Albion Awakening

Edited from Avalonian Quest (1982) by Geoffrey Ashe, pp 254-5:

I believe in a rebirth. The Strong Magic is creative as well as demoralising.

But if a rebirth is ever to happen, it cannot be forced. No one knows what form it  should take or what it is that the presiding beings intend. And to try to exploit the energies is dangerous

The future must be allowed to unfold, and perhaps its logic will be plain without human effort.

Recent years may have been witnessing a necessary prelude. The winds have blown away at least some of the nonsense, at least some of the delusion, at least some of the attempts of would-be gurus to domineer and dictate.

To be aware of Glastonbury with all it implies is to see an ample prospect. The place has to be Christian - local instinct is right in that respect - but it could be the home of a more exploratory, adventurous, questing Christianity - nourished from many sources.

Today the road of Christian prgress is widely assumed to lead in another direction. Theologians seek to demythologise, cutting out not only what is pre-Christian but a good deal of what is Christian too. The pruning process is meant to define a Highest Common Factor capable of uniting divided churches...

To such a conception of the Faith I can only reply: 'Not so, not so!'

Part of the Avalonian destiny may be to remind the Church of a different way, a way of enrichment and development, acknowledging mystery, acclimatising the mythic, absorbing wisdom from many traditions, interpreting Christian doctrines better in the light of them.

This is how it often was in the Church's creative centuries. That is how it might be again...

Better any number of quests, even if some are illusory, than the arid pretence that there is no quest at all. 

**

I turned to Avalonian Quest after reading (and reviewing on this blog) Geoffrey Ashe's novel The Finger and the Moon (1973) last week

Like every book I have read on the subject of Glastonbury, it is flawed and ultimately unsatisfactory - but overall this is probably the best. Its flaw is that the entire central half of the book is focused on the subject of the (perhaps?) labyrinth or maze around Glastonbury Tor - making it very unbalanced, and not really what it purports to be.

However, the rest of the book is highly insightful, and with an appealing 'personality'. I was particularly pleased by Ashe's acknowledgement of the dark 'vibes' of Glastonbury, the ill effect it has on many people and its repeated failures (rather than the usual rose-tinted nonsense about the place); also his skewering of the utterly unjustified and counter-evidential way in which modern 'scholars' assert that the tomb of Arthur discovered in Glastonbury Abbey in 1191 was a complete fraud. Ashe argues (convincingly to me) that there is every reason to assume that the monks discovered something highly significant and interesting, and in some fashion closely bound-up with the Arthurian legends. 

What of the closing passage of the book, which I have excerpted above? It seems to me that Ashe was spot-on in his diagnosis and also his recommended 'treatment' - and that what he believed and hoped-for was indeed exactly what was needed; although in the event it was not what happened.

(For which I lay the blame at the doors of ingrained Leftism and esepcially the sexual revolution - which in practice the most influential people put as their priority ranked above that of spiritual awakening).

Ashe is saying that what is needed must primarily be within the frame of Christianity; but that what is needed must also go beyond historical Christianity in terms of involving a more wide-ranging and overtly 'spiritual' quest - some of which directions we should expect to be 'illusory' and to fail in their hope or promise.

We must, therefore, be ready to acknowledge and repent what turn out to be errors. Nonetheless, we must boldly quest: boldly set-out and pursue what seem like the most fruitful directions for quest.

By the unanimous vote of Bruce Charlton, William Wildblood and John Fitzgerald - the authors of Albion Awakening - we are delighted to announce that Geoffrey Ashe is the recipient of our Greatest Living Englishman Award.

This is a virtual award, as befits a blog - and I can think of nothing more appropriate to give him than that greatest treasure of one of the greatest Englishmen: the Alfred Jewel, of King Alfred the Great.

Geoffrey Ashe was born 29 March 1923. Further information on his life and work can be found here and here and here.

I am currently reading a very interesting book by Geoffrey Ashe - The Offbeat Radicals: the British tradition of alternative dissent. As always with this author, this is full of insights; yet it lacks the necessary Christian framework.

I accept that - quite often - the radical critique was at least partially-valid, often it was mostly-valid; yet if we consider the motivation of radicals, then it becomes clear that most of them were materialists.

Ashe includes William Blake, and he has many excellent things to say about Blake; but he makes the error (at time) of 'bracketing' Blake with Shelley, as if they were both the same kind of thinker and writer. But; although both Blake and Shelley were extremely critical of Established Christianity - their fundamental motivations were opposite.

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When considering radical ('romantic') critique of The Establishment in general, and the Christian Church/ Priests in particular, it is vital to distinguish by motivation.

In particular whether - like Blake  - the author is critical of The Establishment because its Christianity is too feeble, restricted, impersonal, insufficient - or whether - like Shelley or Byron - the Establishment criticism is because Christianity is too oppressive, too restrictive of liberty and license.

Blake wanted Christianity to be a total perspective and medium of the whole of life - he wanted Christ and spirituality to dominate the inner life of everyman; however, Shelley and Byron wanted to be rid of Christian restrictions, to clear space for them to do what they personally very much wanted to do - which was often sexual: sex with people forbidden by Christianity.

It would be foolish to neglect the revolutionary sexual impulse behind radicalism - sex may even be the primary albeit covert motivation for radicalism, for which politics was only an excuse.

Certainly that would seem plausible from here-and-now; when mainstream-Left political 'radicalism' (and anti-Christian propaganda and coercion) is almost-wholly focused on the sexual revolution. And almost all of the anti-Christian radicals listed by Geoffrey Ashe lived-by and advocated one (or many) aspects of the sexual revolution.

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My attitude to the post 1780-ish romantic-radicalism is that something indeed needed to be done; but the proper question is what?

Radicals were objectively-wrong to suggest that poverty was the main problem and economics ought to be the focus of reform.

This was an error; based on the fact that after the industrial revolution the poor would survive in poverty rather than simply dying.

From about 1800, the poor raised large (poor) families such that several children reached adulthood; instead of (pre-1800) typically failing to raise any children at all - they would have died in infancy or childhood. In other words, from 1800-ish there was a lot more poverty - but only because there was less mortality; evidence for which is that the British population grew very rapidly, and mostly among the poor.

(An analogous situation can be seen in recent Africa - In the past the child mortality rates were colossal such that the African population was stable and low. But Western medicine nowadays enables most African children to survive, in extreme poverty. Mass African poverty is therefore a product of Westernisation/ the industrial revolution; much as mass 19th century British poverty was a product of economic and technological progress, and a rise in standards of living.)

*

So radicalism can be divided into the worldly-hedonic on the one side (e.g. Shelley and Byron) - the typical Leftist radicalism which seeks as the primary (and only) goal to enhance short-medium term happiness in mortal life, and/or alleviate suffering in mortal life. Mortal life is an end-in-itself; and indeed the only end.

The contrast is with the radical religious motivation (e.g. Blake and Coleridge) - which is to enhance motivation, energy, purpose, spiritual depth, morality, beauty and truth - by orientating mortal life to its ultimate and eternal goals. To a significant extent, this entails regarding mortal life as a means to eternal ends - certainly not as an end in-and-of itself.

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For example; the Leftist-atheist radical is typically against priests, and wants there to be no priests at all (or else feeble and ineffectual and optional priests: priesthood as a 'job') - because for them priests represent oppression and limitation. Whereas a Christian radical may be against priests on the grounds that every Man should be his own priest. So the contrast is between no priests, and everyone a priest.

With respect to authority; a Leftist radical want no authority and multiple truths, each having his own, and authority must not constrain this. Whereas a Christian radical sees it as a matter of each Man being his own best authority (because no external authority can be trusted with my soul - unless I personally choose so to trust), with every sincere Christian over time freely and spontaneously-converging on the single truth.

The Leftist radical sees the main problem as physical-material oppression with physical-material solutions; whereas (in stark contrast) the Christian radical sees the main problem as oppression by material-ism: that mental oppression that regards Man as essentially an animal... In other words exactly what Blake most railed-against.

*

Thus the Leftist and Christian romantic-radicals have opposite motivations, and Blake and Shelley ought not to be bracketed together!

From Merlin the prophet and his history, by Geoffrey Ashe, 2006.

(Ruthlessly edited from the Epilogue - pages 218-221.)

**

Merlin stands alone, and there is nobody like him.

The Britons had a paramount god who was comparable to Apollo - who was, among other things, a god of inspiration and prophecy. Britain was his 'precinct' or temenos, and he was Britain's tutelary deity.

This god has a special association with Moridenum (Carmarthen, Wales); and thus acquired the sobriquet Myrddin, which applied both to himself and to those inspired by him. Ambrosius and Lailoken were Myrddin-men, or simply Myrddins.

Geoffrey of Monmouth picked up the sobriquet and made the change from Myrddin to Merlin.

There were thus several Merlins, perhaps many. But if we want a Merlin par excellence, the original of the main legend, the place to look is Dina Emrys. Here the Merlin who speaks the prophecies is localised at a place which is known to have been occupied at the right time by someone who could be identical with him. Here story joins hands with archaeology.

As for Merlin's final fate, preference is a matter of taste... Legend traces him in several directions, to several eventual ends, after his triumphant years as royal adviser and magician. He dies at Marlborough and is buried under an inordinately big mound. Or he passes into suspended animation in Cornwall or Brittany.

Or, Merlin is alive and well, and living on Bardsey Island. His dwelling is an invisible house of glass. Some say he is asleep, but he may not be. If awake and active, he is not alone: he has nine companions.

Merlin is the guardian of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain - things of power that embody Britain's ancestral magic. Among them are the Chessboard of Gweddolau, the Chariot of Morgan the Wealthy, the sword of Rhydderch the Generous, a cloak of invisibility that once belonged to Arthur, the red coat of Padern, horns of plenty and talismanic objects that test valour and virtue.

No one knows what the Treasures look like, and they may have the same shape-shifting qualities as their custodian.

Finally, Merlin also has the true throne of Britain, and will enthrone Arthur when the king returns...

Who else, indeed, would have that right?

This novel was given me by John Fitzgerald; and I took it with a feeling of curiosity as to why he had specifically wanted me to read it; but the reasons are clear enough since the theme includes a sort-of Albion awakening movement, and the venue is Glastonbury in Somerset not far from where I was living at the time.

Geoffrey Ashe, the author, was then very well known for having excavated Cadbury Castle hill fort and claiming it was the site of 'Camelot' - i.e. the presumed historic King Arthur's headquarters. I have read a couple of his books on Arthurian themes - this is his only novel, although it is really a set of essays and set-pieces linked by a loose plot with his fictional self at the centre, surrounded by some 'representaive' albeit sketchy characters (indeed, the author states this in the introduction in describing the book's history).

My interest in this book was focused on the insights it gave into why the 'romantic revival' of the late 1960s and early 70s (the theme of this book) went wrong, and failed to achieve anything significantly valuable in spiritual or religious terms.

Ashe was clearly a very intelligent and well-informed man - and the 'diagnosis' of the spiritual ills of modernity seems spot-on. But he also shows why the Glastonbury-type of spiritual movement (eventually becoming 'New Age') proved incapable of providing an effectual answer to the problems of modernity.

The novel is set in a Glastonbury based spiritual community called Allhallows - and the experiences of Geoffrey in writing a piece of investigative journalism about the place, and what they are doing. The impressive and insightful 'guru' leader is called Martin, who turns-out to be using an experimental drug that provides apparently genuine spiritual insights and visions.

Martin offers courses of lectures, and experiences, designed to pass on his wisdom - and at Allhallows he is surrounded by an assortment of the kind of people that I would expect to find in any such venture.

Although my attention was mostly engaged throughout, I nonetheless found it difficult to read this book; because I disliked the people and the milieu. It was unpleasant to spend time in their company! I have come across so many of these types in life and print; and find that (usually sooner rather than later) they drag me down with their sordid pretentiousness.

Such characters have over the forty years since this book become very dominant in the modern Glastonbury, and by now made the town a place of quite strongly negative spiritual atmospheres and energies:

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=glastonbury

The reasons why the Hippie/ New Age romantic revolution so utterly failed to reverse our civilisational decline, and instead worsened it, can be seen in this novel.

They can be boiled-down to three errors:

1. Anti-Christianity

The general spiritual attitude of "Anything But Christianity" was bound to sabotage all efforts. When the central claims of Christianity are actually true, to build a spirituality around the denial of its truth and a gut level hostility, inevitably created a damaging spiritual distortion.

For example, William Blake is oft quoted and mentioned in this book, and was a major influence; the fact that Blake was intensely and pervasively Christian was set-aside.

2. Dreams and Drugs

The spiritual diagnosis of alienation was addressed by the attempt to heal it by moving back to the immersive, passive spirituality of childhood and hunter-gatherers.

This led on to a focus on dreams, trances, and intoxication: there was, at this time, a genuine (albeit bizarre) hope that psychedelic and hallucinatory drugs might actually cure the modern malaise, might actually heal the state of alienation.

This error was based on a misunderstanding of what was required; of what the romantic movement was supposed ('destined') to achieve. The error was to suppose that Romaticism was a reaction to modernity, intended to provoke a retreat and a return (hence the primitive, ethnic, regressive interests); when Romaticism was in fact pointing the way forward and through the materialism, reductionism, scientism of modernity and out of the other side to something new and different from anything that had existed so far. 

What actually happened was The Drug Culture; which included a few people who claimed that they had been spiritually enhanced by drugs. But objective evidence seemed to point in the opposite direction: that drugs had simply lowered their standards, muddled their powers of discernment, and pointed them in almost exactly the wrong direction towards mentally-clouded passivity rather than alert, clear purposiveness.

3. Sex - and the sexual revolution.

This novel depicts how the lack of a real Christian frame, exacerbated by the consciousness-reducing focus on dreams trances, rituals and drugs, subverted the spiritual aspirations and impulses of such people and communities as depicted in Allhallows.

The fact is that the Anti-Christian eclectic perennial spirituality of the Hippy/ New Age type - which nowadays is epitomised by various Wiccan, Druid, Shamanistic and Neo-pagan groups - is weak and feeble by comparison with real religion. 

Furthermore such spirituality has a fatal blind-spot relating to sex; indeed, the specific and visceral rejection of Christianity among such folk is often primarily, albeit covertly, a rejection of Christian guidance on sexuality. Thus Christianity is rejected for sexual freedom; spirituality becomes weak and feeble; and sexuality (more sex, with more people, in more kinds of different ways - always pushing at boundaries...) expands to fill the gap.

When the spirituality is weak, and the power of sexuality is simultaneously unacknowledged and untrammelled; then sex takes over - in many ways and at many levels. This is depicted clearly in the description of Allhallows - the positive spiritual aspirations are feeble, incoherent, malleable; the sexual undercurrents and experiments are strong and dominant; the drive for power and status and pleasure is ascendant; and the outcome is a rapid descent into corruption, darkness, dishonesty, mutual exploitation, hatred and passive misery.


For me, The Finger and the Moon provides a chilling exemplar of the way that sex and drugs and 'Anything But Christianity' doomed the spiritual revolution, and twisted it around to do harm rather than good.

A kind of fascination kept me reading it, but I found it mainly unpleasant. I read it in a strange sequence because although I found much of the analysis (the 'diagnosis') to be very useful, I could not get-through the set-piece descriptions of drug trips and visions, nor a play about the Holy Grail - so I read nearly halfway, then skipped to the end, then went back and skimmed the middle section selectively.

I also found myself unsympathetic to the basic stance of the book, confirmed in the Introduction; which was that the spiritual efforts described in Allhallows were broadly what might be described as 'a good and admirable thing' which had led-onto other good things; and that therefore these people were spiritual pioneers worthy of respect and gratitude.

By contrast I found them self-deceiving, self-indulgent and spiritual cowards - who knew enough to know what they ought to do, but chose instead an easy path of short-term gratification, self-indulgence, hedonism.

The original inhabitants of the island of Albion - or Merlin's Enclosure, as it was first called, Merlin being the presiding deity - were a race of Giants. Indeed, the name of Albion comes from their king.

When the island was first settled by normal-sized Men (Brutus the Trojan and his followers - great grandson of Aeneas) - it was necessary to defeat resident Giant population. Gogmagog was the most famous of these - apparently a small and weak example of the race. However, a remnant of Giants continued as an occasional menace for a very long time afterwards.

Thus Geoffrey of Monmouth - Albion's primary mythographer.  


Giants crop-up in many historical, religious, legendary and mythical sources, from all over the world; so there is no good reason to doubt their reality - except that we don't seem to have any nowadays. Much the same applies to the races of elves/ fairies and to dwarves - there is ample evidence for their existence in earlier time; far more evidence than for most supposed facts of history.

But of course, that does not mean that Modern Man would be able to perceive Giants, fairies or dwarfs, even if they were present - since we are self-blinded to much of the primary reality of this world; and furthermore treat as dogmatically-real many things which are imperceptible and undetectable (except by long chains of insecure and labile inferences).


Giants seem to be a member of the human genus - and perhaps even the same species, since there are many accounts of breeding between us and them - with fertile offspring. Presumably therefore, in some places (perhaps especially some parts of Britain?) some modern Men therefore have gigantic ancestry...

There is no reason why all Giants, everywhere and at all times, should be identical; but it seems that at least some were intelligent as well as strong. The great feats of building attributed to them could not have been accomplished solely by muscle-power.

The idea that giants were stupid seems like a modern slander, since they had their own long-lasting civilisations all over the place - but I suspect that were were easily tricked, and outwitted, by the normal-sized Men who replaced them. Perhaps childlike, naive and instinctive rather than idiotic.

Or perhaps some Giants were magical, and used that rather than 'technology' to perform their feats - indeed, since early man was certainly able to do magic, it seems likely that Giants were too.

How gigantic were Giants? My guess is about 12-18 feet, full-sized and full-grown - big enough to be qualitatively different from us; but not so big as to be just-plain-silly...

Giants don't, for me, have the fascination of fairies, nor the common sense imaginability of dwarves; yet perhaps they ought-to. It just needs a great storyteller or two, to help us picture and empathise-with them.


The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset - another impressively 'long' man! - albeit, he gained some extra 'length' a century or two ago when his umbilicus was accidentally incorporated into his phallus by over-enthusiastic turf-cutters...


(Note: Geoffrey of Monmouth had access to a now-lost book of the deep and mythic history of Albion - a book which, I imagine, would have provided almost exactly what JRR Tolkien felt was missing from his country's culture - 'a mythology for England'. Our modern Geoffrey - Geoffrey Ashe, the Greatest Living Englishman - made a really excellent job of filling this gap with his Mythology of the British Isles of 1990. Ashe uses Monmouth's book as a skeleton, fleshed out with all other available and relevant sources to provide a clear and concise mythical account at the start of each chapter, followed by scholarly commentary and footnotes. If someone extracted the mythical sections, and arranged them sequentially; when imaginatively-illustrated and published as a unity, this could make a wonderful Child's History of Albion.)

A discovery of 2016 was the work of Geoffrey Ashe from the early 1970s - with books discovered by me, gifted to me by John Fitzgerald, and lent me by my brother - this last being the really excellent Camelot and the Vision of Albion, from 1971.

I would strongly recommend Camelot and the Vision of Albion to all who are hopeful of an awakening of Albion  - by rights, this book should be regarded as a classic of British history of ideas.

Camelot and the Vision of Albion has many facets - a close analysis of the person of Arthur and his relationship to the successful (for several decades) resistance to Anglo-Saxon invasion - which changed the future of Albion. The implications of the South Cadbury excavations are described in detail.And the book also ranges extremely widely over national 'myths' of revival - including nationalism, communism, Gandhi and many other examples. There is a fascination section concerning the nature of 'Titans' throughout history, and how the Arthur myth absorbed many of these aspects.

Perhaps the most impressive part (for me) was the discussion of William Blake's prophetic books - Ashe provides a 'key' to these extraordinarily difficult yet profoundly mystical works by Albion's only poet-prophet; and in doing so Ashe makes an extremely important contribution to this vital aspect of understanding.

Here is a taste, which I have edited from pages 105-6:

Let us try to define the archetype which is constant throughout, the active ingredient in the spell. 

The stories vary, but they always tend the same way. There were gods before the gods, kings before the kings, Titans before Olympians, Britons before English; and their reign was a golden age. 

There was a profounder Christianity in the wave-encircled realm of the Celtic West, before the church as we know it. 

Then the glory faded. Injustice and tyranny flowed in. Zeus usurped the throne of heaven. Prometheus was bound. The sea encroached. The Round Table broke up. Arthur succumbed to Mordred. The Saxons conquered Britain. The Grail was lost and the land became waste. 

But the depths are formative. The place of apparent death is the place of life. The glory which was once real has never actually died. 

Somewhere, somehow, Cronus or Arthur is still living, enchanted or asleep through the ages. The Grail is still in safe keeping. The visionary kingdom is still invisibly 'there', latent...

This is the British myth, of which at least a large part can be shown to descend from remote antiquity. I know of no fully developed parallel myth anywhere else. 

As a poetic statement the British myth is indeed unique. But it is a statement of a broader psychological fact. It reflects a human phenomenon, a mode of thought and behaviour, that can be traced through the world in a profusion of forms: one of the strongest constituents in history, and one of the least recognised.

I'm down with a bit of flu at the moment with a brain like a rice pudding that's been left out in the rain overnight. Hence I'm not really up to writing anything requiring much effort. But it occurred to me that it might be an interesting idea to compile a list of books relevant to the theme of Albion Awakening. I hoped that if I started it off then others might come in with their own suggestions. In that way we could have a broad spectrum of works. I'll make a start with the obvious ones.

My two first choices should be uncontroversial. They are C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In the latter's case the books, of course, are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wanted to create a British mythology (English really, I believe) and he did so more successfully than anyone could have dreamed possible. His stories have sunk into the national, and, more than that, anglophone, consciousness. These books have so much spiritual authority that one cannot doubt they were inspired from above. I mean, one really cannot doubt that. I'm not speaking loosely. Tolkien had a spiritual mission and he fulfilled it magnificently. Just consider the arid intellectual field in the mid 20th century at the time he was working. He was going completely against prevailing cultural winds. But he ploughed his own course, sustained by his religion, the power of his imagination and, very probably, his dogged stubbornness.

With Lewis, the choice of books is more difficult because he wrote so many. But I think I would start off with the so called Space Trilogy, especially the last one, That Hideous Strength, which really is about Albion awakening. A cultural and political situation not a million miles away from the one we have now is squeezing the spiritual life out of the country. It is orchestrated by demons who Lewis wittily calls 'macrobes', aided by their human dupes and accomplices, most of whom are not aware of the existence of the macrobes but who can be used because of their own character defects which should be a lesson to us all. A small band of people faithful to spiritual truth hold out against them, and these, in turn, are supported by angelic powers, though only from afar which I think reflects reality. Human beings can be helped and inspired but we must work out our own destiny. Interestingly, one of this band is an atheist. Another is a bear but that's probably not an essential detail. The point perhaps is, though, that in times of great spiritual darkness if even just a few souls stay true to God, or simply, as in the atheist's case, common decency, that can be enough to eventually turn the tide.

Then there are the Narnia stories and any of Lewis's many books of Christian apologetics, Mere Christianity to begin with.

Geoffrey Ashe is an author we have spoken of before on this blog. His Camelot and the Vision of Albion was a ground breaking work that delved into the British myth as expressed principally through the legend of King Arthur. See here for some more on that.

Dion Fortune was an English occultist who wrote a book called Glastonbury: Avalon of the Heart which is well worth reading in this context. There's a post about it here.

Finally on my brief preliminary list, there's a book called The Light in Britain by Grace and Ivan Cooke. This may not be to all tastes since it purports to be a clairvoyant investigation into the prehistoric past of some on the ancient sites of the British Isles, notably Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill.  One doesn't have to give it uncritical assent but it certainly stimulates the imagination and that, surely, is what any book on the Albion Awakening theme should do.

So there we are. I've started the list off, admittedly with some easy choices. Please feel free to add some more of your own.

More and more of our patients complain of a sense of meaninglessness in life. More and more often, the reason is the outlook of science. Or what has come through to them as the outlook of science. 

Sometimes it is called reductionism. I'd prefer to apply a phrase of Jung's and say nothing-butness. 

Thinking people tend to feel that science has cut Man down. It's explained away everything that matters in terms of smaller, meaner things that don't matter. 

Religion is nothing but wish-fulfilling fairy-tales. Love is nothing but body chemistry. Art is nothing but a surge of conditioned reflexes. The highest flights of the poet of philosopher are traced back to childhood trivia and rationalised compensations.

Science leaves man shut-in, futile, doomed. In Desmond Morris's words, a naked ape... 

From The Finger and the Moon by Geoffrey Ashe - a novel published in 1973.


The above passage confirms what those who lived through it remember - that the diagnosis of the modern condition of nihilism was well understood 45 years ago - but its cause was wrongly attributed; and, of course, the main and culturally-dominant ideas for how to solve the problems (free-love, rock music, supposedly-egalitarian communes, psychedelic drugs, eclectic Easter-type religiosity...) were almost-completely ineffective, or counter-productive.

Hardly anybody nowadays feels the above sense of oppression by 'science' - science has waned in the public consciousness, even as the number of people employed as 'scientists' has increased more than tenfold... partly because the number of people employed as 'scientists' has increased more than tenfold.


With the death of Stephen Hawking, famous more for being crippled and anti-religion than for the scope of his scientific achievements, and the non-personing of Jim Watson in 2007; most people could not name a single living scientist - nor could a single living scientist's name be recognised by most people.

The reason is obvious enough - real science has disappeared from the official and professional institutions and been replaced by, absorbed by, The Bureaucracy. The biggest and most heavily-funded 'scientific' projects are actually engineering (the human genome project, hadron collider, renewed interest in space travel...) and/ or a pack of lies propagated for political reasons (anthropogenic global warming, the best-selling 'new' medical drugs...).

The 'scientists' are just careerist bureaucrats, doing what they are told by their 'line managers', who are themselves keyed-into the rest of The Bureaucracy - just like everyone else.

The sixties counter-culture has been completely absorbed by the mass media amplified by personal computers and ubiquitous 'smart'-phones - and political 'dissent' and 'radicalism' is mainstream, taught in schools and by state propaganda; subsidised and promoted by The Bureaucracy.


Now science is bureaucracy; consequently The Bureaucracy is science. We believe and obey because Truth is now consensus, and consensus is manufactured by managed-committees, by procedures and by votes - and the bureaucratic consensus is validated by internal bureaucratic mechanisms that allocate funding, publication, promotions, publicity, awards and prizes.     


Meanwhile, people have gone beyond 'complaining' about a sense of meaninglessness in life - why complain about something immovable and unavoidable and all-pervading? They just live-it; and distract themselves from awareness of it (which has never been easier). Science, for all its nothing-butness, was also exciting and hopeful.

Now excitement and hope is restricted to the manipulative totalitarianism of the mass media; and the ever-expanding bureaucracy closes-off all genuine autonomy in a ever-smaller-meshed network of total surveillance and micro-control.


Sixties-seventies radicalism was always mostly a set-up and a dead-end; and things have moved-on. We can seem much more clearly now, than they did then - so clearly that we don't need to be told. Everyman can see for himself - if he wants-to. Everyman can know what needs to be done - if he wants to...

It is the wanting that is lacking - and also the courage to want.