Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on October 23, 2025 | 2 Comments
A brief note here on a topic that’s been in the news lately – namely, the news. Or, more specifically, the so-called ‘legacy media’ such as national newspapers and television. And, alongside that, declining literacy and book-reading, which is obviously of great personal concern to me as the author of a recently published book, as well as a watcher of historical change. Also, religion.
Let me explain.
Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1983) is a touchstone work on, well, nationalism, that religion of modern times. One of his arguments is that literate publics reading national newspapers, of the kind that emerged in the nineteenth century, helped to create a shared sense of purpose and joint understanding, forging a national community out of people who had no ‘real’ community with each other of the face-to-face sort. Later, national television stations served the same function. These, along with sacred sites of the political centre (like the tomb of the unknown soldier, the Capitol or the White House) help generate the nation as a collective entity. It’s not necessary for citizens to agree with everything they encounter in the media, or to like incumbent governments. But it probably is necessary for these media and symbols of rule to set the terms, to largely define the universe of community narrative for most people, if nation-states of the modern form are to endure.
If that’s so, then various recent events suggest the nation-state’s days may be numbered. If we take the case of the USA, the President’s lawsuit against the venerable New York Times doesn’t bode well. Presidents and newspapers of record need to be jointly defining the political universe, not locked in multi-billion-dollar battles. Keener students of US history than me might correct me if this is wrong, but as I understand it the last president or would-be president who sued a newspaper was Theodore Roosevelt’s case against Michigan’s The Iron Ore in 1913. Apparently he won, receiving six cents.
Meanwhile, I read somewhere on Substack (I read quite a bit of stuff on Substack) that the legacy media is commanding less and less of people’s attention compared to platforms like, er, Substack (see?) The context of the piece was the kerfuffle a few weeks ago about Jimmy Kimmel’s ABC show being pulled after his remarks about the Charlie Kirk murder (sorry, I can’t find the post to link to anymore). No big deal, the Substack author thought. Most people aren’t tuning in to legacy media anymore anyway. The author argued that Jimmy Kimmel would be better off running his own social media show, following in the footsteps of other online notables such as Chris Smaje Joe Rogan.
But the risk is that if citizens get most of what informs them about the wider world by picking and choosing their preferred content from the online bazaar, pretty soon they stop being citizens of a functional nation-state where the terms of the community narrative get publicly defined. Although Kimmel was reinstated after an outcry, it seemed to me that the ease of his initial ousting was symptomatic of this larger disintegration of nation-states, which is impelled by many current forces. Declining literacy is another such force. If nation-states need literate publics, the decline of literacy might help impel their eclipse and replacement.
I’ve long been a critic of modern nationalism and the nation-state, but there’s a case of being careful what one wishes for. One aspect of the modern, legacy-media inflected nation-state is the high bar it sets for citizen rights. Phrases like “that sort of thing just shouldn’t happen here/in this day and age” are possible in a modern nation-state. They become moot when the idea that the state or the modern system of states is the guardian of the nation’s interests crumbles. And that idea has done a lot of crumbling lately. New distributed media technologies like mobile phone cameras enable every bit of state brutality to be recorded and disseminated with the admonitory cry “the eyes of the world are watching!” But increasingly the eyes of the world don’t care. The eyes of the world watching, those things not happening here, only come into play when citizenship rights matter, and that’s precisely what’s now falling apart.
(Incidentally, there have long been de facto if not de jure gradations of citizenship rights in many countries – especially around racialised and other minorities, for whom the eyes of the world have never watched so attentively. I don’t mean to minimise this. But nationalist projects can long endure while stigmatising out-groups, provided there’s a large in-group. I’m not sure they can long endure without a secure in-group).
From my admittedly distant vantage point, I’ve been watching US politics unfold over the last few years, and the last few months in particular, and wondering whether the nation-state can survive what’s been happening (much the same is true in the UK and elsewhere, but generally not on such a fast forward setting). In my new book, Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I draw on the idea of stranger kingship to try to make sense of the present Trump presidency.
I read over that section quite a few times while it was still in draft, asking myself repeatedly if stranger kingship (a phenomenon more typical of premodern societies outside of Europe and its offshoots) really worked as a model for the contemporary USA, or if I was just being a smartarse who was trying too hard to be original and different. To which my considered answers are not entirely and yes probably, but nevertheless I left that section in because I do think it still captures something relevant.
I’ll write about stranger kingship in the US in more detail in another post. One thing that’s clear is that a society characterized by stranger kingship isn’t a nation-state. And that it requires the ordinary people to define themselves as a group in a certain opposition to the king.
Here we come to a fork in the road. I’ve been looking at social media responses to ICE raids and militarised federal incursions into US cities, which often enough divide into progressive horror of the ‘that sort of thing just shouldn’t happen here’ variety, and right-wing glee of the ‘that’s why I voted for Trump’ variety. If that sort of thing continues and Trump-style Republican government endures, then the usual roster of modernist political labels like right-wing populism, authoritarianism and/or fascism will probably do the job. But as the federal government’s inability to deliver big, beautiful outcomes for people locally becomes increasingly manifest, another possibility is that people start to build local politics in structural opposition to their stranger kings.
Presently, the major currents of thinking on both the mainstream political left and right seem fatefully enraptured with the centralized politics of the nation-state, believing that if the correct government is in place it will deliver what the people really want. If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.
A couple more points to wrap up this post. First, my new book was duly launched last week in Frome Town Hall, appropriately. I enjoyed it and the feedback was generally positive. I got an interesting question from a sceptically secular member of the audience about whether ‘ethics’, ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ always go together, as per one of the slides in my presentation. To which my answer, after a long and crooked road from my secular left-wing starting point, is a guarded ‘yes’. To quote Nick Mayhew-Smith “religion is what mediates the relationship between people and place”* – and I think this means collective, organised religion as part of an ongoing tradition, even if I’m not certain that any of the existing organised religions and their ongoing traditions are quite up to the task. Still, I find the fact that, unlike various other extinct creatures, they’re still there after the full force of the modernist onslaught against them to be mildly encouraging. More on that another time.
Second, a check-in with readers of these posts. I’ve got a lot of non-blog related work to get through at the moment, so my output here might be quite slow. I have in the pipeline posts about overshoot, housing and rent, Nate Hagens’s interesting analysis of what he calls the Walrus movement, and possibly an update on the manufactured food story discussed in my previous book. Then I was planning to write a short cycle of posts about Finding Lights in a Dark Age. I’m also feeling quite low energy at the moment and need to pace myself a bit. Anyway, I’m interested in any thoughts about topics of interest to those who generously devote time to reading what I have to say.
Nick Mayhew-Smith The Naked Hermit: A Journey to the Heart of Celtic Britain
* the quote above is from page 113
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A few random thoughts:
1) A focus on image and symbol rather than words as a means of communication is something I’ve been thinking about recently; I don’t think this is necessarily new (one need only look at 20th-century propaganda posters from a variety of sources to understand that symbolism is alive and well), but I do think the effect is magnified by the way improvements in technology have resulted in images being much, much easier to create, reproduce and spread than was necessarily the case even twenty or thirty years ago; I can remember, in the mid-1990s in the Canadian prairies, using a dialup internet connection to view one page of one book from the website of the Bodleian library. My father was much more impressed with this than I was at the time! Now we have a multitude of videos and a lot of them are fake. But this fits into converstions around the Reformation and the control and transmission of information; for a few centuries, the printed word had outsized power because it was easier to reproduce than pictures were, and we built social and educational structures that privilege people like me who do well in word-based systems. But when a stranger president can post a fake video of himself flying a jet that dispenses a brown liquid onto protesters, and wannabe nationalists plaster flags on everything (flags of St George, patron saint of agricultural workers, farmers, field workers, soldiers, archers, armourers, equestrians, cavalry, saddle makers, chivalry, peacekeeping missions, skin diseases, lepers and leprosy, syphilis, sheep, shepherds, scouting, Georgia, Ethiopia, England, Aragon, Catalonia, and Bulgaria — St George, pray for us!) as some kind of protest against migration without thinking about who benefits from their expression of ire, we may be past the point where words will win many battles. And of course censorship and surveillance are serious concerns, too. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as supply chains become more strained; at the moment it’s very easy to buy either a St George’s flag or an inflatable frog costume, but this won’t be the case for ever. I’m also interested in low-power, low-volume network communications like the initiative at meshtastic.org — but this is always going to mean dancing around the edges. What does the samizdat of the coming dark age look like? (How did your narrator, in the last part of your book, know to go to his kinfolk?)
2) Many institutions, including churches, have survived modernity by adapting to it to some degree, and not everyone in these institutions today is aware that expectations of infinite growth are unrealistic and harmful. Churches are also pretty vulnerable at the moment, I know of very few that don’t have worries about how to keep going financially, and while there has been some reckoning with this on various levels, I think the reckoning is far from over and the real test will be what happens locally. I have personally found real solace in the Church of England, but also very deep frustration and hurt, and I accept that this is part of the reality of human beings learning how to live together, part of weaving together meaningful connections of care. To do that I had to get over myself and stop looking for a perfect church. Keeping churches open and functioning is, sadly, not One Weird Trick to Escape Catastrophe, but there are churches that are responding to what’s happening now and what seems to be on the horizon, doing valuable pre-figurative work, building refugia of sorts whether they know it or not.
St Augustine wrote “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless ’til they find their rest in you” (or something very much like that, anyway). Jesus said “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (That’s Matthew 11:28 and the preceding verses are difficult.) One thing many churches do offer, and which is perhaps somewhat counter-cultural, is space to rest and contemplate, to grapple with hard questions of meaning and purpose but also to accept that maybe we aren’t going to be able to answer them on our own. Sometimes, holding this space is very much at odds with responding to financial pressures — as for any institution with a large contingent of voluntary workers and donated income, in a period where people’s leisure time is increasingly enclosed and finances increasingly constrained compared to, say, half a century ago. Sometimes holding this space is difficult in the face of the urgency of responding to our current predicament and the knowledge that things are likely to get worse: volunteer burnout in churches is a more serious problem than some like to admit. But holding this space, even imperfectly, is worth doing anyway, and rest and contemplation are worth seeking out anyway, whether that’s within the walls and liturgy of a church or sitting by a fire with loved ones and a poem or a song.
I do always look forward to your posts here, and to the ensuing conversation, and I will enjoy reading more as and when your energy levels and other commitments permit (and not before, please, I am quite serious that rest and contemplation are worth seeking out). Housing and rent are particularly interesting to me at the moment. I think Nate Hagens overstates the Walrus position a bit, but I’d have to give it a second listen… maybe if the Abundance crowd (who remind me of nothing more than the steel and rail dude in Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, a book I hated so much I nearly didn’t finish it) are saying regulation is the problem and the left-ish technocrats are saying capitalism is the problem, both of them have valid points. But those on the left that I listen to, at least, are quite aware that authoritarianism doesn’t only exist on the right — it’s just that right wing authoritarianism is the flavour of authoritarianism we are facing at the moment. I’d be interested in your views on Zack Polanski as leader of the Green party in England and Wales, though.
The industrial manufacture or precision fermentation of studge or whatever is of much less interest to me than land access to make sure people can grow and eat something else instead, and it would be good to have some sense of how land access (and land use rights?) fit in with industrial protein manufacturing in general (and I might put battery chickens in that category, too…). Meanwhile, last I checked Monbiot is still going after animal agriculture as never sustainable at all, which is frustrating (especially for those of us with difficulties absorbing non-haeme iron but who also still probably eat less animal produce than average just because of growing so much produce…), but he’s already proven himself unwilling to respond graciously to good-natured argument, so it’s probably best not to kick that particular nest. I don’t need you to write a blog post on this to know that he’ll call you names about it if he reads it at all.
You’ve mentioned cooperative or community growing of some staple crops here and there, and I’d love to know how that is working if you’re able to write about it.
Thanks Chris.
I’m in the US, so I haven’t seen your new book yet – I’m still looking forward to it. So you bring up interesting points here, but I’m not certain I know quite all that you are saying about them.
But about the collapse of mainstream media as surrogate town hall causing people to “…stop being citizens of a functional nation-state where the terms of the community narrative get publicly defined…”
I’m old enough that I grew up with legacy media. We lived in the Los Angeles area, so we had more TV stations than anybody, 7 of them. The narrative was definitely under control.
But even still, I was in kindergarten when I unequivocally learned that my fellow students’ stories about fairness and shared citizenship were lies. I was in second grade when I heard my teachers telling me obvious lies.
I am white, male, middle-class, etc. All the demographic markers that my country was supposedly set up to favor. I’ve had every advantage except for obscene hereditary wealth, and even still, whenever I slipped up and started feeling like a part of the larger society of my country, I was rudely awakened from that fantasy in short order.
Yes, it’s true that the 1960s were boom times for sub-cultures here. Maybe that’s a place to start with the latest round of schizmogenesis.
As for your bit about ubiquitous personal media sharing:
“But increasingly the eyes of the world don’t care.”
I disagree. Everyone I know has a deeply held opinion about their media feed. Those opinions don’t necessarily match up with each other or with any verifiable facts, but people care. What we don’t see is any any effective action in response. Nor do we see any evidence that the power elite care about what the people feel or think. At least not in particular. The thoughts and feelings of the people are only for propaganda and occasional vote-getting purposes.
As for ‘stranger kingship’, well, I’m not sure what that entails, exactly.
But I will say that the fundamental logic (if you can call it that) behind the Trump presidency is sound. Trump is the id of America. The few Trump supporters that I know will freely admit that he’s a buffoon, but they still agree with him, more or less.
And the vast majority of my friends who are Trump haters are unable to hear it when I tell them that the plutocracy and torture and war crimes that Trump is doing are largely continuations from the Clintons and Bushes and Obamas and Bidens.
The domestic storm troops are a new development, but not entirely novel. Remember the Haymarket.
In many ways, Trump is the logical next step in the European plunder of the ‘New World’. The empire turning inward on itself.
And don’t forget that the US is the country that perfected the art of professional wrestling. Of course it’s fake. Of course they are cartoon characters. Everyone knows this, but they still treat it as all real.
You say:
“If people were to stop thinking that, we may be at the start of a politics equal to present times.”
Yes, indeed, and twas ever thus. But what did P.T. Barnum (not quite) say about not underestimating the lack of imagination of the American public?