Does Shangri-La exist, and if so, can we get back there? Though the name now is more likely to be associated with a Hong Kong-based luxury hotel chain, an annual international defense and security conference in Singapore, or a best-selling diet program, for an older generation of Americans, Shangri-La conjured up images of a blissful utopia. Published the same year that Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany—and released in paperback in 1939—James Hilton’s international bestseller Lost Horizon was for Western readers an edenic retreat from an impending disaster. In that respect, the imaginative yearnings it provokes are quite similar to those many possess today.

　　Lost Horizon tells the story of several travelers, including the British diplomat Hugh Conway, who find themselves trapped in a lamasery hidden deep in the mountains of Tibet after a harrowing airplane escape from an insurrection in Afghanistan. Called Shangri-La, it is a peaceful community governed by monks dedicated to the principle of “moderation in all things.”

　　Despite its remote isolation, Shangri-La is blessed with modern comforts, including an extensive and modern library, luxurious furniture, perfectly-tuned musical instruments, and fascinating historical artifacts. Inhabitants are in impressively good health, and appear to live longer, much longer, than what is typical or even natural. It is, one might say, a retiree’s dream—The Villages without the callow and comedic attempts to relive youth. And yet, can any supposed earthly paradise ever be what it claims?

　　That question is at the center of the dramatic tension of Lost Horizons, and one conservatives should ask today. We are all tempted by our versions of Shangri-La, the place we quixotically hope to return, even if what we seek is a mirage, or, like the Garden of Eden, closed to man in such a way we can never trace our steps back. This tendency seems peculiarly salient for contemporary conservative Americans, who, perhaps unsurprisingly given the name conservative, speak endlessly of older days we deem more venerable than our own.

　　Indeed, does anybody on the right want to be living right now? Some hope to rehabilitate the 1950s and its era of cultural unity, stronger families, and high rates of religious observance. Others possess a nostalgia for the optimism and adventure of the pioneer west, exemplified in such Western literature as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Many traditionalist Catholics in turn speak glowingly of the medieval France of St. Louis IX—a period in which church and state were less competitors and more collaborators—as the ideal political template.

　　Apart from “no finer time to be a Catholic” Austin Ruse, I know few conservatives celebrating today for today. Most everyone on the right seems of the opinion they’d rather be living in a time less beholden to the rotten fruits of the sexual revolution, dystopian technological innovations, and “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” We yearn instead for an age more friendly to freedom, family, and faith, one defined by more simple pleasures and self-reliance.

　　Nothing wrong with that desire, of course. Thanks to a variety of factors, we are witnessing the consequences of the collapse of American families and the communities they comprised, with more than one hundred thousand of us annually dying of drug overdoses, while obesity and mental illness rates annually break records. An unprecedented number of Americans are killing themselves, both in the immediate, actual sense, but also in a slower, quiet desperation sense defined by narcotics, saturated fats, seed oils, and porn.

　　That distressing fact seems counter-intuitive, given our relative ease and wealth, at least in comparison to the generations we aim to instantiate. Few Americans in the mid-twentieth century had access to such comforts as air conditioning or household cleaning appliances. Someone growing up on the frontier of nineteenth-century America would almost certainly witness the death of a sibling, given the high child mortality rates. And a medieval European, regardless of class, faced innumerable threats to his health and survival, among them plague, famine, and warfare, the last of which was a seasonal reality for Europeans throughout the Middle Ages, from the Thames to the Dnieper.

　　And yet, despite the many distresses (and even terrors) that earlier generations experienced, none of them engaged in the kinds of self-destructive behaviors that now proliferate in American society. “The world is going to pieces,” Conway admits in Lost Horizon. Though we do not face threats more existentially dangerous and despotic than the fascist or communist totalitarian regimes of the 1930s, our hopeless behaviors suggest we feel and act as if we are. In contrast to our suicidal tendencies, relatively few of those destined for concentration camps or the gulag deliberately chose self-annihilation to preempt their demise.

　　A return to more traditional gender norms, homesteading, and hyperlocalist religious communities cannot, of themselves, save us from the many foes we face today.

　　But escapism—whether of the social media, gaming or LARPing kind, or even the well-intentioned attempts to recreate whole-cloth older social and political paradigms—seems an inadequate solution to our current distemper. For one thing, current social and economic realities serve as restraints, if not prohibitions, for millions of Americans to realize the single-income family model of the mid-twentieth century now celebrated by such trends as the “tradwife” phenomenon. Homesteading, while also an admirable alternative to the suburban consumerist lifestyle that is so demonstrably disconnected from creation, is also beyond the fiscal or practical reach of many of the Americans who would most benefit from it.

　　Perhaps the most sophisticated of these trends is that proffered by the post-liberals, represented in such movements as the publication New Polity, which attacks just about everything that defines modernity, from capitalism and the stock market to checks and balances, modern police forces, and ultimately the sovereign liberal state itself. Answering the question of how much these post-liberal shots hit their intended target is beyond my scope here. (Though I think valid the oft-made complaint that post-liberalism, while identifying legitimate problems with classical liberalism, fails to articulate anything that could realistically replace it).

　　Rather, my observation is only that the post-liberal project seems to be one that necessitates a certain retreat from civic life, inasmuch as post-liberalism presumes our novus ordo seclorum is so ingrained with false ideas about the nature of truth and man stemming from Enlightenment philosophy that it is not only false but dangerous to the soul. If that’s the case, then many professions, including, say, law, federal service, the military, or politics itself, seem forbidden, because they all serve to reinforce (and prolong) the hegemony of what post-liberals view as an erroneous, dehumanizing political and economic order that they hope will soon die. In the interim, they argue, it’s best to withdraw to a type of contemplative, agriculture-based lifestyle that shares much in common with Shangri-La. It sounds quite nice, admittedly.

　　Yet it’s also divorced from the hard realities of our day, just as was Hilton’s imagined mountain paradise when he wrote it as the twin pincers of fascism and communism threatened the survival and flourishing of Western civilization. A return to more traditional gender norms, homesteading, and hyperlocalist religious communities cannot, of themselves, save us from the many foes we face today. They may help, and may even be an integral element of grassroots resistance to our atomized “liquid modernity,” as philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls it.

　　But there remain vital choices Americans in positions of business, public service, and politics will make regarding the threats posted to freedom, families, and faith, and who makes them, and what conception of human flourishing those decision-makers possess, matters deeply. For there are people who will choose the degree to which their businesses and academic institutions will participate in the soft-despotic power of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) movement through such measures as rent-seeking, de-banking, and surveillance. There are people who will choose what millions of public school students—including the many whose parents are financially incapable of providing a different option—learn about sex, gender, and race. And there are people who will make choices about abortion, immigration, and foreign policy that will have tangible effects on the livelihoods and very lives of millions of American citizens.

　　Can we return to Shangri-La? Sure—in certain bespoke ways, individual communities can recreate the objective goods of post-war America, the frontier days, or even thirteenth-century Catholic France. But to do so, especially if the prioritization of those utopian visions comes at the detriment of the millions of Americans who are experiencing an increasingly dystopian nightmare of depression and deaths-of-despair, seems irresponsible, if not short-sighted, given the totalizing intentions of the left-dominated technocratic regime. “The time, the place, the cold, his fatigue, were now of less account; there was a job that simply had to be done, and the more conventional part of him was uppermost and preparing to do it,” writes Hilton of the prospect facing protagonist British diplomat Conway at one heroic point of Lost Horizon. The same is just as true of us in 2024.