Against the Machine

We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and

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The quest for perfection is a quest for homogeneity and control, and it leads to the gulag and the guillotine, the death camp and the holy war. Even if we could agree on what perfection amounted to, we would none of us be equipped to build it.

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We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. A rootless society is like a society with no sacred order: it is adrift, and open to capture by dangerous forces.

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her brilliant and singular book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French writer and reluctant mystic Simone Weil put the case starkly: To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future…Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.[1]

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‘The only punishment capable of punishing Hitler, and deterring little boys thirsting for greatness in coming centuries from following his example’, she proclaimed, ‘is such a total transformation of the meaning attached to greatness that he should thereby be excluded from it’.[2] A transformation of the meaning attached to greatness. Perhaps this has always been the task, and perhaps it has always been urgent. But it certainly is now. Our society has attached a meaning to greatness that is not as far away from Hitler’s as it would like to believe, despite our cant about democracy and freedom. Our idols today are economic conquest, unending ‘growth’ built on turning all life into ‘resources’ for human consumption, scientism disguised as objective inquiry, manic forward motion, and the same old quest for perfectibility.

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The history of religion offers no shortage of tyrannies and persecutions, but its secular replacement has, if anything, fared worse. What does ‘greatness’ mean, then? Where should it aim its gaze?

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For centuries now, men of the white race have everywhere destroyed the past, stupidly, blindly, both at home and abroad. If in certain respects there has been, nevertheless, progress during this period, it is not because of this frenzy but in spite of it, under the impulse of what little of the past remained alive.[3]

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Now we find ourselves rootless, rudderless, unmoored in a great sea of chaos; angry, confused, shouting at the world and each other. We have made of our world a nihil.

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The majority of humanity is now living in megacities, cut off from non-human nature, plugged into the Machine, controlled by it, reduced to it.

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‘Our age is so poisoned by lies’, wrote Weil, ‘that it converts everything it touches into a lie’.[4]

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When a plant is uprooted, it withers and then dies. When the same happens to a person, or a people, or a planetful of both, the result is the same. Our crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This, now, is the reality we have to wrestle with—and transcend.

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A society that could create a hell like Passchendaele (where my own great-grandfather was a sniper), and pull much of the world into it, seemed to be suffering from some terrible sickness.

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As the culture grows, it coalesces around a distinct ‘Idea’. Each culture exists to fulfill this Idea, though it may not know it. The culture rises and grows, reaches its full potential and then flowers. The Idea floats off into the world like pollen on the wind. This is the golden age. Having fulfilled itself, then, the culture ‘suddenly hardens, its blood congeals, its force breaks down and it becomes civilisation’. At this point, it may create great monuments, build empires, erect glorious buildings, produce great art—yet its life force is already seizing up. Its peasantry is gone, sucked into the urban slums; the small towns have become sprawling cities; its spiritual life has ossified; and its arts have become self-referential. Civilisation has triumphed, and civilisation ultimately only has one final arbiter of value: money.

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At this point, the decline begins in earnest. The uprooting of everything and everyone, the quest for glory, the construction of empires and monuments, the accumulation of wealth and the subsequent dependency upon it: all of it creates an exploited, unhappy mass population in the ‘barrack-cities’ which are easy prey for corporations, media manipulators and demagogues.

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Spengler’s prediction on this front was clear: the age of cosmopolis was the beginning of the end of all civilisations, from China’s Warring States to Ancient Rome. The resulting decline in each case paved the way for ‘Caesarism’: the rise of demagogues promising to bring order to increasingly formless chaos. After several hundred years of such centralised tyranny, the civilisation finally succumbed to the weight of history and was replaced by another. This, he said, would be the fate of the West; and soon.

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He had discovered that we don’t get to choose the shape of our Caesars, or their designs. Perhaps all we can do is try to make sure we do not prepare the ground for them to spring from.

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What is a culture? It is a story that a people tells itself. Whether or not that story emerges from the Earth and then creates a people to tell it—as Spengler believed and as I am tempted to believe too—we build and rebuild our cultures every day, in the stories we tell our children and ourselves. Stories about who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Stories about the deeper meaning of human life,

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Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.[2]

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Only birth can conquer death. At the end of a culture, the real work is not lamentation or desperate defence—both instinctive but futile reactions—but the creation of something new. ‘Peace then is a snare’, Campbell continues; ‘war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn’.

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Christopher Dawson, amongst others, taught us that those shibboleths had emerged, however imperfectly, from the Christian story: the story that built ‘the West’. If our Faustian culture dethroned Christ from his place at the sacred centre of our culture, and if that Faustian urge has now burned itself out, what remains? What remains is a void—or, to put it another way, an empty throne. But a throne never remains empty for long: something has to fill it. It has been a long time since the West was in any way Christian. It feels like a long time, too, since we have had any real roots, or any real sense of cultural purpose. And yet there is a sense of movement: a sense that we are being taken somewhere by some force which is restlessly pushing forward and whose values seem Faustian still. This thing has common words attached to it. Sometimes we call it ‘…

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For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: ‘to conquer death by birth’. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’—the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up some of the exhausted old plants if you need to—carefully, now—but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it…

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This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can.…

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The more machines there are to replace men, the more men there will be in society who are nothing but…

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there comes a time—and an advancing age—when a man has to admit defeat. I have a lot of grass, it grows too fast at this time of year, and my children are not strapping, interested or free enough to form a mowing team all summer. The hardware shop beckoned. There was no way out.

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The notion that new machinery equates to ‘progress’ is probably as old as civilisation, or at least as old as modernity. In my lifetime, all the labour- and time-saving technologies which have been pushed at us, from the microwave oven to the internet, have given us things we didn’t previously have, and taken plenty more away, but one thing none of them has done is to save either time or labour. I’m old enough to remember, for example, when we were promised that the advent of email would save us hours of time: no more faxing, or opening and replying to letters! Now we spend, by some estimates, thirty days a year on email alone,[1] and it is increasingly impossible to be out of touch with anyone, anywhere.

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This is the devil’s bargain of the technological society, and we have been falling for it forever: embrace the new, lose the old, and find yourself more deeply entwined in a technological web from which you cannot extricate yourself even if you want to.

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‘The fate of our times’, wrote pioneering sociologist Max Weber, ‘is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world’.[2]

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The last century, we all realize, has witnessed a radical transformation in the entire human environment, largely as a result of the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences upon technology…Never since the Pyramid Age have such vast physical changes been consummated in so short a time. All these changes have, in turn, produced alterations in the human personality, while still more radical transformations, if this process continue unabated and uncorrected, loom ahead.[4]

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Mumford died in 1990, before the internet, before smartphones, before the rising age of AI and Smart Everything, but he saw precisely what was coming. ‘With this new “megatechnics” ’, he wrote, the dominant minority will create a uniform, all-enveloping, super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine-conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of depersonalized, collective organizations.[5]

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These corporations operate via a global technological network of staggering power and complexity—undersea cables, orbiting satellites, monitoring devices in our homes and in our pockets, and, soon, web-connected streets, buildings and appliances, all monitoring us in real time and selling us what we didn’t know we needed. They are facilitated by equally depersonalised collective states, which exist not to promote the interests of their citizens as expressed via ‘democracy’ (despite what those corporate-controlled media and entertainment systems would have us believe), but to service the corporations and provide for their interests: a process known as ‘economic growth’.

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The growth has no specific aim and no end in sight, and can always be justified by pointing to problems—poverty, environmental degradation—which were in many cases caused by the growth, but which can now only be solved by more of it. It is facilitated by the production and consumption of ‘goods and services’, the desire (or ‘need’) for which has been manufactured by vast marketing and advertising concerns whose best minds are trained in the essence of psychological manipulation.

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The rise and triumph of the internet—the neurological network of the Machine—has meant that there are now few places on Earth to which we can escape from the incessant noise of this state-corporate ‘growth’ and the incessant urge to contribute to it by clicking, scrolling, buying and competing. It has prescribed all of our values and proscribed the alternatives, and it shows no sign of stopping. It cannot stop, in fact, for to do so would mean collapse. Growth has become an end in itself, long-divorced from any means. And as the wilderness writer Edward Abbey once pointed out: ‘growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’.[6] This, then, is the Machine. It is not simply the sum total of various individual technologies we have cleverly managed to rustle up—cars, laptops, robot mowers and the rest. In fact, such ‘technics’, as Mumford calls them, are the product of the Machine, not its essence. The Machine is, rather, a tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition. The Machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies, which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward, and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world. To do that, it must raze or transmute many older and less measurable things: rooted human communities, wild nature, human nature, human freedom, beauty, faith and the many deeper values which we all adhere to in…

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A machine made of human parts. This is what Mumford called the ‘megamachine’: an entire society ordered from the top down, justified by a mythos employed by its leaders and driven by a desire for ‘order, power, predictability and above all, control’. The archetypal example of the megamachine, in Mumford’s account, came not from modern Europe or America, but from Pharaonic Egypt, whose legions of enslaved pyramid-builders were conditioned to think and behave like cogs in a vast, inhuman mechanism. ‘The workers who carried out these designs’, he writes, ‘had minds of a new order: mechanically conditioned, executing each task in strict obedience to instructions, infinitely patient, limiting their response to the word of command. Machine work can be done only by machines. These workers during their period of service were, as it were, stripped down to their reflexes, in order to ensure a mechanically perfect performance’.

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The pyramids may be four thousand years old, but the legacy of the megamachine assembled to build them is horribly familiar to us now: ‘a waste of destroyed villages and cities, and poisoned soils: the prototype of similar “civilised” atrocities today.’ As for those pyramids, ‘what are they but the precise static equivalents of our own space rockets? Both devices for securing, at an extravagant cost, a passage to Heaven for the favoured few’.[8]

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But, says Mumford, no society would go to all this effort for purely material ends. The Machine is not simply a vast, soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment. ‘Communities never exert themselves to the utmost, still less curtail the individual life’, claims Mumford, ‘except for what they regard as a great religious end…. Where such efforts and sacrifices seem to be made for purely economic advantages, it will turn out that this secular purpose has itself become a god, a sacred libidinous object, whether identified as Mammon or not’.

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history, from Egypt to Babylon, Sumeria to Rome, whenever the Machine falls, we work to build it up again, because at some level we need to hear the story that it tells us about ourselves. ‘The one lasting contribution of the megamachine’, concludes Mumford, ‘was the myth of the machine itself: the notion that this machine was, by its very nature, absolutely irresistible—and yet, provided one did not oppose it, ultimately beneficent. That magical spell still enthralls both the controllers and the mass victims of the megamachine today.’

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But today’s milder forms of resistance are quickly co-opted too. The once-radical green movement, in which I cut my teeth, has been transformed into a Machine accelerant. A movement which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialise the global food supply, track and trace our consumption patterns and promote a vision of ‘sustainability’ that would make any Fortune 500 company smile. Feminism, which began as a movement calling for the equal treatment of women, has become a device for filling the workforce with females while eroding the inconveniently un-Machine-like family unit. As for that ‘social justice’ movement that keeps conservatives awake at night: its ‘radicalism’ just happens to be Machine-shaped. Here is where we find ourselves: in a world in which all of our desires, needs, projects and even attempts at resistance end up furthering the progress of the Machine. The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism; the triumph of ‘reason’ over ‘superstition’; scientism; commercialism and the primacy of market values: all of these go to make up the unseen and unquestioned value system within which we live, and to which we feel there is simply no alternative.

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If the Machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.

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‘For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out’.[9]

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is almost impossible now to imagine the thrilling upheaval that the early days of the French Revolution must have represented to the intellectuals and radical aristocrats who were its progenitors. Like all revolutions of its kind, notably those which followed in Russia and China, the French Revolution was a product not of ‘the people’ but of a disaffected elite, inspired in this case by the ideas of philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau who scorned ancient hierarchies and structures and promoted instead notions of individual liberty, radical patriotism, virtuous living, intellectual inquiry and market economics.

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into a new shape by an elite that claimed to be working on behalf of its people. The actual people, meanwhile, according to Schama, when they supported the Revolution, often did so not because they wanted to institute a new dawn of Reason and Virtue but because the old regime, led by King Louis XVI, had in their view been too modern.

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The liberalism and individualism which fired the minds of the Revolutionaries were more repulsive to many French people than the corruptions of the Ancien Régime. The ‘people’ in whose name the execution of the monarch would be carried out didn’t want more modernity, but less. Many of the ordinary folk who took to the streets in protest, explains Schama, ‘had never been much enamoured of economic liberalism or individualism. Much of their anger had been a reaction against the unpredictable and impersonal operation of the market…They were not only indifferent, then, but actually hostile to much of the modernising and reformist enterprise embarked on, first by the monarchy and then by successive revolutionary inheritor regimes’.[4]

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The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.[5]

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Removing the old customs and strictures led not to a flowering of virtue but to mass outbreaks of revenge. Ideas which seemed intriguing in the intellectual salons of Paris—ideas like dividing the whole country up into eighty-one perfectly equal squares, each administered as a unit of local government—turned out to be ridiculously unworkable when actually tried.

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The Cult of Reason lasted little more than a year before Robespierre, now ensconced as France’s new dictator, replaced it with his own ‘Cult of the Supreme Being’. Robespierre despised Catholicism, but he despised atheism almost as much. The people, he believed, needed something divine to look up to, but it needed to be something with ‘social utility’. His ‘Supreme Being’ was God remade in the image of patriotic, revolutionary France. Like its predecessor, the new, rational religion lasted only a few months, disappearing when its creator was guillotined by the Terror he had helped to create.

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The problem, though, is that this story delivers other goods at the same time: climate change, nuclear weapons and the massed dead of the industrial wars and revolutions of the twentieth century are also products of the Age of Reason. We want to believe, like good Western liberals, that horrors like Nazism or the mass murders of the Communist regimes were driven by irrational fanaticism: that they were in some ways reversions to a ‘barbaric’ past, the opposite of our ‘reasonable’ and humane present. The truth, though, is the opposite. In his 1992 book Voltaire’s Bastards, a broadside against what he calls ‘the dictatorship of reason in the West’, John Ralston Saul notes that the ‘grandiose and dark events’ which ‘overcame Western society’ in the modern period, from religious bloodbaths to the Napoleonic wars, ‘seemed to do so thanks to rational methods’. Reason was supposed to be a moral force, but it turned out to be anything but. The twentieth century, which, according to Saul, saw ‘the final victory of pure reason in power’, also saw ‘unprecedented unleashings of violence and of power deformed’. It is hard, he writes, ‘to avoid noticing that the murder of six million Jews was a perfectly rational act’.[6] That ‘perfectly rational act’, as Simon Schama pointed out, was a direct descendant of the murderous clarity of Robespierre and co: the guillotine, after all, was designed as a humane means of dealing with the enemies of the Revolution. Mass death, yes: but rational mass death.

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This is the essence of Reason’s failure—and that failure in turn has happened because Reason, in and of itself, has always been little more than a fiction. In his 1994 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses the fruits of a lifetime’s work to demolish the notion that anything like an abstracted ‘reason’ existed. Reason, he showed, was intimately connected to emotion; one could not exist without the other. In fact, in many of Damasio’s own patients, damage to the emotional centres of the brain, which rendered them unable to feel but still able to think, rendered them effectively disabled. Reason, it turned out, was not a superior alternative to intuition, emotion or instinct, but a

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manifestation of it. There could be no mind without the body; no unprejudiced ‘concepts’ or unpolluted ‘models’ of reality. There could, in short, be no Reason without the messy world it was embedded in.

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What is so striking about all of this is that we are using money, time, manufactured technology and artificial chemicals to do what a river or a lake does for free and with ease; what the world’s ecosystems, in fact, do for everything that lives, including us. What is so striking is the immense complexity of the natural processes of the planet, and our inability to even really understand, let alone reproduce, them.

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But if a machine is the metaphor you use to represent other living beings, then a machine is what you will make of the world. And when you have made a machine of the world, you are going to have a question on your hands: What fuel does this thing run on? And very soon, you are going to understand the answer before you have even asked it: The fuel is nature. The fuel is life. The fuel is you.

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In his book The Unintended Reformation, the American academic Brad S. Gregory traces the root of the West’s spiritual rot not to Augustine but to the obscure (in his time) thirteenth-century Franciscan friar and theologian John Duns Scotus. Before Duns Scotus, says Gregory, Western Christians, like their Eastern counterparts, had regarded the God they worshipped as something entirely other: something so untraceable and mysterious that its essence could not be named or grasped. They saw their creator as ‘radically distinct from the universe as a whole, which he did not fashion by ordering anything already existent but rather created entirely ex nihilo’. This God could not be named or defined or pinned down: at the heart of the matter was a mystery that the human mind is simply incapable of fathoming. It could even be said that God did not actually exist, if ‘existence’ meant inhabiting the same plane as created matter.

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Duns Scotus, though, was wrestling with an intellectual dilemma. If God was this distinct from everything he created, then how could the human mind even understand him? How could anything be said about God at all? In an indication of the direction in which Western Christianity would head, Duns Scotus believed that human reason must be capable of saying something about God—or else why would God have given us reason? We could only ever have a chance to understand God, he thought, if we share his mode of being. To solve this problem, Duns Scotus declared that God did, in fact, ‘exist’ on the level of material being: God, while being above all created things, nevertheless still ‘belonged to the same order or type of existence as his creation’.[8]

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By basing their new version of the faith on the notion of sola scriptura—that there should be no authority but the Bible—they unleashed the radical individualism on which the modern world would be built. With tradition and authority demolished, reason would become the only ‘basis for argument about God, creation and morality’.

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Science built the Machine. Now the Machine will rebuild the world, and us with it. As Sherrard has it: There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artificial and mechanised as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.[9]

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Perhaps you can see where I’m going here. The history of magic in the West is a long one, but one thing it teaches is that what we call ‘magic’ and what we call ‘science’ are intertwined. Many of the pioneers of science we know today were also magicians of one sort or another. Bacon was said to be a Freemason and an alchemist. Isaac Newton wrote far more about alchemy than he did about physics, and many of the founders of England’s Royal Society, still one of its foremost scientific institutions, were alchemists or mages. In the early modern period, today’s distinction between ‘science’ (real, good, objective) and ‘magic’ (fantastical, bad, superstitious) did not really exist. Both were branches of the same effort: to understand the mysterious forces of the universe, and ultimately to control them. Here is Francis Bacon’s definition of science: The knowledge of causes and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.

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And here is the occultist Aleister Crowley’s definition of magic: The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the will.

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Who and where we are is always a story, justified by the tale of where we think we come from.

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But it would be wrong, too, to deny the other side of the story: that cities, by their existence, their growth and their ongoing colonisation of the world’s wealth and resources, render other forms of life so hard that the escape to the slums is the only recourse for many. Once a society becomes primarily urban, it is locked into a process of metastasising growth which will, in the end, lead to the destruction of other ways of being, and other forms of life, via the monoculture of the Machine—a Machine which is primarily a creation of the city. A Machine civilisation is an urban civilisation, and its worldview and direction is that of the urban dwellers who build, justify and benefit from

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Whether or not ‘prosperity and security’ are a good description of life in a modern city—especially for the poor—the result of such a ‘submission’ is a new sense of immortality, an ‘expansion of human powers’, a Spenglerian drive to create an entirely new world. In cities, humanity could dream vainglorious dreams. ‘Men in cities could become as exalted as gods,’ says Mumford, ‘released from inhibiting conformities and a paralysing sense of their own pettiness. Reinforced by the visible presence of great numbers of their own kind…the kings and governors and their subjects joined in a relentless collective assault on every part of the environment: now form-giving, now expressionist and exhibitionistic, now purely destructive.’[3]

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These ‘barrack cities’, as Spengler referred to them, which now contain the majority of mankind, are tied up with our ultimate fate. Once a structure of this size and complexity has been created, it must be maintained. In the case of a modern city, this means that the surrounding lands, and then the lands further afield, must be colonised to supply it and its inhabitants, their whims and desires and needs. Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it; and a modern world-city sucks in the world. The impacts of this are measurable.

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The lesson is old and growing more obvious daily: a city, unlike a village, can never be self-sufficient.

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A giant city is a kind of micro-empire: it cannot exist without enclosing and harvesting lands and peoples elsewhere to provide for its own growth. One of the great myths of the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the inclination to fend for themselves. A city dweller exists to serve the city. If she is lucky, the city will also serve her. If she is unlucky, she will end up juggling three jobs and trying to scrabble together enough pennies to feed her children. The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but it treats its poor and marginalised with a contempt that the village would regard with incomprehension.

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This is the modern Machine city: global in scale and ambition, bland, homogenised and empty at its heart. Plato’s ideal city, and the real cities of the pre-modern period, were a combination, sometimes uneasy, sometimes harmonious, of ambition and aim. They were religious centres, cultural hubs, marketplaces, dwelling places, loci of power. The twenty-first century city exists mainly for one purpose: profit. Everything that exists there, from schools to art galleries to concert halls to government buildings, is pointed towards this end. You can judge a culture, I think, by its tallest buildings; what it chooses to reach towards is a reflection of its soul and purpose. The tallest buildings in a modern city are not cathedrals, temples, or even palaces: they are skyscrapers, which are homes to banks, finance houses and global corporations.

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In city culture, as Mumford puts it, ‘every aspect of life must be brought under control: controlled weather, controlled movement, controlled association, controlled production, controlled prices, controlled fantasy, controlled ideas.’ The purpose of all of this is, in the end, ‘to accelerate the process of mechanical control itself.’

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In the future that is offered to us we are not even cogs in the Machine, for the Machine can increasingly operate without human input. Mumford, as ever, is bracingly frank about where this leads:

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Never before has the ‘citadel’ exercised such atrocious power over the rest of the human race. Over the greater part of history, the village and the countryside remained a constant reservoir of fresh life, constrained indeed by the ancestral patterns of behaviour that had helped make man human, but with a sense of both human limitations and human possibilities. No matter what the errors and aberrations of the rulers of the city, they were still correctible. Even if whole urban populations were destroyed, more than nine tenths of the human race still remained outside the circle of destruction. Today this factor of safety has gone: the metropolitan explosion has carried both the ideological and the chemical poisons of the metropolis to every part of the earth; and the final damage may be irretrievable.[9]

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But this global Gomorrah we have built, whose ideologues criss-cross the world by plane, selling the ideology of the Machine, invincible in pursuit of their progressive destiny—it is founded on sand. The more the global metropolis expands, the more fragile it becomes. The more it ravages, destroys and cuts off alternative lifeways, the more monocultural its picture of the world grows and the more it works against the laws of nature.

Ref. 72CF-O

A centralised Machine society which must drain the natural world in order to continue its expansion is the very definition of ‘unsustainable’; which means it will not be sustained. Something will have to give. It is already giving. We can all feel

Ref. B557-P

reclaim his Elysium. He failed, as he was always going to: Elysium, once lost, can never be restored by human hands. When I visited London recently, the city in which I and my parents and their parents and theirs had all grown up, I saw the Machine’s advance as only an outsider could. Till-less shops and cashless ice cream vans and train tickets purchased through smartphone apps and ever-present street cameras and proliferating 5G towers and soon-to-be-humanless train stations. Soon enough, human contact will be a luxury good, and like all luxury goods it will sell at a premium.

Ref. 4313-Q

Ozymandias sits on his throne at the heart of the Wen, smiling down on the uprooted, directionless masses at his feet. His statues are everywhere. We can all be assured that they will last just as long as the city.

Ref. 4BC1-R

It was a year or two back, on a short family trip in our van, that I saw something about my world, and by implication myself, that I haven’t been able to unsee. Sometimes this happens to each of us: something that you believe you ‘know’ in some abstract, intellectualised sense becomes suddenly real in a more embedded way. You see it playing out, sinking in, and then it is no longer an abstraction but the pattern of your reality. On this occasion we were in a small town—a nice little place, full of holidaying people like us. There were pubs and restaurants open, and the streets were full of tables and chairs. There were shops and markets. There were people in vans, like us, and other people hiring boats and other people eating and drinking. There were leaflets in the tourist information centre advertising country house tours and chocolate makers and cycling trips. It was a nice little place, and all of a sudden I saw it for what it was. I saw what was happening here, and by extension everywhere, and within me and all of us. I saw that everything around me was dedicated solely to the immediate gratification of the senses.

Ref. 7067-S

Food, drink, fun, entertainment, games, probably some sex somewhere in the mix. All of it came together suddenly into a kind of package of sensory overload and I saw that this was what we were, what we had become without really thinking about or planning it. Stimulating the senses, then reacting to the stimulus, profiting from it all: this was what our society was all about. Feeding the pleasure centres, spending and spending to keep it all coming at us.

Ref. 5D02-T

We’re all human, and that’s still (mostly) OK. Since at least the Neolithic we’ve been adorning ourselves with imported foreign jewellery and roasting meat to perfection. The pursuit of sensory pleasure certainly took up most of my younger life, even though these days my main vices—the public ones, at least—are chocolate and cheese. But the pursuit of instant pleasure as an organising principle of society? A culture that is becoming little more than a pleasure dome, dedicated to ‘growth’ and a supposedly consequent ‘happiness’? This is something that ought to bring about more than moral doubts.

Ref. 4BF3-U

But then they’re not really supposed to deal with it: they’re supposed to keep it away from us. We don’t know what else to do with all this crap, so we—for example—ship thousands of tonnes of toxic waste, containing carcinogenic chemicals, to Nigeria, and just dump it on the beaches. The same way we dumped asbestos on the beaches in Bangladesh, and millions of tonnes of poisonous waste in Indonesia. The same way we run our old ships up onto the beaches in China and India, and leave them for the locals to break up—if they can. The same way we dump nineteen million tonnes of plastic into the environment every year.[2]

Ref. 81AD-V

Had enough yet? Me too. But we need to understand the consequences of the Machine we have built, and which is now rebuilding us so that we may become more perfect consumers, shopping for individual fulfilment in its global marketplace of goods, ideas and identities. We need to understand just what this Machine encourages within us, what it inflames and what we have become: a cheap, digitised version of Late Rome, looking elsewhere when the container ships take away our mess to be dumped on the poor.

Ref. AD58-W

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and feasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Ref. 1C50-X

Marx and Engels, after all, were both self-styled revolutionaries. As such, they recognised that the capitalism they set out to destroy was the most effective revolutionary force in history. The ‘bourgeois’ class which drove it on, they wrote, ‘has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.’ It has also, perhaps even more radically, ‘converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

Ref. ED9D-Y

And here we are. I’m no Marxist, but The Communist Manifesto describes the world we are in with brilliant prescience, despite being written nearly two centuries ago. The mass consumption of the world, and the mass excretion of our culture’s toxic byproducts into its waters and woods and skies, is the natural conclusion of the world which Marx and Engels saw being born, and which they pinioned in words so well. Once the ‘bourgeois revolution’ had cleared the ground of awkward obstacles like the peasantry, the artisans, common land, local cultures and traditions, family and home life, a sense of history

Ref. C261-Z

A force which has driven all this onwards, which is the lifeblood of the Machine, and which, through its untrammelling, acts as an acid which burns through all past structures and values. An acid which is now acting to dissolve our ecosystems and cultural forms, as it has dissolved so much else. What is this force? What could be so powerful that it could dissolve away centuries of our cultural inheritance; could dissolve forests and oceans, great faiths, nations, traditions—everything that makes a human life real—and replace it with this…pleasure dome?

Ref. 284B-A

We can usefully understand our time by seeing in it the final result of the centuries-long tension between the merchant class and everyone else. Pre-modern societies, in every case that I know of, always kept the merchant class in their place, and that place was usually right at the bottom. This was the system known today as ‘feudalism’. The social pyramid during Japan’s Edo Period, to take a typical example, placed the Emperor at the top (of course), followed by the military leader—the shōgun—and then the aristocratic daimyo class. Next were the military nobility—the samurai—and beneath them the peasants—those who produced the food for the nation. Below the peasants came the artisans—the makers. And then, right at the very bottom, came the merchants.

Ref. 73DD-B

Why were the merchants the lowest order of society? Because their work created nothing of value. In fact, it created nothing at all. This was the pattern worldwide. In medieval Europe, usury—the lending of money at interest—was a sin, as it still is in Islamic nations. In this continent too, the merchants, bankers and money people were hemmed in by a network of customs, religious edicts and structures like guilds and professional…

Ref. 5A4D-C

But the story of the world since the eighteenth century has been the story of the setting of that flame, and the resulting fire. We are all bourgeois now, which is to say that we are all driven forward by want. We have all learned a bourgeois version of history, too, in which medieval ‘feudalism’ is seen as dark and barbaric, while modern capitalism is equated with freedom and liberty. Even those who can see through this partial version of history—and can see the…

Ref. F320-D

In a famous essay from 1930—an essay which is in many ways an advert for the utter failure of the modern ‘science’ of economics—the British economist John Maynard Keynes explained that it might take another century to solve ‘the economic problem’ worldwide, ensuring the end of poverty and the creation of a wealthy, leisured modern planet. When that happened, we might again become virtuous as a society: I see us free, therefore, to return to some of…

Ref. 995A-E

of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of…

Ref. 082A-F

This Utopia, however, would take a while to reach, and until it was reached, we would have to pursue ‘growth’ regardless of the short-term cost. ‘But beware!’ warned Keynes. ‘The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.’ There is the devil’s bargain, in black and white. It’s nearly a hundred years now since Keynes wrote those lines. How are we doing at solving his ‘economic problem’? When we look around us, we can see…

Ref. 76E3-G

Four decades after Keynes made his claim, another British economist, E. F. Schumacher, skewered his assumptions in his book Small Is Beautiful. Taking issue with ‘the dominant modern belief’ that the kind of ‘universal prosperity’ narrowly defined by the likes of Keynes would lead to peace or happiness, Schumacher argued instead that entirely the opposite was the case. ‘I suggest’, he wrote, ‘that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.’[4] This made the question of ‘prosperity’ a much bigger issue than the likes of Keynes had suggested. ‘What is at stake’, asserts Schumacher, ‘is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life. Economics…

Ref. 92A8-H

Schumacher knew it, and Keynes knew it too: it’s why he so apologetically explained that we would need to live under a self-made spell for a hundred years, like some fairytale princess. We must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair. What he didn’t foresee was that we would forget that we were pretending. Today we…

Ref. EA49-I

What is interesting about both Schumacher’s and Keynes’s approaches to the plague of want is their openly spiritual perspective on the problem and their almost religious language: in the case of Schumacher, that of a Christian inspired by Buddhist principles. There is a lot of talk here of sin, of wrong and right, of fair and foul. In this, both men distinguish themselves from today’s economists, for whom talk like this is embarrassingly passé. We are all grown-ups now, and we…

Ref. CBE9-J

Take, for example, the famous list of the seven deadly sins in the Western Christian tradition: gluttony, lust, pride, wrath, greed, sloth and envy. With the possible exception of sloth, we currently live in a culture which not only sees nothing wrong with these values but actively encourages them. The pursuit of these six vices is no longer something to…

Ref. 6E67-K

So this is who we are. You don’t have to be a Christian or a Buddhist to see where it has led us, and where it will lead next. Want is the acid. Capitalism is the battery. Growth is the engine. Greed is the forming energy that moves us to where we are inevitably headed. What is the brake? The answer is as hard as it is old-fashioned: limits. Modernity is a machine for destroying limits. The ideology of the Machine—the liberation of individual desire—sees our world as a blank slate to be written on afresh when the old limits of…

Ref. 2552-L

What Schumacher knew but Marx denied—with all the terrible consequences that the twentieth century produced—was that the solution to the triumph of want, as far as there can ever be one, is not political revolution followed by a grand new social structure, but something harder and less spectacular: spiritual vigilance. The problem of want can be guided by systems and cultures, but it is, ultimately, a matter of the heart. Want will dissolve…

Ref. E94E-M

Want is the acid, but the heart is both its provenance and its potential enemy. I often ask myself: Do I want too much? Do I grasp too hard? Do I live too heavily? The answer is always yes, and in spades. Plenty of people don’t have the luxury of asking these questions. I think this…

Ref. 1BA5-N

Fortunately, we don’t have to do it alone. ‘It is hardly likely’, wrote Schumacher, in the conclusion to Small Is Beautiful, ‘that twentieth-century man is called upon to discover truth that had never been discovered…

Ref. D557-O

known since the dawn of time, which is why every sane culture has discouraged it rather than making it the basis of its value system. But an ancient problem, as Schumacher’s closing paragraph emphasised, will have ancient solutions—if we choose to go looking for them. To those who ask ‘What can I actually do?’, he said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology…

Ref. BA64-P

response, the shōgun took radical action: he closed the nation’s borders, expelled all the Europeans, strictly limited international trade, proscribed Christianity and, as a grim example, crucified the leading Christians. Japan had embarked on a major gamble; it would exist in splendid isolation and hope to be left alone. For two hundred years the gamble paid off, preserving the country’s culture and feudal structures—until that day in July 1853 when the shōgun’s luck finally ran

Ref. 3789-Q

Fillmore’s letter was a ‘request’ that Japan open its borders to trade with the USA. America was not here for conquest, wrote the president. Perry and his men came in peace—as long as they got what they wanted. Fillmore described his country to the Japanese like this: The United States of America reach from ocean to ocean, and our Territory of Oregon and state of California lie directly opposite to the dominions of your imperial majesty. Our steamships can go from California to Japan in eighteen days. Our great state of California produces about sixty millions of dollars in gold every year, besides silver, quicksilver, precious stones, and many other valuable articles. Japan is also a rich and fertile country, and produces many very valuable articles. Your imperial majesty’s subjects are skilled in many of the arts. I am desirous that our two countries should trade with each other, for the benefit both of Japan and the United States. The new nation of America, according to its leader, was best described not in terms of its values, its history, its spiritual beliefs or the makeup of its people, but by how much gold and silver it could produce, and how fast its ships could move. America was expanding, and it intended to trade with Japan whether Japan wanted it or not. In case the president’s tactful missive had not been clear enough about the bottom line, an additional letter from Perry was bracingly frank: Many of the large ships of war destined to visit Japan have not yet arrived in these seas, though they are hourly expected; and the undersigned, as an evidence of his friendly intentions, has brought but four of the smaller ones, designing, should it become necessary, to return to Edo in the ensuing spring with a much larger force. But it is expected that the government of your imperial majesty will render such return unnecessary, by acceding at once to the very reasonable and pacific overtures contained in the President’s letter. America had not come to Japan on a cultural exchange trip: it had come to break open new markets for its goods, and to inject its commercial attitudes into a country which had always held those attitudes in contempt. Feudal Japan was a nation which kept its merchants and traders at the bottom of the social pyramid,

Ref. BE7A-R

‘Openness’ is both the aim and the core value of the age of globalism. It is, in the telling of those who promote it, always a good thing. Open minds, open hearts, open doors, open borders; open to trade, to growth, to change, to progress, to ‘diversity’ in all its manifestations. In many of the ructions that have overtaken parts of the West in recent years—the UK’s Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump in the US, and ongoing populist insurgencies in Western European nations being the most obvious examples—‘openness’ was presented as a value under threat from those who would prefer instead to remain ‘closed’. To be ‘closed’ is to be backward, bigoted, prejudiced, fearful, and largely obsolete. ‘Closed’ people must be encouraged—or forced—‘open’, for their own benefit and that of the wider project, just as Japan was by Commodore Perry.

Ref. 4025-S

This was cosmopolis: the dream of a universal, rational way of being. The word itself was a portmanteau, combining cosmos—the universe—with polis—the human realm. Cosmo-polis would combine the human and the non-human in one grand schema that would make the horrors of the Thirty Years War impossible to revisit. By systematising reality, utilising the new sciences, promoting reason over religion, and supporting the new pattern of nation-states which emerged from the Peace of Westphalia over local or feudal loyalties, Europeans could build a better world, one less amenable to irrational, bloody chaos.

Ref. 97C1-T

Friedmanite dreams about the binding friendships resulting from free trade, however, don’t carry much weight in the age of populism. Any talk of the End of History these days is less likely to refer to a final berthing in the port of liberal democracy than to an ecological or cultural meltdown. Politics in the West today could be characterised as a rising tide of complaints from across the spectrum about the impact of too much ‘openness’ on society—complaints which divide, as ever, along tribal lines.

Ref. 109E-U

The flaw in the cosmopolitan dream, now as then, is a simple failure to understand that the world is not ‘rational’, and neither are we. We are crooked timber, and we grow from the ground. Universalist projects ignore that human need for roots, and the attack on culture by commerce fuels destructive want. All of this creates not universal peace but universal upheaval. Like Perry’s arrival in Japan, its effect is to dissolve our previous social bonds, cultural stories, social arrangements and religious commitments in a sea of open, boundless nothing.

Ref. CD3D-V

pulled and pushed and tugged and directed every hour of the day by the demands of the glowing screen. Many people are not paying attention.

Ref. D789-W

‘Twenty years ago’, said Mark, toying with his knight, ‘we were fighting to save wilderness from destruction. Now it seems like we’re just fighting to keep ourselves off screens twenty-four hours a day.’

Ref. BAA7-X

which Mark draws his lines: he is trying, in his own small way, to construct a border around his humanity. He and I both know that borders are porous; but we know too that without them the kingdom will fall.

Ref. 39C4-Y

I have argued that two things are happening as this Machine reaches its maturity. Firstly, an unprecedented technological network of power and control is being constructed worldwide, which is walking us into a tightly controlled future in which both humans and the wider natural world will be bent to this network’s needs. And secondly, in this bending we are losing the essence of what it means to be human. Later, I will be saying a third thing: rebellion is necessary, if we are to remain human at all.

Ref. 9ADF-Z

But why a machine? Why choose this particular image to try and pin down this thing that is enveloping us? Because a machine is an emotionless, inorganic system; something which is pitiless and determined, and which has some task to fulfil. Above all, a machine is something unnatural: something constructed. Specifically, it is constructed of separate parts, all of which, when taken together, perform the wider function for which the machine is designed. If today, then, we live under the reign of the Machine, what is this machine made of? What are its parts, and how do they operate?

Ref. E33C-A

But the Machine is not simply the logical endpoint of certain trends within culture and history. It is not simply a collection of advanced tools, historical designs and political power games. It is that, but it is also something else. It is above all a new type of civilisation: one which is replacing all previous human ways of living, cultures and value systems with something novel and totalising; something which, in some indefinable way, seems to be struggling to be born through us. Something which we are midwifing into existence every time we click and swipe, whether we know it or not. The question is how we can begin to understand it.

Ref. 08BD-B

Ellul’s technique is an attitude of mind, one which replaces spontaneous, human-scale, organic ways of living with a focus on technical, rationalised, planned and directed outcomes. Technique is not the same thing as technology. Humans have always used technologies, or at least tools; but for most of history they have been designed to augment human work rather than to entirely replace it. Technique, on the other hand, when it is taken up as a way of seeing, gives birth to an entirely new type of technology: one which exists to remake the world in the image of technique itself. The kind by which, today, we are all increasingly enslaved.

Ref. 3EFC-C

don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the times we are currently living in would be regarded by many of our ancestors as apocalyptic. The degree of control and monitoring which we endure in ‘developed’ societies, which has been accelerating for decades and which has reached warp speed in the 2020s, is creating a kind of digital holding camp in which we all find ourselves trapped. The rising paranoia that extends now across the political spectrum throughout the Western world—the anger and confusion, the sense of promises broken and established systems gumming up—all of this, I think, can be traced to the rise and consolidation of the Machine, this great matrix which strips from us our understanding of what a human life is, and makes us instead lonely cogs in its drive for self-creation.

Ref. 567F-D

‘It is easy for me to imagine’, wrote Wendell Berry in his extended essay Life Is a Miracle, ‘that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.’ Berry wrote those words twenty years ago, and the great division he foresaw is now upon us: Life versus the Machine. The tension between the virtual and the real, the digital and the organic, the constructed and the born, undergirds all the rifts and ruptures that are opening up within our crumbling society. Where will they lead us—and how, today, are they coming to fruition in the world we are already living in?

Ref. 66BF-E

The modern world shall not be punished. It is the punishment. Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Ref. 5B3F-F

When you are old and aspiring to be wise, you understand that things like this get remembered for a reason, because of the story they are telling you. The story this was telling me was clear enough even at the time. It made me slightly angry and embarrassed and confused all at the same time, but most of all it made me feel like I was missing something. Why didn’t I know any folk songs from my own country? Why did nobody else from my country know any, either?

Ref. 6621-G

you get older, you realise both why home matters and how fragile and elusive it is. Then you find you are living in a world whose forces have set out to destroy your sense of home wherever it can be found. You understand that you are living in a time which has trained its guns on both hearth and heart. You find that the men with the pinstripe suits and the rolled-up umbrellas have been selling your home at markup for hundreds and hundreds of years, and here you are. The numbers all add up. This is called ‘Progress’.

Ref. E99A-H

began this book by exploring the human need for roots—which is another way of framing the need for home—and how the Machine has uprooted us from both nature and culture. These are two very capacious words. The fact that we use them to point at so many things suggests how much they matter, but like most things that matter—love, consciousness, God—there is no agreed-upon definition of either term. The fact that we can’t agree on what ‘culture’ is, for example, is at the root of our so-called culture war. As ever in human history, we are fighting over the ownership of stories, and of meaning.

Ref. 51D9-I

If this is true, we are in a situation in which the Machine has advanced to such a degree that the very possibility of living cultures in ‘advanced’ countries (i.e. the countries most under its sway) is impossible. The direction of modernity is away from land and towards megacities, away from both folk and high culture and into mass online anticulture, and away from any manifestation of God and towards the rule of Mammon. The Machine is the liberal anticulture made manifest. In the new civilisation it is building, culture will be made not by that magical, strange, impossible and miraculous combination of human bodies, wild nature and the soul, but by the Algorithm and the AI.

Ref. 20C1-J

The Screen. Where we are going. The screen is both our main source of distraction from reality and the interface by which we are directed into the coming post-human reality of the Machine.

Ref. C16E-K

We remain, I think, despite our ostensible belief in ‘science and reason’, fundamentally religious people in a religious time. We will always seek some greater meaning, some transcendent truth, and if we can’t or won’t find the real thing we will attempt to create it. This attempt is the story of modernity; the Machine is what we have created to fulfill it. When we forget the proper direction in which to aim our prayers, we will end up aiming them at the ultimate idol: our own image, reflected back at us in our little black screens. We will be kings and queens of a deceptively free world, parading through a liturgy of the self, wondering why the chaos seems to persist so close beneath the surface of this world.

Ref. 8F51-L

Clarkson; only the present mattered, and in the present all people should be equal, as they were in the eyes of God: Nothing is evil that does not harm our fellow men—as many of the existing institutions of society do, and as the repressive humbug and hypocrisy of the self-styled godly certainly do. ‘Swearing i’th light, gloriously’, and ‘wanton kisses’, may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us—a regime in which property is more important than life, marriage than love, faith in a wicked God than the charity which the Christ in us teaches.[2]

Ref. 8DA7-M

Much of the chaos around us at the moment only makes sense once we understand that we are living through a period of massive global upheaval coupled with regional decline. The West has dominated and shaped the globe for centuries, but now, like all empires before it, it is crumbling into decadence and disintegration. As in the 1640s, this political, economic and demographic decline is precipitating what feels to some like a cultural collapse and to others like a period of revolutionary promise. As in the 1640s, the energies being unleashed by the falling structures of the old world cannot be controlled or directed by any of the parties involved. If the failure of Progress has taught us anything, it should be that we were never really in control.

Ref. 0EB8-N

The deflating West is becoming a place of almost pure negation. After decades of cultural inversion, we have forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct, there is nothing left to overturn, and we have come to define ourselves by what we are not. Black is Not-White. Female is Not-Male. Gay is Not-Straight, and Trans is Not-Gay. Muslim is Not-Christian. Weak is Not-Strong. Welcome to the Not-West. Make sure you scan your QR code on the way in, or you’re liable to have your bank account frozen. ‘Devil is God’, declared Clarkson in 1640, ‘Hell is Heaven, Sin Holiness, Damnation Salvation, this and only this in the First Resurrection.’

Ref. 1A01-O

In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of Western modernity and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

Ref. 9EC4-P

America and the world influenced by it, he wrote, was ‘navigating from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way.’ From the patriarchal frying pan, the West had jumped into the post-modern fire. Today, ‘people don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults. The rule is: Where repression was before, fantasy will now be.’ Adults, rather than maturing towards wisdom, ‘regress toward adolescence; and adolescents—seeing that—have no desire to become adults. Few are able to imagine any genuine life coming from the vertical plane—tradition, religion, devotion.’[6]

Ref. F1E0-Q

And in the desert created by late twentieth-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

Ref. BE7B-R

is the Giant—resentful, angry, greedy, marooned in a permanent present—who best represents what we have become, nearly three decades after Bly’s book was published. The culture of inversion is the Giant’s creation, and ours. Adolescent and surly, we can find little good in the past and little hope in the future. Then as now, the governing attitude to our own cultural inheritance is what Bly called ‘a sort of generalized ingratitude.’ This has meant that the culture has been damaged ‘not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors.’ Many of the people he called ‘siblings’ have as a result become ‘convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods’.[8]

Ref. 7761-S

The methods that Western colonial administrators had used to demolish and replace other cultures—rewriting their histories, replacing their languages, challenging their cultural norms, banning or demonising their religions, dismantling their elder system and undermining their cultural traditions—were now being used against us. Only we had not been invaded by hostile outside forces: this time, the hostile forces had emerged from within. No conservative, Bly could nonetheless see that the culture of inversion, already in full swing in the 1990s, was a product of the elite left, who had ‘taken over the role of colonial administrators’, and set about colonising their own culture from within: They teach that European kings were major criminals who dressed well, that feudalism in the Middle Ages was a transparent failure, that the Renaissance amounted to a triumph of false consciousness, that the Magna Carta solved nothing, that the English Royalists were decadent hedonists, that the Puritan governments were brutal, that Mother Theresa was probably sexually disturbed, that the New England town meetings were masks for oppression…that Beethoven wrote imperialist music, that Mencken was a secret fascist, that Roosevelt encouraged Pearl Harbour, that President Kennedy’s Peace Corps did not work, that Freud supported child abuse, and that almost every one of his ideas was wrong.[9]

Ref. 2BB0-T

America, said Bly, was ‘the first culture in history that has colonised itself’.[10] Twenty-five years on, America’s fate is also the fate of the wider West. Our internal colonisers have been ruthlessly effective in the intervening decades, and the ‘culture war’ is a product of their success. ‘If colonialist administrators begin by attacking the vertical thought of the tribe they have conquered, and dismantling the elder system’, he wrote, ‘they end by dismantling everything in sight. That’s where we are.’ Or to put it another way: the word ‘decolonisation’ has two redundant letters in it.

Ref. 238F-U

In our perpetual sibling society—sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, Godless—we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

Ref. ACC2-V

How does it heal itself? Bly, mythologist and poet, had an answer: through story and ritual. The work of the age of inversion and anticulture, which is the culture of the Machine, is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved.

Ref. AEC0-W

The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.

Ref. 0C29-X

In times of conflict, whether our weapons are pikes or words, the temptation is always towards total war. But war is the Giant’s work, and like the Giant it will consume us all if it can. ‘The inexhaustible energies of the cosmos’, wrote Robert Bly, ‘cannot be called down by anger. They are called by extremely elaborate practice—and stories.’[17]

Ref. 83AD-Y

If you have ever asked yourself what kind of ‘revolution’ would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

Ref. 0519-Z

Progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian ‘Red Tory’ philosopher George Grant once observed that ‘the directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor [Herbert] Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.’ These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Ref. 5607-A

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. At its best, it is a gift to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be made to justify their existence, if they can. But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: What happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices—the language of levelling—to tie up its work in pretty bows?

Ref. F617-B

This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not ‘Who should own the means of production?’ or ‘Should we privatise the health service?’ They are ‘What is a woman?’, ‘Where should we implant the microchips?’, ‘How quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?’, and ‘What do you think of my new killer robot?’ The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: neither side of the French assembly has a clue what

Ref. 1200-C

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are. It resists the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Four Ps: people, place, prayer and the past. Neither left nor right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them.

Ref. 98C1-D

The culture war is not, in my view, about politics at all. It’s not even about culture. It is about something else entirely. But what?

Ref. 0B29-E

You probably know what this feels like: sometimes, just for a minute, the stories that support your life dissolve, and something raw is revealed.

Ref. F727-F

All across the culture now, there is an inverse relationship between reality and its presentation, between nature and simulation, between map and territory. This applies to TV ads, general elections, Hollywood films and the daily news. As a result, it increasingly feels like nothing is true and nothing is real—and yet we can’t quite see what is actually wrong. Where are the joins? How are they held together? What is this feeling of discomfort, of unreality, that comes from simply existing amongst all this? Whatever it is, it is this feeling, more than any event or argument, which seems to define our times. Everything is fake now, and we all know it—but how else can we feed ourselves?

Ref. FE5C-G

The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard coined the term ‘hyperreality’ four decades ago to describe a world in which fake things would come to seem more real than reality itself. Baudrillard believed that this world—the creation of mass society, mass media and sophisticated systems of both propaganda and communication—was just around the corner. The boundaries between real and

Ref. E28B-H

Soon after that we would forget there had ever been boundaries at all, and then things would really get freaky. Information would devour content and then replace it. The sign would no longer point to the signified—it would point to nothing at all. Hyperreality would not simply be confused with reality. It would replace it entirely, and we would all be living in it.

Ref. 95B7-I

It was, I think now, an instinctive feeling for the arrogance of modernity. Our etiolated rationalism, the desire to impose our will on the world, the assumption that we know best which survived the collapse of our empires and flowed effortlessly into the age of ‘development’. The insistence that African children should attend Western-style schools and be issued laptops; that India should adopt our patented pharmaceutical medicines; that Pacific Islanders should become Protestant Christians in suits and ties; that all nations everywhere should ‘trade freely’ with our Black Ships (as if they had the choice) and set themselves up as ‘liberal democracies’ just like ours, with parliaments and presidents and a ‘media’; that our wars are good wars and their wars are bad wars; that all the world will be progressing together when They have all agreed to become like Us. This ‘West’ that I was part of had colonised itself with its left-brain blindness, and then colonised everyone else the same way. All the things I loved—small places, wild nature, real culture—were being wrecked, in my country and far beyond. The Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Berdyaev explained what had happened in blunt, and very Russian, terms: The will to power, to wellbeing, to wealth, triumphs over the will to holiness and to genius…. Spirituality is on the wane, [in] a time of bourgeois ascendancy. The knight and the monk, the philosopher and the poet, have been superseded by a new type—the greedy bourgeois conqueror, organizer, and trader…In the new machine-made industrial-capitalist civilization of Europe and America, the spiritual culture…based on a sacred symbolism and sacred tradition, is being irrevocably annihilated.[1]

Ref. 14E4-J

This is the result of the Great Unsettling: a time and place where nothing seems to be solid, comforting or even real.

Ref. B616-K

as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued, has had the same impact as the collapse of the tower of Babel: ‘people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate…

Ref. E012-L

When I look at this history, and then I look at the culture war, I see cause and effect. I see a war being fought over the spoils and the ruins of Progress by people who live in those ruins and are mourning the loss of something they don’t even quite understand. That sense of mourning is common to both ‘left’ and ‘right’. Whether they are mourning the end of the arc of history or the end of a country they miss without maybe even having known it, the sense of loss is profound, even if unspoken. For many people, everything is broken. This is why, though I will never condemn those ‘dead white men’, neither can I stand up and ‘defend the West’ in some…

Ref. 5EAF-M

No: when we talk about fighting for ‘the culture’, or fighting against it, I think we miss the mark. Culture is, after all, as I argued at the start of the book, a spiritual byproduct. Cultures are built around claims and beliefs about the otherworld: about God or gods, about correct worship, about the nature of reality, about goodness and truth and the meaning of virtue. These are also, inevitably, claims about what it means…

Ref. 024A-N

Modern humanity’s attempt to build its own ‘closed system’ to replace nature and tradition, said Guénon, could never succeed, but instead would lead to an ‘artificial world’ which would result in an ‘artificial mentality’ amongst its people. ‘The modern mentality’, he wrote, ‘is no more than the product of a vast collective suggestion’. When enough people realised this, he predicted, a ‘reaction’ would ensue amongst those who wanted to resist the disintegration. But since even ‘those who most sincerely want to combat the modern spirit are almost all unwittingly affected by it’, the danger would be a kind of false ‘traditionalism’ doing battle with an equally false ‘progress’, all against the background of a time in which genuine spiritual unity was a distant memory, and truth itself was disputed on all sides.

Ref. CECF-O

Guénon concluded his study by suggesting that we are living in a ‘great parody’: an age of ‘inverted spirituality’ and ‘counter-tradition’ in which even institutions which claimed to be transmitting the spiritual traditions—most churches, for example—were shells of the real thing. To Guénon, this was a manifestation of an actual spiritual war. He agreed with St Paul that ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world’. Some dark spiritual force was inhabiting the shell of our culture, he said, and driving us ever downwards.

Ref. 26CB-P

But I think it might be the way through. ‘No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society’, wrote the philosopher Eric Voegelin in his book Science, Politics and Gnosticism. ‘On the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order’. If there is better advice for living through the reign of quantity, or surviving the hyperreal culture war, I haven’t found it yet.

Ref. AC55-Q

Those changes represent a breakdown in our shared understanding of what it means to be human—and to have a human body—the logic of which has barely begun to play out. The question is: Where does it lead?

Ref. 0370-R

his 2020 book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman attempts to answer this question. His book began, he explains, as an attempt to understand how the phrase ‘I am a woman trapped in a man’s body’ has ‘come to be regarded as coherent and meaningful’ when just a few decades ago it would have been considered by most people to be ‘incoherent gibberish’. The conclusion he comes to is that the transgender moment, far from being an inexplicable flash in the pan, is the logical result of a shift in the understanding of the self which has been taking place since the advent of modernity.

Ref. 9D95-S

The first type Rieff calls Political Man. Idealised by the likes of Plato and Aristotle, Political Man finds his identity in public life, as he engages in civic life, debates the meaning of life with others and generally discovers his self-expression in some form of public service. Later, as the Middle Ages dawn, Political Man is superseded by type two: Religious Man. Religious Man finds his meaning in the public religious life: the feasts and fasts, mass and liturgy, pilgrimage and procession which give shape to the year and to existence. As modernity beckons, Religious Man gives way to type three: Economic Man, for whom the key to life’s meaning is found in trade, production and profit. Rieff, like Marx before him, understood that the revolutionary nature of capitalism meant that Economic Man could only ever be a temporary phenomenon: in the end, he would undermine the foundations of his own prosperity. So it proved, and when that happened, Economic Man gave way to the type we now live amongst and embody: Psychological Man. Crucially, Psychological Man is qualitatively different to his ancestors. Unlike them, he finds meaning and identity not so much in outward-directed activity as in what Rieff calls ‘the inward quest for personal

Ref. 56A2-T

The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression and that the solution to their pain may go beyond a new set of pronouns, or even invasive surgery, towards nanotechnology, ‘cyberconsciousness software’ and perhaps, ultimately, the end of their physical embodiment altogether.

Ref. 19FE-U

The Machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonisation. The history of modernity is the history of the spread of the Machine mentality to all corners of the Earth, as the Black Ships of the Western traders and moneymen, having enclosed the lands of their own people and forced them into the mines, factories and slums, sailed out to do the same in what would become known as ‘the colonies’. In this way the Machine has, by now, colonised us all—our lands, our hearts, our minds. Externally, we see the results in a chaotic climate, dissolving cultures, spiralling rates of extinction and infernal destruction of nature. Internally, we see it in the loss of our stories, in our broken-hearted confusion about who and where we are. Locally, we see it in the loss of our self-sufficiency and agency in the place where all human stories begin: the home.

Ref. 683D-V

Wendell Berry’s 1980 essay ‘Family Work’ is a short meditation on the meaning of home, its disintegration under the pressures of modernity, and how it might, to some degree at least, be restored. Like so much of Berry’s work, it locates the centrepoint of human society in the home, and explains many of the failures of contemporary Western—specifically American—society as a neglect of that truth. The home, to Berry, is the place where the real stuff of life happens, or should: the coming-together of man and woman in partnership; the passing-down of skills and stories from elders; the raising and educating

Ref. FDB0-W

In my lifetime, in my part of the world, the notion and meaning of ‘home’ has steadily crumbled under this external pressure until it is little more than a word. In a Machine anticulture, the home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in

Ref. 6E61-X

in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise? Phones long ago replaced hearth fires. Handily, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under the pillow in case something urgent happens elsewhere while we sleep. We wouldn’t want to miss anything.

Ref. 735D-Y

For most people now do seem to think that family life and family work are unnecessary, and this thought has been institutionalised in our economy and in our public values. Never before has private life been so preyed upon by public life.’[3]

Ref. 64C8-Z

If you have a TV, your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought.’

Ref. B065-A

Finally, says Berry, the school system—a machine of its own—is designed ‘to keep children away from the home as much as possible. Parents want their children kept out of their hair; education is merely a by-product, not overly prized.’ Much public education, says Berry, is more like ‘a form of incarceration’. Schools exist to train children to fit into the Machine world being built for them, to inculcate and normalise its ethics and goals, and to prepare children for a life serving the Machine’s needs.

Ref. 42A1-B

Back in 1980, Wendell Berry ended his essay by suggesting some actions that could be taken in this direction. As well as the obvious—amongst which ‘get rid of the television set’ took pride of place—he suggested that we should ‘try to make our homes centres of attention and interest’; to make them as productive and nurturing as we can. Once you rid yourself of the propaganda of the corporate media-entertainment complex (‘a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household’), you will see new possibilities begin to open up. You will see, in Berry’s words, that ‘no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves’, whether in the country, the city or the suburb. ‘All that is necessary’, he suggests, is ‘the time and the inner quietness to look for them.’[5]

Ref. EFCE-C

The choice to homeschool our children has changed our lives and theirs; I see this now as the most important thing any parent can do to resist Machine culture. Certainly our children are more self-sufficient already than I was by the age of about twenty-five. Home-making, it turns out, is not something to flee from in pursuit of freedom, as I wanted to do when I was younger. It is a skill, or a whole set of them: a set I have come to value maybe above anything else I do. I am still not very good at it; but even so I feel, on my best days, that I could walk with some of my ancestors and be recognised by them as a fully qualified human being. Maybe this will turn out to be my greatest achievement, in the end.

Ref. A5B1-D

The home can be a friction against the Machine. If this is a war, it is long past time to begin fighting back. I recommend starting with the TV, and working out from there. You might be surprised what emerges.

Ref. 92D3-E

Britain’s decline in my lifetime, from a country which ran much of the world to a country which can barely run itself, has been pretty stark. Come up with whatever diagnoses you please, blame who you like, but you can’t deny the downward trajectory.

Ref. A289-F

‘Nation’ is one of those over-capacious words which, if not used carefully, can mean almost anything and almost nothing. A term which can be applied both to an Amazonian tribe and the United States of America has to be handled carefully. Also to be handled carefully are the primal passions it can evoke, on all sides of the aisle. Make an idol of your nation, and you will end up sacrificing human lives to it. At present, the notion of the nation is being bitterly fought over throughout the disintegrating West. There are some for whom a nation is some kind of racial entity, to be protected from external ‘pollution’ at all costs. There are others for whom a nation is a lie; a historical monstrosity, to be deconstructed as a matter of urgency. The rest of us are somewhere in the middle, treading water, often confused.

Ref. BA10-G

Like a monarchy, then, a nation can be hard to define, or perhaps even to justify, at least on reason’s terms, and yet it offers the human psyche something that it seems to need.

Ref. 4D4E-H

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

Ref. 87BA-I

Our national community gives us roots; to quote Simone Weil again, ‘to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul’. We are back, again, to our Four

Ref. 7F5D-J

In theory, a state is supposed to represent, speak for, defend and promote the interests of the nation it governs. In reality, the twenty-first century state, at least in the West, often acts against the directly expressed interests of its people. Nation and state are at loggerheads. States are nodes in the Grid—economic units posing as cultural ones. They pledge themselves to their ‘people’ and then get on with the job of following the dictates handed down by the EU, the WEF, Silicon Valley or the FTSE 100, whether ‘the people’ like it or not. This, in a nutshell, explains

Ref. BABC-K

To many people, nationalism seems like a reasonable response to this, and sometimes it can be, under the right circumstances. Still, there are good reasons to be nervous about what it can do to the human mind. Humans remain human, and it is not so hard for national feeling to shade into xenophobic triumphalism, just as cosmopolitanism can shade into sneering elitism disguised as compassion. I’ve long found myself in the uncomfortable position of valuing nations but usually being repelled by nationalism. I’m not sure what to do about this. It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, and even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests.

Ref. 5421-L

Solzhenitsyn was right: nations matter. A nation is a story which a people tells about itself across time, and while it is dangerous to be too attached to these stories, or to forget that they are stories at all, it is more dangerous to try and uproot them in some pseudo-egalitarian frenzy. We need our stories, and we need our countries too. They are our repositories of memory, tradition and faith. They are the homes and the burial places of our ancestors. They make us who we are. They cannot simply be abolished, replaced or strip-mined for money, and anyone who tries is likely to receive the full force of a reaction which none of us should look forward

Ref. 9688-M

One is fairly straightforward: there is something we can’t bear to look at, and we are trying to distract attention from it by screaming at the people who are pointing it out. The thing we are avoiding is the thing that we used to call ‘nature’, and the reality that we are trying to distract attention from is that we are part of it, we live inside it and everything we do to it we also do to ourselves.

Ref. F607-N

René Guénon, who we first met in chapter I, also felt something moving beneath the surface of the age, and as a Sufi Muslim, he wasn’t shy about naming it. 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

Ref. 2D54-O

His mind is ‘pure machinery’, his blood is ‘running money’, his love is ‘endless oil and stone’ and his soul is ‘electricity and banks.’ He still sounds very familiar.

Ref. 7303-P

Kelly sees technology growing into something self-aware and independent of its human creators, as he explains in his book What Technology Wants: After ten thousand years of slow evolution and two hundred years of incredible intricate exfoliation, the technium is maturing into its own thing. Its sustaining network of self-reinforcing processes and parts have given it a noticeable measure of autonomy. 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.[2]

Ref. 12F5-Q

Other 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—the Machine—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 ‘Antichrist’.

Ref. 73EB-R

Del Noce has recently been noticed outside his native Italy as a result of a new collection of his essays and lectures, translated into English as The Crisis of Modernity. This crisis, in Del Noce’s view, is one of exclusion: it is what the modern way of seeing leaves out that matters. What is it, asks Del Noce, that ‘is no longer possible’? The answer ‘is simple: what is excluded is the “supernatural,” religious transcendence…. For rationalists, certainty about an irreversible historical process towards radical immanentism has replaced what for medieval thinkers was faith in revelation.’[4]

Ref. 1AA7-S

From the eighteenth century onwards, philosophy sweeps away religion: the world is now understood in purely human terms, and managed with purely human notions. Everything becomes immanent: literally down-to-Earth. There are no principalities or powers, and so everything is potentially transformable and explicable through human might. This is another way of framing Guénon’s ‘Western deviation’: a ‘progressive materialisation’ that leads us into a ‘reign of quantity’ in which we take on the role of the Creator for ourselves.

Ref. 8291-T

How do we shape the universe in the age of immanence? ‘The spiritual power that in the Middle Ages had been exercised by the Church…today can be exercised only by science’,[6] writes Del Noce. Echoing Rupert Sheldrake’s critique from chapter VII, Del Noce writes of a ‘ “totalitarian” conception of science in which science is regarded as the only true form of knowledge. According to this view, 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.’[7]

Ref. D6F0-U

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.[8]

Ref. 38BB-V

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 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.’[9] 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.

Ref. D584-W

Del Noce agrees with the prophetic Simone Weil that ‘the Americanisation of Europe would lead to the Americanisation of the whole world’—and so it has proven.

Ref. 27B7-X

‘Colonization’, Del Noce writes, ‘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 method to themselves.’[11]

Ref. 4271-Y

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 camps. 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. ‘The age of the revolution gave up on searching for unity, and accepted a sharp opposition’, he wrote. ‘The ideal endpoint is identified with liberation from authority, from the reign of force and necessity. However, what has happened so far suggests, rather, that 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.

Ref. 471C-Z

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.[13]

Ref. A517-A

The real source of the disintegration, though, was not partisan: it was the Machine.

Ref. D118-B

Both nostalgia and utopia were ultimately fruitless as tools of resistance.

Ref. 39D2-C

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 Antichrist 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

Ref. 1A9C-D

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.

Ref. EA95-E

God in the Age of Iron

Ref. 5708-F

We are always short of roads, somehow, just as we are always short of houses, hospitals and ‘growth’. Every year we are nearly there, and yet somehow also further away. Every year, we come a little closer to forgetting why we set out in the first place.

Ref. 7E32-G

miles from any bus route. But this is all politics, and beneath the politics, for me and most of my friends, lurked something else. Cars did something to the world; something it was hard to put your finger on but which you could feel all around you. Often, I have wondered at what it would have been like to live in a world without engines, to experience human life without the hum or roar or traffic or the smell of petrol and diesel. This new world is scarcely a century old, but the car has changed everything. The distance we can travel has remodelled and homogenised the entire globe. Motorways have replaced country lanes; careless speed has replaced actual travel. Entire cities have been demolished, along with entire ways of being. It

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The soul-life of humanity. This is what has been invaded by the worldview that has produced the car and the computer, and we are enmeshed in it now, bound around by its thrumming electric current, not seeing it at all as the blue light flickers over us and makes us new. D. H. Lawrence once said that the world changed forever when the first electric bulb was switched on. Today those bulbs obscure the very stars, and we cannot take our eyes off the screens. It took us a very long time to get here, but here at last we are, in the world which the ratio has built out of bits and bytes and undersea cables. ‘The prehistory of the computer’, writes Naydler, ‘is our history: it is the history of human consciousness. It is the history of the project to mechanise the mind, advancing slowly over many centuries, and often against determined and effective resistance from those who saw that it would entail the eclipse of higher cognitive faculties within the human being, receptive to the world of spirit.’[6]

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But none of it satisfied him; it all seemed, in the end, to be a simulacrum of the truth, whatever the truth was. Then, one day, he walked into an Orthodox church and, much to his surprise, as he put it, ‘something in my heart said that I was home’. Exploring further, he discovered that ‘truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal—even a person, sought and loved by the heart’. By 1970, Rose had been tonsured as a monk, and with a group of other converts he founded the St Herman Brotherhood and publishing house, later to become the St Herman of Alaska Monastery, where he would live until his death in 1982.

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It was from this perspective, and with this ground of personal experience, that Rose wrote his 1975 book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, which sought to outline what he saw as the emerging faith of the new age in the light of Christian eschatology. That eschatology gave a particular edge to the project, because Christian tradition has long taught that the emergence of one global religion, based on some potential unity of all faiths under the umbrella of worldwide unity and justice, will be the prelude to the coming of the figure known as Antichrist. Antichrist, contrary to the usual popular portrayal, will not be a figure of obvious Hitlerian evil but a religious leader in the mould of Christ himself, seemingly benign and well-intentioned, presiding over a totalising global system which will promise salvation to a world population exhausted by war, strife and breakdown. Rose believed he could see the birth pangs of this new faith in the countercultural movements of the 1960s, of which he had been a part, and his book takes a tour through many of those movements, from neo-paganism to witchcraft, UFO cults and shamanism, the rise of Eastern ‘gurus’—many of them fake—and the popularity of Eastern religions themselves, usually in a watered-down form designed to appeal to Western consumers. Coming in for particular criticism, unsurprisingly from a monk, were the new, ‘denatured’ and ‘ecumenical’ forms of Christianity, which stripped out the harder teachings of the faith in order to appeal to a world which had already rejected it, losing its own salt in the process.

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Perhaps I would be more popular if I could remain reasonable about all this. But I have become convinced over the last few years that what Guénon called ‘the Western deviation’ is leading us into precisely the trap that Seraphim Rose warned us of. The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage, or even understand.

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I’m trying not to judge here. What do I know? I’m sure there are restrictions, reasons, explanations. But the pit that appeared in my stomach when I first saw a monk on the Holy Mountain with one of those black mirrors in his hand came from an instinct I’ve long had: that the sacred and the digital not only don’t mix, but are fatal to each other. That they are in metaphysical opposition. That what comes through these screens bleeds out any connection with the divine, with nature or with the fullness of humanity. Seeing smartphones in a place so dedicated to prayer and to God: I don’t mind admitting that it was a blow. Even here, I thought, even them. If even they can’t make a stand, who possibly could?

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Still, on this issue as on so many others, the Orthodox monks remain the conservatives. In Buddhist Japan, things are much further ahead, as you would probably expect. They don’t just have smartphone monks there; they have robot priests. One, named Mindar, has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is ‘immortal’. This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in future better than him.[1] Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen ‘robo-monk’ who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading ‘kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media’.[2] In India, Hindus are joining the party, handing over duties in major ceremonies to a robot arm which performs in place of a priest.[3] And Christians are getting in on the act too. In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is ‘designed to help people pray’ by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.[4] Not to be outdone, a Protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called—I kid you not—BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can ‘forgive your sins in five different languages’, which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.[5] Perhaps this tinfoil vicar will learn to write sermons as well as ChatGPT apparently already can. ‘Unlike the time-consuming human versions, AI sermons appear in seconds—and some can be quite good!’ gushed a Christian writer recently.[6] When the editor of Premier Christianity magazine tried the same thing, the machine produced an effective sermon, and then did something it hadn’t been asked to do. ‘It even prayed’, wrote its interlocutor; ‘I didn’t think to ask it to pray…”[7]

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The upshot, says McGilchrist, is that ‘we no longer live in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it’.[2] There is no territory in this new world, only map. Those who can see this, and try to point it out, are dismissed as ‘romantics’, ‘nostalgics’, ‘reactionaries’ or ‘dreamers’. The left hemisphere’s world is taken to be reality, whereas it is, in fact, only an inadequate representation of it. The result, says McGilchrist, is an age that is literally unprecedented in human history. ‘We exist in the world, of course’, he writes, ‘but we no longer belong in this world—or any world worthy of the name. We have unmade the world. This is entirely new in the history of humanity and it is impossible to exaggerate its significance’.

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The bottom line is that I don’t think I really understood the nature of power until that happened. And now that I have seen, along with other coddled people in the Western bubble, what that nature can amount to, I have come to agree with the anarchist philosopher Pierre Proudhon, who saw it all coming a long time ago: To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.[1] What Proudhon is talking about here is the eternal problem of power. The state is hardly the only power centre in existence, of course: corporations, global governance bodies, NGOs and religious authorities also wield power in their own ways. But nothing has the reach of the modern state. Its sheer scale and strength gives it the ability to corral, organise, define, measure and control its population in a manner that is unmatched in human history.

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labour. All of this applies today to the state in which I live, including the last one. The slavery and forced labour now takes place far from the core of modern Western states, in places like central Africa or China, where the poor mine our smartphone components or sew our cheap clothes in regimented workhouses, but that doesn’t make them any less necessary for the system to function. For that system to function, what is needed is order. Regimentation, planning, centralisation, efficiency, measurement, straight lines: this is the stuff of the Machine.

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This is why I find the notion of the jellyfish tribe so intriguing. Any attempt at building utopia will fail—but utopia should never be a goal. Some form of free survival is the goal: survival in order to live a life unconformed to the dictates of the Machine, and to uphold the values of a true human life.

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