Off Topic: What is "Modernia" and why is it Bad?

Bentham's World: How we all became Utilitarians

I frequently use the word “Modernia” in my various online ramblings, a term I coined to summarise whatever this thing is that we all live in now - a kind of global nation of shared misery. Someone the other day asked me to define it, and why I capitalise it. What follows is the answer to that question. It’s a nation; but not one I ever want to belong to.

Zdzisław Beksiński, The Land of Ghosts, part IV. The genre of painting called “dystopian surrealism” and the paintings of the late 20th century Polish painter Beksiński, are useful visual illustrations with an apposite name. The paintings I’ve included here are the less frightening and disturbing ones.

In the last decade, it seems to be coming home to more people in the western world that there is something deeply wrong with our post-war, globalist civilisation, that it seems not only to be unliveable for greater numbers of us, but increasingly seems untenable itself; about to collapse under it’s own unsustainable weight. We feel that whatever it is we are living in (we haven’t been able to call it “Christendom” for centuries) is finally dragging itself to an ignominious end. And while we might mourn for the former greatness of the Constantinian Establishment, we are more worried about what’s coming next.

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In today’s weekend extra post, I go off-topic to talk about something I think we’re all feeling: the growing sense that whatever this is we’re living in, it’s not just broken, but built to fail. I call it Modernia. We’ll make an attempt to identify and diagnose it.

Next weekend, in a post for paid subscribers, we’ll take up the question: if Modernia really is collapsing, what do we do?

This post is free to read, but if you’d like to continue the discussion and help me keep writing pieces like this, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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To answer that question, we should look back at what the new thing is that has already come to replace Christendom and that in the last decade - particularly the last five years - has openly revealed itself. What is the difference between “modernity” and what I’ve often called Modernia? Modernity is the term we use simply to name the “modern” or contemporary iteration of the thing that came before - our old civilisation but now with cars, antibiotics and cell phones.

Modernia is a proper noun, a name, for a completely new thing; a civilisation that has no relationship with what came before and that has been deliberately engineered to oppose and erase what came before it. Modernia is not the natural successor to Christendom, its child, but a replacement, like a cuckoo in the robin’s nest or a fairy changeling: a manufactured break from the past, designed not to evolve from it but to steal its treasures and erase it from all memory. For the moment, it’s still possible to live in the countries we live in and more or less opt out of Modernia. But that time is ending, and this raises important questions - what do we do then?

Unlike modernity, Modernia is an artificial construct that lacks the internal coherence necessary for survival. If it were a living thing, it would be a genetic anomaly, a creature whose very structure is opposed to itself, like a cloned sheep that can’t live a normal lifespan. Civilisations, like organisms, rely on deep-rooted continuity, cultural memory, and a consequent moral and hermeneutic framework that binds the inhabitants together across generations. Modernia, however, is engineered to reject its own past, severing itself from the traditions and spiritual truths that sustained its predecessors. It is a system running on borrowed time, held together only by inertia, normalcy bias and technological scaffolding.

Modernia is a new civilisation, and not a very nice one

Zdzislaw Beksinski. Untitled. 1979

It is not simply that modern civilisation has changed; it is that an entirely new civilisation has taken its place, that has no room for what came before.

Modernia does not see itself as indebted to what came before, nor does it seek to preserve, refine, or even reform the foundations laid by previous generations. It exists in opposition to them, treating the past as a burden to be discarded rather than a foundation upon which to build. This is why those who wish to retain any connection to tradition, heritage, or transcendence increasingly find themselves unwelcome in the world that is taking shape.

I was a child of the social revolutions of the 1960s and ‘70s, and I had been aware from the earliest age that something radically bad was happening. The world I knew at that stage of life was made up of my own home with my parents and my paternal grandparents’ home about two hours drive north on Vancouver Island. They had been married in 1925 and had moved to the furthest reaches of the Empire to become colonial pioneers in the deep forested wilds of western Canada. My mother and father, though both born in Britain, met in Victoria, just as the Social Revolution was getting going.

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I was born in 1966, and like all children of that time and milieu, was treated, in effect, as a test subject in the great social experiment of that time. And it didn’t go well. My earliest memories of my parents marriage was mostly of them screaming at each other, and me hiding in the closet under the stairs. It didn’t take long to connect the dots that it was my grandparents’ world, their peaceful and beautiful, orderly home and their social sphere of English and Scottish ex-pats of that generation, that was the stable, happy and safe world, the one to join and emulate.

That world of my grandparents, born in 1897 and 1903, had rules, structure, and an implicit moral order, albeit one that came to them third hand and was already nearly detached from its origins. But their lives were still ordered by the ancient Christian cultural codes of moral duty, restraint, industry and a firm sense of right and wrong, decent and honourable.

In contrast, my parents’ generation had embraced something new: a world that violently rejected that structure and past, that saw tradition as an obstacle to be torn down, and that believed freedom meant liberation from all moral constraints.

VaticanTwoism - the new religion for the new world

Zdzislaw Beksinski. Untitled. 1983

And of course, it was also happening at that time in the Catholic Church - which my mother and I joined on the same day in 1972. The Catholic Church - or at least its hierarchy - decided, very abruptly in 1965 not to continue to be the thing it had been before. So huge a break was it, so radical a change, that a whole movement, that we know now as “Traditionalism,” was instantly born to oppose it. As an adult, I and many people like me have identified ourselves as “Traditionalist” or traditional Catholics, and align ourselves with this movement.

But sometimes we “trads” tend to compartmentalise the Church from the world surrounding it. I think we perhaps don’t take the evidence for what it clearly is: the change was not a “reform” but the creation of a new religion that has moved in and slowly replaced the old. And it seems that the cuckoo chick has now come to its maturity. The replacement of Catholicism within the institution was absolutely required for the fulness of the project to be completed. If the old civilisation was founded on the Church of Christ, it was going to be necessary to replace the heart of Christendom with something that would serve Modernia in the same way.

The revolution in the Catholic Church in the 1960s was not an accident or an internal theological dispute; it was a deliberate, fundamental restructuring designed to bring it into alignment with - and to be subordinate to - the new civilisational order. To become a servant of Modernity, Catholicism must be hollowed out, leaving an external structure that retained the name and (mostly) the aesthetics of Catholicism while inverting its purpose.

So, what is the new thing? - not so new as the hippies thought

Zdzislaw Beksinski. It’s untitled, but if I were giving it a name, I’d call it “Modernian Man.”

What’s ironic, perhaps from my parents’ generation’s perspective is that the “new world” they thought they were bringing into being, was not new at all. It was in fact the final, unrestricted expression of the very same ideologies that the War had ostensibly been fought to oppose.

They thought they were overthrowing the rigid hierarchies, nationalism, and social controls of the past, but in reality, they were simply unleashing those same forces in a new, more virulent, disguised form, that was no longer tempered by duty, faith, or tradition. The ideologies that had been framed in the propaganda as the “enemies of freedom and democracy” during the war years - materialism, statism, collectivism, and a belief in the supremacy of human and social engineering - were not eradicated by the war. And the moment the guns stopped, they were repackaged, dressed up in new rhetoric, and made palatable to a generation that thought it was breaking free.

If we look back now, we see that the true social revolutionaries of the 1960s were not “the young people” dropping acid and dancing in the mud at Woodstock.

The real revolutionaries

Zdzislaw Beksinski. Untitled. Date unknown. I’d title it “Legion” but I’m Catholic that way. It reminds me of earlier iterations of AI videos, from about a year ago.

In fact, those social revolutionaries treated the then-younger generation, their children, as the first test subjects for a global, social, political, metaphysical experiment. They asked, What happens when we take the de-Christianized young people of today and make them think like pure Utilitarians? Can we frame those ideas in such a way that they will never be capable of naming, identifying or throwing it off? What if we strip away the last vestiges of inherited morality, and raise an entire generation to believe that nothing matters except outcomes and pleasure? Can we take the materialist metaphysics of the 18th century, and use it to re-create the world?

The thinkers and implementers behind the 1960s asked, in effect, What if we implement the Enlightenment philosophers’ theoretical ideas, exactly as they were written; not as a set of vague theories and aspirations, but as a concrete, governing philosophy, the basis of public policy?

The French Revolution was the first grand attempt to put the Enlightenment’s theories into practice, to strip society down to its rational foundations and rebuild it according to the dictates of “pure reason”. It ended in blood, chaos, and tyranny. The first attempt to forcibly create a world of pure “liberty, equality, and fraternity” ultimately led to mass executions and the rise of new, even more ruthless forms of despotism.

The experiment was a failure, but the Enlightenment’s ideological project did not die with it. Utilitarianism remained the most popular ideology and metaphysics of the ruling classes across the developed world in the opening of the 20th century. The German experiment was only the latest round.¹

Two centuries later, a new set of revolutionaries emerged, determined to succeed where the Jacobins had failed. They would not rely on brute force and sudden upheaval but on a slow, methodical reshaping of society - the “long march through the institutions”. The radical intellectuals of the mid-20th century, armed with the ideas of Foucault, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt School, sought to complete the unfinished work of their Enlightenment and early 20th century predecessors.

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Who were Modernia’s architects? A very short and incomplete list of names

Philosophers & theorists

• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) – The leading figure of existentialism, Sartre emphasized radical individual freedom and the rejection of traditional moral structures. His ideas helped shape the countercultural rebellion against inherited norms.

• Michel Foucault (1926–1984) – Argued that all structures of power, including institutions like the Church, family, and state, were systems of oppression that needed to be deconstructed. His theories on power and knowledge profoundly influenced postmodernism.

• Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) – A member of the Frankfurt School and key architect of the New Left, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man provided the ideological basis for the 1960s rejection of authority, repression, and traditional morality.

• Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) – Though he died before the 1960s, his theory of “cultural hegemony” became a roadmap for leftist intellectuals who sought to overthrow Western culture by infiltrating institutions rather than through direct revolution.

Activists & agitators

• Saul Alinsky (1909–1972) – His Rules for Radicals became the playbook for political and cultural subversion. A Marxist, he believed that any means were justified in achieving revolutionary change.

• Betty Friedan (1921–2006) – One of the leading voices of second-wave feminism, her book The Feminine Mystique encouraged women to reject traditional family roles.

• Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) – The psychoanalyst whose theories on sexual liberation heavily influenced the counterculture. He argued that traditional morality was a form of oppression and that sexual liberation was the key to political freedom.

The culture

• Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) – Though known for Brave New World, his later works explored psychedelic mysticism and the dissolution of traditional religious beliefs, which played into the rise of the 1960s drug culture.

• Timothy Leary (1920–1996) – A Harvard psychologist who became a guru of the psychedelic movement, promoting LSD as a means of expanding consciousness and breaking free from societal constraints.

• Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) – A poet and countercultural icon, Ginsberg’s work glorified drug use, sexual liberation, and Eastern mysticism, helping to dissolve the last remnants of traditional Western cultural cohesion.

The psycho-social frauds

• Carl Rogers (1902–1987) – The father of humanistic psychology, his client-centred therapy rejected moral or religious frameworks, promoting the idea that the individual is the ultimate authority on his own life. This dovetailed perfectly with the broader cultural revolution of the 1960s, which cast off external authority in favour of radical individualism².

• Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) – Best known for his Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow popularized the idea of self-actualization, the notion that the highest goal in life is personal fulfilment. His theories provided a psychological justification for hedonism and moral relativism, reinforcing the idea that traditional moral and social constraints were obstacles to personal growth rather than safeguards for human flourishing.

• Erich Fromm (1900–1980) – A Frankfurt School intellectual and neo-Marxist, Fromm reinterpreted psychology through the lens of social critique, arguing that traditional structures, especially religious authority, were forms of oppression. His book The Art of Loving (1956) was widely read and helped popularize the idea that love should be entirely detached from duty, sacrifice, or permanence, a theme that fed directly into the sexual revolution.

• Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) – Perhaps the most radical of them all, Reich fused psychology with outright sexual revolution. He believed that neuroses and social oppression stemmed from repressed sexual energy and that true liberation could only be achieved through the destruction of traditional sexual morality. His ideas, while extreme, profoundly influenced later sexual theorists, including figures like Alfred Kinsey.

• Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) – A Holocaust survivor and child psychologist, Bettelheim was influential in promoting the idea that traditional family structures, particularly strict or religious parents, were psychologically harmful. His writings helped pave the way for the rejection of discipline and structure in parenting, leading to the permissive (indifferent) child-rearing ideas that dominated the late 20th century.

• Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) – Kinsey’s pseudo-scientific “studies” on human sexuality helped to normalize and justify radical changes in social attitudes toward sex. His work, which was riddled with scientific fraud and ethical violations, was used to support the idea that traditional morality was unnatural and oppressive.

The religious subversives

• Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) – A former Jesuit, Loisy was one of the most infamous Catholic modernists. He openly rejected the idea of divine revelation as traditionally understood, treating Scripture as purely historical rather than inspired. His famous quip, “Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that came instead,” perfectly encapsulated his scepticism toward the divine institution of the Church. His theories contributed directly to the erosion of doctrinal authority and set the stage for later theological relativism.

• George Tyrrell (1861–1909) – An Irish Jesuit turned modernist, Tyrrell sought to reinterpret Catholic doctrine through the lens of contemporary thought, dismissing dogma as rigid and outmoded. He was eventually excommunicated but not before spreading ideas that would later be echoed in the aggiornamento “spirit of Vatican II”.

• Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) – Though he came later, Teilhard is a direct heir of Loisy and Tyrrell’s theological modernism. A Jesuit paleontologist and pseudo-mystic, his Omega Point theology presented a version of evolution that attempted to merge Catholic thought with a vague, pantheistic progressivism. His influence was instrumental in shifting the focus of many in the Church away from salvation and toward a vision of “cosmic evolution,” which became deeply embedded in post-Vatican II theological trends.

• Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) – Though often presented as a more orthodox reformer, de Lubac’s ressourcement movement sought to reinterpret Catholic theology in ways that downplayed scholasticism and hierarchy in favour of a more “experiential” approach. His ideas played a major role in shaping the theological revolution of the 1960s.

The artistic transgressives

• Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) – Perhaps the most emblematic figure of artistic subversion, Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917) - a urinal presented as art - wasn’t just a joke; it was a declaration that art no longer needed to be beautiful, meaningful, or even skilful³. His work marked the beginning of art as an act of negation rather than creation, setting the stage for the conceptual and anti-art movements that followed. (We did a complete run-down of Duchamp’s revolution here.)

• Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) – Picasso’s aggressive deconstruction of form in Cubism and later works was more than just stylistic innovation; it was part of the broader project to break with classical artistic traditions and reject objective representation. His influence made fragmentation, distortion, and disorder the new artistic norm.

• Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) – Abstract Expressionism, exemplified by Pollock’s chaotic splatter paintings, was framed as a radical break from tradition, elevating pure instinct and randomness over discipline, order, or technique.

• John Cage (1912–1992) – In music, Cage’s 4’33” (a composition consisting entirely of silence) was the sonic equivalent of Duchamp’s urinal: an open mockery of the idea that art should require effort, skill, or even content.

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Jeremy Bentham’s Dreamworld

Zdzislaw Beksinski. Untitled. Date unknown.

The Modernia we’re now watching be born, is the final fulfilment of Jeremy Bentham’s psychotic dreams. In it, human beings are no longer seen as souls with inherent worth, destined for eternal beatitude, but as material, fungible economic units to be optimized, conditioned, and discarded. Bentham’s vision of total surveillance, social engineering, and the abolition of natural law has been realized - not through overt tyranny, but through bureaucracy, technology, and the slow erosion of moral absolutes and their replacement with “post-truth” distracto-tainment.

The world we live in today is, at its core, a utilitarian world. The logic of Modernia, the ideological construct that supplanted Christendom, is fundamentally the logic of efficiency, utility, eugenics and social engineering - what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the Machine”.

As a child, I had watched all this while it was happening, but didn’t have a name for it until I read Henry Friedlander’s book Origins of Nazi Genocide - it was Utilitarianism that brought us the vast hellscape of 20th century deathcamps. This book demonstrates how the eugenics-driven policies of the early 20th century were rooted in cold utilitarian calculations of mechanistic efficiency and societal “fitness” - in other words, usefulness.

While we tell ourselves that we rejected this way of thinking in 1945, in reality, we only covered it in sugar. Instead of the crude rhetoric of “racial hygiene”, we have the scientific management of human reproduction, down to “death spiral” levels in much of the world. Instead of Aktion T4, we have “death with dignity” and “reproductive freedom” (especially for “minorities”). The moral justification has changed, but the underlying premise remains the same: human worth is conditional, determined by the individual’s utility and ultimately disposable when it is no longer “fit for purpose”.

So now we all have to live in Utopia

Zdzislaw Beksinski. Untitled. 1972

The thing they should make clear off the bat in all political philosophy classes is that utopia is always in reality, in practice, dystopian. Always. From Plato to Engels, it’s always just someone’s terrible Bright Idea - usually someone psychopathic.

The new revolutionaries proposed to tear down the old structures of faith, tradition, and inherited morality, but to replace them with a meticulously engineered society where everything - law, culture, even human nature itself - would be redesigned according to the principles of utility and progress. This time, with mass communication, and then the internet, the revolution would be total and irreversible.

They built their new world, but we, the next generations, were the ones forced to live with its consequences. I was a direct witness to that confrontation: I watched their abolition of tradition but saw it not create freedom, but rather a void, into which flooded, as predicted by the madman Nietzsche, an unrestrained will to power.

1. It’s not often remembered that Eugenics - the murderous offspring of Utilitarianism - and the related ideas of “racial hygiene” as a foundation of government policy did not originate in 1930s Germany, and the first places it was implemented were in the United States. The list of historically crucial figures who were confirmed and determined Eugenicists would freeze your blood - they include Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Henry Ford. The fact that Eugenics is being rehabilitated in public policy and legislation around the world definitely should also.

2. Catholics, of course, know Rogers as the man whose experiments destroyed the orders of active religious sisters in the US.

3. We did a complete run-down of Duchamp’s revolution here.