In the English town of Stow-on-the-Wold resides St Edward’s Church. The Anglican parish is likely dedicated to Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king before the Norman conquest. It underwent multiple restorations since its Medieval construction, following its role as the site of the final battle in the First English Civil War. Its entrance, flanked by two yew trees, is said to have inspired the Doors of Durin in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. This building and the stories it inspired could not reside anywhere else. Were you to materialise outside it, you could not mistake it for anywhere but the English countryside.
But within this alcove of what my friend Douglas Murray calls ‘Deep England’ ticks the heart of the agent of its impending erasure. A plaque on the wall bears the names of four generations of Brookes family men, who wound the Church clock for a hundred-and-ten years. The last line informs the reader that the clock was automated from 2006 onwards. In our obsession with efficiency, convenience, and the perpetual pursuit of abundance, we drive the human and particular elements of our national character to extinction.
I may be accused of making a Mount Doom out of a molehill. But within the premises of liberal capitalism, beginning sectarian 17th century England, lies this interminable drive to dislocate peoples from times, places, and particular cultures.
Max Weber traced the lineage of liberal capitalism from “the secularisation of all ideals through Protestantism” exported to the Americas. Per the Calvinist belief in predestination, Puritans interpreted success in pursuing one’s calling as a sign of endowment with grace. Non-productive work was pathologised and, in Weber’s words, “the search for the Kingdom of God commenced gradually to pass over into sober economic virtue.” As Christ’s imperative to refrain from coveting worldly goods waned in influence with passing centuries, the Protestant work ethic became an “iron cage” for those to whom “the Enlightenment, seem[ed] also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowl[ing] about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs.” The Puritans’ calling has become an inherited compulsion to contribute to what was once condemned as Mammonism: “the pursuit of riches for their own sake.”
Weber is describing what Ivan Illich called “Shadow Work”: the appropriation of private and domestic life by consumption habits which optimally prepare you to return to market production. The modern “Sigma Male Grindset” meme describes this phenomenon. One’s life is itemised and regimented, and relationships marginalised, to maximise financial gains. Economic accountability has shifted, from generating the means of subsistence for those you held sentimental bonds with, within your household; to God, in working to reveal your allotted amount of grace; to yourself, to generate surplus goods via specialist means for disposable income. As Weber wrote, “Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs,” but rather man is subordinated to this spirit of capitalism.
The direction of civilisational travel is toward the commodification of every domain of human activity—the reorientation of all activity toward the generation of material abundance. With a patent filed for wearable technologies which use brainwaves to mine cryptocurrency while we sleep, it’s hard to write Illich off as paranoid.
To achieve this total commodification, sentimentality, human difference, and tradition must be ignored or eradicated in favour of seamless efficiency. Homogenisation happens per Hemmingway’s dictum on bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. It is innocuous and incremental, converting defunct properties into convenient and commercially-viable businesses—until one morning your local high-street is unrecognisable, colonised by international consumerism. The world becomes one unbroken chain of interconnected retail parks. We no longer live in nations, but regionally-managed outposts of a global franchise.
This is what Renaud Camus meant by the ‘Great Replacement.’ An erasure of native cultures through demographic change is not necessarily a conspiracy to disenfranchise European peoples. Rather, it is a consequence of the liberal assumption of a universal human sameness stemming from their anthropology of the state of nature. The view of human beings as each representing a universal standard consumer unit—globo homo economicus—allows them to be instructed and relocated as the market demands. This mythology is facilitated by the fact that liberalism empowers innovation to the extent of generating ample means of transportation, such that the international movement of goods and peoples comes to be construed as some inviolable ‘human right.’
The Shires of we localist ‘somewheres’ get scoured in the international ‘anywheres’’ pursuit of everyone belonging everywhere. The Church clock is automated, because market logic privileges universal precision over the human interest of handing the responsibility of winding it onto the Brooke sons for generations to come. Another clock—this time, a near-century-old floral display in Weston-super-Mare—is concreted over, to spare anyone the inconvenience of maintaining it for purely aesthetic reasons. As Jon Askonas said of Buckley-esque conservatism, shouting “Stop!” athwart history is a futile enterprise:
[the] attempt, against the onslaught of revolutionary ideologies, to set aside foundational questions in order to make common cause in defence of the actually existing human order, failed because it neglected the true revolutionary principle: technological transformation.
In pursuit of alleviating privation, liberalism incentivises the creation and adoption of these technologies. What James Orr calls “revolutionary dynamism” is not an accident; it is fuelled by liberalism’s core values, namely freedom and equality. This antagonistic dyad is dichotomised by Clare Chambers, whose ‘comprehensive liberalism’ contends that political liberals’ attempts to bracket conceptions of the good to the private sphere fails to recognise liberalism as itself a conception of the good.
In the inverse of grace-through-work, inequality is interpreted as a proxy for oppression—for, if human nature is universal, then an injustice must have befallen the poorer party along the way to produce a disparate outcome. In no longer being neutral about liberal values, the state and technology must therefore ensure equality, thereby granting universal freedom to all persons. (Hence why intersectionality was so readily adopted by liberal institutions.) Any desire or tradition which results in unequal outcomes must be disallowed in the presumed interest of the liberal subject. Thus, liberalism undoes itself, generating such universal material abundance that its night-watchman state and property rights, conceived under conditions of scarcity, are rendered obsolete. Chambers’ version is not a mutant strain, but the fulfilment of liberalism’s own stated values. Its progress theology produces what Robert Higgs called a “ratchet effect,” expanding the remit of the state under emergency circumstances until it achieves permanent omnicompetence.
Combined with a conception of a Godless mechanistic world, liberalism acted as an impetus to bring to fruition Francis Bacon’s vision of an “empire of man over things, founded on the arts and sciences alone.” But instead, we have subordinated human nature to the instruments of mastery. As Carl Schmitt warned, “A society built exclusively on progressive technology would thus be nothing but revolutionary”—hence the high rates of anxiety over our state of impermanence, and a body politic lurching between perma-crises, which characterises modernity.
We have conquered the obscure and mysterious for mastery of the world, and wonder why we suffer from widespread dissatisfaction and depression. The technological spirit of liberal capitalism precludes the possibility of anything being held sacred. The resulting disenchantment means driving the awe out of life with a pitchfork.
No symbol better signifies this than the recent silent disco in Canterbury Cathedral. This cyborg bacchanalia profaned the place where St. Thomas Becket was martyred, where St. Anselm and Henry IV are buried. My personal outrage stems from my own graduation ceremony taking place there. How can they be allowed quite literally to dance on graves in the very cornerstone of English Christianity? Because man’s religious instinct will go to great lengths to seek sensation in this disenchanted world. Perhaps all our cathedrals are, as Nietzsche warned, doomed to become sepulchres for a dead ideal, before crumbling to Ozymandian ruins of a civilisation felled by Faustian hubris.
I am not the first to call this technological instinct demonic. Marx’s father mused on whether the “demon” which governed his son’s obsession with abolishing material inequality was “heavenly, or Faustian.” Schmitt observed that the “big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin—an ‘electrified earth.’ They disagree essentially only on the correct method of electrification.” Schmitt believed the faux-neutrality of this expansion of technological progress would blind mankind to emergent existential threats—akin to the Antichrist. Marshall McLuhan called “the Prince of this World a very great electric engineer.”
Whether meant metaphorically or otherwise, to think of technology as animated by an anti-human spirit is a useful framework for understanding how it works. Technology propagates new, insatiable desires, and replaces human labour and relationships. It positions itself as a prerequisite for worldly participation when it becomes commonplace over generations. Hence C.S. Lewis’ warning that Bacon’s empire of man over nature would, in fact, be the empire of “some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” With technologies resting like a dead hand on the sons of their craftsmen, they become like the denizens of Huxley’s World State, never wanting for Shakespeare because they know not what the designers have deprived them of. When a fault manifests in the system, and everybody has forgotten how to fix it, the technologically-contingent will be wiped out and nature will reclaim her territory.
The antidote to this collapse-at-scale is humility. The Christian virtue once constrained human ambition. To protect pockets of economic traditionalism, like hands cupped over a dwindling flame, requires a recognition of mankind as living at an insurmountable distance from the divine. Schmitt advocated a Catholic approach to the world: a retreat from the industrial cities which Weber labelled the enabling condition for capitalism; and to regard the transcendent as represented, yet delightfully inaccessible, obscured as if by incense smoke at Mass. This, too, may be taken as a metaphor if it suits you.
There will be no Ent-march on Isengard. The Anglicans will not drive the glowstick-waving merchants from their Cathedrals, and hand them back to the Catholics. (Nor is the Papacy immune from collaborating with Satan’s change-agents either.) All some of us can do is renounce Promethean ambition, and await the unpredictable hour where nature reasserts herself. This ethos may be best situated to take root in the remaining recesses of Deep England, where—as Edmund Burke observed—men are content with superseding the reach of their private stocks of reason, and for whom “the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution.” The mystery which resides in those sprigs and saplings of what was may be saved and replanted, once our civilisational winter has passed.
