The other oft forgotten thing when we muse about life prior to modernity and industrialization, is that without the many manufactured goods we enjoy, much of our life would be taken up making many of the things we now just buy. Far fewer of us would enjoy the leisure to read, think and write. So many of us, myself included, tend to think of the re-sacralized post-modernity world as being much the same as life now, but without all the ills.
Precisely. It's easy to romanticise the pre-modern world, but for nearly everyone it was a short, grubby and extremely difficult affair. Notwithstanding, we do not need to come to terms with the fact that most of the greatest troubles faced by humanity came in the wake of the 'Enlightenment'. Is it technology we have to fear, or is it technologised thinking?
I happen to be reading Morello's book right now, so I really enjoyed your musings on it. For such a short book, it is slow reading for me. Every few pages or so, I have to stop and stare for a while to figure out my own views on some of his points. In general, I am in accord with his arguments, which may be because of my Catholicism and the fact that when I was younger I was in contact in Irish relatives who had not quite abandoned their fairy faith.
I think that it is worth considering that underneath all the trappings of modernity, its technology and such, the Good Folk are still there, waiting for things to blow over. I am retired, but I made my living as a lawyer. It is a very serious business, and lawyers are not generally known for their whimsy. Yet on occasion I state my opinion to fellow lawyers that there's a certain amount of "fairy dust" in the practice of law. Most often, this comment is met with knowing looks and nods. I think it's because almost every lawyer has had cases where things happened that can't be accounted for rationally, cases that they still puzzle over. That's why experienced lawyers only tell clients what should happen in their case, not what is going to happen. It's not some lawyerly evasion; it's experience.
I think if people would loosen the ties of rationality a bit, the work of the fairies in their own lives would become apparent. I would imagine most people have had things work out for them without not quite knowing how it happened, experienced incredible coincidences, had flashes of insight that came out of nowhere, or heard strangers says things which were exactly what they had to hear at that moment in their life. Could this be the work of the fairies?
Re-enchantment is not a matter of seeing different things, but seeing things differently. It plays out in ordinary life just as much as it does at abandoned monasteries and lonely moors, although the latter are much cooler. Some saint said that he first believed so that he could understand. This is an inversion on how we normally think, but it might just work. Try it.
Newman makes a closely related point when he criticises the liberal claim that there need be nothing in faith or reality in general that’s by definition inaccessible to reason. “It just is” is a perfectly robust ground for accepting something, even if on the face of it that thing doesn’t make sense
For those wishing to contemplate the relationship between modernity and the medieval, or just looking for a rollicking good read, I can make no better recommendation than That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis. Though it's the final part of a trilogy, it was designed to stand on its own, and was, I think, where Lewis explored many ideas he could not credibly relate in essay format. (Although The Abolition of Man covers many of its key themes.) If you know about Lewis, he was fascinated with medieval and dark age thinking, and believed we had lost something essential in moving beyond that philosophical framework. That Hideous Strength is remarkable in how it urges us to consider the cost, and dangers, of modernity, while also not in any way sugarcoating the habits of our ancestors. I truly believe its one of the best and most profound novels in the English language. Its also scarily relevant to the cold modern chaos of our times.
Think I recognise Walsingham from the picture. I walked the East of England for Lent. Ruined priory after ruined abbey. Henry VIII destroyed more than the Luftwaffe. If you have time for one more book, Bijan Omrani’s God Is An Englishman is worth a look.
This is such a good reminder that all of our progress is really about tradeoffs. And since history is written by the victors - including the champions of new technologies - we’ve often focused on the amazing gains but not on the corresponding losses.
I feel an instinctive nostalgia for a more mystical feeling of connection to the land. Everything feels so rushed now and we are so separated from the old rhythms and the gentle quiet.
And the idea that parts of nature may be alive in ways that go beyond mere physical vitality is… enchanting. I’ve been reading “Is a River Alive?” by Robert MacFarlane (such a good writer!) and it raises that question about water.
Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman should be required reading regarding the loss of many types of thinking that came along with the move to an image based media. I think we are all in the deep throes of contending with the impact of media on our selfhood and relation to divinity (for me in the Jewish context). Re-Enchanting our world will come in direct correlation to disengaging from the pace and mind numbing of media.
If you don't mind, I'd like to add Postman's Technopoly to essential reads by this oft-forgotten American critic. It folds Amusing Ourselves To Death into content and takes it quite a bit further down the road...
I can never ignore book recommendations and these appeal as I am currently reading On Mysticism by Simon Critchley. I definitely see this sense of wonder returning to people in the increasing intersections of spiritual practice, engagement with landscape/nature and nostalgia for folk traditions brilliantly captured in such communities as Weird Walk and Stone Club.
Of course whether or not we embrace technology is always a choice. I highly recommend moving to an island and living off grid - the most adventurous few years of my life - and so peaceful…
If you haven't yet engaged with Owen Barfield, his book "Saving the Appearance" is a must-read. I think he offers the best account of why and how humans lost the ability to perceive the spiritual presences that our ancestors knew. And since I recall that you were educated in the Waldorf tradition, you may be intrigued to learn that Barfield was a dedicated student of Rudolf Steiner. I find Barfield's work much more accessible than Steiner, as it doesn't require a specialized conceptual vocabulary and depends much less than Steiner's work on oracular assertion.
You might also enjoy his 'Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century' or 'Technopoly' - I think they were both written later, and while they overlap a lot with 'Amusing...', technology moves fast, and it's interesting to see his more mature/ripe responses to the growing machine/blob/nothing.
As I'm belatedly devouring your outstanding "Feminism Against Progress" in my sunny New England field! Thank you for your presence and voice of reason. As one of England's many gifts to the world reminded us, "Summer's lease hath all too short a date." Enjoy!
Thank you for writing this. I too am pondering on the deep rich wisdom in the pre-Modern world and what can be brought forward. I see the current crisis as predominately spiritual one, and so predict a return to a more Medieval mindset in the future.
This is why I am an AngloFuturist. I see the dialectic of engaging the wisdom of English cultural heritage with the energy of Futurism can help develop the necessary tools we need to unlock the Materialist doors which hem in the Anglosphere.
Have you thought about looking with William Blake? Mark Vernon has recently written a wonderful book about Blake’s vision of reality. My personal hunch is Blake is the mystic we desperately need.
Wonderful—thank you for generously leaving your temporary bucolic respite and re-assuming the yoke of a Substack sage. This was a really thought-provoking review of these three books. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in the sanctuary of woods and fields.
As is to be expected, Mary's essays are like a soft detonation sending me out into a dendritic rapture that finds me wanting to share the riches that have so often been muted and hidden in a society that doesn't seem remotely interested in meaning, beauty, and authenticity. It gives me such hope to find like-minded and like-hearted individuals in this comment section.
I've always loved D.H. Lawrence's take on fairies in his posthumous essay Education of the People:
"And this is what is wrong, first and foremost, with our education: this attempt deliberately to provoke reaction in the great affective centres and to dictate these reactions from the mind. Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which can not have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true, and Little Red Riding Hood is most true."
In regards to Mary's insight into the changes coming after the printing press, I always held Rudolf Steiner's notion of electricity as "dark light" as very significant; verily, the LED light bulb goes a step further and squares the beautiful cursive waves of the light spectrum, turning it into a stair-stepped digital manifestation, forcing even the incandescent bulb into obscurity, and reeking who-knows-what types of degradation to our eyes and bodies.
Since Lewis has been mentioned in the comments, I'd like to introduce two seemingly obscure English writers who have had, and continue to have a profound impact on my life. I'm talking about Owen Barfield (who was instrumental in sharing Rudolf Steiner with the public of his time, and withal, to bringing C.S. Lewis back to considering a religious life), and John Cowper Powys, who, if he is known (and here in America I've yet to find anyone who knows him, though Henry Miller introduced him to this country), is usually remembered for his four Wessex novels (all extraordinary, and also touted as the only novels comparable in the English language to the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by none other than George Steiner), or for his monumental Autobiography, but not so much for his more introspective and philosophical works. In particular I'm referring to his The Meaning of Culture and The Complex Vision. Forgive me for the excess of parenthetic asides! And I've just realized that Mr Carr has dilated on the Barfield topic here!
It is so important to go back and look for those Holzwegs (forest-paths) that might lead out to those "River's North of the Future", that David Cayley so wonderfully describes in the concluding chapter of his intellectual biography of Ivan Illich. He means here a discovery in the past of possible futures that cannot be perceived or accessed in the present time, but must be unearthed through the life work passed on to us by so many dead thinkers and writers.
Mary, please try and vacation more often--the spirit-of-place cascades from your recent post!
Was literally about to mention THS, especially as it has so much of Lewis's exploration into what he calls "neutral beings" (fairies, sprites, elves, the planetary spirits, etc etc), which was what came to my mind as I read this.
The other oft forgotten thing when we muse about life prior to modernity and industrialization, is that without the many manufactured goods we enjoy, much of our life would be taken up making many of the things we now just buy. Far fewer of us would enjoy the leisure to read, think and write. So many of us, myself included, tend to think of the re-sacralized post-modernity world as being much the same as life now, but without all the ills.
The most important part of technology is the way it changes our thinking.
Precisely. It's easy to romanticise the pre-modern world, but for nearly everyone it was a short, grubby and extremely difficult affair. Notwithstanding, we do not need to come to terms with the fact that most of the greatest troubles faced by humanity came in the wake of the 'Enlightenment'. Is it technology we have to fear, or is it technologised thinking?
I happen to be reading Morello's book right now, so I really enjoyed your musings on it. For such a short book, it is slow reading for me. Every few pages or so, I have to stop and stare for a while to figure out my own views on some of his points. In general, I am in accord with his arguments, which may be because of my Catholicism and the fact that when I was younger I was in contact in Irish relatives who had not quite abandoned their fairy faith.
I think that it is worth considering that underneath all the trappings of modernity, its technology and such, the Good Folk are still there, waiting for things to blow over. I am retired, but I made my living as a lawyer. It is a very serious business, and lawyers are not generally known for their whimsy. Yet on occasion I state my opinion to fellow lawyers that there's a certain amount of "fairy dust" in the practice of law. Most often, this comment is met with knowing looks and nods. I think it's because almost every lawyer has had cases where things happened that can't be accounted for rationally, cases that they still puzzle over. That's why experienced lawyers only tell clients what should happen in their case, not what is going to happen. It's not some lawyerly evasion; it's experience.
I think if people would loosen the ties of rationality a bit, the work of the fairies in their own lives would become apparent. I would imagine most people have had things work out for them without not quite knowing how it happened, experienced incredible coincidences, had flashes of insight that came out of nowhere, or heard strangers says things which were exactly what they had to hear at that moment in their life. Could this be the work of the fairies?
Re-enchantment is not a matter of seeing different things, but seeing things differently. It plays out in ordinary life just as much as it does at abandoned monasteries and lonely moors, although the latter are much cooler. Some saint said that he first believed so that he could understand. This is an inversion on how we normally think, but it might just work. Try it.
Newman makes a closely related point when he criticises the liberal claim that there need be nothing in faith or reality in general that’s by definition inaccessible to reason. “It just is” is a perfectly robust ground for accepting something, even if on the face of it that thing doesn’t make sense
Augustine and Anselm both said that.
For those wishing to contemplate the relationship between modernity and the medieval, or just looking for a rollicking good read, I can make no better recommendation than That Hideous Strength by CS Lewis. Though it's the final part of a trilogy, it was designed to stand on its own, and was, I think, where Lewis explored many ideas he could not credibly relate in essay format. (Although The Abolition of Man covers many of its key themes.) If you know about Lewis, he was fascinated with medieval and dark age thinking, and believed we had lost something essential in moving beyond that philosophical framework. That Hideous Strength is remarkable in how it urges us to consider the cost, and dangers, of modernity, while also not in any way sugarcoating the habits of our ancestors. I truly believe its one of the best and most profound novels in the English language. Its also scarily relevant to the cold modern chaos of our times.
I plan on reading them on Kindle, if that's OK.
Think I recognise Walsingham from the picture. I walked the East of England for Lent. Ruined priory after ruined abbey. Henry VIII destroyed more than the Luftwaffe. If you have time for one more book, Bijan Omrani’s God Is An Englishman is worth a look.
This is such a good reminder that all of our progress is really about tradeoffs. And since history is written by the victors - including the champions of new technologies - we’ve often focused on the amazing gains but not on the corresponding losses.
I feel an instinctive nostalgia for a more mystical feeling of connection to the land. Everything feels so rushed now and we are so separated from the old rhythms and the gentle quiet.
And the idea that parts of nature may be alive in ways that go beyond mere physical vitality is… enchanting. I’ve been reading “Is a River Alive?” by Robert MacFarlane (such a good writer!) and it raises that question about water.
Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman should be required reading regarding the loss of many types of thinking that came along with the move to an image based media. I think we are all in the deep throes of contending with the impact of media on our selfhood and relation to divinity (for me in the Jewish context). Re-Enchanting our world will come in direct correlation to disengaging from the pace and mind numbing of media.
Thank you Chava,
If you don't mind, I'd like to add Postman's Technopoly to essential reads by this oft-forgotten American critic. It folds Amusing Ourselves To Death into content and takes it quite a bit further down the road...
I can never ignore book recommendations and these appeal as I am currently reading On Mysticism by Simon Critchley. I definitely see this sense of wonder returning to people in the increasing intersections of spiritual practice, engagement with landscape/nature and nostalgia for folk traditions brilliantly captured in such communities as Weird Walk and Stone Club.
Of course whether or not we embrace technology is always a choice. I highly recommend moving to an island and living off grid - the most adventurous few years of my life - and so peaceful…
If you haven't yet engaged with Owen Barfield, his book "Saving the Appearance" is a must-read. I think he offers the best account of why and how humans lost the ability to perceive the spiritual presences that our ancestors knew. And since I recall that you were educated in the Waldorf tradition, you may be intrigued to learn that Barfield was a dedicated student of Rudolf Steiner. I find Barfield's work much more accessible than Steiner, as it doesn't require a specialized conceptual vocabulary and depends much less than Steiner's work on oracular assertion.
Considering your interest, have you read 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' by Neil Postman?
Parts yes but not finished it!
You might also enjoy his 'Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century' or 'Technopoly' - I think they were both written later, and while they overlap a lot with 'Amusing...', technology moves fast, and it's interesting to see his more mature/ripe responses to the growing machine/blob/nothing.
As I'm belatedly devouring your outstanding "Feminism Against Progress" in my sunny New England field! Thank you for your presence and voice of reason. As one of England's many gifts to the world reminded us, "Summer's lease hath all too short a date." Enjoy!
I am currently reading orthodoxy...
Morello: perhaps similar to Chesterton's argument for Chritianity as dualism in balance instead of in opposition or isolation?
Thank you for writing this. I too am pondering on the deep rich wisdom in the pre-Modern world and what can be brought forward. I see the current crisis as predominately spiritual one, and so predict a return to a more Medieval mindset in the future.
This is why I am an AngloFuturist. I see the dialectic of engaging the wisdom of English cultural heritage with the energy of Futurism can help develop the necessary tools we need to unlock the Materialist doors which hem in the Anglosphere.
Have you thought about looking with William Blake? Mark Vernon has recently written a wonderful book about Blake’s vision of reality. My personal hunch is Blake is the mystic we desperately need.
Wonderful—thank you for generously leaving your temporary bucolic respite and re-assuming the yoke of a Substack sage. This was a really thought-provoking review of these three books. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in the sanctuary of woods and fields.
As is to be expected, Mary's essays are like a soft detonation sending me out into a dendritic rapture that finds me wanting to share the riches that have so often been muted and hidden in a society that doesn't seem remotely interested in meaning, beauty, and authenticity. It gives me such hope to find like-minded and like-hearted individuals in this comment section.
I've always loved D.H. Lawrence's take on fairies in his posthumous essay Education of the People:
"And this is what is wrong, first and foremost, with our education: this attempt deliberately to provoke reaction in the great affective centres and to dictate these reactions from the mind. Fairies are true embryological realities of the human psyche. They are true and real for the great affective centres, which see as through a glass, darkly, and which have direct correspondence with living and naturalistic influences in the surrounding universe, correspondence which can not have mental, rational utterance, but must express itself, if it be expressed, in preternatural forms. Thus fairies are true, and Little Red Riding Hood is most true."
In regards to Mary's insight into the changes coming after the printing press, I always held Rudolf Steiner's notion of electricity as "dark light" as very significant; verily, the LED light bulb goes a step further and squares the beautiful cursive waves of the light spectrum, turning it into a stair-stepped digital manifestation, forcing even the incandescent bulb into obscurity, and reeking who-knows-what types of degradation to our eyes and bodies.
Since Lewis has been mentioned in the comments, I'd like to introduce two seemingly obscure English writers who have had, and continue to have a profound impact on my life. I'm talking about Owen Barfield (who was instrumental in sharing Rudolf Steiner with the public of his time, and withal, to bringing C.S. Lewis back to considering a religious life), and John Cowper Powys, who, if he is known (and here in America I've yet to find anyone who knows him, though Henry Miller introduced him to this country), is usually remembered for his four Wessex novels (all extraordinary, and also touted as the only novels comparable in the English language to the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, by none other than George Steiner), or for his monumental Autobiography, but not so much for his more introspective and philosophical works. In particular I'm referring to his The Meaning of Culture and The Complex Vision. Forgive me for the excess of parenthetic asides! And I've just realized that Mr Carr has dilated on the Barfield topic here!
It is so important to go back and look for those Holzwegs (forest-paths) that might lead out to those "River's North of the Future", that David Cayley so wonderfully describes in the concluding chapter of his intellectual biography of Ivan Illich. He means here a discovery in the past of possible futures that cannot be perceived or accessed in the present time, but must be unearthed through the life work passed on to us by so many dead thinkers and writers.
Mary, please try and vacation more often--the spirit-of-place cascades from your recent post!
Was literally about to mention THS, especially as it has so much of Lewis's exploration into what he calls "neutral beings" (fairies, sprites, elves, the planetary spirits, etc etc), which was what came to my mind as I read this.