Join me for a moment as I engage, Nostradamus-like, in acts of prognostication.
Let us begin with a simple thought experiment. Imagine somebody were to put a gun to your head and ask you to say which you thought was the more likely of the following two scenarios:
- In the year 2124, nobody will be reading text on physical paper
- In the year 2124, nobody will be reading text on digital media
Imagine this choice was also caveated by the proviso that in 2124 human beings will still exist and that they will still need to read text; we don’t all get wiped out by a meteor strike in 2058, or lobotomised and enslaved by space aliens in 2026, or merged with the singularity in 2123 etc.
Next, I want you to imagine that this person has in his possession a crystal ball that will shortly reveal to him what 2124 actually looks like, and that he is going to blow your brains out if you choose one scenario or the other and it turns out the alternative was in fact true. If you said you thought that in 2124 nobody will be reading text on digital media, and the crystal ball informs the gunman that actually nobody will be reading text on physical paper (or vice versa), he will pull the trigger. In other words, you have to stake your life on a choice about which of the two scenarios presented above is more certain to be false. What would you say?
The question, obviously, is based on an incomplete premise. Neither of those scenarios sounds very likely – the real-world in 2124 will presumably be somewhere in the middle of those two extremes, and you might indeed consider it quite likely that we will merge with the singularity, or at least reach a point where we can simply download information directly into our brains (not to mention being conquered by invaders from another galaxy) within that timeframe. Whichever choice you make, it seems unlikely that it will actually end in death.
But the thought experiment is still an interesting one to perform, because it elucidates something important about the way in which we think about the future. Instinctively, almost all of us have an intuition that it is more likely that we will have abandoned physical paper entirely by 2124 than that we will have abandoned digital media. And this, in itself, reveals us to be thoroughly and almost irredeemably modern: we believe in progress, understood in a particular way – and occupying a particular trajectory. We feel as though we know the direction in which we are going (whether we like that direction or not), and we think we are going to go that way more or less forever from here on in.
Well, I would like to go out on a limb in this post and explain why it is that I think, of the two scenarios provided to us by our prophetic gunman, the more preposterous of the two is actually the first. I think the world of the physical, the tangible, the substantive, the grounded, is going to return to prominence – and in a big way. And I do not think the kind of digital dominance that we currently experience and which is no doubt accelerating will, in the grand scheme of things, survive for very long. In short, I do not believe in progress of the type which we intuit to be true – and I will even stick my neck out and say that I do not believe in the project of modernity at all. Bear with me, then, while I explain.
Modernity’s Future Trajectory
During this substack’s existence I have made the case (I am far from being the only person to have done so) that we can understand modernity as the obliteration of theological justifications for anything. If there is one thing that moderns cannot and will not accept, it is the justification: “Because God says so.”
The immediate result of this, of course, is that modernity recognises no principled basis why any phenomenon should not be subject to interrogation and critique; ostensibly anything can be brought before “the tribunal of the intellect” (an Oakeshottism that I have used before) and forced to defend itself. And the next-most immediate result is, therefore, that anything and everything must be able to justify itself in terms which moderns will accept. The state, the political economy, the nation, the church, the family, marriage, the distinction between adults and children, the distinction between humans and animals, love, parenthood, our relationship to nature, even the very existence of humanity itself – none of these things can appeal to God, or natural right, in order to secure their position. None of them can have a deontological reason for being the way they are. Instead, all must have a thoroughgoing consequentialist basis for their ongoing existence and must continue to provide their justification in those terms against unrelenting intellectual assault.
To put this more succinctly, under modernity’s reign, no institution, norm or state of affairs may be permitted to exist which cannot be satisfactorily proven at any given moment to make life ‘better’ in purely consequentialist terms.
Another, related result is that modernity is – to use another favourite phrase that I have used before – ‘individualising and totalising’. Since the existence of anything to which anybody might display loyalty (family, church, nation, etc.) is up for grabs, it is always to the modern person persuasive that such loyalties should only be displayed where they can be justified – and hence that they can be jettisoned on the same terms. We are loyal to institutions only as long as there is something in it for us. This is true both individually and at the societal level, as we can see in, for instance, our individual commitments to our own marriages, and our societal commitments to the institution of marriage as such.
This has the effect, naturally, of breaking down such loyalties, and indeed atomising us to the degree that our only loyalties tend to be towards ourselves. But it also has the effect – counterintuitively – of cementing our loyalty to the state, understood as a continuous practice of reflexive government which is always and everywhere engaged vigorously in the exercise of justifying itself through the act of governing. It is the state, and the state alone, which is able to say to moderns: “I am always justified, because it is I who governs, and without government things will be worse.” The state always has a plausible consequentialist account for its existence, and so it is the only institution whose existence is not questioned, and which therefore becomes the depository of all individual loyalties.
And this has a further effect, which I have also alluded to in recent posts: the lionisation of substantive equality, and indeed of DEI/EDI, as our overriding obsession. Modernity, as I have here described it, is an individuating force which produces in the heart of each of us the sense that we should assess anything and everything in terms of what is better, consequentially, for the self and the self alone. We want things to be better for ‘us’ as individuals to the exclusion of all other considerations. And in aggregate, a society that comprises a mass of individuals who all only want things to be better individually for themselves is collectively one which cannot tolerate distinctions in outcome – one which, indeed, can in the end tolerate nothing other than perfect substantive equality: all of us moving forward, but only in total lock-step.
The sum total of all of these trends is that modernity is characterised by a centripetal force which ruthlessly and remorselessly centralises. It destroys borders, rules, norms and institutions; it encourages circulation and flow; it seeks paradoxically to both improve and equalise; it brings everything together by remorseless logic to what one is compelled to agree is properly called a ‘singularity’.
The only thing to add is that it also – for want of a better word – ‘technologises’; in fact, it venerates technology and technological advancement, since such advancement is definitionally able to prove itself to be in consequentialist terms making things ‘better’ (and may indeed be the only thing which can do so). If modernity is characterised by nothing else, indeed, it is characterised by the lack of any principled objection to technological advancement – there is simply no basis on which moderns can place any limits on the directions in which technology can go, for all that they may have misgivings in theory.
That is how I would define modernity (though I have elsewhere described it as the position of “lacking a principled argument as to why the state should not tell you what underwear you are allowed to wear”), and this, I think you can probably see, is the road on which we are travelling. It has taken a long time to get to the position in which we find ourselves, beginning with Machiavelli and his sparring partners 500 or so years ago, but we are now far advanced on that journey – having indeed reached a point at which most ordinary people, if pressed, can say basically nothing in defence of the existence of the most basic of institutions (the family, national borders, sexual morality, etc.) at all, and have become so unmoored from a concept of natural right that they find it difficult to explain why, for example, children should not be taught about masturbation in primary school, secure borders are important, people should not be permitted to self-mutilate, and so on and so forth.
Modernity’s Doom
In light of this, one might be tempted to say that it seems very likely indeed that we are heading towards a future of total digitisation – or, indeed, the ‘singularity’ as it is popularly understood. This would in fact be the culmination of modernity itself: the complete integration of an atomised, deracinated humanity into a perfect technocracy, deployed through the fusion of technology and the state itself. But, as you will recall, I framed the foregoing account with a declaration: I do not believe in modernity’s project, and I think it is doomed to fail. That future will never emerge. And this is for four sets of reasons, which I will call the practical, structural, biological and spiritual.
Practical reasons first. There is a strange idea that floats about in the heady atmosphere of online ‘dissident Right’ circles, to the effect that our contemporary obsession with diversity is producing a ‘competence crisis’, because at the margins it prioritises inclusion over meritocracy with the effect that complex systems are falling apart. I have a future post brewing about why these people have become so unmoored from reality that they find this account plausible, but to summarise my argument briefly: modern government’s predominant feature is the drive to make the population rely upon it; it can justify its existence on no other grounds than that the population needs it. Everything that the modern state does can be understood in those terms. This necessarily means that as modernity progresses, the state increasingly undermines the tendencies towards self-reliance and autonomy that exist within the population, and so the population in general becomes more enervated, passive, pliant, servile, dependent, and – yes – incompetent.
This is why everywhere your look in the developed world you see the same basic dynamic emerging: the pool of productive, useful, capable people diminishing (or being supplemented by a boost in immigration that can only realistically last for a relatively short period of time), and the pool of unproductive, state-subsidised people – both welfare recipients and middle-class holders of ‘bullshit’ WFH sinecures – swelling to the point of overflowing. This is not, to coin a phrase, sustainable, although fiat money and inertia will keep it going for some time yet. It has nothing really to do with a recent, diversity-fuelled ‘competence crisis’; it is the result of developments which go a tiny bit deeper and further back, than that.
Structural reasons second. Modernity, which, as we have seen, centralises, also by definition fragilises: it produces single points of failure – or, if you prefer the homelier metaphor, puts all of the eggs of society in one basket. The more power is concentrated in the state, and the more that alternative sources of loyalty disappear, the more that civilisation becomes vulnerable to true catastrophe; a foolish or incompetent government is tolerable if it has little to do, but may bring a nation to its knees if it is the only game in town.
It is not, then, exactly that modernity produces bad government (though indeed it does, for reasons we can come back to another day), but rather that it exposes us to what one might call ‘tail risks’ – the governing class may not go collectively bonkers or become ideologically corrupt, but if it does, then the fact that power is centralised in its hands will make matters far worse than they would otherwise be. Modernity despises the kind of redundancy that nature understands; as Nassim Taleb once memorably put it, nature gives us all two kidneys in case one fails – modern reasoning in principle would rather we just have one great big state-owned kidney which we all plug into once a day for dialysis, on the basis of its greater ‘efficiency’. That kind of imperative can be seen everywhere, from the way in which government is centralised at the expense of local and regional decision-making to the way in which policy on important issues – climate change, migration, development, trade, biosecurity, etc. – is determined almost universally within international fora, such that there are no meaningful distinctions between states at all. This is another thing which is not – to repeat – sustainable.
Biological reasons are next. In a sense, we need only at this juncture examine a single chart:
There is something about the conditions of modernity, that is, which are in themselves suggestive of decline and disapperance, and suggestive of a new world soon to spring into being; whether we like it or not, it seems that the culmination of secular modernity is a society in which people choose not to reproduce in sufficient quantities to maintain the population. We do not even need to know the exact reason for this – though you will have a hard time persuading me that it is not connected to any of the other issues raised in this post – and nor do we need to express a view about its normative desirability. We only need to observe the growing childlessness of the societies around us, and the brute fact that the ideologies which sustain them will in the fullness of time peter out and be replaced by something more evolutionarily vigorous – not in the sense of an ethnic ‘great replacement’, but in the sense of being swept away by a commitment to (pre- or postmodern) values and norms which promote childbirth.
And spiritual reasons – actually the most important – come fourth. We all, I think, know something very significant, which is that the world which we are creating for our children is, to put the matter frankly, a bit crap at best, and actively dehumanising at worst. This world – in which everybody is atomised, individualised and interested ultimately only in themselves; in which nobody appears capable of doing much at all other than being passively entertained; in which we are encouraged at every turn to look only downwards or sideways rather than up; in which our aspirations are driven ever more narrowly to the world of hedonic experience; in which we are told that our goals should only ever be to be equal rather than to excel – is modernity itself, and we are increasingly coming to the view that we don’t like it, though this inclination remains, at the moment, half-formed.
In particular, the disillusion with the technological aspects of modernity are becoming acute. This manifests itself in the observations that the internet is in general becoming ‘enshittified’, that it is ruining childhood and that it is turning young people off music; that AI deepfakes are going to make trust in media completely collapse; that modern architecture is intrinsically dehumanising, and so on and so forth – ad almost infinitum.
And we can layer on top of that the way in which the initial promise of the internet (i.e., that it would be fundamentally liberating), as naïve as that was, has been corrupted to the point of almost becoming inverted, such that it is fast becoming a tool for manipulation and control – leaving aside all of the many reasons why the experience of going online is becoming steadily worse. We are reaching an inflection point, though we have not quite got there yet, at which the cool thing to do will not to be online much, if at all, and in which indeed the only way to be free will be to not have an online presence, since the very act of online engagement will involve total surveillance and perfect censorship. We can I think, as Ted Gioia recently put it, feel this in our collective gut. That feeling will get stronger.
While we are, then, as moderns, on a clear trajectory, as I previously described it, towards that ruthless and remorseless future wherein all borders and distinctions are destroyed and all human phenomena are centralised in the centripetal point of the technocratic state, it is not a trajectory that can ever hope to reach its culmination. As the process plays out it will in fact become clapped out; it will make our lives more and more miserable, and sooner or later as a result it will stop. Modernity itself, the world which we have created, will be sloughed off, like a chrysalis or the dead skin of a snake, and something other will emerge – more grounded, more real, more human, though the process may be long or short, and may take on the character of violent revolution or quiet decline and renewal. It will be, I am sure, a more religious future, a more deontologically oriented future, a more open and expansionary future – though there will be pain and suffering in the interim, and thereafter, since neither of those things are in the gift of humanity to overcome. It will not be a return to the past, which is dead and gone, but to a markedly different future to the one which modernity presents to us.
This may very well not be a future in which digital tech is abandoned entirely. But it is one in which that technology will by and large be put in its proper place as a useful tool for certain purposes, and that alone. We will be its masters, rather than its ‘users’. While I do not, in other words, think that either of the scenarios I presented at the beginning of this post are entirely plausible, the one in which our lives go on becoming more and more digitalised into infinity is by far the least realistic. It is an eventual return to the prioritisation of physical reality which I see within our future. And I am willing to stake my life (well, okay, a box of Maltesers) – on that likelihood.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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I am marching forward with my own progress. A big part of that is having a small home, heated by burning wood.
How dare you even want heat, and how dare you use wood to obtain it. You should be marched straight off to the Climate Gulag. There you can admit all your other indiscretions and repent your sins against Mother Earth
Indeed. I like to think most/all of us here are marching forward with our own progress, each in our own way, as best we can, in spite of everything. What else can we do?
Hang on as well as we can in the hope of, one day, seeing at least one of the b’stards doing or permitting all this to be done to be held accountable. Stocks or the gallows seem the best accountability.
Too long to absorb atm , humanity has just proved we are just as mentally un progressed & twisted as at any other defining inquisition/ witch trial type episode in history !
I read this twice, as it needed to be contemplated, the last two paragraphs are well worth a reflection. Particularly with reference to state borders. It is always a pleasure to read Dr D.Mc.
Excellent article.
For a really in depth analysis as to why we are where we are, I recommend reading- The Master And His Emissaery,- a book! by Ian McGilchrist.
A long read at over 500 pages.
Clown World (its very existence made possible only by modernity) no doubt accelerated modernity but that acceleration will only serve to hasten its demise.
People are beginning to wake up. Hopefully the dawn of realisation
I agree; an excellent read.
I also enjoyed reading the article “‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything” which he linked to in the text.
“modern reasoning in principle would rather we just have one great big state-owned kidney”
The current system encourages dependency on medicines which is much the same.
Digital technologies may be reduced back to a tool but other technologies still offer up routes to being users/pawns rather than each of us being our own master.
A superb piece. The modernists want supranational technocracy to reign supreme with individual people no more than atoms responding to the prompts of the technocracy and voluntary associations and traditions swept aside. The modernist doctrine is as evil and dangerous as the various totalitarian isms of the twentieth century.
What to do? We can all make a small difference which in aggregate would be massive. Participate in voluntary associations, support local traditions, use cash and purchase from small businesses. Do not use the language of the enemy and do mock their pretensions. Vote for independents or insurgent small parties. Do not despair but retain faith that evil will be defeated.
There was a clip on UK Column today about an Independent incumbent in Gloucester who was trying to raise awareness of the Council installing 5G on the quiet.
The initial proposition can be worded in a simpler way: Do you believe the 20th century will last forvever?
And the answer is: No, because it already ended.
A real problem for future generations (including anyone presently below pension age and just somewhat above it) is how to get rid of the 20th century idée fixe that human-induced dooom is just round the corner ultimatively caused by the total devaluation of everything that’s somehow human or civilized by so-called strategic airwarfare – really just high-tech mass murder and wanton destruction of anything humans ever created devoid of a strategy for achieving anything beyond itself – culminating in the Tokio firebombing and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the about 50 years of nuclear balance of terror which followed before it terminally ruins their lives. Environmental doomism is really just an offshoot of that which gained traction as the actual nuclear showdown became progressively more unlikely without people’s conviction that human-induced armageddon must be just around the corner becoming weaker as well.
So basically, what EM Forster wrote 120 years ago in “The Machine Stops”.
Sadly, none of us will be here in 100 years to see if it finally did come to pass.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/twenty-eighty-four/
Henry Getley at TCW imagining our dystopian future in 2084.
He has certainly been faithful to the original.
Good read.
Start off with the current situation and extrapolate on the basis that nothing will change until it absolutely has to change.
South Africa manages to limp on; Argentina also still exists and has finally elected a leader that is promising dramatic change.
There is a lot of ruin in a nation.
The existence of everything rests upon the state. Just as in Christian theology everything that exists rests upon God’s will.
“for example, children should not be taught about masturbation in primary school, secure borders are important, people should not be permitted to self-mutilate, and so on and so forth”……You are mixing up very different things there. I was in boarding school, and you are right, kids don’t need to be ‘taught’ that because it came naturally.
I don’t thik that there is a way out or any sense of a trajectory. Just compare the energy level of this country with that of an up and coming country. Of course demoralisation can be overcome but this is deeper than that. Your country is gettign smaller your puissance shrinking day by day like a patient contemplating his debilitation before death. You can try to exert the power of will to transcend this state or more likely, die in a quiet and dignified fashion. Nobody ever said that it was going to have a happy ending,
What Dr McGrogan describes as Modernity sounds more like Marxism. All those that brought the modern world into existence were on the whole social conservatives Christians with strong family bonds. The post WW2 western World has been slowly corrupted by it’s own extraordinary material success, and resultant materialistic individualism, but also the nihilistic influence on our education by the Frankfurt School and the like.
It is hard, and becoming harder, to imagine a world which isn’t dependent on digital technology, not least because that is what the powerful want and are pushing on us.
I entered the world of work in the late ’70s when there were no PCs in the office at all (electric golf-ball typewriters were considered high-tech). By the time I had my first child in 1989 and temporarily stopped work (as you did then) PCs were already in common use.
Three decades on, and I find it almost impossible to even remember how a pre-PC office worked. It will be impossible for anyone who has entered the world of work since the ’90s to visualise it …. and the same applies to their personal lives. They have no idea how to function without digital technology.
People of my generation may resist the drive to digitise every aspect of our lives – but I can’t see the younger generations doing it.
I always seem to comment long after everyone else, I suppose because I wait to get the articles via my DS email instead of going to their website each day.
Dr McGrogan is good but often a bit too long and thus I tend to skim read his articles and quite often give up reading them altogether. However, I hung on in there this time (still only skim reading so obviously not taking everything in by any means) and think that he makes some very interesting points and is probably right. Personally, I would say that modern society (politicians, etc) has largely abandoned God and that’s the basis of all our problems. In the Book of Judges, while there was a ‘good’ (one who followed the Lord) judge (or ruler), the people of Israel also followed the Lord. When a good judge died and there was a hiatus or interim, nearly always (if not always) the people turned to evil and worshipped other gods. This is what we are doing collectively. We cannot survive without God and we need to turn back to him.
“This may very well not be a future in which digital tech is abandoned entirely. But it is one in which that technology will by and large be put in its proper place as a useful tool for certain purposes, and that alone. We will be its masters, rather than its ‘users’”
See: Butlerian Jihad
Our AI clones are far from producing “thinking machines.” They’ve finally managed to turn their trash into a revenue-making product and it’s “virtual designer chatbot girl-friends for [incel] nerds”. My facebook feed is currently getting flooded with ads for that and I chafe at the idea that I could be the kind of person these ads are presumably targetting.
People will get tired of being narcissistic and start to think about the world beyond them, which eventually means more religion, something beyond themselves.