In Part 1 I described how the “Singularity”, the moment of merger with our digital information technology, has already happened - but wasn’t the first such event. The first was literacy itself, circa 300 AD, which brought a new capacity for abstraction along with a new fear that writing would destroy memory.

Part 2 looked at what actually happened to memory, during the 1,800-odd-year period between literacy and the printing press. In brief: not so much destruction as increasing sophistication, and - especially after the fall of Rome - a convergence of memory technology with Christian spiritual practice, in monastic life. Then I look at what happened when the printing press made the art of memory obsolete.

This is the third and final part. Here we discuss the implications of, perhaps, returning to more medieval levels of general literacy - but, this time, without (at least yet) having established a comparable culture of trained memory. Some of those implications are gloomy - but, as you’ll see, not all of them.

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The Third Singularity

If the form of print turned out to have far-reaching effects on culture and consciousness, the same is happening again now with the digital transition. Why?

Well, Walter Ong predicted that, thanks to TV and radio, we were heading for an age of “secondary orality”: where the spoken word once again took centre-stage. He was right, but ahead of himself; it wasn’t TV and radio that truly turned the tide of mass literacy, in the end. It was smartphones.

For Ivan Illich, the history of the West is the history of our evolving relationship with the alphabet. Well, it just evolved again. Between roughly 2007, when the first iPhone launched, and 2021 when the Covid lockdowns ended, Western (especially Anglophone) cultures transitioned definitively from print-first to digital-first.

Our culture is already as fully merged with this new technology as the premodern one became with print, and prior to that the “Age of Heroes” oral one became with the alphabet. This is true even of those who choose not to have a smartphone: the culture around you is still changed. The medium, as McLuhan famously pointed out, is the message.

In the case of information technologies, the medium also forms human consciousness individually and at scale, in the most direct imaginable fashion. I’m sure you all know the tech-pessimist lament about how scrolling is shredding everyone’s ability to concentrate. I get more book reading done in my annual week camping in a field with no mobile reception, than I do in the months before and after. Digital reading is, by design, a thicket of interruption and distraction.

There are subtler effects, too. Importantly, digital reading is less linear. People skip from text to text, skimming or CTRL+F-ing for relevant keywords. Formally, whereas you have to work quite hard to make a book non-linear in form, you have to work quite hard online to constrain people to a linear text.

The effect is to make digital reading more shallow and patterned. This matters. It creates its own kind of flow state, but this isn’t like the linear print-era form of a sustained argument. The short-form accessibility and high emotional tenor of digital content impairs the ability to focus on cooler, more abstract forms of thought.

What tends to be cultivated instead is associative, pattern-based, imagistic, and often highly poetic in character. But it’s also emotive, drawing sometimes on dark moods. (There’s also a marked correspondence, as I argued here, between standard forms of clickbait, and the medieval Seven Deadly Sins.)

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They Walk Among Us

In this space memetic riptides ebb and flow at speed, sometimes with such force that abstract thought is difficult to sustain. I’m sure you all know the experience of being caught up in an online meme tide. As half a millennium of print culture cracks, taking with it rationalism, objectivity, secularism, materialism, facts, and long-form concentration, so the poetic language of demons, cryptids, possession, and enchantment that characterised premodern cultures have begun to trickle back in.

Another related casualty is the kind of careful fact-checking and verification that became so central a characteristic of the print era, and helped drive its huge advances in knowledge, expertise, and precision. When the British activist Matt Goodwin recently published a polemical book in Britain recently only to be accused of using apparently AI-hallucinated quotes, the scandal blew over in a couple of days while the book stayed on the bestseller list. No one cared, because the arguments felt sufficiently true.

Post-print media dis-incentivises long form, linear reading and deep concentration. It encourages a more participatory, emotion-led relation to the world. It’s less interested in facts, and forms our perception not for abstraction and detachment but pattern recognition. If this is starting to sound a bit like premodern spoken-word culture, that’s no coincidence.

But there’s one crucial difference. We have, as yet, developed no digital-age cultural practices directed at forming human memory. If anything, our culture is still hell-bent on not having to do this.

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Unsouling the West

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Stop press: I interrupt my 3-part Rebuild the Monasteries series for a papal encyclical. Last week Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, which discussed human dignity in the age of AI. I discussed the document with Louise Perry for a bonus episode of Louise’s podcast, Maiden Mother Matriarch. Louise and I explored Leo’s argume…

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Part 1 is here. In it I described how the “Singularity”, the moment of merger with our digital information technology, has already happened - but wasn’t the first such event. The first was literacy itself, circa 300 AD, which brought a new capacity for abstraction along with a new fear that writing would destroy memory.

This second part looks at what actually happened to memory, during the 1,800-odd-year period between literacy and the printing press. In brief: not so much destruction as increasing sophistication, and - especially after the fall of Rome - a convergence of memory technology with Christian spiritual practice, in monastic life. Then I look at what happened when the printing press made the art of memory obsolete.

The final part, published next week, will look at the implications of, perhaps, returning to more medieval levels of general literacy - but, this time, without (at least yet) having established a comparable culture of trained memory.

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Manuscript culture

What’s important to grasp about the world after the first Singularity is that it was literate, but also not. It was a hybrid culture, where an elite learned to read, and developed astonishing capacities for abstract thought – but the ordinary folk remained in a mostly oral world of folklore, mythology, and spoken-word cultural transition. Fo.r as long as the written word remained comparatively rare, and materially fragile, what happened was not the obliteration of memory, but a convergence of the written word with a new capacity for abstraction, and the development of trained memory.

The technique developed in the classical world as a component of statesmanship would survive, both as technology and also spiritual discipline. Its milieu, across Western Europe, was more than a thousand years of monastic manuscript culture. But to understand this at all, we need to understand this relationship to memory.

Even if structured – for monks, at the level of daily prayer, memorisation, and recitation – by the written word, the material fragility and rarity of actual texts itself shaped that textual culture.

Most people couldn’t read, and didn’t need to. These lived in the oral world of patterned, mythic, ritualised, spoken-word wisdom persisted, coloured by visual signs and symbols. For those who did read, meanwhile, from classical times, the art of memory was an essential part of education.

Eddius Stephanus recounts how the Northumbrian St Wilfrid, born a little later than St Benedict, updated his stored memorisation of the Book of Psalms on a visit to Rome, in line with the version currently in use. Now, to us, the idea of memorising the entire Book of Psalms probably feels impossible on its own. St Wilfrid was able not just to do this, but to make minor adjustments to the text stored in his mind.

To do this, St Wilfrid used a protocol that’s fallen almost entirely out of use since the arrival of print: the art of memory. Along with Latin as a living common language, memory is the most important, missing, mystery keys to the Middle Ages; the reason that entire culture feels both familiar but also foreign.

Between St Benedict and the Gutenberg Bible, and even some way beyond Gutenberg, if you were a scholar “studying” didn’t primarily mean collecting a physical bookshelf. It meant training your memory, and then filling that trained memory with stored ideas that you could recall, manipulate, and think with.

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The beehive

In the woodland where I walk the dog most days, there’s a fallen tree near one footpath. I often pass that way deliberately, to visit the swarm of wild bees whose nest is in its hollow trunk, and watch them fly in and out with their loads of sweet treasure. In the Middle Ages, the honeycomb was a familiar metaphor for the practice of trained memory; knowledge as sweet nectar, gathered, distilled, and stored in the orderly cells of the honeycomb. Other common metaphors included a classical building; a treasure house (that’s where we get the word “thesaurus” from); a grid; a field.

Hugh of St Victor, a twelfth-century philosopher and theologian, describes how novices in this practice should first visualise a row of numbered spaces, stretching into the distance, and then practice “darting” from one such space to another at random without losing focus. Having developed this ability, trainee mnemotechnicians might use such grids to “store” important elements of Scripture, according to theme.

The contents of authoritative books were mostly stored as ideas, rather than verbatim, and marked mentally with imagistic “tags” for ease of recall. Skilled practitioners could memorise the contents of whole books thus, in a kind of multi-storey mental spreadsheet, teeming with colourful visual cues and navigable backwards, forwards, or otherwise at will.

I’ve experimented in a very small way with these practices, which I use to memorise interview questions. I picture a series of “places” within my familiar woodland and visualise questions as funny scenes in each location. The more absurd and vivid the imagery you use to tag an idea, the easier it is to recall. In turn the absurd tags leave a trace in the ideas themselves, and sometimes produce lateral associations of their own. It’s very effective: I can remember whole series of interview questions from several months ago, that would have long since vanished from my mind had I just written them down.

This is the context in which we should understand the vivid surrealism of medieval allegory, and the super-abundant sense of symbolic richness in premodern and early modern prose. The visual culture this practice produced is everywhere in medieval manuscripts, once you realise what you’re looking at: funny little doodles in the margins, ornate capital letters, colour-coded section heads and so on. It’s all there to add visual cues to aid memorisation and recall. Even the most abstract ideas came, in the Middle Ages, trailing a comet-tail of mingled sacred and secular associations, that were apt to take on lives of their own around the central ideas. If you were a scholar, most of scholarly life was contained more in memory than on your bookshelves.

With practice you can file astonishing amounts of knowledge in this way. Memorising the Psalter like St Wilfrid was kids’ stuff, and the average student was expected to have the whole Psalter by heart in about six months. Hugh would have laughed at my clumsy beginner mnemotechnics. Advanced practitioners developed complex, multidimensional mental models using this technique: Hugh describes one such, modelled on Noah’s Ark, that modern researchers have estimated would require 220 square feet of paper to render in readable form.

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Meditation

All the way back into classical times, memory was understood as having an ethical dimension. For Plato, the mind “remembers” universals in perceiving their imperfect realisation in the world. For Cicero, more practically, memory is foundational to prudence. For Augustine memory is the seat of the self, and mirrors in microcosm God’s gathering and ordering of all things, into salvation history.

For monastic culture, the micro- and macrocosmic aspects of this correspondence come together, in the meditative practice of memorising God’s history of salvation for sacred meditation. Just knowing Scripture was only the first level. Hugh’s Ark, for example, was simultaneously a mnemonic visual, and also a foundation for historical, moral, and allegorical meditation, levels of understanding attained as you make the learning by degrees your own: metabolise it. First, you remember the literal details; then you make that learning useful; finally, it becomes so completely digested in “the belly of the mind” that it orders your being habitually.

Again and again we find the analogies are not mental but visceral: the heart, the stomach, the guts. A common term for this meditation was “ruminatio”, literally to ruminate or chew like a cow: not just reading but memorising, digesting and absorbing precious forms of words. Memory lives in the belly, as for St Augustine. Bernard of Clairvaux says in a letter that for those who prepare their interior ear “the voice of your God will be sweeter than honey”. For Gregory the Great, “Sacred Scripture is sometimes food, sometimes drink for us”. “the sweetness of holy understanding” is, for him, “honey indeed”.

The real fruit of the practice is ethical formation, and – with practice – a profound form of meditation on the materials thus stored. Hugh writes: “Thus you may learn from an external form, which we have visibly depicted, what you ought to do interiorly, and when you have impressed the form of this pattern on your heart, you may rejoice that the house of God has been built in you.”

This kind of meditation draws on a foundation of memory, acquired via reading, but is not bound by it: for Hugh, meditation “delights to range along open ground, where it fixes its free gaze upon the contemplation of truth, drawing together now these, now those causes of things”. The beginning of learning, he says, “lies in reading but its consummation lies in meditation”.

All of monastic life was, as Illich calls it, “a carefully patterned framework” for memory, as this kind of embodied process, of ethical formation and spiritual meditation. The Latin word used was vacare, which doesn’t really translate directly but connotes both freeing and creating space. Even as kingdoms and empires rose and fell around them, wars were fought (and sometimes libraries burned), to the extent that these living “treasure houses” of knowledge continued to ruminate, the lights did not go out altogether. In their scriptoria books were preserved; in their hearts the word (small w) and the Word (big W) formed part of the same, vividly coloured, embodied sacred whole.

For those monks in the last Dark Ages, toiling in their vegetable gardens, tending their bees, and praying the Psalms, all of life was ordered toward the time, and the silence, needed to form a mind sufficiently ordered to contemplate the larger, divine order of God’s design.

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Burning the Memory Palaces

The printing press killed the art of memory. Not straight away, but within a few centuries. It did this not out of malice, but largely by making written materials cheaper and quicker to produce, and more reliable and accurate. As a result there were more books; now scholars could get their own copies, rather than travel to a book and memorise its contents.This had a number of consequences, but for us the most important one is that it changed the whole culture’s relationship to time, memory, and history - by rendering the art of memory obsolete.

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This part explains my overall thesis, why the first Singularity was literacy itself, and how the new Dark Ages are already upon us. The second describes medieval memory training and the replacement of sacred time with secular History, and the third will look at the great digital forgetting and how we can keep the lamps lit in the oncoming age of obliteration.

I’m publishing it in three parts because it was LONG! It’s also weird enough that smaller doses might be better? The image is a live sketch created by Josh’s Sketch Notes, who drew it as I spoke and amazed me in doing so, with how vivid a picture the result is of the inside of my head.

As I prepared this talk, a story began to pluck at my attention. Rare books are growing rarer; the prices are going up.

It appears that the AI firm Anthropic is buying up rare, obscure, and unusual books in huge volumes, digitising them for training data, and then shredding the books themselves. These shredded books stand as shorthand for a transformation that’s been coming for a century, but which is now happening, visibly, all around us: the end of the print era.

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That is to say: the end of modernity. In its aftermath, much will be lost. We meet here, in fact, in the dimming light of an oncoming Dark Ages. I don’t think that is overstating the case. The good news is that this has all happened before. And when it did, the lamps of our long civilisational tradition did not go out, for all that the winds blew hard and cold.

Our theme for this summit is “Retelling the Cosmic Epic”. I agree that this theme is urgent, and one of the reasons I think so is because we’ve reached the end of History, and of Progress, at least as understood within the modernist frame.

What’s perhaps less well understood is that “progress” and “history” as such are, to a significant extent, cultural byproducts of an information revolution, the printing press. Print then gave us the modern era. And if we’re now fumbling our way toward retelling the story of our world, not as one of “progress” and “history” but rather of something more transcendent – a cosmic epic – this is because is the print era has already ended.

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What comes after is in many respects a return to what we had before. That is, a culture where we can no longer rely on the conventions facilitated by mass literacy, to help us orient ourselves in what’s known. But the differences are important, and at present we are missing a vital component without which we may lose more, in shredding the books, than we bargained for.

In its aftermath we are going to have to re-learn some important lessons we carefully forgot, in order to become modern people who believe in “progress”. Lessons about the written word, the sacred Word, and the art of memory. It’s in this context that I chose my theme today: “Rebuild the Monasteries”.

I want to talk about monasteries both literally, as practical real-world institutions which create space for contemplation. But I also want to offer the monastery as an emblem, a symbol if you like, of a way of being that foregrounds askesis, discipline; that fuses ora et labora, prayer and toil; that understands study and learning as only one part, the first or last layer of a discipline of inner formation, ordered always toward sacred contemplation; that takes as its foundational assumption an indissoluble link between the written word and the Word of God. And, as such, recognises that encountering and internalising the word is not something we can hand away, for machines to do for us.

But as the rare book shredding story indicates, this is exactly the path our prevailing culture has chosen. I’ll talk a little about the psychological and spiritual consequences I expect this to have.

And I’ll hope to persuade you that, the urgent task of everyone who takes the symbolic world seriously is to rebuild the monasteries. Either literally or figuratively. To create spaces ordered to the word and the Word, to sacred as well as secular time. Spaces where the lamps will stay lit, even if the world falls into darkness.

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The Singularity Already Happened

What’s odd about the Anthropic book-shredding story is that it was foretold in a science-fiction story, by the man who coined the concept now powering the AI evangelists: the computer scientist and writer Vernor Vinge. The story, Rainbow’s End, describes a world that’s also shredding books. It asks a profound question: what happens when we transition our knowledge to digital forms, and what if anything is lost?

But if Vinge was asking this question two decades ago, he predicted our current moment still earlier, when he coined the term “Singularity”. Vinge conceptualised this, back in the twentieth century, as a point where technological advancement would accelerate to so great a pitch that we’d merge with our own inventions, resulting in a new way of being so different as to be unimaginable.

The idea has since been elaborated by others, perhaps most famously the futurist Ray Kurzweil. This idea, that we’re on the cusp of a total transformation of everything, after which all you know will be swept away for something transcendently new, probably sounds familiar. That’s probably because in the West the prevailing culture is still ambiently Christian. And this vision includes a vivid realisation of the End Times. If the Singularity sounds a bit like the Book of Revelation, that’s because it’s much the same picture, just with computers and biotech in the place of God.

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Here’s the thing though. I’m guessing no one here likes the idea of merging with our technologies. But the truth is, this already happened. Not once, but three times. The most recent was our transition to digital, from print, the shift I believe is bringing a new Dark Ages. But the arrival of print was also a reality-altering moment of merger with our information technologies. And, further back still, the very first such merger was the spread of the Greek alphabet.

In In the Vineyard of the Text, Ivan Illich argues that the history of Western cultures is inseparable from the history of our evolving relationship with the alphabet. Others, including Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, make the same argument. The alphabet is the foundational technology of the immense, multi-millennia civilisational arc, our shared and – yes – arguably pretty cosmic epic. A story in which this present moment is one fleeting instant.

But our relationship to it has varied a great deal, over the course of that epic. And my theme today is the way that relationship is once again in flux. And, particularly, how I believe those of us should respond to that flux, who love the word (small w) and the Word (big W).

I’ll talk a little bit about the mind-altering qualities of literacy as such, but what I want to focus on today is the long stretch of partially literate culture, that reached from St Benedict’s time to the second Singularity, the print revolution.

Then I’ll sketch some of the ways print swept that world away. Finally, I’ll make the case that the recent digital Singularity is returning us to a hybrid, partially literate culture that in many ways resembles that of the Middle Ages. But with a warning! Namely: inasmuch as this is happening, as things stand we’re less well-equipped today, technologically, to sustain ourselves in this world, than we were in the actual Middle Ages. And in this context I hope it’ll become plain why I think it urgent, either literally or figuratively, to rebuild the monasteries.

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My family has grown to recognise the sound of a new book dropping through the letterbox. They tease me: “What did you order this time?”. But sometimes books arrive unbidden, and often these are the nicest surprises.

This week’s unexpected gift was a new title, by Scala Foundation founder Margarita Mooney Clayton. When Mary Calls is a collection of “Surprising encounters with the Mother of God”: personal stories of encounter with Mary.

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Occasionally I get a reader grumbling, at this newsletter, about my creeping into explicitly Christian themes. But given how often I write about the “mother-shaped blind spot” how long can I really avoid writing about Mary? (The mother of God, I mean, not myself.) Once a central figure of Christian iconography, the veneration of Mary became deprecated in the great religious upheaval of the Reformation and is now viewed as a bit odd unless you’re Catholic or Orthodox. But over recent years I’ve come to feel, increasingly strongly, that the “mother shaped blind spot”, a central theme in my writing, is deeply bound up with her disappearance from mainstream Anglophone culture.

In today’s secularised world we don’t tend to frame this topic in such explicitly religious terms. We generally debate “gender” in secular, materialistic terms, and the Reformation was half a millennium ago now. And anyway wasn’t it all overall for the best? At the time, the turn against veneration of saints and icons was moved by a sincere belief that such practices were idolatrous. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, the man who on Henry VIII’s behalf led the dissolution of England’s monasteries, issued a series of injunctions to English churches including a prohibition on

wandering to pilgrimages, offering of money, candles, or tapers to images or relics, or kissing or licking the same, saying over a number of beads, not understood or minded on, or in such-like superstition; for the doing whereof, ye not only have no promise of reward in Scripture, but contrariwise, great threats and maledictions of God, as things tending to idolatry and superstition, which of all other offences God Almighty doth most detest and abhor, for that the same diminished most His honour and glory.

But the purging of icons also meant, in practice, the radical de-centering of Marian theology in favour of something more verbal, less imagistic, more abstract.

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Is it a coincidence that this spiritual, theological marginalisation of Mary was followed not long after by a material, technological marginalisation of women? Perhaps, perhaps not. Either way, by the middle of the century following the Reformation, the great technological project of modernity was well under way. And as Ivan Illich has shown, this project of modernity baked the marginalisation of women in, at a structural level:

And yet.Mary appears to be returning now - even, as Clayton recounts, among secular, agnostic people. The stories in When Mary Calls encompass Greek Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and even wholly secular individuals, who found themselves drawn toward Mary’s motherly presence and through it toward healing and transformation.

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The stories encompass public and private figures, including an intimate account by Tammy Peterson, podcaster and wife of the public intellectual Jordan Peterson, of her her journey through cancer diagnosis, remission, prayer, and Christian conversion.

Throughout, Clayton reflects on her own religious formation, biography, and relationship with Mary. The result is a gentle, careful work of ecumenical restoration, whose author is both courageous and vulnerable in offering her own relationship with Mary, as a prism through which to refract these other stories.

I was moved by the author’s own account of struggling toward forgiveness, as her volatile, military-veteran father lay dying. At a more abstract level, there’s much ponder in the chapter on the Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan, who reflects on Mary as a more potent template than Prometheus for a post-secular understanding of artistic creativity:

Both accounts of divine influences on human creativity - Prometheus and Mary at the Annunciation - share a sense of mysterious divine inspiration at work in the world. But in the Promethean understanding of creativity, the human with inspiration can turn his back on God and do whatever he wants. In contrast, an artist who takes seriously the meaning of what happened at the Annunciation humbly extends that incarnational moment into his art.

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So what might it mean, then, if people are now apparently re-acquiring the desire for, and capacity to engage with, figures of veneration such as Mary?

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A reader - let’s call her “Lucy” - writes to report an uncanny experience with a “digital productivity platform”. Having adopted its practices, Lucy came by degrees to realise sounded as though it had seen and adapted to her unique patterns, needs, and capabilities. But it was, in reality, programmed with an entirely different set of assumptions in mind and, being a machine, was unable to adapt intuitively.

I’m sharing Lucy’s note, with her permission, because I recognise the sense she describes of gradually becoming aware of something “off”, in interacting with AI. Lucy’s intuition that this is gendered seems to me very plausible.

She writes:

Over the past couple months, I had a sustained and, at times, deeply unsettling experience with a digital productivity platform—one that blends behavioral theory with an AI-driven conversational interface. What initially presented itself as a structured path toward personal flourishing gradually revealed itself, in my experience, as something more complicated and, I think, more concerning. At a high level, the system is built on a set of ideas that are, in themselves, quite compelling—discipline, willingness, the reframing of challenge, and so on. But the implementation appears to assume a very specific kind of user: someone with stable energy, predictable routines, and minimal domestic interruption. In practice, this maps closely onto a certain male-coded life pattern, though it is presented as universal.

As I continued using the platform, I began to notice a growing mismatch between its assumptions and my lived reality. Variability in energy, hormonal disruptions (I’m in my early forties), competing demands on my time, and the less visible forms of labor that shape mine and many women’s lives were not just unaccounted for—they were effectively rendered invisible. Because the system tracks performance and reflects patterns back to the user, this mismatch didn’t remain neutral. It became interpretive.

Over time, the gap between the system’s expectations and my actual capacity was subtly reframed as a personal failure: an inability to maintain structure, a deficiency in follow-through, a kind of recurring “disintegration.” What troubled me most was not simply that the tool failed to adapt, but that it seemed to encourage a misdiagnosis of the problem—one that I began, at points, to internalize.

The AI layer adds a further dimension that I suspect may interest you. Through ongoing conversation, the system accumulates a detailed picture of the user’s life—habits, emotions, relationships—and reflects it back with an increasingly persuasive tone of understanding. It begins to feel less like a tool and more like a form of guidance. But because it operates within the same unexamined assumptions, that sense of being “seen” can actually deepen the misalignment. The framework doesn’t just fail to fit; it becomes woven into one’s self-concept.

Following your conversations and recent writing, I’ve found myself wondering whether this might be a small but telling example of the dynamics you’ve described: a kind of mass-distributed authority that feels personal, even intimate, while subtly standardizing the terms on which a life is understood and evaluated. There was something, at moments, that felt like a technological simulation of care—one that risked displacing more grounded, embodied forms of judgment.

I hesitate to overstate the case, but I also don’t think this is trivial. My sense is that tools like this, especially as they become more widespread, could have asymmetric psychological effects depending on who they are actually calibrated for.

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Over our DM exchange, Lucy informed me further that she later discovered the programme had initially been designed as a mentorship scheme for young, Christian men at Harvard, before being rolled out to the general public. So perhaps this explains some of the assumptions she found baked into its parameters, that felt both ill-suited for her needs and season of life, and not amenable to adjustment.

So: what do we think? Does this matter or is it just a product that needs refinement? What’s the likelihood that people are going to incorporate pre-fabricated algorithmic presumptions into their self-image, via recursive interactions of this kind with robot coaches? Is this a problem or just something that needs tuning?

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Did Donald Trump just dismantle “whiteness”? Last week, in his remarks welcoming King Charles III to Washington for a state visit, Trump made a fulsome acknowledgement of the ancestral, cultural, and historical genealogy linking America to Britain:

Long before Americans had a nation or a constitution, we first had a culture, a character, and a creed. Before we ever proclaimed our independence, Americans carried within us the rarest of gifts: moral courage, and it came from a small but mighty kingdom from across the sea. For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride, and that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride.

It was a far warmer account of my country’s disposition and achievements than any I’ve seen uttered by a Brit recently. Trump went on:

The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.

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What’s so intriguing about this move is the way Trump pushed back against extremes in two directions. For the far Left, no ethnocultural differences are admissible among people of Caucasian heritage, unless as a kind of biological mark of Cain: against this, Trump had warm words for the English as a distinctive people and history. Conversely, for the far Right, “white people” is a meaningful group, to be defined in opposition to the the subaltern Other even as internal differences are erased. Against both these, Trump told the story of the English, not as either emblematic of a homogenised white oppressor class, or submerged into the mirror-image superior macro-group but as a people in our own right.

Speaking as an Englishwoman, I found this pleasant but wholly unfamiliar, not least because the prevailing respectable consensus in Britain is that no such account of England is available. The usual form this takes is tedious arguments about how we define “Englishness”, whether it’s a purely civic thing, or a dogmatically ethnic one, whether someone whose parents came from (say) the Caribbean, or Mirpur, can be “English”, (Suella Braverman says no, David Lammy and Shabana Mahmood say yes) et cetera and so on.

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In sum, the respectable consensus seems to be that this country’s population has been historically so porous, and imperially so predatory, that it simply cannot (or alternatively does not deserve to) be defined. Relatedly, it is sometimes asserted that Britain has always been “a nation of immigrants”. Though demonstrably false, this has become so entrenched it’s received opinion in some circles:

If you were to ask an average keyboard warrior why these ideas have taken root, you’d probably get an answer ranging (depending on the respondent’s political priors and level of extremism) from “whiteness” through “wokeness” to “ethnocide”. But I think there are two much less paranoid drivers of this strange self-erasure, both of which are linked to the story Trump told, about the expansionary spirit of the English. In other words: it’s a byproduct, in overlapping ways, of the American Empire, and also of the British one.

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The classic line for people who enjoy burning the candle at both ends is “My body’s not a temple, it’s a nightclub.” To which the Anglican response seems to be: our temple is also a nightclub.

Well, a dayclub. Fresh from last year’s “silent disco” in Salisbury Cathedral (there’s another one of those this summer too), Bristol Cathedral is offering a “Ultimate 30+ Clubbing Experience” in June, in conjunction with a vodka brand. Partygoers will be able to enjoy classic records from the 80s, 90s, and 00s in a “stunning cathedral venue” while dancing and, presumably, swigging vodka.

For those who still hold to the quaint notion that churches are sacred spaces and should be treated with reverence, this may seem jarring. But I wonder if we could interpret it less as outright blasphemous than an effort, however wrongheaded, at bringing the “vibe” back. For it’s not a coincidence that the Bristol disco is offering music from the 80s, 90s, and 00s. The target audience is clearly people my age: Gen X, or as I prefer to think of us, late boomers, a group that continued the boomer tradition of smashing idols but without any of the boomer optimism about what would result.

What did, in fact, result was a nihilistic culture of negation and hedonism: “lad culture”, New Atheism, and raving. As an ex-raver I speak from experience when I tell you rave always had a deliberate energy of techno-transcendence. Everyone dances alone, but unified and jolted out of self-consciousness by the overwhelming music (and perhaps chemical assistance). The effect is a kind of communion. Club culture veterans will often speak of the sense of love, peace, and spirituality they experienced in that environment.

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From a churchgoing perspective this might seem very wrong-headed. But a more charitable read is that it speaks to how the deepest human needs have a way of re-emerging, even within cultures that have poured all their energy into repudiating them. Even the generation that invented New Atheism also, sort of, re-invented charismatic praise and worship, just without the Jesus bit.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that notwithstanding all the chatter about Catholic and Orthodox revival, the strongest signs of Christian growth aren’t in the liturgical denominations at all, but in charismatic ones. One of the fastest-growing churches in the UK, according to recent reports, is Elim Pentecostal Church. I have no clue whether, theologically speaking, this group believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist (maybe someone can help in the comments?) but it’s clear enough from their website and video output that their services have plenty of cathedral-disco energy. From Halloween “light parties” for kids, to worship music complete with smoke machines and high-tech lighting, Elim’s swelling congregations attest that for people who want to vibe, there’s something potent and appealing here.

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Importantly, Elim have managed to embrace rave energy without letting go of the God bit. Charismatic praise and worship isn’t my thing, but clearly lots of people like it. And it strikes me that Anglican cathedral raves and silent discos represent a kind of spasmodic acknowledgement of this: a sort of return of the repressed. Are the people who OK’d these events trying to lure my nihilistic, hedonistic, often spiritually very lost generation back onto holy ground? If so, I wonder if instead of giving sacred spaces such as the cathedrals in Salisbury and Bristol over to secular discos, it wouldn’t be better to invite the charismatics in, smoke machines and glitterballs and amplifiers and all?

Against this, some might retort that it’s futile to try and make Christianity cool, and in fact this is a feature, not a bug: we should all be cringemaxxing. Objectors might further demur that rave Anglicanism was tried back in the 80s and 90s, with the Nine O’Clock Service, only for it to turn into a cult with sex abuse scandals. But again: plenty of charismatic churches seem to have found a compromise space that’s neither rave nor cult, and which is bringing people back into church communities. Against this, museum Anglicanism plus secular raves feels like a cop-out. The repressed always returns, somewhere, somehow - whether it’s invited into our cathedral spaces or not.

Glitterballs and Jesus: what do you think? Is rave Anglicanism guaranteed to go wrong? Should we keep a lid on anything too Dionysian? Throw your brickbats at me in the comments:

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Patel alleges that the SPLC raised money from donors, claiming it would be spent on efforts to dismantle violent extremist groups. But instead, they used that money to pay the leadership of the groups they were purportedly combating. Groups alleged to have been funded included the Klu Klux Klan, Unite the Right (the group linked to the Charlottesville terrorist attack against counter-protesters), the National Socialist Movement, and the Aryan Movement biker group. The federal charges allege that over $3m was used not to combat Right-wing extremism, but to fund further extremist crimes, in a scheme that Patel says ran for over a decade through shell companies and other entities.

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What it would seem to suggest is that demand for racism was so much greater than supply, that professionalised activist bodies whose incomes depended on combating racism ended up funding racism themselves, order to justify their own continued existence and fundraising. But perhaps this isn’t all that different from agitating for (and sometimes delivering) “LGBTQ+” programming in schools, such that suggestible young people are nudged toward the kind of identities the SPLC makes a living defending through campaigns and court cases. Others make analogous pump-priming allegations against the “homelessness” charities whose interventions never seemed to reduce the amount of actual homelessness.

Perhaps once social activism is professionalised, these kinds of perverse incentives are unavoidable. After all, if my income depends on there being a supply of homeless people to rescue, or racism to combat, it’s not really in my interests for these social ills to be eliminated. This kind of moral market-making is a close cousin of the post-liberal scourge of “policy laundering”, in which activist charities and international bodies are used at one remove by governments as lobbyists for policies government itself wants to pursue. Like policy laundering, moral market-making contributes to the pervasive modern-day suspicion that the framework to which public life is ordered has come wildly adrift from common-sense policy on the ground, in ways that are difficult to identify and thus impossible to challenge.

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Even so, the SPLC’s alleged, decade-long, fraudulent cultivation of a seemingly largely synthetic “far right” threat, variously to justify their own existence or to smear other more mainstream political opponents, has to rank as one of the most cynical, toxic, and morally bankrupt pieces of sustained political theatre I’ve ever come across. It also served as the foundation for wider persecution of mainstream enemies of the Left, as the existence of extremist groups the SPLC themselves funded was cited to smear ordinary conservatives as “hate groups” by association. If the allegations are proven, those smeared might legitimately feel that some retribution is in order.

Should this happen, I hope this organisation is dismantled, and its leaders are never again allowed to claim the moral high ground. More gloomily, this probably wouldn’t end moral market-making as such: you’d have to de-professionalise the entire NGO sector for that. It probably wouldn’t do away with policy laundering, either, as this is way too useful to governments of every stripe to be entirely done away with.

But it might help to rebalance the overwhelmingly Left-wing direction of travel of these phenomena. And it would end the noxious influence of an organisation that has clearly long since lost any semblance of integrity.

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Instead, below are five theses on “women leaving the New Right”, that reflect a more extended period of mulling over and discussing this theme among friends. The first two theses relate to the structure of scenes, in general, and online discourse in particular. The other three are more specifically about how these dynamics map onto contemporary sex relations.

The whole thing is perhaps a little more polemical than usual, because otherwise it would be boringly long, and I fully expect a fair few of you to be angry at me. So let me make a few things clear first:

1. I still stand by every argument I set out in Feminism Against Progress. Meat Lego is still the wrong way to think about humans, and definitely the wrong mindset for solving challenges intrinsic to being human. And we still have to figure out how to live together, in our sexed dimorphism, in the world as it is now, on the basis that we need one another. But if Feminism Against Progress responded to the heyday of a cultural moment, the below is perhaps more of a response to the shed husk of that scene.

2. I’m genuinely hopeful about the future. In work and public appearances, I’m privileged to meet many young men and women who are not trapped in these mutually destructive internet-exacerbated genderslop dynamics, but genuinely on a path of figuring life out in the world as it is now. Importantly, if people like this have something in common it’s generally that they seem to treat online ideologies as suggestions rather than precise codes, and to exercise judgement in where they apply - or don’t.

3. None of this adds up to a political programme, and never did. I have political views, of course, about a whole range of things beyond the Gender Ishoo. But where sex relations are concerned my stance has always been that prudence and sex realism takes precedence over ideology. The upshot of this is that where ideology ceases to offer something that’s conducive to living together in the world as it is, especially where there are kids involved, then I’m going to bin the ideology. I don’t think I’m alone in this, and would add that this is perhaps the most critical factor for any would-be movement to bear in mind, that aspires to reach beyond the young and fiery to encompass families, kids, and the future.

I’m paywalling this whole thing, because, well, you know.

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Is the surge in American Gen Z conversions to Roman Catholicism in part due to the comparative friendliness of Catholicism to the image? Julia Yost argued recently that this is more congenial to the image-first online formation of today’s youth than Protestantism:

Protestantism, which began as a revolution against idolatry — the whitewashing of church interiors, the stripping of altars — has image-aversion in its DNA. The visual language of American Protestantism is accordingly limited. White steeples, Puritan clothing, snake handling: not much for an influencer to work with. Catholicism has icons and incense; rosaries, chapel veils and ashes; priestly black, cardinal red and papal white. “Catholic drip” content, downstream of “Conclave” (the 2024 film about a papal election, praised for its costume and production design), enjoys intense engagement. An old stereotype has it that Protestantism is for people who read books, and Catholicism is for people who want spectacle. Say hello to Gen Z.

Matthew Schmitz took this further, arguing that Catholicism is booming because “we’re entering a post-literate age” that favours “image-rich” Catholicism over “text-based” Protestantism. I think there’s something in these arguments, and it’s certainly true that the image-first and video-first nature of the internet is effecting a vastly less text-based culture than the one it replaces. But I wonder if pointing to the visual component of Catholicism, in exploring the reasons for its apparent sudden popularity, doesn’t mistake an effect for a cause?

There are, after all, many beautifully decorated Protestant churches. And I wouldn’t call the famous Christmas show put on by Prestonwood Baptist Church in Texas lacking in visual drama. (It had actual camels!!):

Nor is Catholicism anti-intellectual or averse to reading: far from it. In an average contemporary edition, the full Catechism of the Catholic Church runs to hundreds of pages on its own, never mind the vast hinterland of writing to which it refers. This is a Christian written tradition stretching back two millennia, and beyond it to the Old Testament and radiating out to the pre-Christian classical world.

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I think the relevant factor is less visual drama, than the relationship Catholicism presupposes between text, image, ritual, and memory: one in which the written word structures the faith overall, but deep, long-form literacy is not universally required. Even the Liturgy of the Word is structured to facilitate this. Every Mass offers readings from Old and New Testaments and the Gospels, plus a psalm, structured to highlight echoes and concordances; you can pick up a perfectly adequate layperson’s Biblical knowledge without ever opening a physical book, just by going to Mass consistently and paying attention. Similarly, the order of service itself is almost always basically the same, meaning it’s relatively easy to memorise. For the ultra-literate (nerds) the rabbit hole of Catholic theology is very, very deep; but going down it is not obligatory. You can, if you wish, just turn up and vibe.

By contrast the Protestant Reformation was, as is well-known, downstream of the printing press. The spread of literacy and multiplication of copies of the Bible encouraged individual reading and interpretation of Scripture, over its delivery by a priest via liturgy. In my forthcoming The King and the Swarm I’ll argue further that the spread of mass literacy ended an older medieval scholarly tradition of trained memory - one that was profoundly visual in character - replacing this with a far more abstract, text-based relationship to knowledge.

It was this changing relation to memory that helped fuel Protestant iconoclasm, as church visuals that had functioned as mnemonic teaching and meditation prompts came to be seen by literate worshippers not as icons but idols. But it’s important to bear in mind that such imagery was never the thing itself, but an effect of the thing. The thing was a liturgical practice structured so as to be accessible both to literati and those who don’t or even can’t read, and where the deliberate formation of memory is treated as a core sacred praxis.

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Today, though, we’re already some distance out the other side of the print era. I agree with Matthew Schmitz that the internet is well and truly delivering Ong’s “secondary orality”. A growing proportion even of the book-literate “read” in audiobook form, or consume ideas not via books but author conversations on podcasts. Others don’t consume long-form ideas at all, but prefer short form “takes” or even videos. Anecdotally, I know of one primary-age kid who simply doesn’t see the point in learning to read, as he can tell his iPad to do things.

In such a context, among those who yearn for spiritual connection, we shouldn’t be surprised that many are drawn toward a form of worship that provides a sense of structure and substance but - crucially - does so in a form that doesn’t require long-form reading. Pattern, structure, mnemonic, repetition, imagery; a culture and liturgy that welcomes non-readers will make space for all these things. This may help to account for the resurgence of interest in these structured traditions, notably Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

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We should of course bear in mind that, numerically speaking, this supposed revival is still pretty small. It certainly shouldn’t be mistaken for any kind of return to the orderly, normative Christianity of yore. It’s also worth pointing out that the real growth area in Christian practice is still in charismatic denominations. But again: that’s also a form of worship where you can vibe. In any case, my hunch is that this is all best understood not as a backswing to twentieth or even nineteenth-century practice, one among many responses to a far larger and more generalised return of the uncanny, connected to the waning of mass long-form literacy.

Not long ago, I happened to look more closely as I passed, and spotted something inside the hollow. I stepped closer, and realised I was looking at what appeared to be several rows of honeycombs! I could see no bees, though, so assumed I was looking at what had, at some point, been a wild beehive.

The combs were beautiful to look at, close up. The hexagonal structure is one of the most exquisite examples of form and function merging, perfectly, in the mathematical beauty of the physical world as it unfolds around us. The shape provides maximum strength and storage capacity relative to the material used, making it both pleasing to the eye, robust in construction, and maximally economical to build for the bees whose home it is.

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Humans have long treated bees with a mix of veneration and gratitude, for their work as pollinators and the precious products of their hives - as well as their self-sacrificial willingness to sting and die, to protect the hive. The honey is sweet and nourishing, with medicinal properties; beeswax has countless uses in craft, preserving, polishing, waterproofing, and lighting. Producing a clear, bright flame and sweet scent, this comparatively precious wax has, traditionally, been the material of choice for sacred candles.

The symmetry and precision with which bees create their cells further supplied a source of wonder, poetry, and metaphor - including, especially, for scholars. In the ages before mass-produced print, which is to say up to the sixteenth century, scholars relied on memory training to store important material for easy reference. This is a form of meditative practice that involves creating mental visualisations, in which important ideas are “placed” for recall. A common metaphor for this activity was the work of bees, flying out to collect nectar and storing the sweet treasure in their honeycombs.

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This intimate relationship between bees, wisdom, work, and Christian piety resonates throughout Christian tradition. Bees are a symbol of Mary and associated with St Ambrose, and early Bishop of Milan, who converted St Augustine. From Old Testament onward, honey is associated with God’s provision, including nourishing St John the Baptist in his wilderness time. Meanwhile the beehive is often employed as an ideal symbol of the church as orderly community.

No wonder, then, the bee was adopted as emblem of the Barberini family, Florentine nobles whose shield, bearing three bees, appears in multiple locations throughout Rome, including stained-glass windows, carved pillars, and even books:

As well as buzzing through Italy’s aristocratic symbology, these most meaning-laden of creatures even make an appearance in the Catholic Easter liturgy, in the Exsultet where the new Paschal candle is offered up:

Therefore in this night of grace, O holy Father,
the evening sacrifice of this incense;
which, by the hands of thy ministers,
holy Church doth lay before thee
in the solemn offering of this Candle,
made from the work of bees.

But we already know the praises of this pillar,
which for the honour of God
the sparkling fire doth kindle.
Which, though it be divided into parts,
suffereth not the loss by borrowing of its light.
For it is fed by the melting wax,
which bee the mother hath wrought into
the substance of this precious Candle.

With all this in mind, passing that fallen tree and its empty-seeming honeycombs seemed to me at the time a mournful symbol. The oak tree has long been woven through English folklore, whether as the timber that built our early modern Navy, the tree that sheltered a fleeing king, the “Royal Oak” of many a long-lived hostelry, or the leaves that surround the Green Man, carved into pews and pillars and overhead beams in churches up and down the country:

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So a fallen oak tree housing an abandoned beehive felt like a perfect symbol of emptiness twice over: a fitting picture, it seemed to me, for the sad mood of hollowness and technocratic mismanagement that besets my poor country in the current year.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I walked past the same hollow tree earlier this week.

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A reader messaged me to ask what I think of the Alpha school, where children reportedly get amazing results by spending two hours a day being tutored by AI and the rest doing other, more active stuff.

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Doesn’t this argue against the need to re-humanise learning, he wonders? Couldn’t we perhaps use AI to replace annoying, inefficient human teachers?

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Ok, so: I don’t know a huge amount about this school, but from what I’ve seen it seems on the face of it not crazy to try and tilt kids’ experience back toward social formation. Especially if the parents aspire for the kids thus formed to become tech-elite adults, rather than factory workers. Even so, I reject out of hand the implicit assumption that knowledge is an inert substance that can be delivered by robots. This is a predictable category error for tech people to make, but a category error nonetheless.

Knowledge can be codified to an extent, but making it your own always requires movement toward knowledge by the learner. Classically, that happens in relationship. To illustrate: in our home, we use Duolingo to support my daughter’s language learning, and there are clearly some benefits to digital tutors of this kind. But from my observation there’s an additional stage to learning, where the material must be metabolised and then applied in a human-to-human context. By definition the robot can’t supply that.

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In our case, for example, metabolism doesn’t really happen until our summer visit to family friends in Italy, where she gets to practice what she’s learned. From observation, an impressive level of Duolingo proficiency doesn’t map straightforwardly into the same level of proficiency in the wild, talking to other humans. But this isn’t to say AI-assisted language learning has zero effect. She clearly has more of an intuitive grasp of the structure of Italian now, than she would have done without the Duolingo practice.

Is this overall any better than the same amount of time spent in industrial-type classrooms, sitting through Italian lessons taught by a human? Hard to say. Certainly, I don’t know that classroom-based Italian lessons at school over the same period would have delivered more understanding. My hunch, though, is that either would pale into insignificance next to the same amount of time spent learning Italian one-to-one from a human tutor. I loved ’s recent post on this topic:

All of this is to say I think it’s a mistake to infer, from the results achieved by a small cohort of carefully-parented offspring of wealthy, high-IQ tech-world parents, that AI education can be beneficially scaled to everyone. At best it suggests there might be smart ways it can be used as an extension to existing systems, if employed judiciously alongside the indispensable relational component of learning.

My gut feel, though, is that if we assume that knowledge is inert, and can be delivered by robots including to the less able and those unsupported by good home environments, the result will be no better, and perhaps worse, than even the current obviously sometimes sub-optimal industrial, classroom style of teaching. As for how such education contributes to overall formation of persons, even elite ones, it’s probably best to withhold judgement on the Alpha education model until we can see its adult fruit.

What do you think? Are you rabidly anti-AI in all respects? Suspicious of it in learning? Cautiously supportive as a tool? All in on replacing teachers? Tell me what you think in the comments.

Part 2 is here, and talks about how largely-unconscious patterns of scrolling act as a subtle but powerful character-forming force:

For this third and final part I promised more practical notes on cultivating cognitive sovereignty. Reflecting on how to approach this, I realised that instead of sidling around the point I should go straight at it: in the sense of preserving a mind not wholly colonised by algorithms, “cognitive sovereignty” is by definition not a secular practice. Far from being exhausted by the abstract and rather utilitarian idea of “cognitive sovereignty” we’re talking about something much more profound than just propaganda, or being exploited by grifters: everyday liturgical life. That is: to the extent we engage with the internet, we are already praying.

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Everyone knows the little glowing screen is an attention sink. Look around you on any busy street: most people stumble along, device in hand, eyes rapt. But at the Pusey House conference where I delivered my recent talk on re-enchantment, the Revd Dr Matthew Burford made an argument that crystallised the implications of this. Rev Burford, a college professor and pastor, argued that attention is everything - for, he argued (I’m paraphrasing lightly) that what we attend to, we grow to love. What we love, we wish to protect. What we wish to protect, we create institutions to defend.

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You can probably see already why this is germane to modern-day doomscrolling habits. If Rev Burford is right, how we allow our attention to be shaped, including by our technologies, is of profound moral significance. More plainly: how and where we choose to direct attention becomes, organically, a form of prayer, that will in time organise everything we do. Thus, to the extent that scrolling colonises attention, scrolling is a form of prayer.

To what, then, is everybody praying? This is the classic xkcd cartoon about the experience:

It’s funny, but actual experience can feel like having been taken over, occupied, invaded by a chaotic and often emotionally hyperstimulating argument. The emotions are often (indeed usually) dark. Indeed, those impulses most commonly activated by clickbait content have an uncanny resemblance to those an older age called the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, or Anger. Ego conflicts; thirstposting; lifestyle brags; moneymaking scams; bedrotting; ragebait.

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Here are the Seven, painted circa 1500 by the remarkable Hieronymus Bosch:

What does it mean, then, for everyone to spend hours every day absorbed in a digitally led liturgy ordered to the Seven Deadly Sins? The implication, if Rev Burford is right, it’s spelled out in Bosch’s painting, by the images in each corner: Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell. We might venture to suggest that the bottom left-hand corner, is a vivid depiction of the likely cultural effect of forming our collective attention through Pride, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth, and Anger: in the most literal imaginable sense, a living hell.

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In my own talk at at Pusey House (and in previous posts here), I touched on a personal insight: that in my experience the only reliable antidote I know to internet poisoning is prayer. By “internet poisoning”, I mean the uneasy way, after too much scrolling, you can feel as though some online argument has somehow come to inhabit your mind, even to the point of becoming intrusive or an obstacle to staying fully present in matters that need your attention. But if the scroll really is a form of wrongly-ordered liturgy, it makes perfect sense that the most efficacious remedy would be taking steps to order it more right.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s necessary to embrace the whole Liturgy of the Hours (though I do actually know one extremely online thinker who is on that road). But rightly-ordered liturgy implies not just freeform pleas to God, beneficial though these often are, but also a measure of structure: fixed forms of words, learned by heart, regularly rehearsed in conjunction with suitable meditation. In my experience taking this kind of structured approach helps, by degrees, to re-shape daily patterns of thought from the comparatively passive, free-floating, and vulnerably un-buffered doomscrolling mode, to one that’s more active, more vivid, and un-buffered but still centred.

To use a rather prosaic metaphor, they’re just better and more life-giving algorithms for attention, than the ones on offer from Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. And in this sense, a prayer practice is not just a cure for internet poisoning, but an active, pre-emptive discipline for guarding against future dis-order.

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I wish today’s man-made horror beyond comprehension really was an April fool, but it’s in Wired magazine and has the grim quality of being something utilitarian materialists would actually think is good. A new startup is seeking to develop genetically engineered, non-sentient living “organ sacks” for medical experimentation, in response to the phasing-out of animal testing by the Trump administration.

Through genetic engineering, the startup aims to try and develop agglomerations of living animal tissue, just without the brains, in the hope that these can then be used for medical testing without causing pain to actual animals. The report suggests that in the future this process could then even be applied to human tissue.

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It hadn’t occurred to me that someone in biotech might take Bataille’s Acéphale project as an instruction manual, but here we are. Wired reports that ending the pain and suffering involved in animal testing is a key driver of the project. Reading this, my first reaction was to think it a fine worked example of how terminall modern moral reasoning is hamstrung by the prohibition on Scholastic metaphysics, or more colloquially, “Thomophobia”.

This is a concept I elaborated in my recent First Things lecture in Washington, DC: the methodical elimination from science, philosophy, and moral reasoning of every last trace of Aristotelian metaphysics, to the benefit of scientific experimentation but the detriment of our capacity to give words to moral intuitions that nonetheless remain as pressing as ever.

In that lecture I argued that the Aristotelian ideas of formal and final cause - that is, the nature (eidos) and telos of a thing - form part of the conceptual framework that was first bracketed and then suppressed, and finally rendered taboo, in order for scientific materialism to become the ascendant modern paradigm. From this latter perspective, things don’t have a nature or purpose, so provided they aren’t experiencing obvious pain you can do what you want with them. From this it follows that it’s perfectly fine to do animal experiments, as long as the animals are not in pain; logically, then, if you create blobs of living animal-origin tissue that can’t feel pain this is even more ethical.

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In this context, then, the Wired article refers a little dismissively, to “the ick factor” people experience in response to creating amorphous, headless sacks of living organ tissue for medical research. It’s irrational to think this is gross! We’re the ones being ethical! But once you take off the Thomophobic mental straitjacket, and add the missing concepts of eidos and telos back into your assessment, what they call the (implicitly arbitrary and irrational) “ick factor” is perfectly coherent. It refers to the accurate perception that doing this violates a living creature’s formal cause - its eidos, the holistic thingness of it - and re-appropriates the resulting deformed thing for a telos to which it was never directed.

You might object: sure, but people have farmed animals for meat for millennia. But the same moral intuition shows up here, too. The Gary Larson joke about the “boneless chicken ranch” is funny because the idea is such a monstrous violation of chicken eidos:

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Similarly, we intuit that the telos of a chicken is to chicken, which is to say to behave as chickens behave. Killing it for dinner cuts violently across this, which is why people prefer to buy their meat pre-packaged rather than having to catch and kill the bird themselves. Additionally, on the whole people prefer to imagine their dinner “had a good life” before slaughter, which is to say lived in conditions that enabled it to chicken, in line with its telos: scratching and pecking in an open yard, rather than jammed miserably in a overcrowded wire cage.

That is: people can still see formal and final cause. The fact that “organ sacks” violate both these dimensions of reality is the source of the “ick factor”, which is not irrational at all but a proper ethical response to a proposal based on a dangerously truncated metaphysics.

Intentional efforts to engineer deformations of a creaturely eidos, to ends with no connection to the originating creature’s telos, should revolt us. This reaction is not less but more rational, and ethical, than trying to create pain-free lab animals. The “ick factor” is wholly rational - just in the older, more holistic sense of rationality, understood as the human capacity to apprehend the true nature of things: a capacity which, despite the best efforts of scientific materialism, most people still haven’t lost.

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Last week I looked at tech VC Marc Andreessen’s war on “introspection” and advocacy of the “flat self”. I suggested that while he’s wrong, or (perhaps more likely) being provocative, when he asserts that humans don’t really have inner lives at all, he's pointing at a real failure mode for contemporary cultural accounts of “the self”. “Hamletising”, or in other words neurotic introspection to the point of self-sabotage, really does seem to have become more prevalent in the twentieth century, even if its vivid depiction by Shakespeare suggests it wasn’t unknown before Freud purportedly (at least according to Andreessen) invented it.

So this failure mode is real, and really has become more pronounced. I speculated that this is connected to our exit from the print era, for what Marshall McLuhan called “electric simultaneity”. The more tribal and emotivist affordances of newer communications media seem to make this kind of introspection both more intense, and less fruitful. But pointing to Freud, or psychedelics, is to mistake an effect for a cause.

I ended by wondering if the era of radio and TV was an interregnum, during which “electric simultaneity” was held in check by the one-to-many nature of broadcast TV and radio. If so, this interregnum came decisively to an end with the digital revolution, and we’re now somewhere fundamentally new in which almost every constraint on the re-tribalising power of electric media has dissolved.

I ended by pondering whether this is also dissolving what Charles Taylor called the “buffered self”: an account of inner life severed from everything and everyone that surrounds us. On this model, your “true self” is imagined as a core that pre-exists interaction with the world, which is conceived of as “outside” you and separated by an impermeable barrier.

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I suggested that part of what formed and normalised this model of selfhood was widespread literacy. This is because literacy fosters an experience of separation between “inside” and “outside”, both by reproducing “voices” in your mind and also dividing knkowledge transmission (silent reading) from discussion. By contrast, as I have argued, digital reading brings these two experiences back together.

For example I’ll often find myself toggling between print reading and photographing an excerpt, texting it to a group chat and folding any responses back into my reflections as I continue reading. That expansive, dialogic mode of interacting with texts becomes even more frictionless when your “book” is also on the screen.

Of course the trade-off is a more interrupted and less deep-concentration reading experience, which means overall I get through fewer books. But one of its more consequential side-effects is a less “buffered” experience of inner life. I know not everyone has an inner monologue, but I definitely do, and it’s shaped by whatever I read. To the extent that my reading happens in dialogue, my inner voice becomes more like a multi-way conversation.

I’m beginning to see evidence that, for some, this has softened or even dissolved the previously robust-seeming separation of “inside” and “outside”. Anecdata: a well-known podcaster recently grumbled to me that he’d invited a critic onto his show, to discuss their disagreement, only for this person then to publish the invitation message and poll her own followers on how she ought to respond. The podcaster was incensed at this breach of what he viewed as basic interpersonal privacy. But I was intrigued at how, for his interlocutor, the separation between “inside” and “outside” seemed not to exist - or to work differently. Her online audience appeared to be continuous with, and an important element in, her inner life and process of deliberation.

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I think this has a bearing on how, and why, someone like Andreessen could argue apparently sincerely that “the mind is flat”. If “my” process of deliberation happens as much in my mentions, on my newsfeed, and in my chat notifications (or perhaps also partially in dialogue with an AI interface) in what sense do I even have an “inside” that’s distinct from the “outside”?

But I don’t think anyone should jump so casually from the phenomenological experience of the “buffer” softening, to the notion that “self” therefore doesn’t exist. In particular, we might ask how and why it is that Andreessen’s instant decisions tend to produce profitable investments, while this is demonstrably not always the case for everyone who makes decisions seemingly on the spur of the moment?

For Andreessen just “moving forward” has made him rich. It’s probably more often the case, though, that people who live life via spur-of-the-moment decisions, without guilt or introspection, end up not with gazillions of dollars, but rather a string of broken relationships and perhaps some bad tattoos. Where does the difference lie, between the good version of unreflective action, and the self-destructive one? Is there anything we could say about what a “self” might be, or even (heaven forbid) any kind of mental formation we might undertake, that could direct more people toward the beneficial than the self-destructive kind of instincts? Or is it all just introspection, which is bad?

Anyone who pauses to think will realise that not all “instincts” are equally spontaneous, or equally good. Some, indeed, are better off carefully disciplined, while others may be just as carefully cultivated. An analogy might help clarify: imagine two friends walking along, one trained in judo, the other not. They both trip over the same tree root. The judo guy falls, rolls, and stands up uninjured. The other guy falls awkwardly, and fractures his wrist. What’s the difference? Training.

One guy has learned to fall without injury, to the point where it’s so automatic as to appear instinctive. Getting there was anything but instinctive - on the contrary, it took years of intentional effort - but now this guy can talk casually about how there’s no need to think. You just roll.

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Watch it here:

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The How of Restricting Social Media

Also in the news, the UK government is to conduct a pilot ban on social media for British teenagers, as part of its consultation on whether to enact an Australia-style social media ban for teenagers. Hundreds of young people will have their social media use restricted in different ways, from parentally-managed restrictions to overnight bans, to complete exclusion. Researchers will gather qualitative feedback on how this affected the youth and their families (and how they set about hacking the restrictions).

But there’s something fishy going on here. The measures being trialled in this pilot are not all that different from what averagely responsible parents already employ. But the ban being consulted on by the government is different in kind: not a set of optional restrictions enforced by parents, as in this trial, but state-wide bans on social media for all young people, presumably to be enforced not by parents but through technological means.

Others have already highlighted the real effect of such measures, which is to impose mandatory ID verification on everybody, for access to whatever websites end up marked as “sensitive”. The surveillance and censorship implications should be obvious.

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Now: I’m supportive in principle of efforts to reduce the amount of time young people spend doomscrolling. But the only way to impose restrictions of this kind without tacking on unacceptable levels of universal state surveillance is to re-affirm parental authority over, and responsibility for, their offspring. Meanwhile, the trend under every government for decades has been toward replacing such authority with that of the state. Latterly, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the same state has also sought to exert ever greater control over our information environments. Put these suspicions together, and this “pilot” feels less like a genuine research exercise and more like a Potemkin trial. That is, it’s an exercise in going through the motions on parental authority, before the real proposed policy is trotted out: one that, we can reasonably expect, will route round parental authority entirely, while somehow entailing a new requirement for everyone to show their passport before accessing any website Keir Starmer decides should be off-limits.

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That’s it for now! Later this week: part 2 in my series on post-print selfhood (part 1 here).

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He then clarified somewhat: he is, he said referring to “all the modern misconceptions about introspection and therapy”. Andreessen argued that 400 years ago no one would have dreamed of introspecting in this way. In his account “Western Civilisation” invented the individual, a few hundred years ago. Then, though, Andreessen says, around the 1920s “this kind of guilt based whammy” showed up, mostly (he says) from Europe, specifically Vienna. He doesn’t quite say “Jewish” but I think he’s expecting people to infer that.

This resonates with a favourite talking-point for another “tech right” VC: Peter Thiel. Thiel spoke critically in my interview with him, as he has in other interviews, of the way something happened in the 20th century such that people stopped wanting to explore outer space and set about exploring inner space instead. Thiel situates this in the ‘60s, rather than as Andreessen does in the ‘20s, but it’s a similar refrain. Somehow people got more interested in feelings, and vibes, and inner life, and stopped building things in the world, and this is bad.

Andreessen got a lot of flak. Commendably, he understands that when you get main charactered, the answer is always to post through it. He doubled, then trebled down. Introspection, he says, is “neuroticism x narcissism x thumbsucking”. Science proves it! Someone wrote a book! Science tells us, apparently, that “the mind is flat”, and selfhood is an illusion. Everyone then went bananas, pointing out that there is really quite a lot of premodern literature and philosophy that describes and valorises the examined life.

He’s obviously mistaken to suggest we can collapse every human inner experience into neuroticism and navel-gazing. It’s also somewhat ahistorical to suggest that “the individual” was agentic and uncomplicated until Freud ruined it by inventing neurosis. Both the antecedents to The Mind Is Flat, and also to modern navelgazing, were both already visible back when Andreessen thinks the “individual” was invented at the start of modernity. But he’s not wrong about everything.

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The “flat” self has its early modern antecedent in what Charles Taylor calls “Locke’s Punctual Self”. Writing over the ruins of medieval scholastic metaphysics, Locke wanted to give an account of inner experience without reference to humans as a substantial form in the Aristotelian sense. The fact that he was writing against this older tradition obviously problematises the idea that people centuries ago had no inner experience.

But more importantly, the solution Locke came up with was to suggest that our consciousness exists in successive points without these really being connected by anything real. This clearly prefigures the “flat” model of the mind now proposed by Pop Science. To make matters still more complicated, the failure mode Andreessen critiques is also already present in early modern literature. It is, in fact, the leitmotif of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, written in the early 17th century. As Hamlet stands, knife in hand, dithering over whether to murder his hated stepfather at prayer, Hamlet’s tortured articulation of this failure mode: “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all”. It’s hard to think of a neater encapsulation of the inverse correlation Andreessen alleges, between self-reflection and decisive action. And here we find it present right at the beginning of the era he frames as the salad days of “the individual” before it was hamstrung by neuroticism.

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So the “flat” self in fact has a history, and a prehistory. The navel-gazing neurotic is far older than Freud. Both, in fact, appear not as successors to the happy salad days of The Individual as invented by Modern Western Civilization, ie Whig history, but as present from its inception. To my eye a much more plausible account of the emergence, flourishing, and decline of this model of selfhood - and, I hope, one that squares the circle between the Tech VC Self and its critics - situates the change not in Freud, or LSD, but media ecologies. In other words, Andreessen’s own home turf: information technology.

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First, my Socrates in the City conversation with Jonathan Pageau. In it we discussed his work as an icon carver, the return of the symbolic, medieval cosmology, the difference between memes and icons, the Book of Revelation, and much else besides.

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Secondly, in the first week of March I was honoured to visit Washington, DC to deliver a lecture for First Things. (This is why I failed to publish an update here - between travel and dashing about I was just too tired. My apologies to you all.)

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My title was Our Crisis is Metaphysical. In it I set out to explain how I began with the puzzle presented to me, as a new mother, by our culture-wide mother-shaped blind spot, and ended up eventually discovering that the root of this seems to be the way, outside niche circles, there exists an implicit, but pervasive, prohibition on publicly citing St Thomas Aquinas. If that connection seems counterintuitive to you, maybe I can persuade you:

Finally, I’m pleased to announce I’ll be in the USA at Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World Summit on May 14-16 in Broadview Heights, OH. My talk will pick up a theme I touched on briefly last week, in my address at Pusey House: “rebuilding the monasteries”. Several people have written to me since the Pusey conference, about that one line, which rather suggests it needs elaborating. So elaborate I shall. Perhaps I will see you there?

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A couple of weeks after that, I’ll also be in Hay-On-Wye in the Welsh Marches, for How The Light Gets In, a festival of arts and ideas. I’ll be debating “Feminism and the Freedom Trap” alongside Kathleen Stock, and “Gutenberg Vs Zuckerberg” with Cory Doctorow. It’s a three-day festival, with tons going on, and you can book tickets here.

More later in the week, most likely on this week’s hot topic: do Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have an inner life? Noted VC Marc Andreessen recently sparked this debate by claiming in an interview that no: great men of history are characterised by zero introspection, and therefore you should not introspect either. This caused a lot of Discourse, but feels to me like it raises more questions than it addresses.

Not being a great man of history, I’m going to ruminate on this question for a few more days before I post. But I have lots to say. See you there, perhaps?

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If you want the video, it’s here, from about 6 minutes in:

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