I kind of agree to a large extent with what you're saying, but...all this the-end-times-are-upon-us stuff, the whole eschatological forboding - we've been here countless times before, haven't we?
Ha! I suppose that I’m naturally drawn to the gloomy and portentous—it adds a kind of cheap aesthetic weight to the argument. But short cuts make for long delays, as any wizzid would tell ya, so probably it’s something I should wean myself out of.
On the one hand, I hope that I’m saying something more than merely “kids today don’t know they’re born”—perhaps that kids today are born into something, but they don’t realise that it’s there; or perhaps that kids today are
not born into something, but they don’t realise that it’s absent, because they don’t realise that it ever existed.
On the other hand, however, I
do believe that the current generation is inferior to its antecedents. Technology has improved; men have declined. In fact, I think that one measure of the success of a culture is the quality of the people it produces, so that you can observe this decline in real time in the ongoing collapse of our intellectual and cultural life. Perhaps someone could design a smartphone app, or something.
In any case, it’s fair to note as you do that people have been saying that society is going down the tubes for a while now. And you even pre-empt me by adding the important caveat that this doesn’t mean ipso facto that the people who say this are always wrong. One of the problems with this line of thought, though, is that the standards used when making this judgement are not stable, and have got progressively more unstable in recent years. It’s like trying to gauge the speed of an object coming towards you when you’re standing on a train. You need to somehow factor into your calculations the trajectory of the train itself.
I’m certain that if you were able to go back in time to the year 1911, and show people in Britain the state of their country one hundred years hence, very few of them would be enthusiastic about it. In fact, I can’t imagine that they would be anything other than horrified and appalled at the nightmare vision of the future placed before them. It is impossible to overstate the gap in values between now and then. So I think that it’s fair to say that if two people were arguing about the prospects for progress in 1911, and you could show them exactly how the century would turn out, the argument would be settled in favour of the pessimist in short order. Carried out on a significant scale, the experiment would completely bury progressive-idealism as a going concern.
As to “what is to be done”—well, I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I do have some thoughts on theocracy, totalitarian socialism and fascism, though.
One way to define modernity is an age in which man is no longer understood to partake in some kind of higher order [*]. Since he does not possess a transcendent nature, man is instead strictly limited to history, or biology, or something similar.
Totalitarian ideologies all share in the modernist conception of man. If there is no power higher than the individual, there is no greater good than the satisfaction of individual desire. But in order to give society structure, there has to be some way to resolve the problem of conflicting desires. Totalitarianism takes the arbitrary desiring principle, puts it on a pedestal and demands that society bends its knee before it. The power that enables the collective to subsume all individual desires beneath its own becomes the principle about which society is ordered; power becomes not simply a means to an end but an end as such.
Quite apart from the sterility of all of the actually existing totalitarian societies, it’s clear from the above that totalitarianism can’t in principle solve the deeper problems facing mankind any better than liberalism can. So the choice between the two is indeed a depressing one, if that is what we are faced with.
On the subject of theocracy, it is possible to view all the modernist ideologies as secular religions. (See, for a highly readable argument in this vein, Michael Burleigh’s
Earthly Powers). Liberalism is a kind of secular, state religion. It has its own taboos, rituals, saints, myths and so on. When you write that the idea of resurrecting religion doesn’t appeal I get the feel that what you mean is that you don’t like the idea of spending your Sunday morning in a church. Which is fair enough—neither do I. But I think that
something similar to religion or the religious worldview is necessary to balance out the more extreme tendencies of modernism in general and liberalism in particular. It doesn’t have to be explicitly theistic, though—e.g., Confuciusism, Buddhism, etc. And I don’t think it’s obvious that we end up in vastly different place give that we already have a kind of para-state religion anyway.
*This principle in and of itself is not new. Writing in the 3rd Century AD,
Plotinus criticised a similar tendency:
What can it be that has brought the souls to forget the father, God, and, though members of the Divine and entirely of that world, to ignore at once themselves and It?
The evil that has overtaken them has its source in self-will, in the entry into the sphere of process, and in the primal differentiation with the desire for self-ownership. They conceived a pleasure in this freedom and largely indulged their own motion; thus they were hurried down the wrong path, and in the end, drifting further and further, they came to lose even the thought of their origin in the Divine. A child wrenched young from home and brought up during many years at a distance will fail in knowledge of its father and of itself: the souls, in the same way, no longer discern either the divinity or their own nature; ignorance of their rank brings self-depreciation; they misplace their respect, honouring everything more than themselves; all their awe and admiration is for the alien, and, clinging to this, they have broken apart, as far as a soul may, and they make light of what they have deserted; their regard for the mundane and their disregard of themselves bring about their utter ignoring of the divine.
Admiring pursuit of the external is a confession of inferiority; and nothing thus holding itself inferior to things that rise and perish, nothing counting itself less honourable and less enduring than all else it admires could ever form any notion of either the nature or the power of God.
