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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The future is barbarian

By John Michael Greer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spengler argued that the dominant civilization in the West was on the inexorable downward part of its cycle, and heading for dissolution. I doubt he would have thanked me for punning so egregiously on his magnum opus — and yet, this week, I found myself remembering that work in the context of the contemporary decline, of a different West: Kanye.

West, whose recent torrent of barely-coherent livestream and interview rants attests to an increasingly erratic public persona and possible mental health issues, prompted shock and disgust when he released a new song titled “Heil Hitler”. Launched to coincide with VE Day, it was promptly denounced across the political spectrum as “classic 1930s style antisemitism”, “fascist art”, and “a crude, adolescent chant of racial slurs and fascist glorification masquerading as music”.

So what would Spengler make of this musical work? Would he be Heil Hitlering with Kanye? Some historians draw a line from Romanticism, through Spengler, to the Nazis, notably via the idea that ethnocultural groups share the kind of mystical national consciousness George Mosse called “Völkish moods”. And it’s true that Spengler has since reappeared at intervals, as a touchstone for the Right.

But despite his Romantic literary roots, Spengler himself thought Hitler was “an idiot”, and called the Nazis an “organization of the unemployed by the workshy”. So I doubt he would have seen much of moral or political worth in a hip-hop tune with the chorus line “Nigga, heil Hitler”. And yet his analysis is useful when considering Kanye — offering both short-term reassurance as to what it represents, and also, as you might expect, a longer-term prognosis that is far from happy.

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Spengler died in 1936, but much of his contemporary success and subsequent influence rested on predicting the decline into “Caesarism” that, he thought, would accompany this end-stage “Winter” phase he believed Western civilization to have entered. When the publication of Decline was followed, in short order, by the era of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, Spengler was hailed as a prophet — only to fall out of fashion again as the 20th century wore on and the forces of liberal democracy re-asserted themselves.

Interest in his work tends to revive in periods of turmoil and economic downturn, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the end of the End of History has been accompanied by something of a Spengler revival. But if there’s a sense in which Spengler helps us understand Kanye’s musical development, it’s less in diagnosing his latest single as ominous harbinger of incipient fascism in America. He did predict that “Caesarism” would come in waves, and would doubtless have expected the authoritarians of the early twentieth century to be only the first of these. But even so, Spengler helps us here mainly by revealing that “Heil Hitler” doesn’t have much directly to do with authoritarianism at all. Rather, it sets Kanye’s work in the context of two cultural currents, in both of which Spengler is implicated: first, a Romantic tradition of anti-modernist, usually masculine-coded rebellion; and second the endemic path towards general brutalization that Spengler saw as inherent in end-stage civilization: a brutalization he thought would, in time, give way to a “new primitivism”.

Modernity, in his view, was not the perfection of Western civilization, but the beginning of its “Winter” and herald of its inexorable collapse. The Romantic tradition from which he wrote has been with us more or less since the beginning of this era, in reaction to its character. It’s less a coherent programme than a sensibility: a revolt against everything cold, clean, procedural, and rationalistic that comes with the secular, technological, disenchanting modern worldview.

At its core, though, Romanticism always seeks what is deeper, higher, and more soulful, emphasizing the role of feeling. Goethe’s 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther offers an early instance of such intense emotionality; on publication the book triggered copycat suicides. Half a century later, the same reckless and sometimes self-destructive intensity made Romantic poet Lord Byron “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”, and — another century on — prompted Julius Evola, a Romantic contemporary of Spengler’s and father of the modern esoteric far Right, to call for “revolt against the modern world”.

Today this kind of revolt has, itself, become commodified by the modern world against which it rebelled — and nowhere is this more apparent than in the music industry. Most forms of transgression are mere grist to its mill of transgression-as-product: audiences seem only mildly titillated by (for example) Satanic metal bands or drill artists who boast in music of murders, drug deals and other criminal activities.

In this jaded environment, it’s remarkable in a narrow sense that West has managed to find a way to be genuinely shocking. Jewish groups and allies are rightly furious and distressed. And yet the song itself is more driven by inchoate fury than Nazism as such. West says so in the song: “I got so much anger in me, got no way to take it out”. This is, he says, the fault of a vague “they”, who have taken his kids off him and closed his bank account: “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children”.

So now he wants people to understand his depth of emotion: “Niggas see my Twitter but they don’t see how I be feeling.” And the only way to express his fury is through the only remaining taboo with real shock power. “I became a Nazi, yeah, bitch, I’m the villain.” In context, then, “Heil Hitler” is less coherent ideology than ultimate swear-word: the adult equivalent of a pre-schooler saying “pee pee poo poo”, to get a reaction from his mum.

In other words, the song is pure, distilled essence of male rebellion, in direct continuity with a centuries-old Romantic tradition but today most palpably felt in the noisome underbelly of the internet. Here, especially since GamerGate, a “dissident Right” subculture (aided by a side order of Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler among others) helped propel Donald Trump into power. “Heil Hitler” is this subculture in musical form, voicing a masculinist backlash whose ripples spread well beyond West’s individual circumstances.

And there’s also a second sense in which the song invites a Spenglerian reading. Writing a century ago, Spengler forecast a future of drab, universal uniformity, in which national differences are largely abolished and life concentrated into “megalopolis” world-cities. In this brutalizing environment, competing peoples would spend their days in repetitive tasks, assuaged by vulgar diversions — until a new primitivism emerged that would eventually drive the collapse of this dying civilization. In Spengler’s vivid formulation: “Money is overthrown and abolished by blood.”

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Spengler envisaged an end-point where, “The sword is victorious over the money, the master-will subdues again the plunderer-will”. It’s reasonable to surmise that those cheering on the Trumpian backlash from the depths of the “dissident” internet would understand themselves as aligned with the re-assertion of a martial over a managerial spirit. But what if the internet Nazism as an expression of rage does not, in fact, signal the return of martial spirit? What if it’s just another spasm of brutalization and dissolution, en route to the bottom of the cycle?

If this were so, it would be reasonable to expect any political victory applauded by a dissident caucus not to be followed by much in the way of substantial policy change. And indeed, since Trump’s victory, the so-called “dissident Right” has grown increasingly marginal within the emerging government coalition. The anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo explained why, distinguishing between those effective as critics and gadflies, and those with the temperament for building and cooperation in an institutional environment. “In my opinion”, Rufo said, “we are lacking some of this capacity.” When he made this point on X, one of the first responses promptly illustrated it for him, replying: “I’m kind of like fuck your institutional environment”. It’s a sentiment very much in keeping with “Nigga, heil Hitler”: one of pure opposition.

The clear inference is that what we’re looking at is not some notional revival of institutional Right-wing martial spirit, fascist or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another iteration of Young Wertheresque emotionality, largely devoid of any clear object or organizational capacity. Kanye West has ironically reversed Hitler’s cultural achievement: not appropriating Romantic tropes for Nazism, so much as appropriating Nazi ones for Romanticism.

The result isn’t a philosophical ideology. It’s undirected rage. The good news, then, is that “Nigga, heil Hitler” probably isn’t an omen of approaching military authoritarianism. The bad news is that the longer-term prognosis this suggests is not much better: just one lurch after another, down the path of moral ugliness and brutalization that Spengler saw as characteristic of civilizational “Winter”.

Spengler might also point out that none of this is to rule out another spate of Caesarism. It’s just to say those singing along to Kanye’s tune are unlikely to be the first to enlist in his army. Put simply: they’re too ornery. “I felt crushed by the system, so I became an online Nazi” has been one of the internet’s drumbeats at least since GamerGate. It took the decline of Ye West to set it to music.

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

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

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

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

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

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By Tom Holland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The recent bout of Twitter hysteria prompted by Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, rashly sharing photographs of the family bookshelves, may just have been another pointless skirmish in the culture war, but it illustrated one thing very clearly: our self-appointed censors do not have even a passing familiarity with the political thought they seek to expurgate from the world.

By focussing their outrage on Gove’s ownership of a book by David Irving, Owen Jones and the other intellectual luminaries of Twitter progressivism skimmed over Gove’s far more interesting reading choices, namely works by Guillaume Faye and his partner in the French New Right, Alain de Benoist. One would think an engagement with the political thought of our nearest European neighbours would solicit, if not their approval, then at least their interest: but then there are few political movements as insular or intellectually incurious as late-stage British liberalism.

For their benefit, then, the French New Right, or Nouvelle Droite, began as a movement in the late 1960s to forge a new path for European conservatism, rejecting both the culturally dominant Marxism of the period, and the Atlanticism of the mainstream Right.

Influenced by the Konservative Revolution of pre-war Germany, particular the civilisational pessimism of Oswald Spengler, the merciless critique of liberal democracy assembled in the works of Carl Schmitt and the complex and hard to define body of work created by Ernst Junger, the Nouvelle Droite’s think tank GRECE (Groupement de Recherce et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européene, or Research and Study Group for European Civilisation) established itself, for a time, as an influential body on the French political scene.

In 1979, however, GRECE found itself cancelled by a campaign of demonstrative outrage in France’s liberal Le Monde newspaper, accusing the group of an entryist infiltratation of mainstream conservative institutions, particularly the Le Figaro newspaper. Marginal in electoral politics, GRECE nevertheless gained influence in the meta-political sphere, as part of what we could call the Gramscian Right; understanding that politics is downstream of culture, the Nouvelle Droite aimed to influence a new generation of Right-wing thinkers to reject the worldview of mainstream conservative and liberal thought in place of a standpoint quite outside standard Left-Right divisions.

The Nouvelle Droite rejected the domination of the European continent by what it characterised as an imperialist United States, which spreads capitalism and liberalism across the world through a vulgar and thuggish combination of hard and soft power, destroying individual societies and turning the world into an indistinguishable mush of rootless consumers.

Early enthusiasts of the work of Christopher Lasch, critiquing the emergent class of globalised elites, the Nouvelle Droite in some ways anticipated the current trend in both the United States and Europe towards post-liberal thought, though they followed this line of thought in another direction entirely.

Actively supporting Third World national liberation movements, decrying globalisation for its homogenising effects, and sounding urgent warnings of looming ecological collapse, de Benoist and Faye anticipated the anti-globalisation movement of the millennium, before it petered out into commodified pseudo-protest.

Equally, by warning that mass migration into Europe would lead inexorably to ethnic conflict and mass casualty terrorist attacks, and by railing against the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of globalisation and cosmopolitanism, the Nouvelle Droite anticipated much of the discourse of today’s populist Right, though they explicitly rejected what they saw as their petty nationalisms in favour of the unification of Europe and Russia into a single civilisational superpower.

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Avowedly anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-globalisation and pro-European unification, there is, unfortunately for the online censors, therefore very little evidence of Nouvelle Droite influences on Gove’s personal politics. Indeed, many of its lines of thought can be traced more clearly in European politicians as superficially distinct as Macron and Orban than in any British figure.

Its concerns over the prospect of Islamist terrorism resulting from migration into Europe can perhaps be discerned in Gove’s Celsius 7/7, though even here there is a major point of difference. Gove’s book contrasts global jihadism with a Western liberal tradition he urges us to defend; the thinkers of the Nouvelle Droite, by contrast, saw liberalism as the root problem and jihadism as a natural, if culturally alien response, parallel to their own rejection of liberal values.

Unlike Gove, whose book is situated firmly within the tradition of Western liberalism, Faye echoes Islamist ideologues by asserting that: “The rise of radical Islam is the backlash to the excesses of the cosmopolitanism of modernity that wanted to impose on the entire world the model of atheist individualism, the cult of material goods, the loss of spiritual values and the dictatorship of the spectacle.”

Of the two books by Faye on Gove’s bookshelf, both published by the London-based Arktos publishing house, Europe’s leading disseminator of radical right-wing political thought, the most interesting by far is Archaeofuturism, a collection of essays from the late 1990s republished in book format. Writing at the same time as liberal ideologues were declaring the End of History and politicians were assuring their voters that globalisation would bring with it an endless period of global harmony and prosperity, Faye posited a pessimistic worldview of what is now startling immediacy.

By the year 2020, he claimed, as a result of the inherent fragility created by a globalised financial and political system, civilisation would buckle under a cascading set of interlinked crises. Waves of pandemics, of political disorder and state collapse in the Middle East and Africa, of global financial crashes and ecological degradation would rebound off each other, escalating the pressures upon the international system to the point that the world of the late 20^th century would become impossible to sustain.

In Faye’s words, “a series of ‘dramatic lines’ are drawing near: like the tributaries of a river, and will converge in perfect unision at the breaking point (between 2010 and 2020), plunging the world into chaos. From this chaos- which will be extremely painful on a global scale- a new order can emerge based on a worldview, Archaeofuturism, understood as the idea for the world of the post-catastrophic age.”

Writing before the 9/11 attacks, the last global financial crash, the bloody cycle of wars precipitated by the Arab Spring and the COVID pandemic, Faye’s concern over what he termed the “convergence of catastrophes,” seemed as outlandish and unfashionable then as it now does topical. Yet since the beginning of this century, a greater awareness of what is known as global catastrophic risk has begun to creep into mainstream strategic thought, mostly with climate change in the foreground and Faye’s other fears placed as second order consequences.

The 2007 Age of Consequences  paper, issued jointly by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies and American Centre for New American Security thinktanks, echoed Faye’s apocalyptic warnings in almost every respect, warning that severe climate change would lead to the forced movement of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people from the worst-affected areas, the collapse of liberal democracy in the rest of the world as a consequence, the unchecked spread of pandemics and jihadist terrorism, and the outbreak of wars within and between states as the global order collapses.

In this scenario, the report warns, “nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature.”

Furthermore, the report echoes Faye by warning of such “a dramatically new global paradigm that it is virtually impossible to contemplate all the aspects of national and international life that would be inevitably affected. As one participant noted, “unchecked climate change equals the world depicted by Mad Max, only hotter, with no beaches, and perhaps with even more chaos.”

While such a characterization may seem extreme, a careful and thorough examination of all the many potential consequences associated with global climate change is profoundly disquieting. The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life. The only comparable experience for many in the group was considering what the aftermath of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange might have entailed during the height of the Cold War.”

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Only last year, a major Australian forecast warned that an apocalyptic near-future was at this point almost inevitable, describing its research as “a glimpse into a world of “outright chaos” on a path to the end of human civilisation and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.”

Predictions equally dire as Faye’s have been made in less colourful language though with no less alarming conclusions by the medium-term strategic forecasts of the Ministry of Defence and by the Pentagon, all of which make for unsettling reading.

The European Union, similarly, links climate change to a cascading set of global security challenges , severely threatening both the global and European order. In its 2016 Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign And Security Policy, the overarching mission paper for the continental bloc’s approach to the near future, the EU’s strategists assert that:

“We live in times of existential crisis, within and beyond the European Union. Our Union is under threat. Our European project, which has brought unprecedented peace, prosperity and democracy, is being questioned. To the east, the European security order has been violated, while terrorism and violence plague North Africa and the Middle East, as well as Europe itself. Economic growth is yet to outpace demography in parts of Africa, security tensions in Asia are mounting, while climate change causes further disruption.”

Only last week, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, the Sociology professor Piotr Glinski, took to a two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal to warn that the COVID crisis was a glimpse into a future of civilisational collapse, explicitly likening the modern West to the late Roman Empire.

While the date Faye settled upon for the apocalypse is a decade or two in advance of these more sober warnings, his doomy vision of the medium-term future, is, unfortunately for us, worried over at the highest levels of British, American and European strategic thought.

But perhaps more interesting, not least for its presence on the bookshelf of such a senior British government minister, is Faye’s proposed solution, the Archaeofuturism of the book’s title. Likely influenced by the American political theorist Samuel P. Huntington, Faye unconvincingly suggests the current global system world will coalesce into distinct civilisational blocs: a Chinese-dominated one, a greater North America, a sub-Saharan African bloc, “a Euro-Siberian unit,” a greater Islamic world and a vaguely defined Pacific bloc for the rest.

Once this is achieved, the scene is set for the total reordering of global civilisation, according to “a revolutionary model based on a self-centred and inegalitarian world economy, which may be imposed upon us by historical events, but which it would be wise to foresee and plan for in advance”.

Noting, as is now a commonplace opinion, that “the utopia of ‘development’ open to ten billion people is environmentally unsustainable,” Faye proposes a system of jaw-dropping global re-ordering, worth quoting at length:

“First off, most of humanity would revert to a pre-technological subsistence economy based on agriculture and the crafts, with a neo-medieval demographic structure… Communitarian and tribal life would reassert its rights… Even in industrialised countries- India, Russia, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Argentina, etc- a significant portion of the population could return to live according to this archaic socio-economic model.”

Secondly, Faye asserts: “A minority percentage of humanity would continue to live according to the techno-scientific economic model based on ongoing innovation by establishing a ‘global exchange network’ of about a billion people.”

“Finally”, he notes, “these vast neo-archaic economic blocs would be centred upon a continental or multi-continental plan, with basically no mutual exchange between them. Only the techno-scientific portion of humanity would have access to the global exchange. This two-tier world economy thus combines archaism and futurism. The techno-scientific portion of humanity would have no right to intervene in the affairs of the neo-medieval communities that form the majority of the population, nor — most importantly — would it in any way be obliged to ‘help’ them.”

In a short story at the end of the book, Faye paints a vivid if outlandish picture of this proposed future, where a small, global technocratic global elite pursues rapid technological and scientific advances, while the majority of the world’s population lives in subsistence farming communities at a level of technology broadly equivalent to that of the Dark Ages.

Developing his ideas further in the wildly imaginative series of short science fiction tales which make up his follow-up work Archaeofuturism 2.0, Faye’s vision darkens. Some societies can survive, for a time, by fending off the encroaching chaos and maintaining the rudimentary technology of the early 20^th century. But, over time, the darkness settles and mankind is destroyed utterly.

The excellent academic introduction to Faye’s life and work by Stephane Francois in the recent Key Thinkers of the Radical Right notes that Archaeofuturism entails “the dismissal of modernity, born from the Enlightenment, and conservatism, since modernity shows signs of fracture and conservatism leads to nothing.” Summarizing Faye’s vision, Francois notes that:

“To avoid civilisational and ecological collapse, he proposes putting in place an authoritarian regime under the auspices of a “born chief,” a dictator defined as a providential man who knows how to set his peoples in motion, and protects his peoples’ identity and ancestry.”

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It is perhaps partly for this reason that Faye’s work has proved so popular with Ukraine’s extreme right-wing Azov Movement, an armed brigade fighting Russia in the contested regions of the country’s east as part of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, which also provides policing functions — both officially, with the state’s blessing, and unofficially, as a competitor to the state — in the cities of Ukraine’s western heartlands.

Last year, shortly after Faye’s death, I interviewed Azov’s international secretary Olenya Somenyaka in the group’s headquarters just off Kyiv’s famous, central Maidan Square. Surrounded by bookcases filled with the works of the esoteric ultra-right writers currently undergoing a revival among disaffected Western conservatives, Semenyaka emphasised how central Faye’s work was in developing her worldview. In the world according to Somenyaka and Azov, Ukraine will play a starring role as a springboard for the reconquest of Europe from what she viewed as a collapsing liberal order, and lead the continent into a neo-pagan, Archaeofuturist dawn.

Presumably it is due to their unexpected popularity with a powerful armed force and challenge to liberal democracy in Ukraine that Faye’s works secured a place on Michael Gove’s bookshelf. Their placing next to an academic work on modern Ukraine would seem to indicate the politician’s interest in the country’s social and political development, laudable given the deployment of British soldiers there.

Indeed, Faye’s darkest warnings are echoed in British parliamentary politics only by the Green Party, one of whose most senior figures, the University of East Anglia’s professor of Philosophy and Extinction Rebellion spokesman Rupert Read, warns that: “We need to think about what comes after the likely collapse of this civilisation and plan accordingly. There are of course many sub-possibilities within this possible future, and some of them are very ugly. The successor civilisation could, for instance, be largely a reign of brutal warlordism. We have to try to do what we can to prepare our descendants for survival and for one of the better sub-possibilities.”

But even if we accept the proposition that Guardian columnists have the right to determine what books may and may not be read, it is unclear that Faye’s works deserve a place on their Index of forbidden knowledge. On the contrary, it is an encouraging sign that our senior politicians are reading obscure and outlandish works of political thought, given the times in which we live.

For good or ill, we are living in a springtime of ideologies, Gramsci’s “time of monsters”, where strange and unlikely political creeds proliferate on Twitter like sexual identities on Tumblr. Whatever the likelihood of our societies soon emulating Faye’s Archaeofuturistic vision — and it is presumably very unlikely — it is equally unlikely that we will return to the world of the near past.

The post-war global order enabled by American hegemony has gone, and will never return. The dominant category of books on Gove’s shelves, the autobiographies of American centrist politicians, represent a world as lost and irretrievable as the biographies of Europe’s absolute monarchs would have seemed exactly one century ago.

If we accept, as post-liberals as well as thinkers of far-left and far-right do, that the ideology of liberalism has exhausted itself, broken by its weak correspondence to reality, then we must accept that some successor ideology will eventually appear to replace it. Whatever that ideology will be, it most probably already exists, like Communism a century ago, as an obscure fringe belief waiting for a crisis in which to assert itself.

In the United States, discussions over the merits of Catholic Integralism are raging through mainstream conservatism, despite the minuscule likelihood of the American state reordering itself in such a direction. In Britain as well as continental Europe, citizens have been slaughtered by adherents of Salafi Jihadism, another radical challenge to liberal beliefs which posits itself as a successor ideology.

The merits and challenges posed by fringe ideologies such as these, rather than the petty concerns of party competition, are the grand matter of political thought, and it is reassuring rather than disturbing that our elected representatives are alert to them.

Some of the shrillest Twitter analysts of Gove’s bookshelves have spent years agitating for the political success of devotees of a murderous 20th century fringe ideology, itself now jettisoned on the wreckage of history. The radical left-wing publisher Verso — as far to the left of centrist thought as Faye is to the right, though more socially acceptable — has published all manner of strange and unlikely manifestos in recent years, from demanding the abolition of the family  to asserting that we can live in a world of endless growth and consumption derived from mining asteroids.

Both ideas are absurd, but while we can be grateful that the last election saw their advocates firmly shunted away from political power, neither book should be banned, only considered on its own merits and then ridiculed. The existence of eccentric works like these is, however, broadly positive, in that it shows people are giving serious consideration to what should replace the intellectual and political framework dying all around us.

We should be pleased that our political representatives are reading offbeat ideas, not necessarily because they believe them, but because they represent the strange intellectual and political ferment of the early 21^st century. The idea that There Is No Alternative to the neoliberal consensus is long gone. There are, if anything, too many alternatives, and they represent a future as dangerous as it is exciting.

As well as reading Faye, Gove and other British politicians should be investigating a wide variety of radical thinkers of left and right, from the post-anarchist work of Murray Bookchin to the idiosyncratic Marxist cultural criticism of Mark Fisher, the Catholic critiques of liberal democracy of Patrick Deneen and Ryszard Legutko, the rejection of modernity wrought in fiction by Michel Houellebecq and Paul Kingsnorth, and whatever other responses to what we can call the crisis of the 21^st century are now circulating in the marketplace of ideas. After all, as Faye himself archly notes in Archaeofuturism, “modernity already belongs to a past that is over.”