HOW was the lockdown for you? This short book, a set of reflections springing from the experience of confinement during the Covid period, argues that the pandemic offered an exposé of the mood of our times, in which narratives of either decline or catastrophe control the imagination. “The pandemic worried us,” the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner writes, “but it also freed us from a greater worry: the problem of freedom”. People were glad not only to have dodged a viral bullet, but also, for a time, of the chance to duck out of life. “Adventurers once took to the sea,” Bruckner continues. “Now they take up their joysticks or put on virtual reality goggles and lie down.”

This is the reason that the overnight curtailments were almost universally accepted. In a world of collapsing boundaries — as a result of the internet and scrolling news rather than an ability actually to experience things and travel — the return of boundaries was secretly welcomed. People still complain about the Easter service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his kitchen, but, in truth, Justin Welby was in tune with the times. The domestication of transcendence offered confirmation and comfort.

Bruckner draws in other features of Western life. For example, while we are told that living in the free world is better than living in totalitarian states, doesn’t emancipated consumption routinely degenerate into chronic dissatisfaction, alongside exponential demands for a government that will look after us? Bruckner’s essay is packed with such provocative observations. “All of today’s technologies encourage incarceration under the guise of openness,” is another. Little wonder that, post-pandemic, many have decided that the world inside is preferable to the one beyond four walls: “the house as cradle, the home as womb”.

The author makes a few references to the place of religion — for instance, Hegel’s remark that reading the daily newspaper has replaced saying daily prayers, with the upshot that the routine that tells you who and where you are has been secularised; the greatest hope now on offer is that there will be less rain tomorrow.

This is why the politics of fear — fed by climate, terrorist, and technological anxieties — has become so established. Transcendence and vision no longer speak to most, a situation that Bruckner blames, paradoxically, on Christianity; since the Reformation, work rather than worship has been sanctified, and the cycles of the monastic day have been replaced by watching the clock. The flatland of modernity has grown too small.

So where might be found the Kingdom of heaven which, Jesus teaches us, is not coming, but is near? The one who knows would have a truly radical message and might even suggest stepping again outside.

Dr Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist and writer.

The Triumph of the Slippers: On the withdrawal from the world
Pascal Bruckner
Cory Stockwell, translator
Polity £16.99
(978-1-5095-5952-7)
Church Times Bookshop £15.29