Ed Feser reviews Paul Kingsnorth and Grayson Quay:

Both authors emphasize that liberal individualism was the moral and political corollary of the mechanistic world picture. If ends or purposes are not built into the natures of things, the only purposes things can have—including our own lives—are the ones we happen to give them. But our purposes are radically diverse. Hence there can be no common ends or purposes which all the members of a political community can be expected to pursue, except those to which they all happen to consent. The result is a public square from which religion and traditional moral assumptions have been increasingly excluded, and the hegemony of the market economy as satisfier of individual desires. The local and particular attachments that for most of human history defined ordinary human life—to family, church, tradition, local community, nation, even to the land itself—have largely been dissolved. The vacuum left behind has been filled by a consumer culture that reflects and reinforces this liberal individualism, corporations that profit from it, governments that enforce and spread its hegemony, and political parties that compete to administer it.