Five hundred years of abandoning our essence

Even the material advancement we've given ourselves is deteriorating as a result of our utter lack of humility, gratitude and understanding that we belong to a Creator

The story of the last half-millennium, with regard to Western civilization, has been that of the emergence of the untethered human being. For all the tribalism that characterizes the present moment, in reality, the modern person belongs to exactly nothing.

Each period within this time frame has simultaneously proved a blessing and a curse as the Western person has incrementally wrested himself away from any notion of the transcendent.

The Protestant Reformation made available new theological horizons, insights unconstrained by the parameters of Catholic doctrine. The direct relationship between the individual and God, with all the personal-level reckoning and redemption that entailed, supplanted the assumption that ritual and adherence to institutional obligations were the keys to being absolved for one’s transgressions. The Reformation paved the way for the Great Awakening, which imbued culture with a fervor that had far-reaching consequences. All of the American colonies’ original great universities were founded as Christian centers of learning, for instance.

What the Reformation set in motion, though, was the process of continual splintering, which moved Christianity ever further away from an identity as a unified bride of Christ. The lineage back to the Lord placing his hand on Peter’s shoulder became ever harder to trace.

The Enlightenment gave us Bacon’s empiricism, Descartes’s rationalism, the thoughts of Locke and Montesquieu on how government should be organized, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It gave us scientific academies and societies that birthed fields of theoretical inquiry into the natural world (chemistry, physics, biology) as well as applied modes (engineering). The pace of invention accelerated and didn’t slow down until quite recently.

On the other hand, it gave us Voltaire and Rousseau, who invited us to consider that holy scripture was not so sacrosanct after all, and that man in his natural state - that is, before being corrupted by the societies he organized - was innately good.

This latter strain of thought set the table for Romanticism, which, while practiced by some of the most gifted artists in history, espoused the primacy of individual experience and the feelings evoked by one’s engagement with the natural world. Part of that natural world is, of course, sex, and the Romantics, Shelly in particular, asserted that the constraints of marriage hampered an authentic experience of that realm of human interaction.

The unbridled inventiveness bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution, which made possible degrees of safety, comfort and convenience for much of humankind that had never been known. This was not universally enjoyed at first, though. Hordes of people eager for a life beyond agrarian servitude clustered in ever-larger cities, creating conditions of poor sanitation and a complete lack of the solitude for which the human soul yearns.

It also led to a perception among those masses flocking to urban hives that those employing them were somehow guarantors of their security and future prospects. The rise of the labor movement, while opening society’s eyes to undeniable instances of exploitation, led to an overall sense of diminished agency among what came to be called the blue-collar class. Generations passed along the worldview that obtaining a union card and hanging in there at an industrial facility until retirement, with its package of benefits, was the key to the best life one could expect.

Meanwhile, figures such as Marx, Nietzche, Freud and Dewey steered the preponderance of Western thought further away from consideration of a transcendent order. The sum total of their contributions was a sense that the human being was on his own when it came to ordering the world in a more favorable way. They mostly said that the effort would need to be made collectively as well.

In their wake came progressivism. Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson and the like perceived the necessity of an expert class that would orchestrate industrialized, urbanized society for the greatest good of the most people. This in turn spawned New Deal architects such as Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins who gave that notion concrete application.

The New Left sprang from a disillusionment so great that its major figures, such as William Appleman Williams and Eugene Genovese, saw no moral distinction worth making between what Marx had wrought in the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Vietnam, and what the above-mentioned thinkers had wrought in the United States and Western Europe.

Much artistic expression began to reflect this disillusionment as well. Granted, there was the warm humanity of Great-American-Songbook popular music, the razor-sharp wit of comedic stage productions, and family-and-patriotism-themed Hollywood fare, but much of literature and visual art presented a vision of a world being rapidly drained of meaning.

Then came the Great Upheaval.

A civil rights movement that forced American society to reckon with everyone’s full humanity regardless of race gave way, within a few short years, to militant rage and putting racial identity at the core of personhood.

Psychedelic drugs, fascination with Eastern perspectives on the essential questions of human existence, and dilution of those perspectives into yet another pop-consumerism trend, trivialized much of what was left in the way of interest in the matter of why we’re here.

Attention to addressing the side effects of industrialization’s boost of material advancement became, for the jaded and agitation-prone, grounds for declaring that advancement an assault on the natural world. To the radical environmentalist, it was a sin for which atonement meant reversing that advancement.

Now that marriage had largely been stripped of its status as a sacrament, feminism convinced society to look at it in terms of power dynamics. The world of paid work underwent vast changes as the whole notion that someone in a partnership needed to be principally responsible for fostering gamily cohesion and making the home a refuge for those who lived in it, and that this was generally best handled by a wife and mother, was rendered obsolete. Other realms of public life, such as politics, sports and even institutional religion, came to be shaped by these changes.

The notion that marriage could be defined in any way two people desiring to so conjoin themselves eventually led, as we know, to Obergefell v Hodges. The idea that a marriage brings together distinctly male and female energies, because that reflects the basic dual design of the human species, came to be seen as a quaint notion that could be done away with without consequence.

Another assumption that had been a given in human history - namely, that the female body was the instrument through which the next generation of the species was protected and nourished for the nine months of gestation, and that this was a sacred charge - was assailed with such rage that abortion came to be seen as a kind of liberation.

Another way of ensuring that this view was vanquished was to legitimize the belief that “gender identity” is a matter of choice, and has nothing to do with one’s DNA.

One of the essential means by which humankind has lifted itself out of a primitive state, language, has been mutilated into absurd gibberish. We now speak of pregnant people instead of women and people with penises instead of men. Dictionaries have been modified to reflect this. In some corners, one can get into trouble professionally, socially and even legally for refusing to comply with the new way of regarding language.

And so here we are, rapidly moving beyond polarization into a state of atomization, terminally bored, nagged by the sense that we’re no longer safe and no longer capable of joy, desperate for distraction, and unable to find any meaningful basis for prioritizing anything.

Those who say we’ve never had it so good have a point in a certain way. Few in the West are so destitute that they don’t enjoy air conditioning, cell phone technology and fast transportation.

What we’ve lost is far more important.

By virtue of thinking that we need nothing outside ourselves, we’re about to undo all the advancement we achieved while we still had some sense of being inhabitants of a universe we didn't make.