The Future of Tradition: Surviving in a World of Counterfeits

It is becoming ever more evident that to live in the modern world is to live in a world of counterfeits. One of the most readily observable examples is that of the sheer amount of plastic coverings we wear as a sorry excuse for clothing. I was walking down a town high street recently and it suddenly struck me: in admixed horror and amazement I looked about at all the people masquerading as wrapped meat strolling up and down the pavement.

Only in my lifetime, we have moved from leather, cotton, linen, wool, and cashmere fabrics to outfits of synthetic wrapping. This isn’t clothing, it’s packaging. For anyone who prizes beauty and is pained by encounters with ugliness, observing current trends in apparel is agonising. We have gone from weaving the gifts of nature into adornments for the Holy Ghost’s temples to fastening on recycled coke bottles.

Clothing, or what passes for clothing today, is just one of so many examples of the accelerating rise of counterfeit culture. We also eat counterfeit food: weird, hyper-processed, congealed gloop comprising a hundred ingredients, many of whose names have numbers or the word ‘agent’. We have counterfeit exercise: rather than lifting things that need moving or constructing things that need making—or even just putting on a pair of hiking boots and venturing out into the landscape—we plug ourselves into great machines. On these we run, or we push, or we’re pulled, in dark halls of bizarre contraptions designed to mimic real activity.

We also have counterfeit travel. Travelling was never just about being in a different place, but rather the journey to that place and the experience of the destination on arrival. Travelling has degenerated into merely climbing inside a metallic cylinder and being transported halfway across the world at an inhuman velocity, in the hope that the terminus might have some interesting features to be used as backgrounds for your pouting mug. Those ‘selfies’ can then be uploaded to social media accounts to secure the ‘likes’ which comprise the foundation of all the counterfeit friendships that have replaced genuine human connectivity.

Of course, counterfeit travel is simply one aspect of the counterfeit leisure that now dominates human life. Leisure, as any student of Josef Pieper well knows, is not idleness or ‘zoning out’ or ‘down time’, but jolly hard work. Leisure is about delineating the time necessary to learn a difficult skill, or to enter the inner meaning of a complex poem, or to nurture a beautiful and resplendent garden. And above all, leisure is about liturgy and festivity. Such things are not easy, they are leisurely, for they are the ends for which all other labour is a means. Doom-scrolling, staring at nonsense on screens, playing computer games, and the many ways we’ve filled our non-slavery hours with other kinds of slavery are all versions of counterfeit leisure.

The point is that wherever you look, you find fakes. Our politicians are counterfeit statesmen, our schools and universities provide counterfeit education, our global monoculture is a counterfeit culture, our online communities are counterfeit communities, our porn industries offer counterfeit intimacy, our pop industry pollutes the world with counterfeit music, our galleries are full of counterfeit art, our dog-moms mother counterfeit offspring, the list goes on and on.