Hollowing

Modern Britain still uses the language of meaning. The meaning is draining out of the words.

We still speak of dignity, compassion, sacrifice and truth. We still bury our dead with serious words. We still hang values on the walls of every public building: respect, inclusion, wellbeing, dignity, safety. But fewer of us can say where any of these words come from, or why they should bind anyone who finds them inconvenient. The vocabulary remains. The roots are gone.

In Hollowing, Jonathan Verhees argues that Britain has spent a century quietly removing the sacred centre that once made its moral language make sense. The country has not collapsed. It has not become a wasteland. It has hollowed: the outer forms still stand while the inner force weakens. The church towers remain. Sunday attendance does not. The wedding venue remains. The vow has thinned. The school still teaches values. The metaphysics behind those values has been quietly dropped.

The book argues that the substitutes Britain has tried to build for the old centre cannot carry the weight. Politics tries to redeem and ends in moral war. Therapy tries to absolve and ends in emotional priestcraft. Identity tries to belong and ends in sacred grievance. The market tries to satisfy and turns sacred things into lifestyle options. The sovereign self tries to create itself from nothing, and produces some of the loneliest people in human history.

This is not a book of nostalgia. The past was not innocent. Christianity has justified cruelty, blessed armies, protected power and silenced dissent, and the book says so plainly and early. Nor is it a book of despair. The argument is not that Britain is finished. It is that Britain is living from stored capital, and stored capital runs out.

Written from a small desk in Scunthorpe by a father with a one-year-old son and a daughter on the way, Hollowing is a clear-eyed account of what the country has lost, an honest engagement with what it might do next, and a refusal of both the fashionable secular optimism that pretends the loss has not happened and the reactionary nostalgia that pretends it can be undone by sentiment. It draws on the work of Tom Holland, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, Ross Douthat, Mary Harrington, Louise Perry, Carl Trueman and Paul Kingsnorth, but it is written for ordinary readers, in plain English, by someone who walks the same hollowed-out high street they do.

If you have ever stood in a modern public foyer, read the values painted on the wall, and felt that the words were somehow weightless without being able to say why; if you have ever been to a funeral that did everything correctly and yet left you with the sense that something important had not been said; if you have ever wondered why a country with so much can no longer quite explain what any of it is for, this is a book for you.

Praise for the writing of Jonathan Verhees:
"One of the sharpest commentators on modern British life writing today." - UnspunUK readers

Hollowing sits on the same shelf as Tom Holland's Dominion, Douglas Murray's The Strange Death of Europe, Ross Douthat's The Decadent Society, and Mary Harrington's Feminism Against Progress. If you found those books useful, you will find this one useful too.

A short, serious, readable book about why Britain feels the way it does, and what might be done about it.