Over the coming weeks, as I bring book-writing to its close, I’ll be previewing my forthcoming book The King and the Swarm here, in chapter-by-chapter summary form.

Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 30 July at 19.00 BST (14:00 EST, 11:00 PST) in the subscriber chat for this newsletter. (I promise I’ll do a video one in August…!)

So far I’ve made my case that the Singularity already happened, not once but three times. We looked at the deep differences between oral and literate cultures: the way learning to read rewrites our brains, and how this changed human societies at scale. We’ve explored the European manuscript culture that developed the wake of literacy: one deeply bound up with Christian faith, where books were hand-written and scarce, and where literacy meant not just reading, but also the cultivation of memory and reading aloud.

Now we need to dive a bit deeper into the print Singularity. In this week’s preview we’ll touch on some general features of this momentous transformation. Then we’ll look more deeply in future chapters at three facets of the culture it created - secularism, nation-states, and democracy - before I argue that the recent Singularity is on its way to reversing all these attainments of the print era.

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the previews or any other themes you want to bring. The next AMA salon will take place on Thursday 30 August at 19.00. Link to follow!

Week 1 is here, in which I set out the book’s over-arching thesis. In week 2, I previewed the chapter which explores the very first Singularity: the Greek alphabet. Now, it’s time to delve into the hybrid cultures of literacy, memory, and the spoken word that took hold in the long stretch between the ancient world and the printing press.

The next Preview Salon will be on Thursday 30 July at 19:00 UK time, 14:00 EST / 11:00 PST.

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Link is here. See you there?

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Reminder to anyone that I’ll be hosting a salon later today for supporters, to discuss the preview posts so far on The King and the Swarm (or anything else that’s on your mind).

We’ll start at:

11:00 Pacific

14:00 Eastern

19:00 UK

I'll share a link when we kick off but it’ll be a thread in subscriber chat. I’ll send another link when we kick off. Hope to se…

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Then, a couple of times a month, I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the book or any other themes you want to bring. Thank you for your poll responses last week on date and time! More of you opted for the later time, so the first AMA will happen at 19.00 UK time (1400 EST / 1100 PST) this coming Thursday, 16 July. Link to follow!

Week 1 is here, in which I set out the book’s over-arching thesis. This week, the deep context for the book: how the Greek alphabet was the first information revolution in “the West”, what was unique about this technology, and how it sets the stage for much that we’re facing today.

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Yesterday, a cover story published in The Atlantic headlined “The End of Reading is Here”. It caused quite a stir! The author, Rose Horowitch, mentions a number of the touchpoints in early chapters of The King and the Swarm; it’s exciting to see these issues coming more generally to the surface.

But while I think Horowitch’s article documents the change pretty compellingly, we need to get beyond “oh no long-form reading seems to be over, and maybe it’ll take modernity with it”, to how is it over? Through what mechanisms? What can we learn from how it arrived, about the manner of its departure? And what does life look like in the aftermath? That is: less “can this be reversed” than “what comes next?”.

So this is what I’ll be exploring in The King and the Swarm, and previewing here in chapter-by-chapter summaries, while I work on the final section and wrap the draft up for my publisher’s September deadline. A couple of times a month I’ll hold a subscriber-only AMA salon, to discuss the book or any other themes you want to bring.

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This week, the book’s overarching thesis: the Singularity already happened. Not once, but three times.

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Marathon preparations are all-consuming. You spend hours a week, just training, and because you have to build up the stamina gradually, this commitment stretches across multiple months. Sticking to it requires willpower, and saying ‘no’ to other things. Unless you’re already freakisly fit and supplied with excessive animal spirits, it’s also so draining that it leaves little for other obligations. Sunday long runs left me so tired sometimes I would be pretty much unable to do anything else for the rest of the day, to the exasperation of my husband and (then) toddler.

It turned out that many comparable principles apply to book-writing. It’s a long-term commitment. Sometimes you feel like giving up, or that you’ll never get there. It’s also all-consuming in a comparable way, albeit less physically so: the arguments would fill up my head, and make me infuriatingly absent-minded and prone to leaving doors unlocked and the oven on. (This is not cute or charming when it keeps happening). In short, it consumed a huge amount of mental energy and willpower, to the point where sometimes the competition with family life felt zero-sum.

My family was very patient with me during both the marathon and the book, for which I’m eternally grateful. But it was also clear, having done both, that going forward I’d have to choose. So I did: five years on, the reason I haven’t run any more marathons is that while I like running, I love writing books, and I would not be able to do both at marathon distance without dropping literally all my other obligations. Which I don’t want to do.

Life is full of tradeoffs. These days I run fewer miles, with a dog for company. And as most of you know, I’m working on a second book: The King and the Swarm. Composing it has been quite different to the Feminism Against Progress: that was a sequential argument, like stringing beads on a wire or perhaps a violin concerto. This one is more like a helix, or maybe a fugue. It’s about information revolutions, and there have been several of these so the material twists around itself and sets off unexpected resonances.

I’m happy with the way it’s coming together. But at almost 10 chapters in, there are now more moving parts in play than can easily be set down for a day here and there, without pieces getting lost. By “moving parts” I mean the number of concurrent themes in a piece of written work. As a rule of thumb, I find unless it’s in a very dense register a 1,200 word piece has about 2, a 2,000-word piece has 3, a 5,000 word paper has 5-6, and a book has lots.

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The difference between making an argument, and making an argument that sings, is keeping all the moving parts in mind so you can bring out harmonics as you go along. If you do this well, it creates space for something extra, that (sorry if this sounds mad) comes from beyond whatever little insight I might have on my own. And The King and the Swarm has reached the point, more than three-quarters of the way in, where it’s time to draw those parts together - and that means I need to think about as little else as possible, for a while. So I’ve decided to set down Substack, at least partially, for a few weeks while I gather those threads together.

I’ve been wondering how best to do this, while honouring the support of my many wonderful readers here, and here’s what I propose:

For the next 12 weeks, after this one, I’ll post just for my paying subscribers. What I propose to share is a chapter-by-chapter preview of The King and the Swarm. Every week I’ll post, summarising a book chapter, and once or twice a month I’ll host an exclusive supporters-only salon, on the themes raised in the newsletter - or anything else you want to discuss. If I’m feeling brave enough I might even do these as a livestream. I’ve never tried going live on Substack before but it seems like it might be fun? Would it be fun? Only one way to find out!

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Anyway, if you want to come along for this end-of-marathon last, exhausted sprint, I’ll be grateful as ever for your interest, support, and feedback. If you aren’t currently a paid subscriber, but fancy egging me on to go live on Substack, now’s your moment. If you’d rather point a limited ‘Stack budget elsewhere for now, no worries: just write to me by replying to this email for a refund or subscription pause, or unsubscribe the usual way. No hard feelings! But I hope you do come along for the ride. I owe more than any of you can imagine to the community around this newsletter, and appreciate every one of you.

So with this in mind, it’s sprint finish time. Wish me luck! For those of you who are sticking around, stay tuned for KATS salon, week 1, next weekend, where I will make the condensed version of my case that the Singularity already happened. Meanwhile wish me luck with chapter 9 , in which the 17th-century end of absolute monarchy maybe (or maybe not?) goes into reverse…

The video of our panel isn’t up yet, but the talk to which we responded was this very eye-opening primer, from Chloe, on what Claude actually is:

More reflections on this talk, and on the questions it raises for me, once I’ve had a chance to catch my breath. First take, for now: I’m more sure than ever that arguing the toss on machine “consciousness” is a distraction. What I took from Chloe’s talk, in addition to this, is that we should think a great deal more about mirrors, interpellation, and other recursive recognition-based social dynamics, in the context of AI.

More on this when my energy levels have recovered a little! Meanwhile, do take a look at her video, and let me know what you all think in the comments.

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The other standout moment for me - one that I’ll be reflecting on for some time - was a most passionate counterpoint to the world according to Anthropic. This talk was delivered by Jonathan Pageau, of Symbolic World, on staying human in the age of the machine:

What do you think? Will we be devoured by the machine or extended and empowered by it? Why not both? Let me know what you think below.

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Over this very intense week I also recorded FOUR episodes of Socrates Dialogues, the discussion series I’ve been honoured to record as a contributor to Socrates in the City. I was joined by philosopher Kathleen Stock, theologian Carl Trueman, and tech entrepreneur Mike Solana. And for the fourth I joined Eric Metaxas, to discuss my recent adventures in medieval memory technology.

Last year, I didn’t handle ARC well at all, and left after two days exhausted and with a flu that took me two weeks to shake. It turns out that when one’s preferred mode of existence is silence, solitude, and a room full of books, being transposed to a busy, exciting conference of thousands is a touch overwhelming. So this year, I was more realistic about how much public exposure is manageable for a country bumpkin like me, and made it all the way to the end relatively unscathed. Lessons learned!

It was such a thrilling week and I’m grateful for it all. I’m also relieved to be home, with my little family, and to be treading the usual forest walk this morning: a physical place, and an especially beloved and familiar one, which forms the visual backdrop for my memory meditations.

And taking this smiley golden girl to cool off in the stream:

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Nothing spreads joy (and spare dog hair) like a Labrador. Happily, at least if you’re me, it’s possible to tidy an overstretched mind, simply by letting it do nothing very strenuous while you vacuum dog hair off the floor. An unintended gift from the dog, perhaps, but also one that keeps on giving (whether my mind is overstretched or not).

I hope your weekends are just as full of joy, and maybe less full of dog hair. Let me know what you think of Chloe’s and Jonathan’s words in the comments, and stay tuned for deeper reflections when I’ve caught my breath. X

David Hockney, one of the great British painters of the twentieth century, died last week. There’s a lovely elegy for him in the Times, by his longstanding friend, the critic and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. One line stood out to me, on Hockney’s attitude to the expressionists and modernists. Bragg writes:

He had no time for the anguish and angst of the expressionists and the modernists. He was drawn to real things, joyous things, natural and human. Once he overheard an art expert making a derogatory remark about artists who painted tulips. “Actually it’s very hard to paint a tulip,” he said. “Have you tried?”

Hockney was right, as anyone will know who has ever made a serious attempt to draw or paint from life. Difficulty aside, though, the subtext to this exchange is a moral one. The “art expert” in this anecdote was, however obliquely, making a moral assessment of drawing from life. He wouldn’t be the only one: at this point it’s more or less taken for granted, among people who consider themselves sophisticated appreciators of art, that being able accurately to draw and paint how people, objects, or landscapes look doesn’t necessarily evidence artistic merit, but mere technical skill.

Commenting on the Bragg elegy, the Revd Professor Andrew Davison, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Divinity, picked up on this substrate of moral assertion, identifying it as, in truth, anti-moral: “So much that is sick about contemporary culture is summed up in this distain (sic) for painting tulips.”

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So here we have two opposing views. One claims there is no moral value in painting the appearances of things. The other argues that this viewpoint itself expresses a deep sickness within contemporary culture. But I wonder: is there perhaps a via media here? In my view, our problem doesn’t exactly come from not wanting to do naturalistic paintings. That loss of interest in the appearances of things in fact took place some time ago, around the turn of the twentieth century, and is linked to the advent of electricity and also of photography. No: our problem lies in having abandoned artistic naturalism, without restoring metaphysics. And there are important conclusions to be drawn from this insight, for those who wrestle with the question of where art should go next, from our current confused and exhausted moment.

I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Revd Davison recently, at Pusey House. He is that extremely rare theological creature, an Anglican Thomist; as such, I think it highly likely that he’s more alert than most to the importance of metaphysics. But this can’t be said for many in the world of modern art, which is wrestling with a problem only secondarily about art, and much more fundamentally about a metaphysical question: do things have an essence in any sense distinguishable from their appearance, or our ideas about them?

This question is hundreds and hundreds of years old, and was first contested back in the 13th century by William of Ockham, when he argued that positing any kind of stable essence to things imposed artificial constraints on God’s freedom to act as He pleased, in His creation. The countervailing position, most famously expounded by St Thomas Aquinas (and here I am a bit worried Revd Davison will be along shortly to give me a B minus for my sketchy summaries), was that no: things do in fact have a form or essence, independent of the ideas we ourselves form about them. They also have ends, which is to say they are directed.

The chicken-ness of a chicken is just as chickeny, regardless of my perceptions of that chicken. Its purpose is to chicken. Here is the obligatory photo of a chicken, chickening:

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I’m sure it’s clear enough to all of you by now that I’m emphatically Team Aquinas here, and not Team Ockham. In This House, the nature of chickens is a frequent source of joyful contemplation. Regular readers will also know that I love to bang on about the way form and ends were abandoned as categories for study or research, as a key precondition for the modern scientific revolution.

It’s too much of a sidebar for this short essay, but in The King and the Swarm (published next year) I’ll make the book-length case that this and much else besides was downstream of the print revolution. In the wake of this, a new and more empiricist mode of thought was normalised, that developed Ockham’s original challenge to focus on what is accessible to the senses, downplaying theories about the essence or nature of what is perceived as a distraction from the real business of research.

This narrower conception of “reality” is the version represented, often with astonishing skill and beauty, in the naturalistic schools of painting that began to flourish from the Renaissance on. These culminated in works of astonishing skill and precision, such as the sea-paintings of the 19th-century artist Ivan Aivazovsky:

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For anyone interested, there’s a great discussion of Aivazovsky’s work here by the contemporary artist and printmaker .

Photography was the beginning of the end of this kind of naturalism. Why pursue a perfect representation of physical appearances in painting or drawing, when you can point and click with a camera? But the real death-knell was electricity. The great prophet of technology, Marshall McLuhan, foretold all the way back in the 1960s that electricity was the beginning of the end of the print revolution, and particularly of the way print (really, mass literacy) shifted Western cultures from “the magical world of the ear” to “the neutral world of the eye”.

Photography was already driving artists to differentiate their vision from pure naturalism by the mid-19th century, but the eruption of radical subjectivism into painting via Expressionism, Cubism, and the rest kicked off after the world began to go electric at the turn of the century. It’s almost always the case that artists intuit the direction of travel before anyone else, and this was no exception. By the early twentieth century the most sensitive artists had abandoned pure naturalism, and were instead moved to pain inner topographies, or - as with Cubism - to paint the same subject from multiple superimposed perspectives:

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For the sake of space I’m not going to try and recap the entire history of contemporary art after Cubism. But one of its knottiest problems is this: if “art” is no longer naturalistic, what precisely is it supposed to depict? Recall that the modern worldview was built on explicitly rejecting the metaphysics of form and ends, essence and purpose. We can still enjoy painting or drawing the appearances of things, even if they don’t have an essence or purpose.

But if photography does a better job of capturing appearance, and electricity has (as McLuhan put it) “extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time” and throwing us out of neutral objectivity back into the immediacy of enchantment and emotion, then what is left for artists to represent, if they don’t have recourse to essence or ends?

The answer, over the course of the twentieth century, has been ever-escalating levels of abstraction, involution, and, latterly, nihilism, culminating in straight-up deathworks such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be like that!

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

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

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

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The Third Singularity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They Walk Among Us

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

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

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

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

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Unsouling the West

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

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

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

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

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Manuscript culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The beehive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Meditation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Burning the Memory Palaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Singularity Already Happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, a dayclub. Fresh from last year’s “silent disco” in Salisbury Cathedral (there’s another one of those this summer too), Bristol Cathedral is offering a “Ulti…

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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…

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