress, like the ghost tales which envelop it, is most powerful for only facing its horror obliquely.