The meaning crisis: Meaning and decadence through the history of western civilization

Via Richard Tarnas's "The Passion of the Western Mind"

This is a post about the trends toward meaning or decadence throughout the history of western civilization.

In this context, meaning means western civilization offering a worldview to the people within it that provides a satisfactory explanation for man’s place in the world, a reason for his suffering (man can bear almost any suffering so long as it is perceived as meaningful) and a guide for living a fulfilling life.

Decadence means that society has lost discipline to achieve its values or has lost interest in the values themselves. Laws are not enforced, standards are lowered, difficult things are not attempted. There is a perceived decay in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, honor, discipline, or skill at governing among the members of the elite of a very large social structure. More importantly, decadence relates to the inability of a society to maintain a worldview which provides meaning which people need to function cohesively in the world. Decadence signifies a loss of faith in the existing paradigm. The most serious form of societal decadence is nihilism, where decay reaches a point that society believes that nothing has any inherent importance and that life lacks purpose. Decadence goes hand in hand with material success; the richer and more powerful a culture is, the more decadence follows.

I recently read Richard Tarnas’s 1991 book “The Passion of the Western Mind” which investigated these trends.  Passion became a bestseller, increased Tarnas’s stature and, according to Christopher Bache, it is "[w]idely regarded as one of the most discerning overviews of Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks to postmodern thought.” Joseph Campbell called it “the most lucid and concise presentation of Western thought. The writing is elegant and carries the reader with the momentum of a novel... A noble performance.”

Tarnas looks quite a bit like Jordan Peterson, unfortunately

This post will look at the fluctuations between meaning and decadence historically using Tarnas’s book as a guide.

Tarnas traces the development of philosophy from ancient Greece through the modern era, summarizing how man’s ideas about the world evolved over time.  Philosophers built on the work of those who came before them in an ongoing dialectical process, whereby competing ideas and internal contradictions within an era ultimately resulted in the production of a synthesis, a Kuhnian paradigm shift and a new perspective, which in turn resulted in new contradictions or “anomalies” of its own.  Knowingly or unknowingly, directly or circuitously, the impact of philosophers was to either reinforce the existing meaning paradigm, to weaken it leading to increased decadence, or, in rare situations, to push for new sources of meaning.

Since the complete victory of Catholicism by the 10th century AD, there has been an ever-increasing trend toward shedding its faith-based worldview in favor of reason — first with Scholasticism, then via the reintroduction of Aristotlean reason, followed by the increasing dominance of that reason over faith, then from attacks on the hierarchical structure of Catholicism via the Protestant Reformation, then from the supreme ascendancy of reason crystallized in the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, followed by philosophical attacks on the reliability and objectivity of our senses and our reasoning abilities (most notably by Kant) and to what extent we can even know anything real about the world. All of this has led to a ubiquitous nihilism after the “death of God” as prophesied by Nietzsche. There is only one thing we have held onto throughout these changes, gripped white knuckled for dear life: our belief in the egalitarian core values that permeate every aspect of society which intensify over time via the egalitarian ratchet effect. This is the final hurdle, the last thing that must be overcome, before society can be reborn…if it can be at such a late stage as civilization hurtles into the abyss.

With that said, let’s begin.

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Meaning at the beginning

Religion originally arose among hunter gatherers as a form of ancestor worship. Gods were a part of everyday life and they were just like humans, only more powerful, with their own personalities and whims. These religions were shamanistic in character in that they involved intense ceremonies led by charismatic, right-brain-dominant, chaotic practitioners who attempted to unite small groups of people in focused, high-energy, altered consciousness rites.

Hunter gatherer mythological narratives involved stories where everything has meaning, which served as a forum for action for how everyone should act in their own lives. Humans were generally well integrated between their thoughts and their instincts because they had naturally selected for this nomadic lifestyle for millions of years. Life was meaningful, and there was not an excess of food production that arose during the neolithic agricultural revolution which created the opportunity for inegalitarianism, the rise of non-productive elites who ruled with an iron fist, and ultimately decadence.

Peasant farmers in a neolithic grain field

In Greece in the eighth century BC spectacular myths arose:

The values expressed in the Homeric epics, composed around the eighth century B.C., continued to inspire successive generations of Greeks throughout antiquity, and the many figures of the Olympian pantheon, systematically delineated somewhat later in Hesiod’s Theogony, informed and pervaded the Greek cultural vision. In the various divinities and their powers lay a sense of the universe as an ordered whole, a cosmos rather than a chaos. The natural world and the human world were not distinguishable domains in the archaic Greek universe, for a single fundamental order structured both nature and society, and embodied the divine justice that empowered Zeus, the ruler of the gods. Although the universal order was especially represented in Zeus, even he was ultimately bound by an impersonal fate (moira) that governed all and that maintained a certain equilibrium of forces. The gods were indeed often capricious in their actions, with human destinies in the balance. Yet the whole cohered, and the forces of order prevailed over those of chaos—just as the Olympians led by Zeus had defeated the Giants in the primeval struggle for rulership of the world, and just as Odysseus after his long and perilous wanderings at last triumphantly achieved home….

Giulio Romano, The Gods of Olympus (c, 1635)

For both archaic poet and classical tragedian, the world of myth endowed human experience with an ennobling clarity of vision, a higher order that redeemed the wayward pathos of life. The universal gave comprehensibility to the concrete. If, in the tragic vision, character determined fate, yet both were mythically perceived. Compared with the Homeric epics, Athenian tragedy reflected a more conscious sense of the gods’ metaphorical significance and a more poignant appreciation of human self-awareness and suffering. Yet through profound suffering came profound learning, and the history and drama of human existence, for all its harsh conflict and wrenching contradiction, still held overarching purpose and meaning. The myths were the living body of that meaning, constituting a language that both reflected and illuminated the essential processes of life.¹

What followed these ancient myths included Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers who deepened the Hellenic understanding of the world. Plato came up with the idea of idealistic dualism which later so heavily influenced Christianity, while Aristotle’s dealt more with a scientific, materialistic understanding of the world which would later inform the scientific method. But both still saw the world in a classical framework.

The School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle represented in the center, by Raphael

When Rome conquered Greece it absorbed its culture. However, it could be argued that Greece actually conquered Rome because the Romans continued to operate within the Greek intellectual framework. The Romans copied the Greek masterpieces and brought them into the Latin language with Cicero, Virgil, Horace, and Livy, and the Greeks remained the leaders in philosophy, literature, science, art, and education. But Roman military expansion came at a cost to society:

Although nobility of character often evidenced itself in the turmoil of political life, the Roman ethos gradually lost its vitality. The very success of the empire’s inordinate military and commercial activity, divorced from deeper motivations, was weakening the fiber of the Roman citizenry. Most scientific activity, let alone genius, radically diminished in the empire soon after Galen and Ptolemy in the second century, and the excellence of Latin literature began to wane in the same period. Faith in human progress, so broadly visible in the cultural florescence of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and sporadically expressed, usually by scientists and technologists, in the Hellenistic age, virtually disappeared in the final centuries of the Roman Empire. Classical civilization’s finest hours were by then all in the past, and the various factors that brought on Rome’s fall—oppressive and rapacious government, overambitious generals, constant barbarian incursions, an aristocracy grown decadent and effete, religious crosscurrents undermining the imperial authority and military ethos, drastic sustained inflation, pestilential diseases, a dwindling population without resilience or focus—all contributed further to the apparent death of the Greek-inspired world.²

In other words, Roman success - its wealth and the pacifying luxury it afforded - led to decadence (especially for the upper class) and loss of meaning, reminiscent of the G. Michael Hopf quote, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Decline began in the first and second centuries BC, was interrupted by the short-lived ‘Restoration’ under the emperor Augustus (reign 27 BC – AD 14), then it resumed. In the process of decline, the Roman religion embraced emperor worship, the ‘oriental cults’ and Christianity as symptoms of that decline.

The famed historian Edward Gibbon argued, “...The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight." Gibbon thought that, in its quest for world dominion, Rome had created a situation that intensified despotism, loss of public freedom, and allowed the universal dominion of their Pax Romana to cause the deterioration of virtue. The Roman Empire included many different nations and cultures, and Rome assimilated them recklessly. The citizens of the world-empire "received the name without adopting the spirit of Romans". This led to what Gibbon saw as an obliteration of what it meant to be Roman.”

The Romans in their Decadence, French painting by Thomas Couture, 1847

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Reinvigorated meaning via Christianity

The success of Christianity, regardless of the questionable motivations of Paul of Tarsus, transformed society on a fundamental level. Instead of polytheistic Hellenic Gods who provided templates for how people could act in the world, themselves subject to a more unknowable Unmoved Mover, Christians inverted the Roman warrior values into priestly values valuing the ascetic ideal, an all-knowing God spying and judging your every move, turning believers against their baser instincts, providing incentives of Heaven/Hell, and demonstrating extreme intolerance of all other religions (as well as other Christian sects) except to an extent for Judaism.

Even though Gibbon believes that Christianity weakened and had a major role in destroying Rome by sapping its fighting spirit and esprit de corps, there is no doubt that the ascetic ideal prepared believers for hard living during the decline of Rome. It offered a comprehensive worldview which placed man at the center of the universe and gave him a reason for his suffering, removing the decadence felt from the height of Roman materialist success.

Tarnas explains Christianity’s turn inwards toward the ascetic ideal:

With the rise of Christianity, the already decadent state of science in the late Roman era received little encouragement for new developments....The world as a whole was understood simply and preeminently as God’s creation, and thus efforts at scientifically penetrating nature’s inherent logic no longer seemed necessary or appropriate. Its true logic was known to God, and what man could know of that logic was revealed in the Bible.…

The scriptural testaments were thus the final and unchanging repository of universal truth, and no subsequent human efforts were going to enhance or modify, let alone revolutionize, that absolute statement….Truth was therefore approached primarily not through self- determined intellectual inquiry, but through Scripture and prayer, and faith in the teachings of the Church, and only the hope of recovering that lost spiritual light motivated the Christian soul while detained in this body and this world. Only when man awakened from the present life would he attain true happiness. Death, as a spiritual liberation, was more highly valued than mundane existence. At best the concrete natural world was an imperfect reflection of and preparation for the higher spiritual kingdom to come. But more likely the mundane world, with its deceptive attractions, its spurious pleasures and debasing arousal of the passions, would pervert the soul and deprive it of its celestial reward. Hence all human intellectual and moral effort was properly directed toward the spiritual and the afterlife, away from the physical and this life. In all these ways, Platonism gave an emphatic philosophical justification to the potential spirit-matter dualism in Christianity.

Monks living the ascetic ideal

Christianity went from strength to strength against its Hellenic opposition and competing heresies such as the Arians and the various gnostic sects: from surviving the various Roman crackdowns, to growing the religion’s following, to the conversion of Constantine, to the Edict of Milan, the Council of Nicaea, the establishment of Constantinople, the conversion of Augustine and his Confessions and City of God, through the Frankish conversion under Clovis to Christianity, through the outlawing of Hellenism and the gradual disappearance of “pagans” until they were forgotten (along with their philosophy, engineering, architecture and and science), toward the end of the 1st millennium Catholicism stood alone, more or less unopposed throughout Europe. It’s paradigm was the paradigm of the West, and the prior Hellenist, polytheistic, tolerant warrior beliefs were nothing but a memory.

Visualization of the spread of Christianity.

Christianity provided meaning to man’s life regardless of its actual metaphysical validity:

Viewing now in retrospect the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its glory in the high Middle Ages—with virtually all of Europe Catholic, with the entire calendar of human history now numerically centered on the birth of Christ, with the Roman pontiff regnant over the spiritual and often the temporal as well, with the masses of the faithful permeated with Christian piety, with the magnificent Gothic cathedrals, the monasteries and abbeys, the scribes and scholars, the thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, the widespread care for the sick and poor, the sacramental rituals, the great feast days with their processions and festivals, the glorious religious art and Gregorian chant, the morality and miracle plays, the universality of the Latin language in liturgy and scholarship, the omnipresence of the Church and Christian religiosity in every sphere of human activity—all this can hardly fail to elicit a certain admiration for the magnitude of the Church’s success in establishing a universal Christian cultural matrix and fulfilling its earthly mission. And whatever Christianity’s actual metaphysical validity, the living continuity of Western civilized culture itself owed its existence to the vitality and pervasiveness of the Christian Church throughout medieval Europe.³

St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City

Just like other religions and ideologies throughout history, having opposition to fear (the Arians, the Hellenists, the gnostics) had kept Christianity energized and invigorated, just like the omnipresent specter of white nationalism (no matter how silly the perceived threat) keeps liberals vigorous in stamping out heresy in the modern era. Threats and heresies that could undermine the nascent order might be anywhere. But by the end of the 1st millennium there was no opposition to be seen: Catholicism had conquered everything and there were no credible threats (other than the Muslims) to stand against them. Without such threats Christianity descended into complacency. And it is that complacency which led, in turn, starting with the Scholastics and then with the fortuitous reintroduction of Aristotle’s works by the Muslims (given the Christians had burned or lost almost all of it over the centuries) which began the assault on the Christian worldview.

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The slow-moving assault on the Christian belief system

The rediscovery of Aristotle was probably the most impactful find in post-Roman Western history. It massively influenced the Church’s approach toward reason which had already begun shifting under the Scholastics:

In this unprecedented context of Church-sponsored learning, and under the impact of the larger forces invigorating the cultural emergence of the West, the stage was set for a radical shift in the philosophical underpinnings of the Christian outlook: Within the womb of the medieval Church, the world-denying Christian philosophy forged by Augustine and based on Plato began giving way to a fundamentally different approach to existence, as the Scholastics in effect recapitulated the movement from Plato to Aristotle in their own intellectual evolution.

That shift was sparked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the West’s rediscovery of a large corpus of Aristotle’s writings, preserved by the Moslems and Byzantines and now translated into Latin. With these texts, which included the Metaphysics, the Physics, and De Anima (On the Soul), came not only learned Arabic commentaries, but also other works of Greek science, notably those of Ptolemy. Medieval Europe’s sudden encounter with a sophisticated scientific cosmology, encyclopedic in breadth and intricately coherent, was dazzling to a culture that had been largely ignorant of these writings and ideas for centuries. Yet Aristotle had such extraordinary impact precisely because that culture was so well prepared to recognize the quality of his achievement. His masterly summation of scientific knowledge, his codification of the rules for logical discourse, and his confidence in the power of the human intelligence were all exactly concordant with the new tendencies of rationalism and naturalism growing in the medieval West….

Islamic portrayal of Aristotle, c. 1220

The use of reason to examine and defend articles of faith, already exploited in the eleventh century by Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, and the discipline of logic in particular, championed by the fiery twelfth-century dialectician Abelard, now rapidly ascended in both educational popularity and theological importance…medieval thinkers became increasingly preoccupied with the possible plurality of truth, with debate between competing arguments, and with the growing power of human reason for discerning correct doctrine. It is not that Christian truths were called into question; rather, they were now subject to analysis. As Anselm stated, “It seems to me a case of negligence if, after becoming firm in our faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe.”⁴

Thomas Aquinas furthered the influence of Aristotlean reason on Catholic thinking:

The extraordinary impact Aquinas had on Western thought lay especially in his conviction that the judicious exercise of man’s empirical and rational intelligence, which had been developed and empowered by the Greeks, could now marvelously serve the Christian cause….Faith transcended reason, but was not opposed by it; indeed, they enriched each other. Rather than view the workings of secular reason as a threatening antithesis to the truths of religious faith, Aquinas was convinced that ultimately the two could not be in conflict and that their plurality would therefore serve a deeper unity. Aquinas thereby fulfilled the challenge of dialectic posed by the earlier Scholastic Abelard, and in so doing opened himself to the influx of the Hellenic intellect.⁵

But was this a good thing? Secularism and materialism arising within the Catholic church led to increasing decadence and disillusionment:

In the high Middle Ages, the Christian world view was still beyond question. The status of the institutional Church, however, had become considerably more controversial. Having consolidated its authority in Europe after the tenth century, the Roman papacy had gradually assumed a role of immense political influence in the affairs of Christian nations. By the thirteenth century, the Church’s powers were extraordinary, with the papacy actively intervening in matters of state throughout Europe, and with enormous revenues being reaped from the faithful to support the growing magnificence of the papal court and its huge bureaucracy. By the early fourteenth century the results of such worldy success were both clear and unsettling. Christianity had become powerful but compromised.

The Church hierarchy was visibly prone to financial and political motivation. The pope’s temporal sovereignty over the Papal States in Italy involved it in political and military maneuverings that repeatedly complicated the Church’s spiritual self-understanding. Moreover, the Church’s extravagant financial needs were placing constantly augmented demands on the masses of devout Christians. Perhaps worst of all, the secularism and evident corruption of the papacy were causing it to lose, in the eyes of the faithful, its spiritual integrity… The very success of the Church’s striving for cultural hegemony, at first spiritually motivated, was now undermining its religious foundations.⁶

Pandora’s box had been opened:

On the one hand, the Church was supporting the whole academic enterprise in the universities, where Christian doctrine was explicated with unprecedentedly rigorous logical method and increasingly greater scope. On the other hand, it attempted to keep that enterprise under control, either by condemnation and suppression, or by giving doctrinal status to certain innovations such as those of Aquinas—as if to say, “This far and no further.” But within this ambivalent atmosphere, the Scholastic inquiry went on, with increasingly weighty implications.

The Church had largely accepted Aristotle. But the culture’s new interest in Aristotle did not stop with the study of his writings, for that interest signified a broader, and ever-broadening, interest in the natural world and a growing confidence in the power of human reason….This new focus on direct experience and reasoning was beginning to undermine the Church’s exclusive investment in the authoritativeness of the ancient texts—now Aristotelian as well as biblical and patristic. Aristotle was being questioned on his own terms, in specifics if not in overall authority. Some of his principles were compared with experience and found lacking, logical fallacies in his proofs were pinpointed, and the corpus of his works was subjected to minute examination.⁷

Technological innovation during the Renaissance undermined role of Catholic church further:

As with the medieval cultural revolution several centuries earlier, technical inventions played a pivotal role in the making of the new era. Four in particular (all with Oriental precursors) had been brought into widespread use in the West by this time, with immense cultural ramifications: the magnetic compass, which permitted the navigational feats that opened the globe to European exploration; gunpowder, which contributed to the demise of the old feudal order and the ascent of nationalism; the mechanical clock, which brought about a decisive change in the human relationship to time, nature, and work, separating and freeing the structure of human activities from the dominance of nature’s rhythms; and the printing press, which produced a tremendous increase in learning, made available both ancient classics and modern works to an ever-broadening public, and eroded the monopoly on learning long held by the clergy.

All of these inventions were powerfully modernizing and ultimately secularizing in their effects. The artillery-supported rise of separate but internally cohesive nation-states signified not only the overthrow of the medieval feudal structures but also the empowerment of secular forces against the Catholic Church. With parallel effect in the realm of thought, the printing press allowed the rapid dissemination of new and often revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. Without it, the Reformation would have been limited to a relatively minor theological dispute in a remote German province, and the Scientific Revolution, with its dependence on international communication among many scientists, would have been altogether impossible. Moreover, the spread of the printed word and growing literacy contributed to a new cultural ethos marked by increasingly individual and private, noncommunal forms of communication and experience, thereby encouraging the growth of individualism. Silent reading and solitary reflection helped free the individual from traditional ways of thinking, and from collective control of thinking, with individual readers now having private access to a multiplicity of other perspectives and forms of experience.⁸

The widespread sale of indulgences was one of the causes of the Reformation

The Protestant Reformation led to more secularism, even though it was a reaction against the decadence of the Catholic Church:

Here we encounter the other extraordinary paradox of the Reformation. For while its essential character was so intensely and unambiguously religious, its ultimate effects on Western culture were profoundly secularizing, and in multiple, mutually reinforcing ways. By overthrowing the theological authority of the Catholic Church, the internationally recognized supreme court of religious dogma, the Reformation opened the way in the West for religious pluralism, then religious skepticism, and finally a complete breakdown in the until then relatively homogeneous Christian world view….The immediate consequence of the liberation from the old matrix was a manifest liberation of fervent Christian religiosity, permeating the lives of the new Protestant congregations with fresh spiritual meaning and charismatic power. Yet as time passed, the average Protestant, no longer enclosed by the Catholic womb of grand ceremony, historical tradition, and sacramental authority, was left somewhat less protected against the vagaries of private doubt and secular thinking. From Luther on, each believer’s belief was increasingly self-supported; and the Western intellect’s critical faculties were becoming ever more acute….

By disenchanting the world of immanent divinity, completing the process initiated by Christianity’s destruction of pagan animism, the Reformation better allowed for its radical revision by modern science. The way was then clear for an increasingly naturalistic view of the cosmos, moving first to the remote rationalist Creator of Deism, and finally to secular agnosticism’s elimination of any supernatural reality.⁹

Even as the West became secular, though, its ethics and metaphysics remained thoroughly Christian:

The West had “lost its faith”—and found a new one, in science and in man. But paradoxically, much of the Christian world view found continued life, albeit in often unrecognized forms, in the West’s new secular outlook. Just as the evolving Christian understanding did not fully divorce itself from its Hellenic predecessor but, on the contrary, employed and integrated many of the latter’s essential elements, so too did the modern secular world view— often less consciously—retain essential elements from Christianity. The Christian ethical values and the Scholastic-developed faith in human reason and in the intelligibility of the empirical universe were conspicuous among these, but even as fundamentalist a Judaeo-Christian doctrine as the command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature found modern affirmation, often explicit as in Bacon and Descartes, in the advances of science and technology. So too did the Judaeo-Christian high regard for the individual soul, endowed with “sacred” inalienable rights and intrinsic dignity, continue in the secular humanist ideals of modern liberalism—as did other themes such as the moral self-responsibility of the individual, the tension between the ethical and the political, the imperative to care for the helpless and less fortunate, and the ultimate unity of mankind. The West’s belief in itself as the most historically significant and favored culture echoed the Judaeo-Christian theme of the Chosen People. The global expansion of Western culture as the best and most appropriate for all mankind represented a secular continuation of the Roman Catholic Church’s self-concept as the one universal Church for all humanity. Modern civilization now replaced Christianity as the cultural norm and ideal with which all other societies were to be compared, and to which they were to be converted. Just as Christianity had, in the process of overcoming and succeeding the Roman Empire, become Roman itself in the centralized, hierarchical, and politically motivated Roman Catholic Church, so too did the modern secular West, in the process of overcoming and succeeding Christianity and the Catholic Church, incorporate and unconsciously continue many of the latter’s characteristic approaches to the world.

But perhaps the most pervasive and specifically Judaeo-Christian component tacitly retained in the modern world view was the belief in man’s linear historical progress toward ultimate fulfillment. Modern man’s self-understanding was emphatically teleological, with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a darker past characterized by ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression, and toward a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom. The faith in that movement was based largely on an underlying trust in the salvational effect of expanding human knowledge: Humanity’s future fulfillment would be achieved in a world reconstructed by science. The original Judaeo-Christian eschatological expectation had here been transformed into a secular faith. The religious faith in God’s eventual salvation of mankind—whether Israel’s arrival in the Promised Land, the Church’s arrival at the millennium, the Holy Spirit’s progressive perfecting of humanity, or the Second Coming of Christ—now became an evolutionary confidence, or revolutionary belief, in an eventual this-worldly utopia whose realization would be expedited by the expert application of human reason to nature and society.¹⁰

That secular western society retained the underlying values of Christianity even as it discarded the religion itself is exactly the point that Tom Holland made in Dominion, where he argues that no philosopher until Nietzsche understood the assumptions that went into choosing society’s core values, and that the French Revolution, the communist revolution, secular liberalism, and atheism are all mere continuations and amplifications of the underlying Christian principles. Only the Nazis tried, but failed, to transvalue the West’s core priestly egalitarianism back into inegalitarian warrior values.

Tom Holland explaining that all the major secular revolutions within the west prior to Nazism were merely extensions of underlying Christians values and metaphysics.

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The descent into nihilism

In the modern era idealist metaphysics no longer commanded widespread acceptance because its ideas were not empirically testable, and therefore society focused on materialism. This intense focus on materialism has led to widespread environmental destruction and an unsustainable quality of life:

But compounding these humanistic critiques were more disturbingly concrete signs of science’s untoward consequences. The critical contamination of the planet’s water, air, and soil, the manifold harmful effects on animal and plant life, the extinction of innumerable species, the deforestation of the globe, the erosion of topsoil, the depletion of groundwater, the vast accumulation of toxic wastes, the apparent exacerbation of the greenhouse effect, the breakdown of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, the radical disruption of the entire planetary ecosystem— all these emerged as direly serious problems with increasing force and complexity. From even a short-term human perspective, the accelerating depletion of irreplaceable natural resources had become an alarming phenomenon. Dependence on foreign supplies of vital resources brought a new precariousness into global political and economic life. New banes and stresses to the social fabric continued to appear, directly or indirectly tied to the advance of a scientific civilization—urban overdevelopment and overcrowding, cultural and social rootlessness, numbingly mechanical labor, increasingly disastrous industrial accidents, automobile and air travel fatalities, cancer and heart disease, alcoholism and drug addiction, mind- dulling and culture-impoverishing television, growing levels of crime, violence, and psychopathology. Even science’s most cherished successes paradoxically entailed new and pressing problems, as when the medical relief of human illness and lowering of mortality rates, combined with technological strides in food production and transportation, in turn exacerbated the threat of global overpopulation. In other cases, the advance of science presented new Faustian dilemmas, as in those surrounding the unforeseeable future uses of genetic engineering. More generally, the scientifically unfathomed complexity of all relevant variables—whether in global or local environments, in social systems, or in the human body— made the consequences of technological manipulation of those variables unpredictable and often pernicious.¹¹

I covered similar themes in my discussion about the sad corruption of the environmental movement.

An increasing world of trash and junk, leaving the world a ruin for future generations

So what we have seen is the faith of the Christian worldview slowly giving way to a scientific materialism that accelerated into both decadence and nihilism. Tarnas comments on the rise of the impersonal technocratic society:

As the twentieth century advanced, modern consciousness found itself caught up in an intensely contradictory process of simultaneous expansion and contraction. Extraordinary intellectual and psychological sophistication was accompanied by a debilitating sense of anomie and malaise. An unprecedented broadening of horizons and exposure to the experience of others coincided with a private alienation of no less extreme proportions. A stupendous quantity of information had become available about all aspects of life - the contemporary world, the historical past, other cultures, other forms of life, the subatomic world, the macrocosm, the human mind and psyche - yet there was also less ordering vision, less coherence and comprehension, less certainty. The great overriding impulse defining Western man since the Renaissance - the quest for independence, self-determination, and individualism - had indeed brought those ideals to reality in many lives; yet it had also been eventuated in a world where individual spontaneity and freedom were increasingly smothered, not just in theory by a reductionist scientism, but in practice by the ubiquitous collectivity and conformism of mass societies. The great revolutionary political projects of the modern era, heralding personal and social liberation, had gradually led to conditions in which the modern individual’s fate was ever more dominated by bureaucratic commercial and political superstructures. Just as man had become a meaningless speck in the modern universe, so had individual persons become insignificant ciphers in modern states, to be manipulated or coerced by the millions.

The quality of modern life seemed ever equivocal. Spectacular empowerment was countered by a widespread sense of anxious helplessness. Profound moral and aesthetic sensitivity confronted horrific cruelty and waste. The price of technology’s accelerating advance grew ever higher. And in the background of every pleasure and every achievement loomed humanity’s unprecedented vulnerability. Under the West’s direction and impetus, modern man had burst forward and outward, with tremendous centrifugal force, complexity, variety, and speed. And yet it appeared he had driven himself into a terrestrial nightmare and a spiritual wasteland, a fierce constriction, a seemingly irresolvable predicament…

The anguish and alienation of twentieth-century life were brought to full articulation as the existentialist addressed the most fundamental, naked concerns of human existence—suffering and death, loneliness and dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness and ontological insecurity, the void of absolute values or universal contexts, the sense of cosmic absurdity, the frailty of human reason, the tragic impasse of the human condition. Man was condemned to be free. He faced the necessity of choice and thus knew the continual burden of error. He lived in constant ignorance of his future, thrown into a finite existence bounded at each end by nothingness. The infinity of human aspiration was defeated before the finitude of human possibility. Man possessed no determining essence: only his existence was given, an existence engulfed by mortality, risk, fear, ennui, contradiction, uncertainty. No transcendent Absolute guaranteed the fulfillment of human life or history. There was no eternal design or providential purpose. Things existed simply because they existed, and not for some “higher” or “deeper” reason. God was dead, and the universe was blind to human concerns, devoid of meaning or purpose. Man was abandoned, on his own. All was contingent. To be authentic one had to admit, and choose freely to encounter, the stark reality of life’s meaninglessness. Struggle alone gave meaning.¹²

The comparison of the human impulse to live a life of meaning with modern society’s explanation of the universe as a cold, impersonal force devoid of meaning, ultimately creates spiritual conditions akin to schizophrenia in the modern man:

We have the post-Copernican dilemma of being a peripheral and insignificant inhabitant of a vast cosmos, and the post­-Cartesian dilemma of being a conscious, purposeful, and personal subject confronting an unconscious, purposeless, and impersonal universe, with these compounded by the post­-Kantian dilemma of there being no possible means by which the human subject can know the universe in its essence. We are evolved from, embedded in, and defined by a reality that is radically alien to our own, and moreover cannot ever be directly contacted in cognition.

This double bind of modern consciousness has been recognized in one form or another since at least Pascal: "I am terrified by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces." Our psychological and spiritual predispositions are absurdly at variance with the world revealed by our scientific method. We seem to receive two messages from our existential situation: on the one hand, strive, give oneself to the quest for meaning and spiritual fulfillment; but on the other hand, know that the universe, of whose substance we are derived, is entirely indifferent to that quest, soulless in character, and nullifying in its effects. We are at once aroused and crushed. For inexplicably, absurdly, the cosmos is inhuman, yet we are not. The situation is profoundly unintelligible.¹³

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Concluding thoughts

We currently live in an era of ubiquitous nihilism; no meaning at all, an all-encompassing decadence everywhere one looks. Meanwhile, via the egalitarian ratchet effect, the parabolic rush toward enforcing total equality of outcome via white erasure continues apace. Natural resources are being vigorously consumed as the worldwide population gallops toward an unsustainable 10+ billion population, while the world also drowns in Rothschild created central bank debt slavery. Oligarchy rules everything, populist leaders have elections stolen from them and then thrown into prison on nonsensical charges, there is no freedom of speech and no freedom of association, spying on everyone is ubiquitous, mainstream media lies are unrelenting and nonstop, and everything careens down to the lowest common denominator. According to

2nd Smartest Guy in the World

American suicides are at an all-time high. The lack of meaning provided by this era is Hell, despite its unprecedented levels of material prosperity.

One can argue that that the doctrine of materialism is using idealism itself as fuel for its continued propagation, turning humanity into unthinking automatons without any dignity, independence, creativity or uniqueness to benefit the Machine. But this materialist philosophy undermines itself as it consumes and destroys the world’s limited natural resources; how can materialism continue long-term without the cheap propagation of goods? After all the joy and spontaneity is sucked out of life, perhaps the whole enterprise just collapses, either from the central banker’s depopulation agenda, from a natural resource crisis, or otherwise. Perhaps humanity goes extinct. Or perhaps, like Rome when it was subsumed by decadence and lack of meaning before the rise a new Christian paradigm, there is an opportunity for a new paradigm shift toward a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism into something different…

Here’s a crude chart, “Meaning Through the Ages”, documenting the story told in this post:

Any worldview that successfully combats nihilism will likely have a very different expression with very different values from the ubiquitous secular egalitarianism we all experience, in whatever form it ultimately manifests.

Let us hope that we can develop the wisdom, experience, and luck to discover and birth a worldview which brings forth a perspective full of meaning and hope for mankind, of life-enhancement and soul complexity, and leave this nihilist, materialist, soul-deadening world of short-sighted death, trash and blind, one-track money-chasing behind.

1. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, 17.

2. Ibid, 88.

3. Ibid, 169.

4. Ibid, 176.

5. Ibid, 188.

6. Ibid, 196.

7. Ibid, 200.

8. Ibid, 225.

9. Ibid, 240.

10. Ibid, 321.

11. Ibid, 363.

12. Ibid, 389.

13. Ibid, 419.