Let us begin with a few grand hypotheses about what is going on. Rene Guenon’s hypothesis, first sketched around 1930, was that all civilisations possess spiritual and temporal powers and so somehow incorporate a tension between the two: but that, for the first time in history, our modernity from any time after 1500 placed the temporal above the eternal, the material above the spiritual: in short, ‘state’ above ‘church’. There were a few related hypotheses offered at the same time: such as Julien Benda’s hypothesis that the clercs, or intellectuals, had shifted their concern: so the immense value they had always attributed to unworldly matters was now attributed to worldly matters. That was to say, the intellectuals were now corrupt, coming after filthy lucre.
An American friend of mine recently drew my attention to some of the recent writings of a novelist and essayist, Paul Kingsnorth. Originally an anti-capitalist, he thought he was on the Left, and now finds himself more or less on the Right. His hypothesis is that the decline of Christianity in our civilization – the decline of the eternal and spiritual – coincides and was probably ultimately caused by the rise of what he calls ‘the myth of progress’. Progress is the conviction that the world, this world, is getting better…
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