The Abbey of Misrule

Welcome to the Abbey

‘Instead of thought there is a vast, inhuman void, full of words, formulas, slogans, declarations, echoes, ideologies ... If we do not think, we cannot act freely; we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces that are arbitrary, destructive, blind, fatal to us and our world.’
- Thomas Merton

Everything is changing, and there is no going back.

The 2020s have seen us us staggering, masked and muted, into a new time. We can all sense the craziness in the air, the feeling of our moorings being cut one by one. It feels hard sometimes just to stay upright as we live through a threefold earthquake: a global ecological breakdown; the cultural disintegration of the West; and the rise of networked technologies of control and surveillance which daily have us tighter in their grip.

The powers of the world are merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the Internet, the power of the network itself. Call it the Great Acceleration, the Great Reset, the coming of Technocracy: whatever you call it, it has been long planned and long feared, and now it is upon us.

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.

These are not questions of economics, or politics; it’s bigger than that. I believe that our society is spiritually wounded, and it barely even knows it. We have to identify the site of the wound, and the cause, before we can imagine what health might look like on the other side.

But be of good cheer. The storm is here and an age is ending, but new and old hearts stay steadfast on the margins. God is not mocked, and reality bats last. In an age of Big Everything, small remains beautiful and shall, in the end, inherit the Earth. Here, I plan to use my small words to try and work out what is going on and why, and what can be done about it by those of us who see things this way.

What is this place?

‘No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.’
— Eric Voegelin

Abbeys of Misrule arose in late medieval France, set up by irreverent locals to mock the powers of the day. They were places of chaos, in which the world was turned upside down. Black was white and wrong was right. Perhaps this sounds familiar.

Misrule is all around. These days, we need a few Abbeys in which we can re-establish some semblance of sanity instead: in which we can look to bigger truths, cherish them, and think about how to re-seed them in a strange new world.

I write as a refusenik: a poet in an age of algorithms, a traditionalist by instinct and a radical at heart, a man from the suburbs with a love of the forests, an Orthodox Christian with a pagan soul. For inspiration I look to localists, agrarians, the indigenous, the peasants, the rooted, the holy, the marginal and the meek. I don’t offer ‘solutions’, because I don’t have any. I only have my instincts, and a battered keyboard.

‘The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization’, wrote the great critic of technocracy Jacques Ellul, ‘is to give them the slip.’ I have slipped away to this edge of the Internet to examine the Machine, its roots and its meaning, and what secession from its dominance might look like.

Should you subscribe?

‘All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.’
— C. S. Lewis

Subscribe to this newsletter, and you will receive substantial essays from me on these themes every two to three weeks, along with various other bits and pieces, including a monthly opportunity to engage in open conversation with other readers on topics of your choosing. You’ll be able to join in the conversation under each essay, and I hope that often you will educate me. You’ll also be supporting my work, by providing me with an income from my writing so that I can support my family, and retain my independence as a writer and thinker in a time when that is increasingly necessary.

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To find out more about me and my work, you can visit my website.