The resulting decline in each case paved the way for ‘Caesarism’: the rise of demagogues promising to bring order to increasingly formless chaos.

Spengler took the long view. The Decline of the West is a comparative history of civilisations, in which its author claims to have discovered a pattern of birth, growth and decline which can be applied to all major human cultures, from that of Ancient Egypt to that of the modern West.

Here the arch-traditionalist Spengler comes into strange alignment with the communist Karl Marx, with his theory of alienation, and the uncategorisable Simone Weil with her reflections on the consequences of rootlessness.

Our crisis comes, I think, from our being unable to admit what on some level we know to be true: that we in the West are living inside an obsolete story. Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This, now, is the reality we have to wrestle with—and transcend.

‘Our age is so poisoned by lies’, wrote Weil, ‘that it converts everything it touches into a lie’.

Once these rootless, curated ‘identities’ are the choices we are faced with, we are already a long way down the road that leads away from real culture.

Wendell Berry

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.