I listened to your address at Oxford, two days ago Mary. It was absolutely brilliant, an address I’ll always remember. I don’t even want to summarize your whole talk to explain why- because I’m still digesting. But when you spoke about those Christians, likely blue collar, that would lay down their lives for Christ (forgive my paraphrasing), that moved me like I can’t describe. There’s a reason that there were so many rough fishermen among the disciples. Since your talk, my head and my heart have been resounding with the pained beauty of cruciformity. Thank you for your address.
I was also deeply moved by Rod Dreher’s description of how, at Chartres Cathedral, he truly encountered God. Rod has such a beautiful way of calling the West back to the high arts- be that architecture, or icons, or what have you. As a classical, atelier trained artist, I deeply appreciate his insistence on the importance of beauty, and at the same time rewilding Christianity, reimbuing Christianity with wonder, with awe.
And Dr. McGilchrist, the next day, also gave one of the most important addresses I’ve listened to in my life. We need to regain our humanity, and rescue it from the clutches of the Machine. I was struck by the necessity of building our house upon Christianity, first as individuals, then the larger West, because the storms are indeed coming- whether that be AI, Islam.
The memory palace argument is the one that stops me cold — because what you are describing is not merely a loss of technique but a loss of a whole mode of being in relation to knowledge. The premodern scholar did not store information; he inhabited it. The mnemonic image was not a filing system but a form of encounter, and the stripping of that imagistic, colored interior world by the twin forces of print abundance and iconoclasm left behind something that looked like clarity but was in fact a kind of sensory deprivation. What we are now watching, in the re-emergence of the meme as shared symbolic lexicon, is the return of that imagistic consciousness — but without the interior architecture to receive it wisely. The images are back. The nous that knew how to dwell in them is not.
Where I think your argument opens something that deserves further pressure: the revival you are describing is real, but it is arriving into people whose capacity for the kind of sustained, receptive attention that genuine formation requires has itself been damaged by the very medium driving the re-enchantment. The hunger for mystery is genuine. The ability to be slowly shaped by it — to sit with an icon, to pray a prayer ten thousand times, to let a text do its work across years rather than seconds — that is precisely what the architecture of the feed has been quietly dismantling. The monasteries you call for are needed not only as social forms but as schools of attention. Without the recovery of that interior stillness, re-enchantment will remain a sensation rather than becoming a formation.
Yes, a tremendous amount to process here. My sense is that the general thesis is undoubtedly true. The huge shifts Mary convincingly describes are being driven by technological change. Neil Postman has spoken of the Faustian bargain every new technology presents: the benefits of the new are often obvious (indeed, are the selling points); the costs become obvious only later. I am also convinced that Christianity is the only place to stand as all other foundations dissolve around us. And, as some other commentators note, it is because in Christ we encounter the cruciform pattern of true resistance. The Holy Spirit is indeed for everyone, of every nation. But nota bene, Pentecost did not come until after Christ's death, resurrection and ascension. I suspect that what was true ontogenetically for the Saviour will need to be experienced phylogenetically by those who will share the Holy Spirit in the new world. Some form of death, I suspect, will therefore be necessary before we experience any kind of global Pentecost.
I enjoyed watching your speech on YouTube (a simultaneously Classical Greek experience of the Agora and a 21st century experience here amidst the woods and fields of Pennsylvania) and now, winding back to Gutenberg’s time, I’ll post my favourite excerpt from your very insightful and persuasive analysis:
“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.”
Yes- this was exactly the message we needed to hear, in the moment we are in. Chris, thank you for writing Mary’s quote down- I’m going to copy and paste it, to remember.
This was wonderful, and an excellent summary of your topics here lately. While I am usually all for heaping blame on my generation, especially my elders, I do want to defend them a bit. Not all Boomers are liberal church ladies who make felt banners, jump up when they call for Eucharistic ministers in a congregation of less than 30, or can’t wait to get their hands in the tabernacle. The generation before ours (I’m 64) has kept a Latin Mass going for 50 years in our diocese, despite Vatican II, multiple attempts at cancellations, and the difficulty of finding qualified priests. 25 years ago we were one of only two young families and our founders have all died off one by one. They would’ve been delighted to see two Latin Masses on Sundays, both full of large, young, families.
I do know exactly what you meant and certainly the bulk of baby boomers, including the pope, seem determined to keep the church as undemanding, progressive, and uninteresting as possible but some have kept the faith, with a liturgy that deserves to be called worship.
Brilliant analysis yet lacking. The Cross is promised to faithful Christians. Moreover, the re-enchantment speaks to the universal mysteries that are still out there, and acknowledges the supernatural as existing even if we are unable to measure them yet with current telemetry.
And one more remark: It's so easy for those of you in the great Western majority who were raised Christian to proclaim that only Christianity can save us. It feels a bit smug and dangerous to us minorities. It reminds me of the pro-AI people who are also saying "Adapt or die" (one of them actually said that to me). I am ethnically Jewish but finished with the religion since so many of my co-religionists were OK with butchering children. (Easy enough for me as I was raised nearly secular.) I think of myself as a "recovering Abrahamic." I sense there's a trustable Great Spirit/Holy Spirit but want to keep it generic and agnostic. A Pentecostal friend actually brought the presence of Jesus near to me (no way I could ever have imagined such a vast, wild love) and I resisted assenting to it because I knew she expected me to fall into a fit and get up proclaiming my gay friends hell-bound if they find love. I fear it is our own systems of ideas we worship (sola scriptura), interpret as suits us, and invest with authority.
Superb and subtle thinking. I read it in print; like you, I was formed by the print era, lack the patience to sit through a long video—reading darts, even concise vocal speech plods and meanders—yet am also losing the patience to read a whole book. I lament that with the passing of the last print-formed generation we will lose even the ability to think about digital as richly and provocatively as you do.
In particular thank you for warning that "re-enchantment" won't be a simple matter of returning to an innocent faith we imagine is what the "simple foik do." I'm curious what you think of Martin Shaw, whom I just learned of (via Rod Dreher), and who (like and unlike Paul Kingsnorth) is trying to contain re-enchantment within Orthodox Christianity.
Francis Fukuyama has written extensively about how impersonality in institutions is crucial to the capital-m Modern idea idea of the state; this character could also be seen in legacy broadsheets (which only added bylines in many cases in the late 20th century, and initially only for people known to be insiders such as James Reston playing a quasi-government role. The non-abstract, personality-based orientation of patrimonial politics is fed in my opinion as much by advertising as a key premise of modern media than McLuhanism alone — among less media-literate populations, a message that appeals via the narcissistic ego-ideal is more likely to sell than one coming seemingly from nowhere. Hence people getting their opinions as well as their product recommendations from influencers who look like them. Those of us who grew up trusting institutions BECAUSE of their abstract neutrality and facial objectivity (even to the extent this was always imperfect and more illusory than it ever really was in its media-represented form) rather than charismatic and "relatable" people often are or should be aghast by this. Still, those of us wanting to push back against this tide, if at all possible, should not promote or treat as inevitable populist personas and the rule of celebrity-influencer-monarchs rather than abstractions. A jihad against abstraction can only end badly for those wishing to cultivate and maintain bourgeois values and standards from deferred gratification to an appropriate sense of cultural hierarchy and taste
Thanks for not pay walling this.
I listened to your address at Oxford, two days ago Mary. It was absolutely brilliant, an address I’ll always remember. I don’t even want to summarize your whole talk to explain why- because I’m still digesting. But when you spoke about those Christians, likely blue collar, that would lay down their lives for Christ (forgive my paraphrasing), that moved me like I can’t describe. There’s a reason that there were so many rough fishermen among the disciples. Since your talk, my head and my heart have been resounding with the pained beauty of cruciformity. Thank you for your address.
I was also deeply moved by Rod Dreher’s description of how, at Chartres Cathedral, he truly encountered God. Rod has such a beautiful way of calling the West back to the high arts- be that architecture, or icons, or what have you. As a classical, atelier trained artist, I deeply appreciate his insistence on the importance of beauty, and at the same time rewilding Christianity, reimbuing Christianity with wonder, with awe.
And Dr. McGilchrist, the next day, also gave one of the most important addresses I’ve listened to in my life. We need to regain our humanity, and rescue it from the clutches of the Machine. I was struck by the necessity of building our house upon Christianity, first as individuals, then the larger West, because the storms are indeed coming- whether that be AI, Islam.
I only wish Paul Kingsnorth were there!
Lovely lecture Mary,
The memory palace argument is the one that stops me cold — because what you are describing is not merely a loss of technique but a loss of a whole mode of being in relation to knowledge. The premodern scholar did not store information; he inhabited it. The mnemonic image was not a filing system but a form of encounter, and the stripping of that imagistic, colored interior world by the twin forces of print abundance and iconoclasm left behind something that looked like clarity but was in fact a kind of sensory deprivation. What we are now watching, in the re-emergence of the meme as shared symbolic lexicon, is the return of that imagistic consciousness — but without the interior architecture to receive it wisely. The images are back. The nous that knew how to dwell in them is not.
Where I think your argument opens something that deserves further pressure: the revival you are describing is real, but it is arriving into people whose capacity for the kind of sustained, receptive attention that genuine formation requires has itself been damaged by the very medium driving the re-enchantment. The hunger for mystery is genuine. The ability to be slowly shaped by it — to sit with an icon, to pray a prayer ten thousand times, to let a text do its work across years rather than seconds — that is precisely what the architecture of the feed has been quietly dismantling. The monasteries you call for are needed not only as social forms but as schools of attention. Without the recovery of that interior stillness, re-enchantment will remain a sensation rather than becoming a formation.
Yes yes yes to all that
Yes, a tremendous amount to process here. My sense is that the general thesis is undoubtedly true. The huge shifts Mary convincingly describes are being driven by technological change. Neil Postman has spoken of the Faustian bargain every new technology presents: the benefits of the new are often obvious (indeed, are the selling points); the costs become obvious only later. I am also convinced that Christianity is the only place to stand as all other foundations dissolve around us. And, as some other commentators note, it is because in Christ we encounter the cruciform pattern of true resistance. The Holy Spirit is indeed for everyone, of every nation. But nota bene, Pentecost did not come until after Christ's death, resurrection and ascension. I suspect that what was true ontogenetically for the Saviour will need to be experienced phylogenetically by those who will share the Holy Spirit in the new world. Some form of death, I suspect, will therefore be necessary before we experience any kind of global Pentecost.
I enjoyed watching your speech on YouTube (a simultaneously Classical Greek experience of the Agora and a 21st century experience here amidst the woods and fields of Pennsylvania) and now, winding back to Gutenberg’s time, I’ll post my favourite excerpt from your very insightful and persuasive analysis:
“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.”
Yes- this was exactly the message we needed to hear, in the moment we are in. Chris, thank you for writing Mary’s quote down- I’m going to copy and paste it, to remember.
What has any of the above to do with whether you think there should or can be a Christian Revival?
This was wonderful, and an excellent summary of your topics here lately. While I am usually all for heaping blame on my generation, especially my elders, I do want to defend them a bit. Not all Boomers are liberal church ladies who make felt banners, jump up when they call for Eucharistic ministers in a congregation of less than 30, or can’t wait to get their hands in the tabernacle. The generation before ours (I’m 64) has kept a Latin Mass going for 50 years in our diocese, despite Vatican II, multiple attempts at cancellations, and the difficulty of finding qualified priests. 25 years ago we were one of only two young families and our founders have all died off one by one. They would’ve been delighted to see two Latin Masses on Sundays, both full of large, young, families.
I do know exactly what you meant and certainly the bulk of baby boomers, including the pope, seem determined to keep the church as undemanding, progressive, and uninteresting as possible but some have kept the faith, with a liturgy that deserves to be called worship.
Weren't the monks—and nuns—of the Middle Ages the guardians of literacy? Is that a role they could return to in a new barbarian age?
Bravo Mary, bravo.
An "egregore" seems to be the same thing that Rupert Sheldrake, in more "scientific" language, calls a morphogenetic field.
Brilliant analysis yet lacking. The Cross is promised to faithful Christians. Moreover, the re-enchantment speaks to the universal mysteries that are still out there, and acknowledges the supernatural as existing even if we are unable to measure them yet with current telemetry.
And one more remark: It's so easy for those of you in the great Western majority who were raised Christian to proclaim that only Christianity can save us. It feels a bit smug and dangerous to us minorities. It reminds me of the pro-AI people who are also saying "Adapt or die" (one of them actually said that to me). I am ethnically Jewish but finished with the religion since so many of my co-religionists were OK with butchering children. (Easy enough for me as I was raised nearly secular.) I think of myself as a "recovering Abrahamic." I sense there's a trustable Great Spirit/Holy Spirit but want to keep it generic and agnostic. A Pentecostal friend actually brought the presence of Jesus near to me (no way I could ever have imagined such a vast, wild love) and I resisted assenting to it because I knew she expected me to fall into a fit and get up proclaiming my gay friends hell-bound if they find love. I fear it is our own systems of ideas we worship (sola scriptura), interpret as suits us, and invest with authority.
Superb and subtle thinking. I read it in print; like you, I was formed by the print era, lack the patience to sit through a long video—reading darts, even concise vocal speech plods and meanders—yet am also losing the patience to read a whole book. I lament that with the passing of the last print-formed generation we will lose even the ability to think about digital as richly and provocatively as you do.
In particular thank you for warning that "re-enchantment" won't be a simple matter of returning to an innocent faith we imagine is what the "simple foik do." I'm curious what you think of Martin Shaw, whom I just learned of (via Rod Dreher), and who (like and unlike Paul Kingsnorth) is trying to contain re-enchantment within Orthodox Christianity.
As for how digital forms the mind, here is something brief and related that I wrote about the truncation of form and frustration of resolution in short video clips chopped out of whole songs or speeches. https://anniegottlieb.substack.com/p/chopped-off?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Re declining median IQ: you're overlooking or ignoring an elephant in the room, albeit one that may be impolitic to acknowledge. Namely, dysgenic fertility. See, e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960300103X
https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/intell/v63y2017icp29-32.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616301106
Francis Fukuyama has written extensively about how impersonality in institutions is crucial to the capital-m Modern idea idea of the state; this character could also be seen in legacy broadsheets (which only added bylines in many cases in the late 20th century, and initially only for people known to be insiders such as James Reston playing a quasi-government role. The non-abstract, personality-based orientation of patrimonial politics is fed in my opinion as much by advertising as a key premise of modern media than McLuhanism alone — among less media-literate populations, a message that appeals via the narcissistic ego-ideal is more likely to sell than one coming seemingly from nowhere. Hence people getting their opinions as well as their product recommendations from influencers who look like them. Those of us who grew up trusting institutions BECAUSE of their abstract neutrality and facial objectivity (even to the extent this was always imperfect and more illusory than it ever really was in its media-represented form) rather than charismatic and "relatable" people often are or should be aghast by this. Still, those of us wanting to push back against this tide, if at all possible, should not promote or treat as inevitable populist personas and the rule of celebrity-influencer-monarchs rather than abstractions. A jihad against abstraction can only end badly for those wishing to cultivate and maintain bourgeois values and standards from deferred gratification to an appropriate sense of cultural hierarchy and taste