Paul Kingsnorth writes a Substack (I believe that is a new noun, which renders the addition of a qualifying noun such as “essay” or “post” or newsletter” pleonastic) entitled “The Abbey of Misrule”. He is a blow-in from London and now lives - as I do -on what he calls the “periphery of the Internet”, I believe in the West of Ireland, on the opposite coast to the one I and my family find ourselves on in this beautiful, maddening and comfortingly distant country on the northern fringe of Europe, a two-week sail from the Americas (you know, just in case).
In his introduction to his Substack (which I feel sure will resonate with everyone who subscribes to Pitchfork Papers) he writes,
Welcome to the age of the Machine.
The Machine makes us - is designed to make us - homeless. It rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, Smart, borderless, profitable and soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.
Now, as old certainties fall away, the culture crumbles, the climate changes and hearts harden, it becomes hard to speak without being forced to take sides; hard even to know what we are permitted to say, as our language is remade and the range of acceptable opinions is seemingly narrowed daily.
He writes beautifully and intelligently of his struggle to make sense of these times, examining as so many of us are doing at the moment, the predicament we find ourselves in, separating the noise, misinformation, gaslighting, manipulation, and gravity-defying idiocy packaged as truth from the real truth to find a semblance of solid ground on which we can plant our flag and Luther-like state “Hier steh ich - ich kann nicht anders. Amen” (Here I stand - I cannot do otherwise. Amen”), whilst acknowledging that we are fighting a rearguard action as the foundational ethic of ‘The West” or Christendom as he more accurately describes it appears to be disintegrating before our very eyes.
Paul doesn’t like capitalism very much, calling it “the system that has done more to destroy culture and values than any other in the world, ever”, linking it with the cult of materialism and uber-consumption, itself products of our unbridled drive towards individualism. Well, maybe that is one aspect - particularly odious admittedly - of what we have done with it, but it replaced a worse system of oppression and exploitation, and has also lifted vast sections of a growing population out of abject poverty and into an undeniably more comfortable existence. Capitalism - or the free-market economy - is what happens when you leave people to get on with life, but I will leave that discussion for another time. Or maybe come back to it at the end.
This week Unherd hosted Paul Kingsnorth for a speech and debate in London entitled “What is there left to conserve?”, which I encourage you to listen to in its entirety. Here it is:
His concluding words were
“In a culture that doesn't agree that nature exists, or that we have some basic shared assumptions about reality, the question almost doesn't make sense because conserving something assumes some kind of understanding of what the good is, what reality is, what history is, what your culture is, what the sacred is or anything. And we haven't got that anymore. So I think that the challenge actually now is not so much to ask what you can conserve or restore. You have to go much further back than that you have to dig down to the foundations. So the challenge now - I'll just end by throwing this out there so you can see what you think - the challenge now is not to ask what you can conserve or restore.
The challenge now is to choose your religion.
Right now if you don't choose [to sic.] and avoid that challenge, your faith will be chosen for you and you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the New Age, which is the attempt to build God and replace nature through technology. That's the path of the snake and the snake is still there. So what can you do when there's nothing left to conserve?
The answer is pray.”
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