I really appreciate this summary/introduction to Brett Andersen's thinking, and the insights into Nietzsche's thinking as well.
I, too, wondered what was going on with Brett in his recent anti-Trump tantrum and seemingly endless citation of pop music. Nice to learn he's allowed himself to come under the influence of plant toxins.
This is admittedly due to ignorance on my part, but I’ve never quite understood the meaning of warrior value and their importance.
With Rome I can understand how such militant values came about due to Rome spending its youth constantly pushing its borders. Useful in that context, and others, like in a fragmented feudal world where warlords maintained order.
But I don’t really see it happening in the kind of civilization we have today given the nature of our economy and technology.
I don’t 100% agree with Yarvin’s ideas, but his ideas have an appeal to me in the sense that his idea of monarchy does bear resonance with stable models of rule outside the West in other contexts, such as the Confucian ideal of a good Emperor and Egyptian Pharaohs.
Some were warriors, but their respective cultures put more of an emphasis on them wise philosopher kings and enlightened administrators. Mainly on the account they had to manage extensive networks of complicated infrastructure and projects.
Not to say that they didn’t also rely on military might or had their own issues.
Hi Metatron, thanks for your comment. There are two issues at play here. One is a government structure argument, which you touch on. A government is always going to be one of two things: either (1) a monarchy with a stronger middle class and a controlled oligarchy, with a generally rising average quality of life, or (2) a strong oligarchy who uses the lower class to smash the middle class, with a declining quality of life for all but the oligarchy. There are gradations between the two, but those are the polarities on which government operates. I go into this more on my post about Lee Kuan Yew, which you may find helpful if you havn't read it: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/lee-kuan-yew-and-singapore-a-knife
The other issue is one of society's core values, which is not a government structure argument. What do we *value* and why? Western society's core values are rooted in Christian egalitarianism; everyone is inherently equal, and differences are solely caused by the -isms and -phobias -- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. These are inherently *priestly* values as Nietzsche used the term, quantity over quality. Such priestly values emphasize subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering and self-hatred; in other words, the herd instinct. Warrior values, on the other hand, valued things that were inegalitarian, quality over quantity: Greatness, strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility.
You're right that these warrior values aren't valued in this modern world, which destroys quality wherever it finds it. But this kind of environment is only possible in a world where we recklessly consume the world's natural resources, which are dwindling very quickly, in order to temporarily hold off Darwinian selection pressures. This kind of world promotes people living on welfare and having a bunch of kids and not working. But in the future we will hit up against neo-Malthusian limits as these resources dwindle which are going to be extremely painful for the world, and the aftermath of that, if humanity survives, will have to involve a return to discrimination for quality over quantity. https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental
"This is admittedly due to ignorance on my part, but I’ve never quite understood the meaning of warrior value and their importance."
Why not? Modern sport basically embodies warrior values. The classical pagan values of Rome and Greece never really disappeared. In modern times they have simply been sublimated into sporting contest. Nietzsche believed those same values could be, and should be, sublimated into intellectual and spiritual contest.
"The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil"
I have a couple of thoughts. Firstly in regards to the above, a healthy form of life, an ascending form of life does not view the world as imbued with evil. That is the slavish point of view. The Romans were not unaware of suffering. The lesson they took however was very different from the lesson slaves took. Namely they saw suffering as teaching them that it was better to inflict suffering than to suffer it.
A synthesis of the slave and master morality would go something like this. As far as you can see that the healthy person does not require a plaster cast on their leg you can also see the the person with a broken leg does need it. So as far as there are people who need (traditional) religion they should be free to do so, BUT they should not be allowed to inflict the healthy. This was one Nietzsche's main criticism of Christianity. That everybody was deemed a sinner. In other words, Christianity requires everybody to wear a plaster cast.
"naturalist or pantheist perspective in relation to the Darwinian struggle for survival just as likely leads to increased conflict as increased cooperation".
I think you have misread or misunderstood this point. Life is not naturally cooperative. It is conflict or tension that produces cooperation. Cooperation would not exist all except for conflict. Two books you may already be aware of I would highly recommend to further explore this point: The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian and Ultra Society by Peter Turchin. Brett Anderson relies of both books.
Good post. I wish Mr Andersen well in his search for meaning the other side of nihilism.
The funny thing about Nietzsche is that the only folk concerned with his deicide are those who have lost their faith, or those who had none to start with. Granted this is a large population in the West. But this fact tells us something about Nietzsche's claim that God is dead - which he clearly isn't for many folk. What Nietzsche did in fact accomplish was to kill the idea of objective morality - the Holy Grail of moral philosophers seeking a universal moral system with a scientific basis. This is wonderful, as the whole idea was folly anyway and it means we can finally accept moral relativism in all its glory. It is telling that moral relativism is only seen as a problem from a POV *outside* of a robust moral tradition. From inside it is automatically assumed that one's own tradition is superior to all others, hence no such problem arises. Sure wars are fought over such things, but whatcha gonna do?
The fact is, morality is fundamentally subjective, at a personal level and exists in the realm of religious faith, itself a product of societal tradition (see Alasdair MacIntyre). Lose the tradition and the moral scheme will fall apart and with it the society. Build a moral tradition again and society will flourish. This is the descent/renewal cycle at a civilizational level. Christendom has been devastated by the Enlightenment's project to supplant faith with Reason. Interestingly enough the Islamic world has remained largely immune - the subject for another discussion, I expect. It is actually my suspicion that come the inevitable collapse of Western civilization, Islam may well flourish as never before. The other obvious example is the flourishing of orthodox Judaism in Israel - a fact that has secular, liberal Jews terrified, as it is *their* moral scheme that is in jeopardy. God sure ain't dead there.
The only moral schemes that matter now are the ones that will arise from the ashes after the coming collapse. I suspect it is a pointless academic exercise postulating a workable scheme now, given the enormous upheavals that await us. Also, there can be no such thing as a purely reasoned moral scheme - Hume demonstrated this almost 300 years ago. Kant had to conjure his out of fictitious purely rational beings to make it work. Though oddly enough Kant's Kingdom of Ends is a perfectly description of the AI run Hellscape some folks have in mind for us, it's just the humans in this world will have to be divested of their humanity. Omelas and eggs I guess.
Faith and Reason are mutually exclusive modes of human thought. Reason has no place in ethics, just as faith has no place in science. When things get bad enough faith will make a comeback big time and we'll start again. With a bit of luck the best bits of our culture will survive. It will be no loss if the texts of moral philosophy do not make it.
Very nice response, and you have correctly identified that the groups most resistant to this global nihilism are the Orthodox of all faiths. I have a post prepared on Orthodox Christianity about this, and have the start of a post analyzing the groups with the highest fertility rates within Western society -- which also includes the Amish and the Mormons (although Mormon fertility is dropping like a rock given globohomo has skinsuited it). I share your disdain for most philosophers, who merely and unintentionally (due to lack of perspective) paved the way for society's transition from faith to reason/decadence.
I agree with you that with the way things are trending, the future clearly belongs to Islam. Houellebecq wrote a famous book on this called "Submission" which I have yet to read, but I hear is very good. I am not looking forward to a world dominated by Islam and the sword, but at least children won't be turned into transsexuals and homosexuality won't be thrown into our faces at every opportunity.
Houllebecq is a poster boy for the faith of Reason. His book 'Submission' deals with the author's fears of the triumph of Islam over his own faith. It is a tremendous irony that the book just happened to be published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. That attack targeted some smug intellectual cartoonists, paragons of the faith or Reason, in the capital of the country whose unofficial state religion is the Enlightenment itself. I wonder how many people in France or the West in general really understand why some radical Islamists decided to murder a bunch of radicals of the faith of Reason in Paris that day. Islam has its own fears and will not submit.
"The fact is, morality is fundamentally subjective, at a personal level and exists in the realm of religious faith, itself a product of societal tradition."
It cannot be 'fundamentally subjective' and at the same time the 'product of social tradition'. Consider the way small children are socially integrated into their communities. If a small child is being teased by another and he lashes out and strikes the other what happens? In general he will be told that it is wrong to strike the other regardless of whether he is being teased or not. What is the child learning in such circumstances other than his subjective feelings DO NOT MATTER.
The fact the adults subjective feelings align with their moral beliefs is not evidence that morality is subjective, rather it is evidence that they have been successfully socialized into their community.
Thank you for this. It will take some time to process.
I might not have the model right in my mind, that is, that Ethics and meaning derive from the collision of entropy and complexification, and the moral imperative is to resist the entropy.
It seems nondirectional.
'If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there'
In Christianity, the direction is Grace, and Heaven.
Here, it cannot be expressed as a concrete end state.
Complexification is an increase in power. The direction is towards an increase in power as in Nietzsche's 'Will to Power'. Complexification occurs as a consequence of nature finding non zero sum games. Single cell to multi cell is an example of complexification.
"it cannot be expressed as a concrete end state."
Indeed, that is the reversal of Christianity. The process and not the result is what is now sacred.
> "The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil, in the sense that every living creature can only survive by consuming other living things."
I don't have an alternative to offer, but the above (perhaps partial) definition of evil doesn't sound right.
Big fish eat little fish.
Little fish eat littler fish.
Littler fish eat the littlest fish.
The littlest fish eat the big fish.
That's not evil but *beautiful* and, more, it's just how things work and can only work.
Ergo, probably not evil except to a Gnostic (which, to be clear, I'm not saying you are).
> "During the Axial Age between the 8th and 3rd century BC, humans transitioned from hunter gatherer societies to agrarian societies brought on by the neolithic agricultural revolution. New selection pressures resulted in a movement away from these shamanistic, high-intensity religious ceremonies and polytheistic Gods and toward left-brain, low-intensity, formalized religions based on written texts and featuring distant, inaccessible God(s)."
You are certainly trying to say something profound, yet please, consider that there were no hunter-gatherers in Western Eurasia during the Iron Age. And the two millennia of the Asian Bronze Age seem to have harmonised metropolitan areas with polytheisms perfectly well.
> "He[raclitus] rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing. He considers belief in something persistent as error and foolishness. To this he adds this thought: that which becomes is one thing in eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal transformation, the Logos in all things, is precisely this One, fire. Thus, the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work.”"
This is interesting, because isn't idolatrous fascism all about preserving things? And isn't it Christianity that put focus on change, progress? Was Nietzsche a Chrictcuck all along? Or is the essence of the eternal swastika in the application of natural laws which move, but in circles?
P.S. It's a funny coincidence that my all-time favourite number (4) means order in Kabbalah, and my least favourite (5) apparently means change. Just learned it this month. Jewish, maybe, but the Jews might have preserved something of the magic of Babylon.
> "after the death of God and the descent into nihilism, western civilization has retained the morals and ethics of Christianity but without the underlying belief structure."
Isn't this point contradictory? Because it is exactly this that I use to justify my idea that nihilism is as much a joke as globalisation. How can nihilism be found in a land of continuous moral outrage, of ever more calls for trans rights, of outright crusades... which in turn are sabotaged due to the underlying moral framework being deemed as more precious than material victory?
Unless by nihilism you mean something akin to Jewish mockery of solemnity - yet, I posit, that in truth is a reflection of perennial Christian atheism (per Tom Holland), their nihilistic proclivity to idol-smashing, Nation-destruction and indeed meaning-compromisation.
There could be another way altogether to view this useless buzz phrase - namely, apply it to the Germany, and not beyond. The Germany apparently pregnant with anti-Christian ideas of Lebensraum that horrified both the Anglo-French and the Russians. The Germany that would not last beyond 1945, and whose experience is wasted on the non-Asians swine.
Nietzsche's "death of God" essentially means the death of idealism and the descent of the world into a pure, gross materialism -- this is nihilism, where our actions have no spiritual connotations and no intrinsic meaning to them. We're all just human bugs floating on a ball in space in a cold, impersonal universe consuming until death, I guess. But underlying this comprehensive nihilism is, as Tom Holland argues, the retention of Christian ethics, morals, and values -- specifically, in the blind belief in human equality in all of its forms -- unmoored from the belief in a Christian God, which is an unstable situation.
Culture is not necessarily "idealist" - see the Jews and the Mongoloids, neither of whom seem to believe in a guaranteed afterlife (their contact with Christianity or Buddhism notwithstanding.
I really appreciate this summary/introduction to Brett Andersen's thinking, and the insights into Nietzsche's thinking as well.
I, too, wondered what was going on with Brett in his recent anti-Trump tantrum and seemingly endless citation of pop music. Nice to learn he's allowed himself to come under the influence of plant toxins.
This is admittedly due to ignorance on my part, but I’ve never quite understood the meaning of warrior value and their importance.
With Rome I can understand how such militant values came about due to Rome spending its youth constantly pushing its borders. Useful in that context, and others, like in a fragmented feudal world where warlords maintained order.
But I don’t really see it happening in the kind of civilization we have today given the nature of our economy and technology.
I don’t 100% agree with Yarvin’s ideas, but his ideas have an appeal to me in the sense that his idea of monarchy does bear resonance with stable models of rule outside the West in other contexts, such as the Confucian ideal of a good Emperor and Egyptian Pharaohs.
Some were warriors, but their respective cultures put more of an emphasis on them wise philosopher kings and enlightened administrators. Mainly on the account they had to manage extensive networks of complicated infrastructure and projects.
Not to say that they didn’t also rely on military might or had their own issues.
Hi Metatron, thanks for your comment. There are two issues at play here. One is a government structure argument, which you touch on. A government is always going to be one of two things: either (1) a monarchy with a stronger middle class and a controlled oligarchy, with a generally rising average quality of life, or (2) a strong oligarchy who uses the lower class to smash the middle class, with a declining quality of life for all but the oligarchy. There are gradations between the two, but those are the polarities on which government operates. I go into this more on my post about Lee Kuan Yew, which you may find helpful if you havn't read it: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/lee-kuan-yew-and-singapore-a-knife
The other issue is one of society's core values, which is not a government structure argument. What do we *value* and why? Western society's core values are rooted in Christian egalitarianism; everyone is inherently equal, and differences are solely caused by the -isms and -phobias -- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. These are inherently *priestly* values as Nietzsche used the term, quantity over quality. Such priestly values emphasize subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering and self-hatred; in other words, the herd instinct. Warrior values, on the other hand, valued things that were inegalitarian, quality over quantity: Greatness, strength, individuality, self-determination, immediacy of purpose, honor, acceptance of hierarchy and nobility.
You're right that these warrior values aren't valued in this modern world, which destroys quality wherever it finds it. But this kind of environment is only possible in a world where we recklessly consume the world's natural resources, which are dwindling very quickly, in order to temporarily hold off Darwinian selection pressures. This kind of world promotes people living on welfare and having a bunch of kids and not working. But in the future we will hit up against neo-Malthusian limits as these resources dwindle which are going to be extremely painful for the world, and the aftermath of that, if humanity survives, will have to involve a return to discrimination for quality over quantity. https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental
I hope this is clarifying...
"This is admittedly due to ignorance on my part, but I’ve never quite understood the meaning of warrior value and their importance."
Why not? Modern sport basically embodies warrior values. The classical pagan values of Rome and Greece never really disappeared. In modern times they have simply been sublimated into sporting contest. Nietzsche believed those same values could be, and should be, sublimated into intellectual and spiritual contest.
"The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil"
I have a couple of thoughts. Firstly in regards to the above, a healthy form of life, an ascending form of life does not view the world as imbued with evil. That is the slavish point of view. The Romans were not unaware of suffering. The lesson they took however was very different from the lesson slaves took. Namely they saw suffering as teaching them that it was better to inflict suffering than to suffer it.
A synthesis of the slave and master morality would go something like this. As far as you can see that the healthy person does not require a plaster cast on their leg you can also see the the person with a broken leg does need it. So as far as there are people who need (traditional) religion they should be free to do so, BUT they should not be allowed to inflict the healthy. This was one Nietzsche's main criticism of Christianity. That everybody was deemed a sinner. In other words, Christianity requires everybody to wear a plaster cast.
"naturalist or pantheist perspective in relation to the Darwinian struggle for survival just as likely leads to increased conflict as increased cooperation".
I think you have misread or misunderstood this point. Life is not naturally cooperative. It is conflict or tension that produces cooperation. Cooperation would not exist all except for conflict. Two books you may already be aware of I would highly recommend to further explore this point: The Romance of Reality by Bobby Azarian and Ultra Society by Peter Turchin. Brett Anderson relies of both books.
Thanks Paul, this is an astute and helpful comment. I will check out the books you recommend.
Good post. I wish Mr Andersen well in his search for meaning the other side of nihilism.
The funny thing about Nietzsche is that the only folk concerned with his deicide are those who have lost their faith, or those who had none to start with. Granted this is a large population in the West. But this fact tells us something about Nietzsche's claim that God is dead - which he clearly isn't for many folk. What Nietzsche did in fact accomplish was to kill the idea of objective morality - the Holy Grail of moral philosophers seeking a universal moral system with a scientific basis. This is wonderful, as the whole idea was folly anyway and it means we can finally accept moral relativism in all its glory. It is telling that moral relativism is only seen as a problem from a POV *outside* of a robust moral tradition. From inside it is automatically assumed that one's own tradition is superior to all others, hence no such problem arises. Sure wars are fought over such things, but whatcha gonna do?
The fact is, morality is fundamentally subjective, at a personal level and exists in the realm of religious faith, itself a product of societal tradition (see Alasdair MacIntyre). Lose the tradition and the moral scheme will fall apart and with it the society. Build a moral tradition again and society will flourish. This is the descent/renewal cycle at a civilizational level. Christendom has been devastated by the Enlightenment's project to supplant faith with Reason. Interestingly enough the Islamic world has remained largely immune - the subject for another discussion, I expect. It is actually my suspicion that come the inevitable collapse of Western civilization, Islam may well flourish as never before. The other obvious example is the flourishing of orthodox Judaism in Israel - a fact that has secular, liberal Jews terrified, as it is *their* moral scheme that is in jeopardy. God sure ain't dead there.
The only moral schemes that matter now are the ones that will arise from the ashes after the coming collapse. I suspect it is a pointless academic exercise postulating a workable scheme now, given the enormous upheavals that await us. Also, there can be no such thing as a purely reasoned moral scheme - Hume demonstrated this almost 300 years ago. Kant had to conjure his out of fictitious purely rational beings to make it work. Though oddly enough Kant's Kingdom of Ends is a perfectly description of the AI run Hellscape some folks have in mind for us, it's just the humans in this world will have to be divested of their humanity. Omelas and eggs I guess.
Faith and Reason are mutually exclusive modes of human thought. Reason has no place in ethics, just as faith has no place in science. When things get bad enough faith will make a comeback big time and we'll start again. With a bit of luck the best bits of our culture will survive. It will be no loss if the texts of moral philosophy do not make it.
Very nice response, and you have correctly identified that the groups most resistant to this global nihilism are the Orthodox of all faiths. I have a post prepared on Orthodox Christianity about this, and have the start of a post analyzing the groups with the highest fertility rates within Western society -- which also includes the Amish and the Mormons (although Mormon fertility is dropping like a rock given globohomo has skinsuited it). I share your disdain for most philosophers, who merely and unintentionally (due to lack of perspective) paved the way for society's transition from faith to reason/decadence.
I agree with you that with the way things are trending, the future clearly belongs to Islam. Houellebecq wrote a famous book on this called "Submission" which I have yet to read, but I hear is very good. I am not looking forward to a world dominated by Islam and the sword, but at least children won't be turned into transsexuals and homosexuality won't be thrown into our faces at every opportunity.
Houllebecq is a poster boy for the faith of Reason. His book 'Submission' deals with the author's fears of the triumph of Islam over his own faith. It is a tremendous irony that the book just happened to be published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. That attack targeted some smug intellectual cartoonists, paragons of the faith or Reason, in the capital of the country whose unofficial state religion is the Enlightenment itself. I wonder how many people in France or the West in general really understand why some radical Islamists decided to murder a bunch of radicals of the faith of Reason in Paris that day. Islam has its own fears and will not submit.
"The fact is, morality is fundamentally subjective, at a personal level and exists in the realm of religious faith, itself a product of societal tradition."
It cannot be 'fundamentally subjective' and at the same time the 'product of social tradition'. Consider the way small children are socially integrated into their communities. If a small child is being teased by another and he lashes out and strikes the other what happens? In general he will be told that it is wrong to strike the other regardless of whether he is being teased or not. What is the child learning in such circumstances other than his subjective feelings DO NOT MATTER.
The fact the adults subjective feelings align with their moral beliefs is not evidence that morality is subjective, rather it is evidence that they have been successfully socialized into their community.
Thank you for this. It will take some time to process.
I might not have the model right in my mind, that is, that Ethics and meaning derive from the collision of entropy and complexification, and the moral imperative is to resist the entropy.
It seems nondirectional.
'If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there'
In Christianity, the direction is Grace, and Heaven.
Here, it cannot be expressed as a concrete end state.
Complexification is an increase in power. The direction is towards an increase in power as in Nietzsche's 'Will to Power'. Complexification occurs as a consequence of nature finding non zero sum games. Single cell to multi cell is an example of complexification.
"it cannot be expressed as a concrete end state."
Indeed, that is the reversal of Christianity. The process and not the result is what is now sacred.
> "The material world seems fundamentally imbued with metaphysical evil, in the sense that every living creature can only survive by consuming other living things."
I don't have an alternative to offer, but the above (perhaps partial) definition of evil doesn't sound right.
Big fish eat little fish.
Little fish eat littler fish.
Littler fish eat the littlest fish.
The littlest fish eat the big fish.
That's not evil but *beautiful* and, more, it's just how things work and can only work.
Ergo, probably not evil except to a Gnostic (which, to be clear, I'm not saying you are).
> "During the Axial Age between the 8th and 3rd century BC, humans transitioned from hunter gatherer societies to agrarian societies brought on by the neolithic agricultural revolution. New selection pressures resulted in a movement away from these shamanistic, high-intensity religious ceremonies and polytheistic Gods and toward left-brain, low-intensity, formalized religions based on written texts and featuring distant, inaccessible God(s)."
You are certainly trying to say something profound, yet please, consider that there were no hunter-gatherers in Western Eurasia during the Iron Age. And the two millennia of the Asian Bronze Age seem to have harmonised metropolitan areas with polytheisms perfectly well.
> "He[raclitus] rejects Being. He knows only Becoming, the flowing. He considers belief in something persistent as error and foolishness. To this he adds this thought: that which becomes is one thing in eternal transformation, and the law of this eternal transformation, the Logos in all things, is precisely this One, fire. Thus, the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work.”"
This is interesting, because isn't idolatrous fascism all about preserving things? And isn't it Christianity that put focus on change, progress? Was Nietzsche a Chrictcuck all along? Or is the essence of the eternal swastika in the application of natural laws which move, but in circles?
P.S. It's a funny coincidence that my all-time favourite number (4) means order in Kabbalah, and my least favourite (5) apparently means change. Just learned it this month. Jewish, maybe, but the Jews might have preserved something of the magic of Babylon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQSTQV3WVH8
> "after the death of God and the descent into nihilism, western civilization has retained the morals and ethics of Christianity but without the underlying belief structure."
Isn't this point contradictory? Because it is exactly this that I use to justify my idea that nihilism is as much a joke as globalisation. How can nihilism be found in a land of continuous moral outrage, of ever more calls for trans rights, of outright crusades... which in turn are sabotaged due to the underlying moral framework being deemed as more precious than material victory?
Unless by nihilism you mean something akin to Jewish mockery of solemnity - yet, I posit, that in truth is a reflection of perennial Christian atheism (per Tom Holland), their nihilistic proclivity to idol-smashing, Nation-destruction and indeed meaning-compromisation.
There could be another way altogether to view this useless buzz phrase - namely, apply it to the Germany, and not beyond. The Germany apparently pregnant with anti-Christian ideas of Lebensraum that horrified both the Anglo-French and the Russians. The Germany that would not last beyond 1945, and whose experience is wasted on the non-Asians swine.
Nietzsche's "death of God" essentially means the death of idealism and the descent of the world into a pure, gross materialism -- this is nihilism, where our actions have no spiritual connotations and no intrinsic meaning to them. We're all just human bugs floating on a ball in space in a cold, impersonal universe consuming until death, I guess. But underlying this comprehensive nihilism is, as Tom Holland argues, the retention of Christian ethics, morals, and values -- specifically, in the blind belief in human equality in all of its forms -- unmoored from the belief in a Christian God, which is an unstable situation.
Culture is not necessarily "idealist" - see the Jews and the Mongoloids, neither of whom seem to believe in a guaranteed afterlife (their contact with Christianity or Buddhism notwithstanding.