Months ago I posted here a review of Alex Karp’s ‘The Technological Republic’ in which I hinted at the idea that those truly concerned with ‘the West’ should let it go once and for all. Defending something that is already gone is, in my view, pointless. Now I find a similar argument fully developed in this book.

In the present age our aim should be — Paul Kingsnorth writes — ‘to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a “West” that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires— fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths— and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true.

But first, we are going to have to be crucified.’