Christopher Alexander:

The fact is, that even when we have seen deep into the processes by which it is possible to make a building or a town alive, in the end, it turns out that this knowledge only brings us back to that part of ourselves which is forgotten.

Although the process is precise, and can be defined in exact scientific terms, finally it becomes valuable, not so much because it shows us things which we don’t know, but instead, because it shows us what we know already, only daren’t admit because it seems so childish, and so primitive. […]

This is why it is so easy for others to play on our fears. They can persuade us that we must have more method, and more system, because we are afraid of our own chaos. Without method and more method, we are afraid the chaos which is in us will reveal itself. And yet these methods only make things worse.

The thoughts and fears which feed these methods are illusions.

It is the fears which these illusions have created in us, that make places which are dead and lifeless and artificial. And—greatest irony of all—it is the very methods we invent to free us from our fears which are themselves the chains whose grip on us creates our difficulties.

For the fact is, that this seeming chaos which is in us is a rich, rolling, swelling, dying, lilting, singing, laughing, shouting, crying, sleeping order. If we will only let this order guide our acts of building, the buildings that we make, the towns we help to make, will be the forests and the meadows of the human heart.

Alongside Smaje’s Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I’m also reading Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World. So far a good complementary pair.

Guardini:

It became clear to medieval man when he turned his spirit in upon itself, when he descended to the core of his soul, that he reached a frontier of “inner finiteness.” Beyond it was the dwelling place of God again, but it was just as inconceivable as was the great expanse of transcendence where dwelt the Lord. To maintain his total cosmology, medieval man had to allow his spirit to think of “something” lying beyond the innermost side of that frontier of “inner finiteness”—a not-something and yet a something—the “place of God,” Who has crossed over and come into the world, into man’s soul as Immanence. There also “lived” God. In the Empyrean, however, God reigned publicly as the high Lord of all things; within the depths of the human soul He dwelt inwardly and privately. Both were “places” transcending the two farthest poles of reality: the first, lying beyond the uttermost sphere of creation; the second, lying buried to the “other side” of the inmost core of the soul of man.

Between these extreme points floated the world. As a whole and in each of its parts the world was the portrait of God; that is, the rank and excellence of every created being was determined by the degree to which it bore within itself the stamp of God’s image. A vast hierarchy of being—the non-living, the plants and the animals—was formed by the interrelations of the many things found in these realms of essence. At the highest, man in his rational-spiritual life was enabled to gather all lesser things into a unity unknown to the ancients and true to the revealed creation of God, into the unity of the macrocosm in all its ranks and degrees, in the fullness of its meaning.

Modern astronomy has refuted this total construction of the medieval genius which gave expression to reality as it is directly grasped by the human eye and consciousness. For this very reason the theory has a most penetrating symbolic power in human thought. Even today its existential validity cannot be denied, while its influence upon the ways of medieval man was profound.

He goes on to describe what he calls “the key to medieval efforts”: “namely, that medieval man neither wished to explore the mysteries of the world empirically nor did he want to illuminate them by a rational methodology.”

[T]he medieval thinker went directly to the world of existing things, to those things which he experienced immediately in sensation; he reflected upon their essences and status within the interdependent ordering of creation. From those reflections medieval man garnered a wisdom which even today has its value. Medieval anthropology, for example, in both principle and application, is superior to its modern counterpart. In morality and moral attitude, medieval life had a firmer yet richer hold on reality than is possible for modern man; it also made possible a fuller perfecting of human nature. In social philosophy and jurisprudence, medieval thought encompassed and ordered its concrete cultural situation to its own time, yet it offers insights which have basic validity for man at any time.

Charting A Moral Vision of American Foreign Policy

In 2026, the United States has entered into the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War. The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace. The sovereign rights of nations to self-determination appear all too fragile in a world of ever greater conflagrations. The balancing of national interest with the common good is being framed within starkly polarized terms. Our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world, sustaining the right to life and human dignity, and supporting religious liberty are all under examination. And the building of just and sustainable peace, so crucial to humanity’s well-being now and in the future, is being reduced to partisan categories that encourage polarization and destructive policies.

For all of these reasons, the contribution of Pope Leo in outlining a truly moral foundation for international relations to the Vatican diplomatic corps this month has provided us an enduring ethical compass for establishing the pathway for American foreign policy in the coming years.

He stated:

In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies. War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading. The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and desirable good in itself, or in pursuit of “the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.” Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion.

Pope Leo also reiterates Catholic teaching that “the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation for every other human right” and that abortion and euthanasia are destructive of that right. He points to the need for international aid to safeguard the most central elements of human dignity, which are under assault because of the movement by wealthy nations to reduce or eliminate their contributions to humanitarian foreign assistance programs. Finally, the Holy Father points to the increasing violations of conscience and religious freedom in the name of an ideological or religious purity that crushes freedom itself.

As pastors and citizens, we embrace this vision for the establishment of a genuinely moral foreign policy for our nation. We seek to build a truly just and lasting peace, that peace which Jesus proclaimed in the Gospel. We renounce war as an instrument for narrow national interests and proclaim that military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy. We seek a foreign policy that respects and advances the right to human life, religious liberty, and the enhancement of human dignity throughout the world, especially through economic assistance.

Our nation’s debate on the moral foundation for American policy is beset by polarization, partisanship, and narrow economic and social interests. Pope Leo has given us the prism through which to raise it to a much higher level. We will preach, teach, and advocate in the coming months to make that higher level possible.

Signed,

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago
Cardinal Robert W. McElroy, Archbishop of Washington
Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, C.Ss.R., Archbishop of Newark

From Ruth Graham:

Cardinal Tobin said in an interview that he had been struck by voices in the Trump administration who seemed to be advancing a moral framework that he described as “almost a Darwinian calculus that the powerful survive and the weak don’t deserve to.”

He added, “I would say that’s less than human.”

Chris Smaje, with a good introductory statement in chapter 1 (between the preface, introduction, and first chapter, there are basically three good introductions):

THE TERM ‘DARK AGES’ is disreputable among contemporary historians because of its moral loading — for example, in the way that modern European thinkers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment vaunted their own rebirth, their belief they could now see things in the clear light of a reality they thought had been obscured in the ‘dark ages’ of medieval thought after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

People still unthinkingly use terms like ‘medieval’ and ‘dark ages’ as pejoratives, to the extent that two historians titled their popular history of medieval times The Bright Ages in a worthwhile but probably fruitless attempt to redress the balance. In this sense, I invoke the idea of a dark age ahead ironically. There are things we can learn today from the ruralism and political innovation of the post-Roman or postimperial Dark Ages, and there are things we can learn from the medieval moral and political thinking that preceded our modern age of self-proclaimed Enlightenment.

In times of trouble, grassroots intellectuals have been articulating localism and agrarianism at least since the fourth century BCE with the School of the Tillers during the Warring States period in ancient China. The case for going back to the land is not some uniquely modern affectation of nostalgia for a lost past we’ve definitively left behind, but a permanent counter-civilizational possibility, which is constantly being refreshed. Maybe it’s time to get over ourselves a bit, slow down, and listen to some voices from the dark circle beyond the fire of our self-absorbed ‘enlightenment.’

“To press the point,” he goes on to say, “‘dark-age’ situations where people build local land-based autonomies in the shadows of state power — deliberate autonomies, geared to keeping that power at bay — have been near-permanent historical possibility that people have often jumped at when they get the chance.”

Also:

Almost everything we think we know about ‘development’ — moving people away from making their livelihood directly from a local ecological base, and toward making it indirectly and supposedly more prosperously via the medium of money from many unknown ecologies worldwide — is built on these same assumptions. Promethean hero stories claim we can keep this ball in the air via new technologies. …

As these assumptions reach their expiry, it’s hard to overstate the scale and the urgency of the back-to-first-principles approaches that are needed.

Chris Smaje, in the preface to what promises to be an excellent book:

Before long, the self-reinforcing cycle of interlinked trading, raiding, slaving and adventuring built a vast economic and military Viking diaspora stretching from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and from the edge of North America to the western Eurasian Steppe. The access of some more than others in Viking society to the fruits of this extractivism-fuelled social stratification within it. The gap between lord and peasant widened.

Eventually, the Vikings embraced Christianity and their story merged with the development of a relatively unified medieval culture in northwest Europe, woven out of more disparate earlier strands.

But it retained a combative edge. William, Duke of Normandy — a Norse settler culture in northern France, Norman meaning Norse or Northman — famously invaded England in 1066 and installed himself on its throne. The Domesday Book he commissioned was a colonial document prefiguring many later ones. It asked, in enormous quantitative detail, exactly what the country could yield, and in what quantity, with a view to appropriating as much as possible to the Anglo-Norman exchequer. The Norman conquerors bequeathed to England a centralized and extractive state apparatus that arguably prepared the ground for England’s own expansion much later as a global power, helping to spread this predatory mindset across the Earth.

~~~

TODAY, WORLDWIDE, our societies and governments are still asking exactly what our countries can yield, and in what quantity. It’s too easy to see this as benevolence — lifting the poor, feeding the world and so forth. It’s as much because they’re still conquest societies — Viking societies. The trading-raiding-slaving nexus of Viking-era globalization is our world, directly paralleling the globalization of modern centuries.

The modern style of globalization has sometimes been tamer and more rationally framed than its medieval precursors. Nowadays, it’s typically expressed through an implausible universalism: everybody can aspire to being a Viking, organizing a flow of trade goods and labour services to their personal advantage, while nobody has to be disadvantaged and reap the consequences of this plunder. Or else it manifests in an embrace of a ‘Viking’ warrior or winner-takes-all attitude, typically among social-media-saturated young men who are not very plausible candidates for effecting it.

Either way, these implausible positions reveal the beating dark-age heart of our modern age of enlightenment: a world built on slavery, colonialism, labour exploitation and the levelling of nature in pursuit of a relentless material throughput.

From the introduction:

In any case, the livelihood model … is not a technological fix like nuclear fusion that you don’t understand and have no agency over, but that the government uses to keep the lights on so that you can carry on getting to work, paying the mortgage and taking your mind off things with Netflix in the evening while your wider culture trumpets its manifest destiny. The model is that you yourself can learn the skills to live well in the place you call home by working to generate your livelihood, and that this work, this way of being, is your culture, of which you are an important bearer.

John Prine:

The bells ring out on Sunday morning
like echoes from another time
All our innocence and yearning
and sense of wonder left behind
Oh gentle hearts remember,
What was that story? Is it lost?
For when religion loses vision,
That’s how every empire falls
[…]

Padlock the door and board the windows,
put the people in the street
“It’s just my job,” he says, “I’m sorry,”
and draws a check, goes home to eat
At night he tells his woman,
“I know I hide behind the laws”
She says, “You’re only taking orders”:
That’s how every empire falls

A bitter wind blows through the country,
a hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning,
there must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire,
like torches thrown into the straw?
If no one asks, then no one answers:
That’s how every empire falls

Here my journal stutters with a squirrel story bigger than words:

Unfathomably, it plunges back into blue chance—into uncharted. 

We are never done, it says, with a body tiny enough to know.

The world is large, it says, with a courage I am greedy to learn. 

Praise here all fabulous unwritten. …

what little rooms are words in these seasons of plenty.

— Kimberly Blaeser

---

For from the least to the greatest of them,
    every one is greedy for unjust gain;
and from prophet to priest,
    every one deals falsely.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly,
    saying, ‘Peace, peace,’
    when there is no peace. […]

Thus says the Lord:
“Stand by the roads, and look,
    and ask for the ancient paths,
where the good way is; and walk in it,
    and find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
I set watchmen over you, saying,
    ‘Give heed to the sound of the trumpet!’
But they said, ‘We will not give heed.’

---

I’ll grant that Wyatt Graham might be onto something helpful by (sort of) defending Kingsnorth’s book as “philosophy of history” — though, if correct, not nearly as explanatory and high-mileage as he thinks. And I can’t tell if he merely sympathizes with other critics or inadvertently falls into the very same category of disappointment and misplaced expectations that he’s trying to explain away.

“[A]s I read the whole work,” writes Graham, “I did find myself grasping for a full argument. Kingsnorth has mastered the office of assertion, but I too wanted to be carried along the flow of an argument to the end. I did not always feel that the author led me as well as he could have.”

For this, whether from Graham or the other critics he has in mind, I don’t think a category like “philosophy of history” is needed. Instead, I just want to say (with a genuine smile), So what? Why do you, why should I, expect “a full argument”? You want to be “carried along the flow of an argument to the end”? Tough shit. Read the Gospel of Mark and let me know how that works out for you. (In fact, “I did not always feel that the author led me as well as he could have” is a pretty good description of how most people feel when they read their bibles.)

“The positivity of the unambiguous only allows for sequential processes,” writes Byung-Chul Han, who prefers what Jean Baudrillard called “delirious contiguity” over the sequential — functional and informational — use of language. It can be partly out of some grander respect for the unknown and unknowable, and it can be partly out of respect for their readers, but in my experience, the best writers, and the best books worth reading, don’t lead their readers through a full argument; they resist systematization. Or, as Kingsnorth puts it, “Sometimes the ridiculous ideas are the only ones worth having.”

Though Graham seems aware of this, it’s not clear to me how much he appreciates it. But when he gets to his own review of Against the Machine, it’s not even clear to me that he read the book. “I mostly agree with his criticisms of the deleterious effects of modern technique,” he writes. “But I also wonder at Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 4:4–5: ‘everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, provided it is received with thanksgiving, for it is sanctified by God’s word and by prayer’ (bold text in original).”

Putting aside the issue of forcing 1 Timothy 4 to say something about modern technique, I have to ask: Did Graham hear in Kingsnorth a rejection of the thankful and sanctifying reception of the earth and all God created?

He goes on:

And has not God shaped and formed human life? Has not God given the city of Enoch music, metallurgy, ranching, poetry, and city works (Gen 4:17–26)? These techniques and tools that built the pyramids, which Kingsnorth associates with the Machine, do not evince in and of themselves something unredeemable.

Let’s again put aside the question of whether Graham gets it right with this Genesis 4 reference. (This I really do not know. I am moved by the God of restraint and blessing Marilynne Robinson sees abiding over Cain, but there’s also Robert Alter’s commentary on the passage: “The first recorded founder of a city is also the first murderer, a possible reflection of the antiurban bias in Genesis.”) In fact, I’ll happily give it to him. It still doesn’t fit. Perhaps I missed something — I did listen to the audiobook and I do have a bad memory — but I did not come away from the book with anything even close to the impression that Kingsnorth would automatically associate “music, metallurgy, ranching, poetry, and city works” with The Machine.

Near the end of the book, Kingsnorth says this:

I have come to the end now, and here is what I think: that the age of the Machine is not after all a hopeless time. Actually, it is the time we were born for. We can’t leave it, so we have to fully inhabit it. We have to understand it, challenge it, resist it, subvert it, walk through it on towards something better. If we can see what it is, we have a duty to speak the words to those who do not yet see, all the while struggling to remain human.

As tempted as I am to say that Wyatt must not have finished the book, his review is more confusing than that. Because this among Kingsnorth’s closing passages did not surprise me or strike as something wholly different from the chapters that preceded it. For this reader, at least, the whole argument led pretty consistently to conclude with “We must fully inhabit the age of the Machine while understanding, challenging, and resisting it.”

Against Kingsnorth, Wyatt would pit Jacques Maritain’s “ambivalence of history,” and he seems to think that this is something very similar to the sanctifying practice he sees in 1 Timothy. But I don’t see it. To say, as Maritain does, that evil and good will inevitably grow alongside each other in no way implies that something called the Machine must be received with thanksgiving. Likewise, to say that in every age we must practice thankful sanctification for everything God has given us is not the same as sanctifying everything known to man or created by him.

I think dwelling more on Maritain’s “ambivalence of history” would probably be helpful… some other day. But I’ll say this: the law of ambivalence does not require a philosophy or a religion or an ethics or a metaphysics of ambivalence. To call something what it is, that is what I see Kingsnorth doing. And, contra Graham, living in the law of ambivalence is also exactly what I see Kingsnorth doing. And the fact is, I hear a better — wiser and more sanctifying — ambivalence of history in Kingsnorth than I do in Wyatt’s “receive the machine with thanksgiving” approach.

More simply: Inhabit the age, not the Machine.