Not The Re-Enchantment We Ordered

Address at Pusey House, Wednesday 11 March 2026

Keynote lecture delivered at Christian Revival: Our Post-Liberal Hope?, a conference held 11-12 March at Pusey House, Oxford.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.