How Kipling foresaw our present downfall – more than a century ago By
Niall McCrae and M L R Smith
August 31, 2025
LITERATURE often succeeds where theory falters: it slips past jargon, cuts through fashion and confronts us with the truths we would rather ignore. Which brings us – inevitably – to Rudyard Kipling. Dismissed in polite society as a colonial curmudgeon, Kipling has become almost unmentionable, except in the footnotes of culture war essays or half-hearted defences of If.
Kipling’s 1919 poem The Gods of the Copybook Headings is a work so unnervingly prescient, so unrelentingly sane, that it ought to be read aloud at the beginning of every Cabinet meeting and every undergraduate seminar on ‘building a better world’. Instead, it remains neglected, probably because it’s the literary equivalent of a bucket of cold water hurled into the face of liberal optimism.
The ‘copybook headings’ of the title refer to the moral aphorisms printed in Kipling’s time at the top of schoolbooks – preachy phrases such as The wages of sin is death or If you don’t work you die. He imagines these not as dull clichés but as ancient deities: stern, enduring gods whose authority comes not from charisma or ideology, but from the raw, unbudgeable truths of existence.
History, Kipling observes, is a graveyard of societies who backed the wrong gods. Written in the aftermath of the Great War, which incinerated Edwardian dreams of harmony and onward-marching reason, the poem describes, stanza by stanza, the arc of civilisational decline. Each age, seduced by novelty and blinded by hubris, tries to rise above the old truths: biology, scarcity, mortality, responsibility. And each age ends, inevitably, in collapse.
Fast-forward a century, and Kipling’s diagnosis reads like a commentary on the morning news. Economic fantasies? Check. Social derangement? Check. Moral entropy packaged as enlightenment? Double check. As Kipling warns: reality doesn’t disappear. It just bides its time.
Nowhere is the return of the gods more visible than in economics. The 2008 crash was a copybook moment: a collective act of magical thinking where banks, regulators and investors convinced themselves that they had abolished risk and reinvented prosperity. Then reality walked in uninvited and repossessed the house.
The modern state perpetuates the delusion. Governments print money as though scarcity were a conspiracy theory. Voters are bribed with benefits that no one is quite sure how to fund. But arithmetic is not ideological. The gods of subtraction are merciless.
Meanwhile, our culture wages war against limits. Identity is no longer something inherited or shaped, but endlessly customisable – a spiritual Lego set. Biology is treated as hate speech; permanence is oppression. While presented as liberation, this is really disintegration. A society that insists everything is malleable – truth, sex, morality, history – will find it has nothing solid left to stand on. As Kipling might have said: The centre cannot hold if you dynamite the foundations. Liberation, unmoored from responsibility, drifts into lunacy.
Kipling’s realism also shreds the post-Cold War fantasy that liberal democracy would spread across the globe like a TED Talk. America and its allies marched into Iraq and Afghanistan armed with the tools of modernity, believing that they could engineer entire nations by managerial will. Instead, they discovered that tribalism, religion and history don’t respond well to progressive imperialism. The lesson – obvious to anyone who reads Kipling or a good history book – is that other cultures are not blank canvases.
Technology now poses as salvation. AI will do the thinking; biotech will do the ageing; social media will do the connecting. The copybook gods, unimpressed, light a cigarette and wait.
Silicon Valley’s vision of a frictionless world is to human nature the zoo cage to the lion. No software patch will erase the need for meaning, discipline or love. As ever, the machines may change, but the operators remain stubbornly human – flawed, needy, irrational.
Kipling’s genius is not just in naming the problem, it’s in anticipating the modern defence of it. Consider the scandal of Britain’s grooming gangs, which were permitted, even protected, under the pious excuse of avoiding racism. Historian Tom Holland claimed the authorities acted with ‘noble’ motives, https://thecritic.co.uk/the-road-to-hell-is-paved-with-arse-covering-cowardice/ a dangerously indulgent misreading that risks cloaking wilful complicity in grotesquely immoral and criminal behaviour beneath the veil of moral purpose. Perhaps the road to hell has a Diversity & Inclusion signpost now.
It’s the same story again and again: noble rhetoric masking cowardice, fantasy policies disguising economic decay, slogans standing in for sanity. Kipling saw it all coming because it had all happened before.
The copybook gods don’t punish stupidity with lightning bolts. They let pride fall.
The academic world, naturally, wants none of this. It prefers footnotes to fire. But it is Kipling’s literary domain where the truth sneaks through. Orwell, Camus, Solzhenitsyn all grasped what the seminars missed: that history is not a straight line toward utopia, but a weary circle of half-remembered wisdom and wholly repeated mistakes.
Kipling’s poem is not reactionary. It’s prophetic. It does not preach nostalgia, only realism. Its truths are not gentle, but they are true, and never outgrown by progressive hubris.
Our civilisation, like so many before it, believes itself uniquely enlightened. We speak of justice while eroding truth, of rights while scorning duties, of equality while bankrupting the treasury. But consequence is inescapable, and the gods will not come smiling.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man – There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Niall MacCrae and MLR Smith https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-kipling-foresaw-our-present-downfall-more-than-a-century-ago/