It was in the bloody aftermath of that war that the Western ruling class’s now-dominant vision of a post-national world took root. European nations had been battling each other for centuries, but National Socialism revealed new depths to which a state might sink. Theodor Adorno famously claimed that it was ‘barbaric to write poetry after

Guénon concluded his study by suggesting that we are living in a ‘great parody’: an age of ‘inverted spirituality’ and ‘counter-tradition’ in which even institutions which claimed to be transmitting the spiritual traditions—most churches, for example—were shells of the real thing. To Guénon, this was a manifestation of an actual spiritual war. He

But, says Mumford, no society would go to all this effort for purely material ends. The Machine is not simply a vast, soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment. ‘Communities never exert themselves to the utmost, still less curtail the individual life’, claims

‘The fate of our times’, wrote pioneering sociologist Max Weber, ‘is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world’.[2]

‘Openness’ is both the aim and the core value of the age of globalism. It is, in the telling of those who promote it, always a good thing. Open minds, open hearts, open doors, open borders; open to trade, to growth, to change, to progress, to ‘diversity’ in all its manifestations. In many of the ructions that have overtaken parts of the West in

This kind of aboriginality—this deep belonging to place and the cultures that spring from it—is, he says, our human inheritance. The stories we tell in a place make up the culture we are part of. This is what we have done forever. We must never stop doing it.

Marx and Engels, after all, were both self-styled revolutionaries. As such, they recognised that the capitalism they set out to destroy was the most effective revolutionary force in history. The ‘bourgeois’ class which drove it on, they wrote, ‘has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has

These corporations operate via a global technological network of staggering power and complexity—undersea cables, orbiting satellites, monitoring devices in our homes and in our pockets, and, soon, web-connected streets, buildings and appliances, all monitoring us in real time and selling us what we didn’t know we needed. They are facilitated by

Humans cannot live for very long without a glimpse of the transcendent, or an aspiration, dimly understood, to become one with it. Denied this path, we will make our own. Denied a glimpse of heaven, we will try to build it here. This imperfect world, these imperfect people—they must be superseded, improved, remade. Flawed matter is in our hands