There is a certain bittersweet experience to be had in walking through modernity’s forgotten corners. Readers may recall wandering through a neighbourhood which has seen better days, the faded glory of an English seaside town, or a rust-ridden post-industrial landscape with its crumbling facades, cracks in the asphalt, and silenced machinery. Yet among these decaying monuments and forgotten lives spring wildflowers and humble bushes with unknown names. Man’s most powerful building materials—concrete, steel, and brick—are no match for the quiet, slow growth of even the smallest plants. The relentless return of the vital forces of our home is almost imperceptible on the scale of time with which we are most comfortable—the day-to-day—but it is perceived through celluloid stills across the decades of a man’s life, and the looming finality of its reconquest is haunting and inescapable.
We have inherited a mechanistic picture of nature from the so-called Enlightenment, downstream from which we assume that nature is driven by mechanical causes, a view from which modern science has increasingly distanced itself. Traditional societies, however, intuited that in the iconographic world of nature—a world that both participates in and emanates from the Deity—the reason behind all natural processes is eternal wisdom itself. The dandelion grows towards the Sun, drawn by wisdom, and the mighty oak, in all its strength, likens itself to wisdom. All things seek their perfection so as to fulfil their ultimate purpose of giving glory to the One who brings creation into existence and ever holds it in being. This perception—that vitality and growth are communicative of eternal wisdom—led our ancestors to treat nature as a teacher, and from her they sought to understand their own mode of flourishing and how to arrange their societies, recognising that they could work against nature only to their own detriment. Certainly, nature was fearsome, but nonetheless, to truly flourish was to work in harmony with her whilst sacralising her ways.
This is not an appeal for a Rousseauian return to a romantic ‘state of nature’ in which civilisation itself is the enemy, but an apologia for a third way. We reject the notion of an innocent state of nature, undarkened by cruelty and suffering, in relation to which we ourselves supposedly play the role of original sin—a worldview utilised with great success among the environmentalists and vegan lobbyists of our day. And we reject the Promethean industrial spirit, which sees the world as a mere resource to be exploitatively repackaged and commodified in response to the demands of the market. Late modernity seems to oscillate between these two errors, and the survival of the earth-exploiters has largely depended on their posturing as leading environmentalists.
Rejecting these two modern deceptions, we advocate the rebuilding of civilisation as an existential harmony with nature, by which divine wisdom is embodied in a people. This harmony is reflected in ecological wisdom, which itself finds and clarifies its voice in philosophical cultivation mediated by the natural priesthood of humankind. Here, man neither faces the schizophrenic struggle to enjoy the benefits of society whilst seeking to emancipate himself from it in pursuit of some imagined noble savagery, nor is he possessed by the libido dominandi, the impulse to dominate and exploit. Instead, he discovers himself to be a lover, whose enduring task is to facilitate the renewal of the landscape that is his proper home, cultivating it and himself, and by so doing uniting himself to the Deity whose presence is revealed in the cosmos.
In Western Europe, especially Great Britain, the Green Man has long symbolised the eternal wisdom that is unveiled in creation. He adorns the stonework of old churches, fountains, and hand-carved pews, and in some of the ancient English cathedrals, his image can be found in almost every nook and alcove. He is the masculine counterpart to nature’s inherent femininity, the face of the masculine Deity adorned with the finery of his spousal creation. But specifically, the natural priesthood of humankind is personified in the Green Man’s ‘green wisdom,’ and thus he is the symbol of man’s mediating role between creation and Creator. The countenance of the Green Man symbolises neither any political theory nor any ecological ideology, but the sacralising event of man living in the light of the Eternal One whilst resting in the bosom of the Magna Mater, the Earth Mother, whom every great wisdom tradition honours. Mankind, symbolised by the Green Man, patiently waits for the arboreal choirs of green to replace the foolishness of Babylon, with its anti-Grail filled with the enchantments of Mammon (Revelation 17:4).
This is where man finds himself today, drunk with the foolishness of Babylon, intoxicated with greed and sentimentalism. Many there are who call man a parasite and a cancer upon the earth, which they say would be a better place without him—and not without good reason. There is not a place on earth where plants haven’t withered, creatures haven’t been over-hunted, rolling hills haven’t been concreted over, and ancient forests haven’t been felled. The whole earth groans under our toxins and pesticides and herbicides, and we hear her crying out in the screams of a hundred billion battery-farmed animals. Every corner of the world seems to have been desecrated by the poor stewardship of man. Only by acknowledging this can we recognise that both penitence and penance are principles of ecological ethics. Then we can once again accept nature as a teacher.
The Great Whore is the central antagonist of divine wisdom, of Sophia herself. The Whore is reason unchained from the service of the heart, turned away from the everlasting light, and plunged into intellectual sightlessness. Hers is the face of ideological—dare we say, mystical—capitalism and rapine industrialism, and she orchestrates the degradation of the archetypal chivalric quest for the Grail by welcoming Mammon into the bridal chamber. This corruption is explicitly described by the ancient historian Herodotus:
The Babylonians have one most shameful custom. Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit down in the precinct of Venus, and there consort with a stranger … a woman who has once taken her seat is not allowed to return home till one of the strangers throws a silver coin onto her lap, and takes her with him beyond the holy ground. When he throws the coin, he says these words: the goddess Mylitta prosper you. The silver coin may be of any size; it cannot be refused, for that is forbidden by the law, since once thrown it is sacred. The woman goes with the first man who throws her money and rejects no one. When she has gone with him and so satisfied the goddess, she returns home, and from that time for no gift however great will prevail with her.
Behold the Babylonian ecology: the maternal face of the earth is desecrated for a silver coin. This is the worship of the Whore Reason which stood in Notre Dame, Paris, in 1793, when all those Enlightened gentlemen theatrically expressed their commitment to reason as they publicly lost their minds and gave birth to modernity. This dark goddess, who lies at the heart of our epoch’s fascinations, continues to be worshipped in a thousand stupidities and desecrations every day. The Age of Reason and its ‘Enlightenment’ have wrought an almost universal blinding of the spiritual eye—the vision of the heart—and thereby man is demolished. His own deconstruction in the ghoulish coalescing of virtual reality and transhumanism is a mere reflection of what he himself has inflicted upon the earth. In turn, the world over which he was called forth to be priest and steward is desecrated, and the Divinity whom creation should unveil is banished beyond an ever-extending wasteland over which rises an ever-growing mountain of corpses.
Yet ecological wisdom is not—and cannot be—defeated. The broken paving, through which the smallest daisy grows, is pregnant with symbolism. The great unnatural edifices of modernity have now decayed to such a point that another layer of paint cannot hide the rot. The promises of unending wealth creation, freedom from the restraints of custom and biology, and the gospel of eternal liberal democracy are increasingly incredible to younger generations. The re-emergence of old ideologies and the proliferation of new ones show their fundamental weaknesses in their multiplicity and confusion, while the flowers of wisdom continually emerge in surprising places.
Whilst bourgeois political mandarins yet again sought to prop up the failed promises of rapine industrialism, usury, and noxious wealth-generation, a sign of blessing descended upon the Royal House of Windsor, where a young Prince of Wales turned to the pursuit of wisdom and the contemplation of nature in his long preparation to receive the Crown. Few today are aware of the depth of wisdom to be found in the writings of the United Kingdom’s reigning King; but to those who know, his wisdom is a lamp in this dark age. He wrote for a generation of Boomers who were busy erecting ugly buildings and bulldozing beautiful ones, hyper-processing all our food, obsessing over GDP growth, secularising the public arena, and calling all this ‘progress.’ But his writings and initiatives will be left to a generation who will desperately need them—a generation totally cut off from their civilisational inheritance and groping about to rediscover it. When they find the writings of King Charles III, they will cherish them.
The quiet signalling of his benediction was revealed in the King’s choice of symbol on his coronation invitations: the Green Man. Re-emerging from the obscurity of forgotten English masonry, Natura’s consort finds his avatar in the Patriarch on the Throne. His mandate from heaven is sealed by the fact that the King, certainly a philosopher of ecological wisdom, is also a Christian mystic—another facet of his extraordinary personality. In him, his subjects will find the harmony of natural wisdom and religious initiation.
Although the cracks in the Western political system have been evident for some time, it is only recently that the dominant paradigm itself has faltered, and the scale of the catastrophe has been made plain. The managerial elite’s chokehold on the polity has slipped. The bureaucrats enslaved to the Enlightenment’s great Egregores, to whom the great revolutionary project has been entrusted, have had their anti-human agendas exposed. Until now, the violence to which man has been subjected was facilitated by a vast, decades-long programme of demoralisation. By such means, power-holders could attack any person who might resist their process of re-constituting each human being as an interchangeable economic unit, ruled by his passions and loyal to nothing but the political regime. But the project has become a victim of its own success: the husk of humanity which has resulted from this ‘progress’ has failed to thrive, exhibits widespread psychological pathologies, produces few offspring, and possesses diminished economic productivity.
It is in our rejection of that all-encompassing scheme of demoralisation that we turn instead to a worldview based upon principles of ecological wisdom. In order to free the population from its belief in and reliance on the ruling paradigm, a sacred green movement would need to recognise the damage done by the omnipresent media bombardment which continuously stimulates the passions of wrath and greed while failing to educate us in virtue. At bottom, we are calling for a ‘Green Man traditionalism.’ In turn, we have some practical suggestions, beginning with the imperative to question the ubiquitous reach of modern technology and the demoralising effect it has on human personhood.
Continuous new technological innovations, never or rarely subjected to moral scrutiny, have introduced disorder into the natural rhythms of human life, and judgments will need to be made as to where any particular technological growth should be stopped. Every technology must be considered from the perspective of whether it serves human flourishing or undermines it. It may also be necessary to institute low-tech reservations throughout rural Britain where those fatigued from the modern technological way of life can discover alternative and simpler ways of living that are more communitarian and less technologically mediated. The common good, it seems uncontroversial to say now, is not well served by the omnipresent intrusion of ever-changing technology into every part of the human ecological sphere.
The pervasive and demoralising effects of ugly, threatening, modern architecture must be seen as a human wellbeing issue. The built environment in which we live is both an extension and a reflection of our interior lives; it should inspire nobility and virtue in the people who inhabit it, not crush their spirits. But the crushing of the human spirit is, of course, the very effect that modern architecture has on contemporary man. The domination of cars within cities also contributes to the corrosion of man’s wellbeing, and city planning needs to be approached along traditional principles which allow for the priority of pedestrians and cyclists. A renewed effort should be made to complete the Victorian Royal Park programme, extending it throughout Britain’s urban areas, replacing roads with linear parks, and ensuring that the healing power of greenery is constantly renewing urban subjects.
Contemporary life is dominated by a need to be mobile. This is facilitated by complex transport systems, yet little attention is paid to the demoralising effects of car-based individualism and the ongoing destruction of rural communities (which was the primary result of transport reforms such as the Beeching cuts). Major efforts should be made to restore the comprehensive countrywide network of trains and trams as well as the beautification of these systems, which would require the rejection of minimalist, utilitarian design principles. In a society that genuinely cares about human flourishing, beauty cannot be treated as a secondary concern. It is well worth observing that the Japanese system has demonstrated the affordability of running lines to very remote areas using low-tech options which require very little expensive maintenance and can even be maintained by local populations.
Priority should be given to locally produced, high-quality foods which do not involve the unnecessary suffering of animals, recognising that human thriving cannot be achieved whilst the wider ecosphere is suffering under the tyranny of market-based efficiency logic. This ought to be followed by a move away from centralising industrial farming practices and towards family- and cooperative-owned biodynamic and regenerative farming. The benefits of local food production would strengthen local customs, community cohesion, and shared traditions, which themselves are often based on the ecological wisdom found in the calendar of seasons encoded in the liturgical calendar of the Western Tradition.
Many movements have recognised the deleterious effects of overwork, proposing to shorten the working week. However, these proposals often appeal to the mechanical, bureaucratic principles of the modern working week. Instead of shortening the week to four working days, a large number of traditional festival days should be reinstated as public holidays, achieving the same effect but within the context of ecological and cultural wisdom and not merely considering life from the perspective of instrumentalism. ‘Days off’ should not be seen as mere respites from labour but as opportunities to build, celebrate, and enjoy a shared culture together. A major source of demoralisation is the domination of the priorities of unfettered capitalism upon society as a whole; the nation’s ‘wealth’ can no longer be judged only in reference to GDP but in spiritual wealth and gross happiness.
Attention must be paid to the cultural habitat within human ecology. Western cultures exhibit unprepared immune systems when confronted with more vital and aggressive cultural expressions, and this must be remedied by stepping away from the pretence of a neutral public square. The monarchy must take up its role once more as guardian of cultural and spiritual life throughout the kingdom, a responsibility that belongs to anointed monarchs in any age. As part of this responsibility, the monarch should foster the restoration of the ancient monastic traditions of these Isles. This will be so vital to the cultivation of a wide variety of human-ecological categories such as education, science, healthcare, and spiritual wellbeing. That the monastic genius has so cultivated these categories of human flourishing in the past without being driven by profit motives is one reason why it has not been easily replaced by the works of other institutions.
What has been advanced here is only a superficial sketch to indicate the direction that the restoration of ecological wisdom in a political movement must take. To facilitate this restoration, there is only one political party in the United Kingdom that claims to be based on principles of ecological wisdom and thereby receptive to becoming the vessel of this programme of transformation: the Green Party. To all subjects in the United Kingdom who are vexed and jaded by the current political paradigm and who long for something different to what mainstream politics in these lands has to offer, we call upon you to take over the Green Party.
Across the kingdom, many people feel politically homeless; they desire a movement that will renew their natural covenant with the landscape that is their only home, to whose history they still feel deeply attached. The Constitution of the Green Party lays out that leadership positions go to the ballot every two years, allowing for the possibility of significant and radical change throughout the organisation by a motivated and well-organised group. Policies are formed through grassroots motions in a democratic system, which also allows the trajectory of the party to be guided by ordinary members. Once the minimum two-year membership requirement to stand for leadership positions is met, a combination of grassroots members and well-placed individuals could oversee the restoration of sacred wisdom principles within the party. In our view, the Green Party is ready to be transformed by the infusion of the sacred for the renewal of the Kingdom and the rejection of the dominating managerial techno-tyranny which has throttled the human spirit in these Isles for too long.
