"The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free,
as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an 'age of reason' was always really
just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as
the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual
infancy of 'irrational' belief.
But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense
that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed
to 'my truth' than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead.
The myth of 'enlightenment' served well to liberate us from any antique notions
of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills;
but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric.
And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human
liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant.
Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer
really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of
responsible rationality.
Freedom -- conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will --
is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth...
...It is, at the very least, instructive to realize that our freedom might just as well
be seen -- from certain more antique perspectives -- as a kind of slavery:
to untutored impulses, to empty caprice, to triviality, to dehumanizing values.
And it can do no harm occasionally to ask where a concept of freedom whose horizon
is precisely and necessarily nothing -- a concept that is, as I have said, nihilist in
the most exact sense -- ultimately leads.
This is not a question, I would add, simply for the conservative moralist, pining
nostalgically for some vanished epoch of decency or standards, but a question
that should concern anyone with any consciousness of history.
Part of the enthralling promise of an age of reason was, at least at first, the prospect
of a genuinely rational ethics, not bound to the local or tribal customs of this people
or that, not limited to the moral precepts of any particular creed, but available to all
reasoning minds regardless of culture and -- when recognized -- immediately compelling
to the rational will. Was there ever a more desperate fantasy than this?
We live now in the wake of the most monstrously violent century in human history,
during which the secular order (on both the political right and the political left),
freed from the authority of religion, showed itself willing to kill on an unprecedented
scale and with an ease of conscience worse than merely depraved.
If ever an age deserved to be thought of as an age of darkness, it is surely ours...
...Either human reason reflects an objective order of divine truth, which awakens the will
to its deepest purposes and commands its assent, or reason is merely the instrument and
servant of the will, which is under no ultimate obligation to choose the path of mercy,
or of 'rational self-interest', or of sympathy, or of peace.
When Nietzsche -- the most prescient philosopher of nihilism -- pondered the possibilities
that has opened up for Western humanity in the age of unbelief, the grimmest future he could
imagine was a world dominated by the 'Last Men', a race of empty and self-adoring
narcissists sunk in banality, complacency, conformity, cynicism, and self-admiration.
For him, the gravest danger of confronting a nihilist culture was the absence of any
great aspirations that could prompt humanity to glorious works and mighty deeds.
There is much to be said for Nietzsche's prophetic gifts, certainly; contemporary culture
does after all seem so to excel as depressing mediocrity and comfortable conventionality,
egoistic preciosity and mass idiocy.
But, honestly, Nietzsche's fears seem almost quaint now, given how much more nihilistic
we know a truly earnest nihilism can be.
Christian society certainly never fully purged itself of cruelty or violence; but it also
never incubated evils comparable in ambition, range, systematic precision, or mercilessness
to death camps, gulags, forced famines, or the extravagant brutality of modern warfare.
Looking back at the twentieth century, it is difficult not to conclude that the rise of modernity
has resulted in an age of at once unparalleled banality and unprecedented monstrosity,
and that these are two sides of the same cultural reality.
And why should this not be so?
If the quintessential myth of modernity is that true freedom is the power of the will
over nature -- human or cosmic -- and that we are at liberty to make ourselves what
we wish to be, then it is not necessarily the case that the will of the individual should
be privileged over the 'will of the species'...
...This is why it is correct to say that the sheer ruthlessness of so much of post-Christian
social idealism in some sense arises from the very same concept of freedom that lies
at the heart of our most precious modern values.
The savagery of triumphant Jacobinism, the clinical heartlessness of classical
socialist eugenics, the Nazi movement, Stalinism -- all the grant utopian projects
of the modern age that have directly or indirectly spilled such oceans of human blood --
are no less results of the Enlightenment myth of liberation than are the liberal
democratic state or the vulgarity of late capitalist consumerism or the pettiness of
bourgeois individualism.
The most pitilessly and self-righteously violent regimes of modern history --
in the West or in those other quarters of the world contaminated by our worst ideas --
have been those that have explicitly cast off the Christian vision of reality and sought
to replace it with a more 'human' set of values.
No cause in history -- no religion or imperial ambition or military adventure --
has destroyed more lives with more confident enthusiasm than the cause of the
'brotherhood of man', the postreligious utopia, or the progress of the race."
- David Bentley Hart 'Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies'
(emphases mine)
Agree with the man or not, he most certainly has a persuasive way with words.
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