Well now, that was rather stimulating. Not often I disagree with you so much (amidst much agreement too). I think my major disagreement is simply: present trends will not continue, things will change, and change radically, sometimes in expected ways, sometimes other than that. So the collapse of faith, of any sort, that is bound up with Mammon worship will cease to be attractive when Mammon is no longer in a position to offer the goods. The tolerance for multi-culturalism has already peaked - the future is more Birbalsingh's school than Babel - but the English soul, very real, has woken up, thanks to the detachment and abuse given to it by the governing classes, including the church. My concern is less that Islam will take over than that in a context of chaos the Muslims will be scapegoated in an English-flavoured reconquista. Most of all, though, I expect God to act. It may be that Britain is coming to an end (not sure) and it is certainly true that England is changing, in a multi-ethnic fashion, but England dying (now, not just inevitably one day) - that is a prediction I'm happy to reject until shown otherwise :) And I've ordered the Ackroyd, sounds right up my street.
For me, I sense that the soul of the land is reflected best in Earth based religions. I think the sky gods imported into the land always have, and always will bring consternation and conflict. They don't sit naturally and have always has to be enforced - both as mechanisms of power and as templates for mind control.
Intrinsic to an Earth based path are land rights. I'd like to see a return to an Anglo Saxon model of ownership and a redistribution of land. Perhaps, initially as a dividend to the young administered along the lines of the 5 kingdoms. I realise this might seem anachronistic but is it any more so than one family hoarding vast tracts of land for over a thousand years whilst many sleep in doorways? It all depends on your conditioning. Sometimes you have to go back to move forwards.
We might be picking up the same vibe: I recently wrote 'To and Island People':
"Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator." - Chief Seattle
I wonder how many people are feeling what I'm feeling: that the Earth is becoming noticeably, alarmingly, devoid of life at the same moment the cacophonous, drunken party of modern culture rages on more noisily than ever. One can of course find plenty of articles and research papers on biodiversity loss, accelerating extinctions, "inexplicable" disappearances of invertebrates, collapses in phytoplankton abundance, trophic cascades, and much more. Still, what I've noticed more and more is how sickly and empty the landscape *feels*; how lifeless and skeletal. Often now, I will hear a bird, and then silence. *One bird*. In Ireland. In the spring. And I'm out in the sticks, not Dublin.
This otherwise great essay by Paul has a certain tone deafness from my perspective, because it's about people, and their distant future. I do not think they/we have one. We are not going to be able to live on this Earth for long with the web of life in ashes around us. That's a fantasy worthy of Elon Musk and his Mars colonies. And I suspect the way this plays out is what we see already: exploding rates of cancer, increasingly scarce and expensive and low quality, non-nutritious food, skyrocketing euthanasia, increasing repression and tech-assisted, AI-facilitated murder across a gray, toxic, post-industrial wasteland.
We as a species have long since rejected the idea that we are a strand in the web of life, and that kind of delusion is not sustainable, certainly not at this late hour, with Machine culture at its apex, grinding the last of the living planet into desert in endless pursuit of power and profit.
"Forests precede us, and deserts dog our heels." Religion? The societies that produced these Abrahamic religions had already made deserts of their land.
Good article, covering a lot of ground. Disagree that Orwell was greatest essayist, preferring GKC.
Curiously, although Orwell is regarded as a Socialist and GKC as a conservative, the latter could have written the opening lines of your article. Having read "Real England" I suspect that you know this.
Cobbett described the political economic system he hated as "The Great Wen".
Chesterton, and Belloc, set up a campaigning group called Distributism to fight against it. Let me finish with some more GKC:
‘The Secret People
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.
Thank you Paul, this has cheered me up (though I appreciate that you weren't aiming at simple cheery uplift!)
My local Catholic parish (in Hertfordshire) is predominantly black and Asian at the moment, and it is quite cheering to see the Nigerian priest talking about e.g. St Margaret Clitherow and other English saints to his decidedly non-indigenous flock. The church is rammed on Sunday mornings, and intriguingly is rammed again on Sunday afternoons when the local travelers (if that's not a contradiction in terms) have their own Mass. I hide out in the Anglican Ordinariate and the Latin Mass myself (I have a low cringe threshold).
The link between Labour and non-conformist Christianity seems to be of a piece with the general shape of English radicalism, in which reformers appeal to an earlier, happier state in which Englishmen had a fairer share of the land and the commonwealth. A genuinely English Lefty has to play at Saxons and rail against the latest iteration of the Norman yoke if he is to work with the grain of our traditions. This suggests to me that our Left need to be very wary of deracinating themselves too much, because without those roots they won't be able to sustain themselves.
“We have succoured and nurtured the imposter that squats on our throne, and now we complain that it is eating us, and thrash around looking for someone else to blame for its triumph.” Wow. What an essay to wake up to this morning! Moving, mournful and yet still hopeful, it has given me much to think about.
Paul, do you think that as England falls or triumphs so shall America? Living in a small town in the US, I sometimes feel more hope than others that my country can somehow figure a way out of this massive mess. I’m curious as to your thoughts on if England is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of Western nations?
Thank you as always for your beautiful and thoughtful writing.
"Nations aren't really Christian things." But Jesus, or John quoting him, says that in the New Jerusalem there will be trees for the healing of the nations. I wonder what that means.
I hope you will indulge me in a very vague comment. I remember the 1990s localist green movement that you describe - I was too young to be a part of it but I feel I have got the texture and feel of it stored away in my mind somewhere, together with the associations I have with it. I was more consciously aligned in my late teens and early twenties with the anti-globalisation movement, which received favourable coverage in the Guardian and had Radiohead and Godspeed You Black Emperor as its court minstrels (though my involvement was pretty much limited to listening to those bands. approving of Naomi Klein without reading her books, and having friends who stole mugs from Starbucks).
20 or 25 years later and after something of an ideological hiatus I now feel that I sympathise strongly with both groupings, but they don't really seem to be there anymore. It's like realising that you are now in a place where you would really like to be friends with that man who you remember living on your parents' street, but when you knock on his door you find that he moved out years ago and left no forwarding address. Or deciding that the time has come for you to get really into classical music, only to find that nobody plays it or listens to it anymore so the cultural world you wanted to join has vanished.
This feels like something the Germans would have a word for. The best thing we can do I suppose is to call it "irony", but that really doesn't cover it.
Beautiful article. Ireland is arguably in a more advanced state of degradation, and we had no empire nor evenaccess to our own resources. Thanks for another thought provoking piece, beautifully written.
Outstanding piece, Paul. And dare I say, buoyant. For some readers longing for a return to a simpler, earth respecting life, look no further than the great saints Sarov, Herman, et al, and the Bible itself where God often shows his care for the animals, even above certain humans, e.g., Balaam’s donkey. For a wonderful if not sad modern example of heavenly believers whose faith is also earthbound, I recommend a new film titled Sacred Alaska. You won’t be disappointed. Just search for Sacred Alaska movie…
Great piece. Is this the best review essay ever, the introduction to the book I’m dying to read, a manifesto? Perhaps all of the above and well done, you.
Funny timing - I reviewed Ackroyd yesterday:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/may-june/english-soul-peter-ackroyd-christian-nation-secular.html
Happy St George's day!
Well now, that was rather stimulating. Not often I disagree with you so much (amidst much agreement too). I think my major disagreement is simply: present trends will not continue, things will change, and change radically, sometimes in expected ways, sometimes other than that. So the collapse of faith, of any sort, that is bound up with Mammon worship will cease to be attractive when Mammon is no longer in a position to offer the goods. The tolerance for multi-culturalism has already peaked - the future is more Birbalsingh's school than Babel - but the English soul, very real, has woken up, thanks to the detachment and abuse given to it by the governing classes, including the church. My concern is less that Islam will take over than that in a context of chaos the Muslims will be scapegoated in an English-flavoured reconquista. Most of all, though, I expect God to act. It may be that Britain is coming to an end (not sure) and it is certainly true that England is changing, in a multi-ethnic fashion, but England dying (now, not just inevitably one day) - that is a prediction I'm happy to reject until shown otherwise :) And I've ordered the Ackroyd, sounds right up my street.
Thanks for this, I really enjoyed it.
For me, I sense that the soul of the land is reflected best in Earth based religions. I think the sky gods imported into the land always have, and always will bring consternation and conflict. They don't sit naturally and have always has to be enforced - both as mechanisms of power and as templates for mind control.
Intrinsic to an Earth based path are land rights. I'd like to see a return to an Anglo Saxon model of ownership and a redistribution of land. Perhaps, initially as a dividend to the young administered along the lines of the 5 kingdoms. I realise this might seem anachronistic but is it any more so than one family hoarding vast tracts of land for over a thousand years whilst many sleep in doorways? It all depends on your conditioning. Sometimes you have to go back to move forwards.
We might be picking up the same vibe: I recently wrote 'To and Island People':
https://open.substack.com/pub/danoneill/p/to-an-island-people?r=3zg2g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
And 'Lines for the Landless': https://open.substack.com/pub/danoneill/p/lines-for-the-landless?r=3zg2g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Both deal with similar ideas.
Chilling.
"Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator." - Chief Seattle
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/16/world-faces-deathly-silence-of-nature-as-wildlife-disappears-warn-experts-aoe
I wonder how many people are feeling what I'm feeling: that the Earth is becoming noticeably, alarmingly, devoid of life at the same moment the cacophonous, drunken party of modern culture rages on more noisily than ever. One can of course find plenty of articles and research papers on biodiversity loss, accelerating extinctions, "inexplicable" disappearances of invertebrates, collapses in phytoplankton abundance, trophic cascades, and much more. Still, what I've noticed more and more is how sickly and empty the landscape *feels*; how lifeless and skeletal. Often now, I will hear a bird, and then silence. *One bird*. In Ireland. In the spring. And I'm out in the sticks, not Dublin.
This otherwise great essay by Paul has a certain tone deafness from my perspective, because it's about people, and their distant future. I do not think they/we have one. We are not going to be able to live on this Earth for long with the web of life in ashes around us. That's a fantasy worthy of Elon Musk and his Mars colonies. And I suspect the way this plays out is what we see already: exploding rates of cancer, increasingly scarce and expensive and low quality, non-nutritious food, skyrocketing euthanasia, increasing repression and tech-assisted, AI-facilitated murder across a gray, toxic, post-industrial wasteland.
We as a species have long since rejected the idea that we are a strand in the web of life, and that kind of delusion is not sustainable, certainly not at this late hour, with Machine culture at its apex, grinding the last of the living planet into desert in endless pursuit of power and profit.
"Forests precede us, and deserts dog our heels." Religion? The societies that produced these Abrahamic religions had already made deserts of their land.
Anyone remember this guy:
https://derrickjensen.org/open-letter-to-reclaim-environmentalism/
Good article, covering a lot of ground. Disagree that Orwell was greatest essayist, preferring GKC.
Curiously, although Orwell is regarded as a Socialist and GKC as a conservative, the latter could have written the opening lines of your article. Having read "Real England" I suspect that you know this.
Cobbett described the political economic system he hated as "The Great Wen".
Chesterton, and Belloc, set up a campaigning group called Distributism to fight against it. Let me finish with some more GKC:
‘The Secret People
Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget,
For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet.
There is many a fat farmer that drinks less cheerfully,
There is many a free French peasant who is richer and sadder than we.
There are no folk in the whole world so helpless or so wise.
There is hunger in our bellies, there is laughter in our eyes;
You laugh at us and love us, both mugs and eyes are wet:
Only you do not know us. For we have not spoken yet.
Keep up the good work
Russell Sparkes
Thank you Paul, this has cheered me up (though I appreciate that you weren't aiming at simple cheery uplift!)
My local Catholic parish (in Hertfordshire) is predominantly black and Asian at the moment, and it is quite cheering to see the Nigerian priest talking about e.g. St Margaret Clitherow and other English saints to his decidedly non-indigenous flock. The church is rammed on Sunday mornings, and intriguingly is rammed again on Sunday afternoons when the local travelers (if that's not a contradiction in terms) have their own Mass. I hide out in the Anglican Ordinariate and the Latin Mass myself (I have a low cringe threshold).
The link between Labour and non-conformist Christianity seems to be of a piece with the general shape of English radicalism, in which reformers appeal to an earlier, happier state in which Englishmen had a fairer share of the land and the commonwealth. A genuinely English Lefty has to play at Saxons and rail against the latest iteration of the Norman yoke if he is to work with the grain of our traditions. This suggests to me that our Left need to be very wary of deracinating themselves too much, because without those roots they won't be able to sustain themselves.
“We have succoured and nurtured the imposter that squats on our throne, and now we complain that it is eating us, and thrash around looking for someone else to blame for its triumph.” Wow. What an essay to wake up to this morning! Moving, mournful and yet still hopeful, it has given me much to think about.
Paul, do you think that as England falls or triumphs so shall America? Living in a small town in the US, I sometimes feel more hope than others that my country can somehow figure a way out of this massive mess. I’m curious as to your thoughts on if England is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of Western nations?
Thank you as always for your beautiful and thoughtful writing.
"Nations aren't really Christian things." But Jesus, or John quoting him, says that in the New Jerusalem there will be trees for the healing of the nations. I wonder what that means.
I hope you will indulge me in a very vague comment. I remember the 1990s localist green movement that you describe - I was too young to be a part of it but I feel I have got the texture and feel of it stored away in my mind somewhere, together with the associations I have with it. I was more consciously aligned in my late teens and early twenties with the anti-globalisation movement, which received favourable coverage in the Guardian and had Radiohead and Godspeed You Black Emperor as its court minstrels (though my involvement was pretty much limited to listening to those bands. approving of Naomi Klein without reading her books, and having friends who stole mugs from Starbucks).
20 or 25 years later and after something of an ideological hiatus I now feel that I sympathise strongly with both groupings, but they don't really seem to be there anymore. It's like realising that you are now in a place where you would really like to be friends with that man who you remember living on your parents' street, but when you knock on his door you find that he moved out years ago and left no forwarding address. Or deciding that the time has come for you to get really into classical music, only to find that nobody plays it or listens to it anymore so the cultural world you wanted to join has vanished.
This feels like something the Germans would have a word for. The best thing we can do I suppose is to call it "irony", but that really doesn't cover it.
Beautiful article. Ireland is arguably in a more advanced state of degradation, and we had no empire nor evenaccess to our own resources. Thanks for another thought provoking piece, beautifully written.
Outstanding piece, Paul. And dare I say, buoyant. For some readers longing for a return to a simpler, earth respecting life, look no further than the great saints Sarov, Herman, et al, and the Bible itself where God often shows his care for the animals, even above certain humans, e.g., Balaam’s donkey. For a wonderful if not sad modern example of heavenly believers whose faith is also earthbound, I recommend a new film titled Sacred Alaska. You won’t be disappointed. Just search for Sacred Alaska movie…
Great piece. Is this the best review essay ever, the introduction to the book I’m dying to read, a manifesto? Perhaps all of the above and well done, you.
Would those thumping African Churches not be Anglican?
Interesting and depressing if it wasn’t for God’s word which leads us through these times to His triumphant return.
" And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright
wings" ~Gerard Manley Hopkins
These lines keep popping up in my head when I think of the 'last lights' of the West.
Maybe all is not lost....
Thank you for these thoughts on this Feast of St. George