Václav Havel made a perfectly extraordinary speech yesterday, condemning ours as "the first atheist civilisation", which "has lost its connection with the infinite and with eternity".

Havel is not often thought of as a defender of religion, and the Czech republic is by some measures the most completely dechristianised part of Europe. But he means by atheism the kind of insatiable proud greed which mashes both interior and exterior landscapes into something as homogenous as mechanically recovered chicken. It is a vision of the consumer society as hell:

"Our cities are being permitted without control to destroy the surrounding landscape with its nature, traditional pathways, avenues of trees, villages, mills and meandering streams, and build in their place some sort of gigantic agglomeration that renders life nondescript, disrupts the network of natural human communities and under the banner of international uniformity it attacks all individuality, identity or heterogeneity. And on the occasions it tries to imitate something local or original, it looks altogether suspect, because it is obviously a purpose-built fake. There is emerging a new type of a previously described existential phenomenon: unbounded consumer collectivity engenders a new type of solitude."

This is a similar vision of the horror of modern life to that which animates Rowan Williams, with his talk of "the fantasy that you can organise the world to suit yourself".

Havel was speaking at a conference which focusses on architecture; but he sees exurban sprawl as the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace:

"...not only a globally spreading short-sightedness, but also the swollen self-consciousness of this civilisation, whose basic attributes include the supercilious idea that we know everything and what we don't yet know we'll soon find out, because we know how to go about it. We are convinced that this supposed omniscience of ours which proclaims the staggering progress of science and technology and rational knowledge in general, permits us to serve anything that is demonstrably useful, or that is simply a source of measurable profit, anything that induces growth and more growth and still more growth, including the growth of agglomerations. But with the cult of measurable profit, proven progress and visible usefulness there disappears respect for mystery and along with it humble reverence for everything we shall never measure and know, not to mention the vexed question of the infinite and eternal, which were until recently the most important horizons of our actions. We have totally forgotten what all previous civilisations knew: that nothing is self-evident."

Naturally this won't convince anyone who finds self-evident the foundations of their own world view. And perhaps the most attractive and persuasive part of Havel's speech is that he knows this. He takes the recent economic crash as an example of the way in which an apparently rational and entirely controlled system suddenly showed that it was neither of these things.

"I regard the recent crisis as a very small and very inconspicuous call to humility. A small and inconspicuous challenge for us not to take everything automatically for granted. Strange things are happening and will happen. Not to bring oneself to admit it is the path to hell. Strangeness, unnaturalness, mystery, inconceivability have been shifted out of the world of serious thought into the dubious closets of suspicious people. Until they are released and allowed to return to our minds things will not go well."

After this crisis a thousand and one theorists will emerge to describe precisely how and why it happened and how to prevent it happening in future. But this will not be a sign that they have understood the message that the crisis sent us. The opposite, more likely: it will simply be a further emanation of that disproportionate self-assurance that I have been speaking of.

I fear very much that he is right. But in that case the lesson will be repeated, more and more painfully, until we learn it, or our children must.