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:

Introduction

So our theme for this conference is “Christian revival” and “postliberal hope”. My topic today is the way digital is inflecting both of these, is in fact helping to drive them. What I see coming is indeed a revival of interest in spiritual matters, but not, as the programme suggests, as a consequence of the post-war consensus. Dissolving. Rather, as a breakdown of the material preconditions for modernity as such. And I think this is at least as frightening as it is welcome.

Over the next half-hour I’ll set out to persuade you that much of what we think of in a vague sense as “modernity” is inextricable from the printing press – including secularism, a principal villain for this current gathering. But we no longer live in the age of print: after the TV and radio interregnum, the print age has been displaced by digital media.

And with that shift we also exited modernity. We’re well on the way to exiting secularism. But as we’ll see this has far more existential consequences, than some might expect. It is not the re-enchantment any of us ordered, and I think in time we will all wish we could send it back.

The medium is the message

To frame this, let’s revisit Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of technologies as forms. His famous phrasing is: “the medium is the message”. By “medium” he means not just encompass the kind of communications media you’d expect to form the subject of “media studies” or “media theory”. For McLuhan, all human inventions count as “media”.

The defining characteristic of media, McLuhan argued, is their capacity to act as “extensions of man”, increasing one or more of our senses or capacities and with it our ability to act in and exert control over the world. He argued that we tend to mis-read media – technologies - in that we unthinkingly assume the meaning of a technology resides in what we do with it. Wrong, he argued: the meaning of a medium lies not in its use, but in its form, understood as a totality.

So what does it mean to consider information media as a form? The first thing to say is that this comprises not one form but four: the alphabet, handwritten texts, print on paper. And digital media, which is so different in its form that it may still reverse all these revolutions, for all but a minority.

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Orality and literacy

Let’s take the alphabet first. The Greek alphabet is not the oldest form of human writing, but it’s distinctive in that it represents not ideas, but just sounds, in a minimum of symbols. This makes it comparatively quick to learn and transferrable between languages. It also allows the reader to see words rather than hearing them; or, rather, to turn sight into hearing.

The literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf has shown how learning to read literally rewires our brains. In doing so, argued the literary scholar Walter Ong, it didn’t just alter our literary forms but whole patterns of consciousness.

In Orality and Literacy Ong showed how oral cultures are different from literate ones, in distinctive ways. Oral cultures are less interested in (or perhaps capable of) abstraction, and when shown a circle will call it “plate” or “the moon” rather than using the geometric abstraction “circle”. Their language is more patterned and rich in symbolism, have more constrained vocabularies, and is grounded in the concrete lifeworld of that people.

For oral cultures objectivity in the sense we’d understand is simply not a thing. Storytelling tends to be highly coloured, because that simply makes for more memorable accounts and enjoyable retelling. Oral peoples will have a bardic tradition of shared memory: what makes the Homeric epics unique is that they comprise, written down, the oral recollections of a people just on the point of transition to literacy.

The historian Adam Garfinkle has argued that it’s not a coincidence what Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age” occurred over the earliest transition to literacy. Indeed that famous passage in Plato’s Phaedrus captures a deep ambivalence about this: Plato warned that this new technology severs words from those conveying them, risking chaos and misinterpretation. And it poses a danger to memory, as people just write things down instead.

The art of memory

As it turns out, he was right – but about 2000 years too early. After Plato, and for some two millennia afterwards, the West was literate – but only a minority. And those who read did so alongside the technologies of memory Plato was so anxious to guard.

The scarcity of reading and writing materials meant books were rare and precious, and scholars stored their knowledge mostly through the cultivation of trained memory. This is an almost entirely lost art now, that required the practitioner to visualise an inner “place”, classically what Quintilian called a “memory palace”, in which vast quantities of reading material would be stored, usually in summary form, to be retrieved at will.

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A well-educated premodern scholar could retain what were in essence multi-dimensional mental spreadsheets holding whole libraries’ worth of argument, assemble these mentally, and create lengthy compositions almost entirely in the mind. We think of “rhetoric” as just the manipulation of language to be persuasive; to a premodern it was the whole practice of retrieving relevant auctoritas, authoritative ideas, from the mental library, ordering them, figuring them, and then memorising the assembly using vivid mnemotechnics so it could be delivered as if extempore. Only the very last stage of any composition involved writing.

This was a highly visual and emotive technique. [Explain.] The visual lexicon of premodern books –ornate capitals, marginal doodles, colour schemes, funny little homunculi and so on - is not whimsy but mnemotechnics, visual aids to storing and recall. The art of memory was highly coloured, imagistic, and overladen everywhere with sometimes lurid mnemonic iconography. In this context even debates that seem arid to us would, at the time, have automatically trailed comet-tails of vivid associative imagery.

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Whitewashing the memory palaces

I set this all out first to challenge the simplistic idea that the medieval era was “enchanted” in some simplistic sense of superstitious, or intellectually under-developed. They were systematisers: CS Lewis observed that of all modern inventions medieval scholars might most have admired the card index. Yes, part of the population lived in Ong’s oral world of folklore, myth, and implicit knowledge. But intellectuals and scholars lived in a world both intellectually rigorous and highly coloured; ferociously abstract but necessarily vivid, thanks to the ubiquity of mnemotechnics.

What Weber calls “disenchantment” is a complex phenomenon, but the printing press played a key role. Firstly, as the print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein shows, what distinguished print, as a form, from the codex was two key attributes: scale, and fixity. Print enabled a multiplication of texts, and much more reliable reproduction.

This had a host of second-order effects, but one of them was that books became abundant, reducing the need for mnemonic practices. Meanwhile scholars continued to love systematising – just, now, they didn’t need the colourful mnemotechnic hinterland. Without it, though, these disciplines grew arid and disconnected from reality.

Ought we to be surprised that by the backlash? Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Descartes – all wrote tacitly and sometimes explicitly against the schoolmen, arguing for an end to their dusty theories and a renewed focus on the world around us. I suspect that when Bacon wrote Novum Organum in 1620 his attack on formal and final cause felt like a fresh, radical call to see the world in its fulness, rather than through a fog of theory that had long since lost its colour.

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Spreading the word

As well as replacing the memory palaces with physical libraries, and transforming practices of reading and recall, print also enabled the reproduction of texts with far greater accuracy – including, importantly, diagrams and images. Previously, there was no way of replicating technical drawings, meaning it was almost impossible to transmit technical knowledge except through first-hand learning, which took place largely within guilds. The explosion in first woodcuts and later engravings replaced the guild system with financial incentives to broadcast technical expertise to the widest possible audience. In this way whole realms of what was formerly implicit knowledge, orally transmitted, became the subject of literate study for the first time.

Add to this the sudden availability and reliable reproduction of charts, tables, and so on and what you have is an explosion in scientific knowledge. Copernicus and Galileo had to hand a previously unimaginable wealth of study materials. Bacon’s rejection of the schoolmen, and their now abstract-seeming talk of fourfold causality, deepened this new, urgent refocus on the material, the measurable, the empirical.

Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the memory palaces began falling into ruin around the same time iconoclasm began to take hold of the religious reformers. Frescoes that had, in the premodern world, served a mnemonic function for their congregations came to appear not as prompts for meditation but as distractions from it: not icons but idols.

In more material ways, too, as Eisenstein points out, the same medium at the same time also fostered new frenzies of religious zeal: an orgy of pamphleteering, a rebellion against clerical authority in favour of sola scriptura, a proliferation of new sects: ranters, diggers, levellers, Puritans and all the rest.

Add to this a general spread of literacy, with the increased capacity for abstraction Ong argues this brings; strip the mnemotechnic language of symbol out of everyday intellectual life; season with scientific revolution. Add in the new national consciousness, also fostered by the power of print to fix, and then broadcast, some vernaculars as new “national languages”, over the previous plurality of vernaculars and elite Latin lingua franca.

Add a catastrophic thirty-year religious war on the Continent, and civil conflict in England; you will find you have, by the Restoration, a world no one wants to see regain either its medieval icons or its Puritan fervour.

No wonder, then, that in his 17^th century history of the Royal Society Thomas Spratt should already have been inveighing against the colourful language of the previous era: its “vicious abundance of Phrase” and “trick of Metaphor” that, he thought, ought more decently be replaced by plain language fitted to a (it was hoped) now more rational universe. No wonder, either, that the term “enthusiasm”, once referring to a religious sect, came to be negatively coded in the modern England that emerged after 1688.

None of this could have happened without print: not the science, not the belief that facts are fixed, not what the historian Carlton Hayes called the “small empires” of nation-states, that conjured into being an “imagined community” via print, contiguous with a physical border and reflected back to itself by vernacular literature. It worked.

The high point of this culture was probably the late 19^th century: an era characterised by widespread capacity for what Maryanne Wolf calls “expert reading”. That is, an ability not just to parse the text but do so alongside an inner dialogue that adds connections from existing knowledge, behind or in counterpoint to the text’s argument. It’s this process that creates what historian Adam Garfinkle calls “deep literacy” – the bedrock, in turn, of complex cultural norms upon which many features of what we call “modernity” are predicated: objectivity, deliberative democracy, scientific rationalism, religious secularism, to name but a few.

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Electric simultaneity

This is all very schematic. And nothing is monocausal, of course. It wasn’t just print. But my aim in telling the story through this lens is to shift our reflections on culture, consciousness, and technology out of either the upbeat narrative of “rational progress”, or the downbeat one of “disenchantment”. It’s also to underline the fact that the moral valence of a medium is always ambiguous, and nowhere is this more so than information media. We have to remember that print produced the indulgences, even as it drove protest against their sale. Print fostered Biblical fundamentalism as well as secularisation.

I say this in turn to frame the next piece in the argument: the fact that we’re already some distance past Peak Print. McLuhan predicted in the 1960s that electricity would force a retreat from long-form reading, by replacing its comparative material constraint with “electric simultaneity”. He also predicted that this would mean retreat from the individualistic, rationalistic, and secular outlook, in favour of a return to more oral-like patterns of emotivism, tribalism, and magical thinking.

Arguably you can see this already happening by the 1960s; Owen Barfield saw it even sooner – albeit in the most abstract imaginable language – predicting a return to “participation” from the “idolatry” of modern so-called “objectivity”. But I want to focus on our time, the contemporary digital age, which has seen this incipient shift far more fully realised.

What should we say, then, about digital as a form, as it has accelerated this change?

Compared to print, the scale is vastly greater. Storage and transmission are instant; there are far fewer material constraints on volume of text. But it’s no longer linear, or fixed. Now your page can be infinite, in all directions, and hyperlinked across dimensions too; this introduces new kinds of non-linear media consumption, and a new competition for attention which in turn changes the character of the material.

You can make the pictures move, so people do! Now you have to make them shorter and more emotive to keep people’s attention. That exerts downward pressure to Maryanne Wolf’s “expert reading” in dialogue with other texts, or Garfinkle’s long-form “deep reading” as constitutive of rationalism, objectivity, even the concept of citizenship as such.

Importantly, just as literacy alters our neurology, so too does reading less. The journalist Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows that digital reading is associative, lateral, distractible, and less conducive to reflection and remembering; the studies to date bear this out. Reading on a screen and reading in a book are different in kind, as schools which embraced digital learning are beginning to discover.

And to the extent that one practices and becomes habituated to short-form, associative media consumption, and continuous partial attention, one loses the ability to pursue long-form, linear arguments. A recent report in the Financial Times suggests that the Flynn effect, by which those qualities measured in “IQ” (and which correspond strongly to the mindset developed by deep reading) are going into reverse for the first time since people started measuring them – in uncanny synchronicity with the widespread adoption of smartphones.

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Reversals

To be clear, I don’t think phones are making us dumber. The concept of “IQ” is itself conditioned by print-era priors. Natural ability is what it is. But digital reading really is changing our patterns of thought, and forming us along new lines. In particular, the “secondary orality” Ong predicted as an effect of TV and radio has been far more fully realised by short-form streaming video.

This is further accelerated by the rise of LLMs and voice recognition. Anecdotally I know of one primary-age kid who simply doesn’t accept he needs to learn to read full stop, as he can get his iPad to do things using speech commands. University-age relatives report that all but about 10% of their peers get AI to do the work for them, because why wouldn’t you.

From a neurological point of view this is a bit like sending someone else to do your workout for you. The workout will still happen, but the formation of your body (or in this case, mind and neurology) will not take place. Able people will still be able, but they will think differently.

And if Ong is right about the cognitive effects of literacy, then plunging aggregate literacy levels will likely tilt the culture in less rationalistic, more agonistic, more personalistic, highly coloured, and more tribal directions. Never mind actual logic, now we want logic as tribal cage-fight: “Destroying the Libs with FACTS AND LOGIC” and so on.

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Patterns

I think this is, in truth, the deep structural cause of the so-called “competence crisis”. But this isn’t just a declinist story. Digital doesn’t just take us away from deep reading. It also forms us for pattern recognition. This is something of a mixed blessing, but among its effects is that the world is growing magical again.

The symbolic lexicons of the Middle Ages, that formed the foundation of memory technique and gave that world its colour, have a great deal in common with the re-emergence of shared “meme” topoi, amenable to use, reference, reworking and polysemy in a way radically out of joint with the rationalistic mindset of modernity. If you think of the experience of doomscrolling, too, it’s less a rationalistic one than an exercise in pre-rational selection of patterns.

This is a potent propaganda tool, in cynical hands. But from the vantage-point encouraged and conditioned by this mindset the world looks stranger, more fluid, more unpredictable: in a word, more enchanted.

And yet this has little necessarily to do with formal religion. For example we can see its contours in the repeated and increasingly shrill complaints by “classical liberals” about the assault on science by progressive ideology and conspiracy fandoms.

We can see it, too, in the emergence of what Tara Isabella Burton calls “Strange Rites”, pseudo-religious communities of practice spanning interests as varied as personal fitness and Wicca. We see it in digital fandoms, conspiracy communities, and the revival of half-playful online discourses such as Birds Aren’t Real and the flat-earthers.

We can see it in what Venkatesh Rao called “the Great Weirding”: the sense that digital interconnectivity and technological complexity has made the architecture of the modern world surreally non-linear, returning mystery to our mental sense of causality in general – not in spite of tech but because of it. We see it in those Silicon Valley technologists Rod Dreher reports in Living In Wonder as intentionally setting out to contact non-human intelligences in order to “download” information about which research to pursue next.

We see it, too, in the popularisation of the occult term “egregore”, to describe the common extremely-online experience of encountering what feels like an emergent collective intelligences, through the passage of ideas collectively across the discourse.

In this world it’s not just easy but intuitive to write the medieval fourfold causality of Aristotle and Aquinas, so fiercely condemned by Bacon, back into our picture of how things come to be. It’s also, for many, growing urgently necessary to find and cling to a coherent body of theology, amid these riptides of strangeness and symbolism.

Revival

So yes: the theme of this conference is Christian revival, and we can see it here too. Many people sense the great weirding, and in many cases – notably the young and very online –decide that the best way to make sense of what’s going on is not reinventing the wheel. In some cases I know personally, people have had encounters with internet phenomena so uncanny they concluded that it’s best to take refuge in a community where people will take you seriously and offer to help, if you say you feel haunted. Speaking personally, I can attest that the only reliable remedy I’ve found yet for internet poisoning really is prayer. If you know you know.

Lest you think this is a tepid, relativistic “cultural Christianity” namecheck, let me clarify. For those keen to find a footing amid re-enchantment, without reinventing the wheel, Christianity has the great advantage of being true. But inasmuch as there’s been discussion of a “quiet revival” all indications are that, if it is happening, this is less within the Christian mainstream than what were previously the edges: “high” and “low” churches, liturgical or charismatic. In other words, people seek either the sense of mystery that comes with ritual, structure, and continuity with the past, or else the fulness of emotion and connection attendant on praise and worship in the charismatic style.

What they don’t want is “Christianity Not Mysterious”. They don’t want “the higher criticism” or historicisation or rational apologetics. They want “it just is”, for a world growing stranger by the day. And my hunch is that people who stayed Christians even through the Not Mysterious times are really not going to like this, as it grows.

You hear muffled noises off, for example, as young, conservative religious converts lock horns with their comparatively liberal boomer church elders; this happens across numerous denominations.

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Nation and State

You also see it in the horror, among those Christians who’ve kept the flame alive even in late modernity, at the ways this new, old, less apologetic religiosity maps onto the other breakdown now occurring, of nation states. For with the end of modernity that settlement has ended too. What’s referred to in your programme as “the postwar consensus” was really an interregnum in which we clung to the dead form of the nation-state while our elites have acted as though it was already obsolete, focusing instead on the planetary-scale forms of governance implied by electric simultaneity.

That elite planetary worldview hasn’t gone away with digital; if anything it’s tightened its grip. Do you really think Big Tech cares about nation-states? Lol, as they say. Techies think it’s fine for anyone to live anywhere, and digital makes it more easy to do so, by the day. If you live in the dimension of Amazon, Doordash, Alibaba and Uber, you’re accustomed to seamless app-based service and the ambiguously documented global underclass that delivers it.

Meanwhile each imagined community consolidated in print-era “nations” is being forcibly reconstituted along lines that, along with being more “oral” in the sense of agonistic, emotivist, and indifferent to history or objectivity, are also more tribal.

Again, this is not despite but because of tech. Digital has collapsed distance, such that global mobility is both easy and incentivised. Tribal membership is likewise no longer contingent on geographic proximity. Instead people cluster by language, affinity, or – increasingly, as IRL gets more atomised - ethnocultural or faith identities.

The emerging political and social form, then, looks like a retrieval of the medieval one in many respects: vast imperial governance architectures, now enabled technologically, under which multiple striated “nations” coexist, sometimes uneasily. And we’re seeing, again, the same gulf between this now post-literate tribal “people” and the literate elite of politicians, merchants, and (instead of priests) technologists. But now they live in the seamless, frictionless nomos of the airport; instead of Latin they speak International Business English. This is the real postliberal order.

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Not The Re-Enchantment We Ordered

This has huge political ramifications, especially for England, paralysed as we currently are between three geopolitical models, namely Europe, America, and the Commonwealth. But for our conversation here, a more pressing question is perhaps as follows: how does Christian revival (which is real, if only a fraction of the total re-enchantment) map onto this picture?

How, indeed, should we navigate pluralities of religion, now that faith has ceased to be a private matter and is once again growing an increasingly strident public one? What are we to make of Labour’s sponsorship of Islamic speech controls? Or Tommy Robinson’s Christmas carol service, or Crusader insignia at Unite the Kingdom rallies? What do we make of those who say the way to challenge the “Islamisation of Britain” is not liberalling harder but returning to church? What are we to make of those Evangelicals cheering on the demolition of Iran by the USA, because of how they read the Book of Revelation?

Perhaps the saving grace of modernity was that, as we gained the power to build ever more lethal weapons, so those in the upper echelons largely abandoned the apocalyptic mindset, in favour of the more rationalistic, pragmatic post-Machiavellian mode. Thus by the time we got nukes, no one who might be tempted to deploy them to explicitly eschatological ends ever got close to the big red button.

I’m not sure that’s true any more. Perhaps it hasn’t been since the Global War on Terror.

I get the impression sometimes that when people talk wistfully about re-enchantment what they mean is basically polite, moderate secular modernity, except everyone goes to church and you can quote the Bible in Parliament. They don’t mean blasphemy laws. They don’t mean witches using the internet to hex Charlie Kirk, and congregations creating AI effigies of him, after his assassination, as a Christian martyr. They don’t mean dispensationalists having a hand in Middle East policy.

This really isn’t the re-enchantment I ordered: it’s too violent, too tribal. Too existential. Jonathan Pageau said to me recently that it’s become possible again to “live inside the Christian story” and I think this puts it well. Faith has stopped being a thing we stand outside and look at, and has become once again the ground of our decisions about what to do. But we should take this seriously, too. We’re used to Muslims willing to die for their faith; my hunch is that many here will get a bit nervous if working-class Englishmen start saying they’d die for Jesus.

And I actually think this is coming. As people resume living fully inside faith stories, this will have anarchic ripple effects, bewildering to state authorities and formal faith institutions alike. We can, for example, expect it to catalyse far more forceful confrontations in the coming years between Muslim and newly-awakened Christian believers. Much as the Middle Ages contained both scholarly interfaith dialogue and mass faith-inflected conflict, so too I anticipate that the unifying and divisive effects of re-enchantment to stratify by education level and reading ability.

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Upon This Rock

Against this, though, I also view Christian faith as perhaps the only place left to stand. And it’s perhaps the one worldview that has both the fluidity and universality to help us navigate the new tribalism: not to homogenise us, but to welcome people in their nations, without dividing those nations necessarily from one another. After all, the Book of Genesis tells us that God created the peoples of this earth “in their nations”. And the Gospels tell us in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit is for everyone. The new covenant isn’t just for one nation; it’s for all the peoples on earth. That’s the message of Pentecost.

As the old print-era nation state settlement slides from our hands, and the new transnational, post-geographic empires tighten their grip, I look forward to discussing with you over the next day and a half all how we can best meet this new and turbulent age. I’ll offer, as my final word, three opening thoughts.

First, this post-liberal transition in culture and consciousness poses a unique challenge, for us, in England. The English were among the first people to embrace the new empiricism. The Anglican establishment held some form of this in emulsion with our nation-state settlement for close to 500 years. Now empiricism and the nation-state are visibly imploding, and we are left as perhaps the most homeless nation on the planet.

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Disenchanted spiritually. Disembedded domestically. Dispossessed by our own government. Disaffected, disbelieving. But yet also perhaps the most successful diaspora people on the planet. Who will catechise the Anglo? Who is already doing so? Who can bring us home, and where even is home, now?

Secondly, and this is really just a hunch at this point: that we need to rebuild the monasteries, in England most urgently of all. I mean this perhaps figuratively: if the post-modern, post-print, post-liberal age is on its way, retrieving a medieval stratification of consciousness, social roles, and nations, we would do well also to restore medieval practices of memory. To write our own inner algorithms, through deliberate study and meditation, lest the platforms and LLMs write us.

And finally: this is no time for “Christian Nationalism”; not even (perhaps especially not) the Diet Coke C of E version. The Holy Spirit really is for everyone. Everyone, that is, who is willing to say “yes”. Even the English. My sense is that in this new, post-national age of tribes, as we discover the real beauty and terror of life after disenchantment, this is the only centre able to hold.

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First, and also (you’ll see why) relevantly for this week’s topic, some news: I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined Socrates in the City as a guest interviewer for 2026. Under that banner I’ll be interviewing brilliant, wise, and insightful guests from the worlds of history, faith, philosophy, politics, feminism, art, culture, and more. (Making the first of these videos is part of why my first couple of months has been so busy!)

Here’s the very first:

New interviews go live every two weeks - do check them out.

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Now: Athens. It was my first visit. I have never seen somewhere so thickly over-written, in architectural terms. England often feels to me like palimpsests overlaid on palimpsests, with half-timbered medieval structures absorbed into high imperial ones, and this all jumbled with bleak postwar concrete and the dizzy fantasia of global replacist glass.

Athens, though, knocks my homeland into a cocked hat. Britain’s ruins span two millennia; the stones of Athens saw the very age of heroes. There is so much history here that you can’t avoid building on it, or sometimes through it: near the historic centre, the metro line passes by, over, and through ancient ruins, with graffiti’d trains rattling past the ancient Temple of Hephaestus:

A few days before the trip, I interviewed the classical scholar Spencer Klavan for Socrates in the City. You’ll have to wait till May for the video, but amidst a marvellously rich discussion we touched on Tertullian’s famous question: “what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?”. Spencer’s view is that the moment when Athens and Jerusalem came together - the fateful instant that, he argues, marks the foundation of “the West” as we know it - is recorded in Acts 17, which details St Paul’s visit to Athens.

There, St Paul preached to members of the Areopagus, a prestigious governing body, and made his first converts including St Dionysius the Areopagite, who now gives his name to Athens’ Catholic cathedral. To step from that conversation to standing on the Areopagus (the Hill of Ares) itself, a few days later, felt like falling through a wormhole in time and space. I didn’t take a photo, but the sense of worlds within and behind worlds was intense. Facing the Areopagus, you stand with your back to the escarpment that leads to the Acropolis, capped by the Parthenon, a structure so laden with history and myth, with the dreams and yearnings of entire cultures, that space itself seems to bend around it.

But this isn’t just about my holiday snaps. I want to talk more about about how history and memory can bend space and time. To this end, I want to pause (warning: more holiday photos incoming!) at one of the much younger (!!) buildings in Athens’ protracted history: the Church of Panagia Kapnikarea, an 11th-century structure located in the centre of what is now a concrete shopping square, one of the oldest continuously in use churches in Athens.

Visiting this church is the most vivid experience I’ve ever had, in the physical world, of space not working quite the way geometry says it should. Here it is, with Guess Jeans and Birkenstock shops and concrete office blocks in the background. Doesn’t it look tiny?

And yet - I swear this on my life - when you step through the door, you instantly realise this church is bigger inside than out.

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The latest round of revelations on the scale and reach of Jeffrey Epstein’s corruption have shaken public life to its foundations, on both sides of the Atlantic. I joined this week for a bonus episode of Maiden Mother Matriarch, now available here as well for my paying subscribers. In it we explore what the latest Epstein discoveries reveal about cont…

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Toward the end of this last week of Epstein pandemonium, in yesterday’s FT Janan Ganesh put his finger on a key aspect of the operation: the way this man acted as broker between the financial one percent and what Ganesh calls “the public one percent” - a group with clout but not necessarily so much money:

Artists, intellectuals, politicians, even the occasional journalist: the public rather than private 1 per cent. Their value in social settings is high. Their income might not be. It is hard to get rich doing something fun. Again, most of them just shrug this off as the tax on having a cool job.

What struck me here was the way Ganesh’s description meshes with something I’ve been tracking for a while: the re-emergence of aristocratic patronage, for culture-makers. As Ganesh notes, the wealth gap between apex financiers and apex culture-markers creates a world of temptation:

Even those who really mind will often find a clean solution, such as the classic private-public intermarriage, where one spouse provides the wealth and the other the social clout. (George Washington’s marriage to a Virginia plantation-owner is a template from the annals of hypergamy.) A few, however, will do improper things for the rich to get some of their crumbs. It is just too jarring for them to be the star of a dinner party and then fly economy.

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Is this always, or only, a recipe for corruption? It’s complicated. The picture Ganesh paints bears comparison to the aristocratic patronage arrangements that were common in the Middle Ages. If you spend any time at all rummaging around in the literature and history of the past, several things become clear. One: there has always been a small subset of people who form a “Public One Percent”: perhaps not identical to today’s celebrity culture entertainers, but who stand head and shoulders above others in their field, and who tend to seek one another out internationally, more or less regardless of age, sex, faith, or other identity markers, for the exchange of ideas. Two: those people historically tended to wind up with aristocratic patrons.

Back then, copyright wasn’t a thing, and nor was mass-producing your works and earning royalties. Instead, intellectuals generally sought the protection of lords and princes, who would bankroll their existence in exchange for the clout that came from having leading intellectuals floating about their entourage. If that sounds a bit like what was happening when Epstein collected novelists, filmmakers and models as dinner guests for his dorky billionaire clients, that’s because it was.

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But does that make it corrupt by definition? From the idealistic, “speaking truth to power” vantage-point we tend to associate with modern artists and writers it looks dodgy in the extreme, pretty much by definition. But is it completely indefensible? Really, it probably depended firstly on your patron, and secondly on the work your patron wanted to commission. In the16th century, for example, the Renaissance Italian esotericist Pico della Mirandola spent much of his (relatively short) life in the orbit and protection of the Italian statesman and patron of the arts, Lorenzo de’Medici. Medici also supported some of the greatest Renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo and Botticelli. In the 17th century Cosimo, another Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, would act as patron to Galileo Galilei.

From the age of print onward, though, public intellectuals were increasingly able to make money directly rather than depending on patrons. If Galileo had a lordly patron in the 17th century, by the 18th the English poet Alexander Pope was able to make so much money just from his translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey he could buy a villa in Twickenham and set himself up as a gentleman. Print publishing was efficient and cheap enough, readers sufficiently numerous, and the legal environment sufficiently well-developed, that for two centuries after Pope writers were able to make a living more or less directly from paying audiences. That, then, becomes the basic economic condition wherein writers begin to imagine themselves “speaking truth to power”.

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By and large, though, it doesn’t work like that any more. There are outliers, such as JK Rowling, but for the most part it’s no longer possible to make a living directly from book publishing. The chief culprit is the internet, which has the liberating power of loosening constraints on who can write, but with the concomitant effect of diluting formerly reliable writerly income streams away.

It remains possible to make a living as a public intellectual, but the ecology now works very differently. For one thing, as has recently observed, there’s a convergence afoot between what writers do, and what influencers do; to succeed as the former you need a multi-channel presence more like that of the latter, and you have to keep plugging away at it. And not everyone enjoys this, or is good at it, or can command a big enough audience to make it work. For these, the best realistic alternative really is aristocratic patronage of some kind.

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For this group, there are surely lessons in the Epstein debacle.

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Secondly: we have a poorly chicken. I wouldn’t normally mention so domestic a matter, but the ailing hen is Minty, who featured in a previous post about “grindset” and the Thomist idea of “mastering our natural bent”.

She’s warm, comfortable and well-supplied with food, and seems a bit more perky today. We hope she just has a bad cold and will pull through. But please spare a warm thought in passing for the recovery of Minty the hen, who truly has mastered the art of fully being her creaturely self.

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Finally, this week’s topic is my HUGE excitement on opening a text recently recommended me, by a scholarly friend who has read parts of my book in draft:

I’m only into the foothills of this fascinating text, but in brief it’s a study of medieval theories of the theory, function, role, and cultivation of memory in the culture that preceded the printing press. That is: manuscript culture, an age in which books were rare treasures, laboriously produced, and so precious and vulnerable they were often collected in walled libraries, chained to desks, or even locked in chests.

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Under such circumstances books weren’t ready to hand most of the time, as they are now, so an elaborate theory and practice of memory flourished. This theory and practice distinguished between the how of remembering (mnemonic schemes, which Carruthers calls “heuristic”), and what is remembered, plus a subtle phenomenology covering the experience of remembering, and the relation between a memory and what is remembered.My friend recommended me the book in relation to my chapter on manuscript culture, but my immediate thought on opening Carruthers is that its relevance is far more contemporary.

One of the phrases I have been kicking around lately is “The Great Forgetting”: a hunch that in embracing AI, as an extension both of our capacity to remember and of our heuristic faculties in retrieving and arranging what is remembered, we run the risk of allowing faculties to wither that are in fact central to our capacity to think. (I made this case, and also that it is unevenly distributed across social classes, recently in the New York Times.) Building on these themes, my working hypothesis is that at least at the collective level AI is survivable, but only provided we counterbalance this effect by deliberately cultivating our human faculty for memory, as distinct from the digital kind.

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Carruthers cites Plato, who describes this human faculty as “κηρινὸν ἐκμαγεῖον”, resembling a block of wax in which impressions are made, held, and can be over-written. It’s surely true that every age draws analogies between human cognition and familiar modes of information storage and retrieval: in our case, computers, and in Plato’s, wax tablets. But I think there’s something hugely important about how tactile as well as visual Plato’s analogy is, in eloquent contrast to the mute abstraction and human-level illegibility of the digital one.

I don’t use wax tablets for storage, but Plato’s analogy still feels metaphorically far closer to how I experience remembering than the analogy from computer memory. Memorising a form of words or succession of ideas for repeated reflection produces an inner experience that feels, to me, like something I can both see and touch, and around which other ideas then cluster and crystallise. I often compose essays and arguments when out dog-walking or running, and can later recall whole sequences of ideas by picturing where I was when the thoughts came to mind.

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It seems intuitively right that being deliberate about how we cultivate this inner landscape would in turn, form our overall patterns of thought. AI, though, incentivises the exact opposite, in the now-normative student practice of giving your homework to Chat-GPT. Meanwhile, if using Chat-GPT effectively bypasses inner formation, doomscrolling is instead the polar opposite of deliberately shaping the inner wax tablet. When we doomscroll, the experience is of accumulating others’ short-form thoughts seemingly at random, out of a torrent of such thoughts (and never mind how algorithmically conditioned the torrent is overall) then allowing the resulting patterns to form our inner landscape.

Where memorisation and meditation is intentional, this is passive. But the resulting patterns nonetheless shape the inner “wax tablet” of thought and memory, and hence also the ideas that are subsequently able to crystallise. This on its own could perhaps help explain something I’ve recently learned: that the only reliable antidote to internet poisoning, the feeling of inner unease produced by too much doomscrolling, is prayer.

This probably needs elaboration at greater length, in a separate essay; time is short today, so I’ll stick a pin it for now. There’s so much more to say on practices of memory in relation to the digital memeplex. I expect to revisit this as I get deeper into the Carruthers book and into my own book draft. But let me know in the comments if you too have a practice for countering internet poisoning, or for cultivating your non-digital, human, “wax tablet” capacity to memorise, recall, and re-compose. As we all slip deeper into this post-print age, I’m coming to think our best hope of cultural survival lies in rediscovering and re-applying the ancient ars memoriae.

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Every time I visit a bookshop, I’m struck again by the monolithically progressive feel of promoted books. This got me thinking: what are bookish contrarians reading, and how do they find interesting titles when bookshops are so homogeneous? I decided to ask my X followers.

If, I enquired, you used to believe all the conventional dogmas, and now don’t, what one book changed your worldview? I got an avalanche of replies. These quickly added up to a reading list so lively, eclectic and wide-ranging I’ve collated it here. (My inaugural deradicalisation book was Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, which several other readers agreed was influential for them too. Two other readers also mentioned Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of it, and one Spoilt Rotten.)

I haven’t been absolutely comprehensive, because people are still adding to the list. But I’ve tried to draw out patterns. Philosophy, political science, faith, cultural critique, and a solid leavening of great works of fiction all attest to the transformative power of reading. The list also delineates, as it were in negative, the worldview to which “deradicalisation” in this sense is reacting. From fiction that centres the tragic nature of the human condition, through grim lessons of history and foreign-policy realism to Christian apologetics, and explicit critiques of progressivism, the picture is of quiet or not-so-quiet mutiny against blank-slate secularism, and all who sail in her.

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I make no personal representations as to their wisdom or value, beyond saying each is on the list because least one person in my extended network found it transformative. I’ve taken the time (much more than expected) to compile it, because we live amid information super-abundance, awash in more books than anyone could read in a hundred lifetimes. My own reading tends to be selected based on whimsy, other books’ end-notes, personal recommendations, and whatever review titles land on the doormat. Of these, recommendations weigh most heavily.

I’ve begun with titles that got a single recommendation. There were loads! Then I moved on to those with two, then three or four and finally a Deradicalisation Hall of Fame, comprising books that multiple people said transformed the way they saw the world. And this was a striking collection, which challenges our polarised age with the a compelling case for the transformative power of long-form writing unflinchingly committed to truth over tribe.

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Literature and fiction

Single mentions in the fiction category included Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudoun, which filmmaker Michael Nayna says “showed me how public morality gets leveraged for private interests”. There were some dystopian sci-fi classics - CS Lewis’ - That Hideous Strength and EM Forster’s The Machine Stops, along with classic treatments of the human condition: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Henry James’ The Bostonians.

Also in the human-condition category comes Chaim Grade’s My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner, which a commenter reports “contains the most scathing denunciation of Western liberalism I have ever encountered in print.” Jung Chang’s family epic Wild Swans changed one reader’s worldview, while another reports that Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being conveyed the teaching that “No matter your position in life it can be stripped from by fate and the system”. Intriguingly, one respondent mentioned 2007 Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, comparatively little-referenced now but a highly subversive lens now on multiple woke dogmas.

There were also a few works of social-commentary fiction, including Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole. And others mentioned more immediately political works, notably Lionel Shriver’s Mania, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomized, and Jean Raspail’s explosive The Camp of the Saints (long considered too incendiary to republish, but last year reprinted in a new English translation).

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Political theory and criticism

There was a lot in this category. Several books denounced the post-war counterculture, including Heath and Potter’s The Rebel Sell: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, David Mamet’s The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, and Peter Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation. Lots more challenged aspects of leftism and, especially, the modern “woke” kind: Nick Cohen’s What’s Left and Ben Cobley’s The Tribe look specifically at the British left, while Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s The Rise of Victimhood Culture, Bernard Henri-Levy’s Barbarism with a Human Face, and Helen Pluckrose’s Cynical Theories examine aspects of this phenomenon internationally. Several more challenged specifically the stifling of these ideologies on speech, thought, and politics: Mick Hume’s Trigger Warning, Jonathan Rauch’s The Kindly Inquisitors, Pascal Bruckner’s Tyranny of Guilt and Tammy Bruce’s The New Thought Police.

There was a further cluster of books on the managerial elite and its discontents, notably John Carey’s seminal The Intellectuals and the Masses, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, James Scott’s classic Seeing Like A State, and Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders. Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement sits somewhere between challenges to wokeness and managerialism, while Theodore Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future just wants to blow everything up. And Renaud Camus’ Enemy of the Disaster, while superficially about immigration, is also properly understood a challenge to post-national managerialism.

A few geopolitics and IR books got a mention, notably Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations, Eamonn Fingleton’s Jaws of the Dragon and Kenneth Waltz’s Man, the State, and War. John Glubb’s Fate of Empires probably belongs here, too, as does Ian Morris’ War: What Is It Good For?. Then there was a more general category of challenges to received opinion, including Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, Michael Crichton’s climate-change-sceptic State of Fear, and Arlie Hochschild’s study of the Tea Party, Strangers in Their Own Land.

Philosophy and Faith

Some heavy-hitters here, including the Catechism of the Catholic Church and, for one respondent, The Book of Mormon. There’s also a mention each for Plato’s Dialogues, Cicero’s The Republic, and Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue. Several readers had their minds expanded by books exploring the fault-line between theism and atheism, or across faiths, with those named including David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions, Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, Sam Harris’ The End of Faith, and Nabeel Qureshi’s Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus. Difficult to categorise between this category and psychology, meanwhile, is Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, a look at left- and right-brained thinking and how these shape culture at large.

Victorian judge, philosopher, statesman and critic of JS Mill James Fitzjames Stephen deradicalised someone with Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, an early critique of these ideas. GK Chesterton’s Heretics also changed someone’s worldview by taking early aim at modern sacred dogmas from a Catholic perspective, and Rene Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World did via “the perennial philosophy”. Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences changed someone’s worldview by locating the origin of modern woes in nominalism.

Several Christian authors changed worldviews by challenging contemporary dogmas, such as Carl Trueman in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Udo Middleman in Pro Existence, Robert Spritzer S.J. in Healing the Culture, and DC Schindler in Freedom from Reality. And one contributor had his or her (let’s be real, probably his) worldview transformed by Bronze Age Pervert’s Bronze Age Mindset.

Men, women, and family

This was a wide-ranging category, encompassing pro-family arguments such as Waite and Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage and Louise Perry’s The Case Against The Sexual Revolution, plus a roster of gender-critical and feminist texts including Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Victoria Smith’s Hags, Janice Raymond’s classic The Transsexual Empire, and John Colapinto’s biography of poor, mutilated David Reimer, As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl.

There were also some contrarian and even anti-feminist ones: Christina Hoff Somers’ Who Stole Feminism got a mention, as did Susan Faludi’s Stiffed and Carrie Gress’ The Anti-Mary Exposed.

Science

The theme here is probably books in which science challenges received dogma: Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man and Vincent Sarich’s Race opened eyes by questioning liberal views on violence and racial differences, while Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene did so by propagating an amoral view of human survival. Ullica Segerstrale’s Defenders of Truth: the Sociobiology Debate and Robert Nisbet’s The Sociological Tradition both broadened people’s understandings of these disciplines, and how they interact with ideology.

Psychology

Nick Chater’s The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and The Improvised Mind delivered, for one reader, an “Absolute sucker punch to much of the bunkum about ‘the unconscious’ that permeates western humanities.” Robert Jay Lifton’s Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism offered another insight into the history of political brainwashing.

History, biography, memoir

Homer’s The Iliad could sit under literature, but it’s oral history originally, so I’m putting it here. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel also transformed one worldview, as did Hannah Arendt’s classic exploration of the Holocaust, The Banality of Evil.

Several people recommended conservative critiques of modern policy and governance, including Peter Hitchens’ A Brief History of Crime, Vincent Cannato’s The Ungovernable City and Jared Taylor’s Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure Of Race Relations In Contemporary America. Another, Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, opened eyes by recounting the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of the working classes at the sharp end of its sometimes brutal transformations. PJ O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores redpilled someone, by lifting the lid on how American government actually works.

In the memoir category we found Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, David Horowitz’s Radical Son, and JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.

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Business/finance

There weren’t many books in this category, which maybe says something about my internet community; or maybe it says something about economics books. Ron Paul’s End the Fed changed one mind though by calling for, well, ending the fed. Milton Friedman one more, arguing for free markets in Free To Choose, Capitalism and Freedom, and Paul Heyne opened a set of eyes by explaining key economic concepts in The Economic Way of Thinking.

Deradicalisation Honourable Mentions

Books that were mentioned twice included, on the literary front, Tolstoy’s War And Peace and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Political theory and criticism included Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God that Failed, Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, James Bartholemew’s The Welfare State We’re In, Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and other essays, and and Helen Joyce’s superb Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality.

Grand histories of Western culture included Tom Holland’s epic Dominion and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual.

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Deradicalisation Runners-Up

Several people recommended, on the literary front, the poetry, essays & memoir of Czeslaw Milosz. Four also namechecked Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a bleak allegory of Soviet political terror.

Roger Scruton was the philosopher of choice, having changed minds with An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, A Political Philosophy, Soul of the World, and Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life surely also belongs broadly under philosophy, with three mentions, and the one science title among runners-up was Charles Murray’s still-controversial The Bell Curve, also with three.

The rest in this category were, broadly, political theory and criticism: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (four mentions), Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed (three each), plus three namechecks for Christopher Lasch , two for The Revolt of the Elites and one for The Culture of Narcissism. There were two women among these runners-up: Abigail Shrier, who changed four respondents’ worldview with her searing exposé of child gender transition, Irreversible Damage, and yours truly, though I suspect this was more an effect of the respondent filter bubble than any absolute impact.

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The Hall of Worldview-Changing Fame

The real giants of deradicalisation stood out pretty quickly. But they weren’t who I expected at all! It contains philosophers, great works of fiction, stubbornly truth-seeking scientists, social critics, and one foundational holy book (you can probably guess which one). But there aren’t many thinkers here who I’d characterise as polemical social conservatives. Instead, overall, what characterises the Hall of Fame is intellectual integrity. I certainly don’t agree with all these worldviews, but in each case the commitment to it is both profound, and worked out at length and with a commitment to truth as the author sees it.

I think there are lessons here, both on the transformative power of books but also on which books change minds, and how. There’s plenty of room in the bookshop for titles aimed at people who have already made up their minds, and want to feel good about it; but the ones that really change the world bring their readers along, to new places.

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Is it really true that progressive women are protesting ICE patrols because they secretly want to bang them? Amid escalating rhetoric and violence around ICE immigration patrols, this X post has precipitated the week’s most provocative memes:

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The most common response, albeit usually more crudely expressed, was to the effect that the subtext of of this was wayyy horny. The internet promptly got to work, re-imagining the anti-ICE protests as romantic genre fiction. This one, based on a widely-shared video of a woman in Minneapolis obstructing border control officers, is fairly typical:

So are all these women really only obstructing ICE enforcement because they aren’t getting any? Do they, as they say in Britain, just need “a f—- and a hot cup of tea”? This insinuation long precedes Trump’s deportation programme. Previously, its chief vector was the predilection of progressive protesters of a certain demographic and class (ok, bourgeois white women) for attending protests in costumes based on the Handmaid’s Tale TV series. These costumes have also appeared at ICE protests, as attested by the header image. (I couldn’t find the original image credit, sorry.) There are plenty more such images at the Facebook group Handmaids of MN.

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Meme-world has long since concluded that this tendency, as well as the TV show on which it is based, is powered not by ideology but by these women’s unacknowledged psychosexual cravings:

But is it true? Several things can be the case at once. The first is that, let’s be honest: in an even slightly less febrile context than Trump’s mass deportations, the AI-generated “Detained by Desire” book design is totally the kind of storyline you might expect to find on the “Erotic Fiction” shelf in a bookshop. The Substack fiction-writer says she’s actually going to write it (working title: “Hot as ICE”). And this is only plausible because, however outrageously the proposition violates political correctness, horny is not a drive that pays much attention to political correctness.

In other words: I think there is something to it. But I also think the protesters really believe in their cause. That there’s no reason protest should not be powered by moral conviction, and also - for some at least - erotically tinged. And this is important, because the whole “Detained by Desire” meme tends to be deployed to suggest that because this erotic energy is present at the edge of some such encounters, we can safely discount any political principles expressed by the women involved.

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Whether or not you agree with the women protesting ICE, I don’t think this follows. On the contrary: the internet wags gleefully posting romantic-fiction memes as though this rebuts progressive women’s political worldview have wholly misunderstood the nature of the challenge. And this tells us at least as much about them, as it does about Minnesota ladies in Handmaid outfits.

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Spending too much time online really does rewire your brain, especially if you’re very young. A Singapore study reported by Bloomberg showed a correlation between heavy screen exposure in infancy, and a non-typical pattern of neurological development that seemed linked to anxiety in adolescence.

“Don’t give your toddler an iPad” would seem to be a no-brainer, and yet here we are. What about adults, though? I’m pretty enmeshed in the internet, and have been for 25 years now. calls it “Fairyland”. I love Fairyland. But as anyone will know who reads older stories about this realm, Fairyland isn’t all twinkly tinkly mini-girlies with wings, in tulle minidresses. It’s an eerie place, with perverse rules, and some straight up monsters - including the one on my mind today: the vampire.

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This isn’t a woo-woo post. What I want to talk about here in mythic terms can also be described more abstractly using a phrase coined by the psychologist and addiction expert David Courtwright: “limbic capitalism”. In The Age of Addiction, Courtwright defined this as “a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction”. I’ve referenced Courtwright before, in the context of the compulsive, antisocial, and wildly lucrative nature of the porn industry. But his framework encompasses a huge range of negative behavioural patterns, from junk food to gambling as well as porn.

It also includes great swathes of online behaviour. Last week’s online main character was Justin Murphy, an American internet personality who posted on X about how he doesn’t enjoy playing with his little kids. Murphy got absolutely dogpiled for his post, and my aim here isn’t to litigate the question he posted about, but to think about what’s going on when people get sucked into arguments of this kind.

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Again, abstractly, this is “limbic capitalism”. It works via the incentive structures baked into engagement-based social media platforms, where the social media platform is always more engagement, and higher traffic, and is powered by a recursive feedback loop of algorithms and dopamine and behavioural modification. From a human perspective, this means some kinds of online behaviour are rewarded with more attention, engagement, amplification, and other kinds of social focus, producing a dopamine hit. Other kinds of behaviour won’t get you the same happy buzz. We talk routinely about “feeding the algorithm”, but wonder less regularly what, precisely, we’re feeding it. And here I think the best analogy really is the vampire: an uncanny entity that lurks outside your gait, waiting for an invitation to feed on your lifeblood - at least metaphorically so, in the form of your passions.

Consider: not all types of engagement are, well, equally engaging. The key is triggering some kind of strong emotion, meaning you can obtain this effect via positive-sum types of post. But the swiftest and often most rewarding (on its own terms) way of securing online engagement is often the dark stuff that makes people feel worse: angrier, sadder, lonelier, hornier, more inadequate, more fearful.

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After I read the Murphy post about fatherhood, I nearly got caught. Then, on the cusp of posting a reply, it hit me that the dividend of ego satisfaction I’d get, from being mildly self-righteous to this guy I’ve never met, would almost certainly be outstripped by the emotional cost of letting the whole bad-tempered discourse live rent-free in my head, even for a few hours. I used to just get stuck in, but the more unhinged social media gets, the less appealing this feels, because of the cost of getting involved in arguments of this kind: a cost I’ve come to think of as “letting the vampire in”.

The lore varies, but these creatures are generally depicted as undead entities, often with uncanny powers such as hypnotic powers. They can assume the form of loved ones, as they plead at the window for you to let them in. They are repelled by garlic or Christian symbols, and extremely difficult to kill. And, importantly, they feed on the blood of living humans, canonically pretty young women but really anyone they can get their fangs on. Also importantly, vampire lore frequently has it that these entities are only able to enter your house, and feed on you, if invited over the threshold.

The analogy should be clear. What I mean, when I talk about “letting the vampire in”, is the precise moment of deciding to participate in the arms-race of disembodied dark emotion: the stock-in-trade of the “limbic capitalism” that flows so lucratively and addictively throughout social media. Dark emotion is so much more engaging that every incentive pushes us toward being the most angry, or most sexy, or most despairing, or grotesque, or whatever.

Inviting the vampire in produces an unmistakable feeling. If you’re at all online you almost certainly know it. There you are, walking the dog, or making dinner, or whatever, and realise you are mentally composing angry or scornful or scintillatingly witty retorts to people you’ve never met, on a topic that has the most glancing relevance to your real-world existence but which feels URGENTLY pressing and of the utmost importance. When you’ve invited the vampire in, this feeling can become all-consuming. Sometimes it brings a mood of dread, or silent fury, or deep depression. It never brings a mood of focus, joy, or peace. On the contrary, it will sap your focus, besmirch your joy, and interrupt your peace. Worse still, once you’ve invited the vampire in, it is very much more difficult to get rid of it.

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It can take the (figurative) form of your ex; your mum; a wounded child; a desperate victim. It’s constantly scrabbling at the edges of that little glowing screen, pleading to be let in. Even positive-sum forms of posting tend to reward personal, intimate disclosure: baby photos, personal anecdotes, vulnerability: a slippery slope, that I’ve previously argued easily becomes another source of food for this entity to consume, without replenishment.

So let’s suppose you’ve let the vampire in, on some topic or other. Now what? Here again, vampire lore offers subtle but (in my experience) often effective suggestions for getting rid of it. It’s repelled by daylight, by garlic, by religious symbols; we might take these as metaphors for keeping normal, diurnal hours, staying grounded in physical reality, and praying regularly. In my experience these are all helpful remedies for that feeling I described above, of hauntedness and depletion, that comes from letting this thing feed on your passions.

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But if you will visit Fairyland, prevention is better than cure. For what it’s worth, over a quarter-century online I’ve stumbled by degrees into five self-imposed rules for navigating Fairyland, without accidentally inviting any vampires in. I don’t always manage to stick to them, but when I do life is considerably less haunted:

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