Brave Old World

We are repaganizing.

Over at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, Mrs. Psmith has recently penned one of the best book reviews I’ve read in a while. The book—Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton—came out in the 90s, when it was popular to paint a certain Disneyfied picture of the “noble savage” for WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) audiences. With gruesome thoroughness, Edgerton puts that fairytale to bed, then clobbers it dead in its sleep. While the work isn’t new, Mrs. Psmith brings it to bear on current discourse around morality, the fragile achievements of the West, and how much of humanity’s “source code” is worth holding onto. She raises a fascinating question: How much, if any weight should we place on arguments from tradition?

There is good old Chesterton and his fence, of course. But Mrs. Psmith makes the salient point that Chesterton could afford to wax eloquent about the dangers of casually messing with tradition, because he wrote within a tradition that had spent hundreds of years orienting itself towards the sane, the beautiful, and the Good. In short, he wrote within cultural Christianity.

Today, there are those Mrs. Psmith christens “the utilitrads,” public intellectuals who may not share Chesterton’s faith but like to invoke his fence. I think of Bret and Heather Weinstein, who discuss culture and religion the way they discuss everything else—like evolutionary biologists. They explicitly hat tip Chesterton in their book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, first making the point that we shouldn’t lightly assume certain “vestigial” elements of our bodies have no purpose, then reiterating this point for bodies politic. Yet they themselves—deep blue coastal Jewish atheists that they are—are still swimming downstream of Christianity. As Mrs. Psmith drily puts it, you rarely find utilitrads in societies that burn their widows.

But as a once-Christian society loses its cultural memory, what happens when it repaganizes? In 2024, we don’t have to guess the answer.