Is the World Coming to an End?

This blog will not contain a lot of photos. If you get bored, stop reading and go play a computer game. You will be proving the point of the article.

Endarkenment (This is a link.)

>>Here’s my slightly truncated (whittled down) edition of David Strom’s article, which you can read in its entirety on this link: https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/10/29/the-endarkenment-n3796436

“The Endarkenment is the natural end of the Enlightenment, which sparked the creation of the modern world.”

     >>Over the last two centuries, philosophers have been moving further and further away from the reality of God, replacing Him with human logic and physical things and pleasures. At the same time, science expanded radically, along with individual rights, thus replacing Christianity (which no longer has a clear definition) with science as an absolute.
      >>Along the way, a few voices have questioned this “progressive” change in the Western world, but nobody could see the ultimate result. The clearest statement of what true Enlightenment stood for was Nietzsche (google him if you don’t know who he was). He called for the death of God and added that the humbleness of Jesus was completely opposed to the pride of man. This didn’t really get rid of the idea of God. It just turned humans into their own god(s), and removed any external meaning for humans. It was no longer that I exist because God created me, but I exist because I exist. The ultimate triumph of humanity was to become God, but they never managed to overcome their one main obstacle to building a super-human world. Everybody kept dying.

Strom continues: “Asked whether she could provide a definition of the word ‘woman,’ Ketanji Brown Jackson, Supreme Court nominee, magna cum laude at Harvard and graduate of Harvard Law, seemed perplexed: ‘I’m not a biologist,’ she observed. Yet we are told by Jeremi Carswell, a specialist in the field, that children know perfectly well which of many genders they wish to grow up to be ‘from the moment that they have any ability to express themselves.’”

“During the 2020 pandemic, because of safety concerns, San Francisco took draconian measures to keep adults apart and children out of school, even as it promoted and protected the use of dangerous drugs by a large homeless population. That year, 257 San Franciscans died from the virus, while the number of overdose deaths climbed to 697.”

“In May 2024, former president Donald Trump was convicted in a Manhattan courtroom of a crime most Americans would be hard-pressed to describe. Three months earlier, a special prosecutor found that Joe Biden had mishandled classified documents but refused to bring charges because the sitting president of the United States was ‘an elderly man with a poor memory.’”

“These recent episodes are symptoms of a mass decline in America into unreason—bordering, at times, on a psychotic breakdown. Strange fantasies have overwhelmed reality: it’s an age of delusion, impossible longings, and ritual self-mutilation. The causes are many and complex, but the syndrome deserves a name. I’m going to call it the “Endarkenment” because it rises, like an accusing specter, out of the corpse of the fallen Enlightenment.”

“The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.”

     >>Strom's next sentence sums up most of the problem. Most, but not all.

“At the root of the Endarkenment is the search for meaning in a world stripped of it. As hyperrationalism rejected the Divine and replaced it with sheer materialism, the purpose of life became pleasure and self-realization.”

Strom continues: “America became the most prosperous and powerful country in the world, I would argue, because we were simultaneously the best exemplar of Enlightenment values and also the most religious country in The West. Religion hung on here in America longer than anywhere in Western Europe, and a sense of higher purpose still drove America. We went to the moon--an achievement of scientific rationalism, and when we got there, our astronauts read Genesis.”

     >>Another revealing paragraph about humanity’s blindness to its own wrong thinking.

“From the pinnacle of government to the youngest generation—the Zoomers—the same existential confusion prevails.”

     >>This is a summary statement.

“Materially, the Zoomers are a privileged cohort. They benefit from more education and higher income than preceding generations.”

>>They didn’t have to work for it.

“Emotionally and spiritually, however, their lives are parched of meaning and oppressed by fear of the dark.”

     >>This comes from not having to work for their education and income.

“According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Zoomers suffer from unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide.”

>>Even though they have more than any previous generation. Literature from every culture in every century has bemoaned this paradox of great riches accompanied by abject unhappiness. Solution?

“Haidt blames the cell phone and social media. I would add: and the emptiness, too—the lack of anything else.”

   >>Blaming physical objects and a type of social interaction for human choices.  When humanity had no cell phones and chat rooms, were they happier? Nope. Strom’s view that emptiness causes such unhappiness doesn’t answer the question of why are people empty? Strom would say, that they need the “Divine,” but is that vague concept enough?

“The digital world, with its subjectivist distortions, has become God and religion for the Zoomers, their source of identity and measure of self-worth. It’s a generation imprisoned in a house of mirrors.”

     >>Yes, the source of identity. However, when the “Divine” is based on a religion that is based on a culture, that doesn’t being world peace. It will being some form of group unity, but that is never a guarantee of internal peace and internal happiness. Group unity might prevent wars within the group, but people within these groups still experience massive unhappiness in their lives. Why? Because they don’t like the relationships that have been forced on them. Because they aren’t wealthy enough. Because others have more than they do. Because nobody listens to them, and they wish they had more power. And they are unhappy in their sex lives. Yes, the source of identity. Religious people can still be empty, feeling alone and that something is missing inside of them. Loneliness kills people more than being alone.

     >>Jesus had a lot to say about a person’s identity.

“Fevered attempts to break out have only led deeper into the maze. Young gays and transsexuals, for example, have been, after the October 7 terrorist massacres in Israel, among the fiercest defenders of Hamas—an Islamist movement that condemns their behavior as a capital crime. ‘Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,’ warned a Zoomer of uncertain gender at Columbia University’s anti-Israel protests. That chilling mix of self-righteousness and verbal threat is the starting point of Endarkenment politics.”

“We live in a world where there is no difference between imagination and reality. You and I may see men and women because, well, we come into the world that way and our basic identities are determined by forces outside our control. Like it or not, you are male or female, have certain genetic traits, and live in a world where physical laws rule.”

“In the world of the Endarkenment, a Supreme Court Justice cannot define a term as simple as ‘woman.’ People even get to determine their species, not because their species really changes, but because reality is a thing of the mind and the will alone.”

“Totalitarian movements in the 20th century were one response to the perceived meaninglessness of the world; the transnationalist response is a technocracy in which meaning is determined by the benevolent tyrants in Brussels and Washington. One version is the hard totalitarian version, the other is soft totalitarianism. Both are the Endarkenment.“

>>I’m going to add a specific detail to this next paragraph.

“In my view, it was Kant who first exposed the essential emptiness of the scientific project. Don't get me wrong: science is GREAT! I love it. But without some version of the Divine attached to it, it corrodes all meaning from life. What makes a life worth living is meaning, not sybaritic pleasure-seeking )a person who is self-indulgent and wants more sex), but without the Divine most human beings become sybarites. Go to a Pride parade and see what I mean, or watch the Harris campaign go after the porn vote.”

     >>Here’s my detail. According to the Bible, God is constantly trying doing good things for people in His desire to draw to Himself those who reject Him or those who haven’t found Him yet. Take a look at Acts 14:17 and Psalm 145:8-9. He gives good things to people who have no interest in Him, because He wants them to develop an interest in Him. Also, God built into His creation the principle that good produces good and evil produces evil. A culture that attempts to promote a high code of morality will prosper and succeed far more than one that promotes murder and adultery.

     >>So I agree with Strom’s comment that humanity needs to recognize some form of Divine in the universe. However, most humans don’t want God, and many who do, only want His benefits. Richard Dawkins is an avowed atheist and rejects the message of the Gospel, but he wants the culture to remain ‘Christian.’
      >>I need to add one missing ingredient. Every religion believes in the Divine. And some of those religions are violent and intolerant of even the smallest deviation from their own beliefs. And all of them, except one, are founded on “good deeds” to please their god(s). Their problem is that they can’t clearly define what “good deeds” look like, nor can they define how many good deeds are enough to enter the next life and land in utopia.

     >>Strom’s solution is focused on making this world better. Jesus, however, didn’t die to make this world better. He died and rose from the dead to save individuals. Not systems, not governments, not schools (even Christian ones), not churches (good, bad or indifferent). He died for individuals. Why? Because Jesus is setting up His own kingdom, and it won’t incorporate humans inventions of government, secular, religious or whatever.

     >>So the solution is simple. People who believe that Jesus died for their sins and rose from the dead, and who confess their sins to Jesus and ask Him to forgive them, and then choose to love Jesus for what He has done, THOSE people will make it into the NEXT existence: living eternally with Jesus in an existence with no more sin and everything that results from sin: hate, insanity, war, crime, immorality, pride. The list is at least not endless.

     >>Bringing in the Divine into society will indeed give people meaning external to themselves, and this should hinder or slow down humanity’s demise into “Endarkenment,” but even religions fight with each other.

     >>The real solution: Evangelism. You can start by reading through the process on this website: Evangelism for Beginners

Strom continues his tirade:
“Criticism was unrelenting because the gaze of science is total: no exceptions are tolerated, no waivers issued for angels in the great beyond.”

“The Old World was enchanted. Meaning flowed from heaven to earth. Social structures reinforced the linkage: religion, class, guild, family, village, and neighborhood—all inserted the individual into communal arrangements rich in memory and certainty.”

“But these were precisely the bastions of conservatism that liberal thinkers and statesmen undertook to tear down. By the mid-nineteenth century, the disruption of traditional forms had attained escape velocity. Listen to Marx in 1848: ‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’”

“Liberalism sought to solve the problem of meaning by privatizing it. Individuals were free to believe whatever they wished, so long as it remained within the law. [But then they began changing the laws!] But this could only be a provisional expedient. The massive weight of the culture pressed against traditional sources of shared meaning, grinding them down. One was free to believe that the sun orbited the earth, but not if one wished to be taken seriously. The same became true of Christianity and religion in general. To be enlightened—or “modern”—came to mean disenchantment, skepticism, the impossibility of settled belief. Marx’s “fast-frozen relations” had aroused powerful feelings of belonging; for these, liberalism substituted the cold scalpel of the statistician and the bureaucrat.”

Having severed all connection to the absolute, the entire project seemed to hang, magically, in midair. Liberalism made claims to universality—but on what basis? Most liberal ideals, like humanism, were secularized versions of Christian virtues—how could they survive the repudiation of the original? As Darwinian organisms in an indifferent universe, what, other than discredited custom, stood in the way of a “revaluation of all values” that would exalt the superior predator—the “blond beast”? Such questions, central to those like Marx and Nietzsche, who detested the system, somehow wound up elided in the mainstream of liberal thought. We look in vain in the many pages of John Stuart Mill for a moment of anguish over the matter. A curious lack of self-awareness clouded the critical enterprise.

The descent into solipsism (the self is all that can be known to exist) was inevitable once we discarded God from the core of our society. This is, of course, not proof of the existence of God, but sure is proof that the lack of belief in God leads people to very dark places. That is why Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist, is appalled at the descent of the West into a muddled mass of pleasure seekers helpless to defend itself against barbarians whose sense of meaning--however twisted--is rooted in the Divine. 

Unlike Bastani (the tweet's author above), I don't find Dawkins' reaching back to Christian values bizarre. He recognizes that all that made the West truly great--our art, our literature, our embrace of human rights, and our striving to build a better world--was rooted in Christianity. Without Christianity, the West is a spiritual void in which great technology is used to create high-tech sex toys that get reviewed in the New York Times. 

The advance of liberalism sparked ferocious opposition. The pushback came less from conservatism [Christians], whose “long withdrawing roar” was scarcely audible in history, than from rival ideologies [Nazism, Communism, etc.] that were just as totalizing, but offered what liberalism couldn’t: social cohesion and a shared belief system. Two world wars and a “cold” war, adding up to hundreds of millions dead, settled the question. Liberalism triumphed over its external rivals (fascism, Nazism, Marxism-Leninism), even as it completed the decomposition of internal sources of meaning (religion, community, family). The world was demystified. Social relations were stripped of all transcendental trappings. The purpose of human life was understood to be the reproduction of selfish genes. The universe, preached evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, had “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but pointless indifference.”

In such a bleak landscape, the ideals that had stood as guideposts to behavior withered. Liberal politics degenerated into the will to power. The pursuit of happiness was reduced to a frantic grab for pleasure—but pleasure devoid of happiness is a tedious and insipid goal. The last surviving values were said to be reason and science—but why should they be privileged? At some point in the twenty-first century, the critical eye turned inward; the Enlightenment began to devour itself.

There is much more, but you should go read the piece yourself if you are so inclined. It is the sort of piece I would have had my students read back when I taught political philosophy, not because I agree with it 100%, but because it is a great starting point for a conversation that gets to the heart of our cultural decline. 

The Endarkenment is real, and it is not clear how to slow it down or reverse it. Personally I think Elon Musk is on the right track--move humanity forward by moving it outward. Create a goal and put all society's resources into it. [>Good luck with that.]

Individuals can look inward and look for the spark of the Divine and pass it along to others, but don't expect a massive revival of Christianity on a societal scale any time soon. Perhaps if we truly enter a Dark Age it would be possible, but in our current society religion is a declining force and not an expanding one.

We have to meet people where they are, and finding a goal we can all get behind is a good place to start. Having babies and going to Mars seem like good goals.

     >>My comments on the last three paragraphs.

“How to slow it down or reverse it.”

     >>Why do we assume that it is reversable? Just because we want it to be?    History has demonstrated that war has been the great ‘reset button’ for whatever direction a culture has taken.

“Religion is a declining force and not an expanding one.”

     >>True, but the “peace” that religion brings is temporary. The aftermath of war also brings peace, because humans can’t survive century-long wars. They run out of bullets, and they run out of people to kill. Only Jesus can give a person and a culture permanent peace.

“We have to meet people where they are.”

     >>What does that mean? Do we have to enter their worlds of meaningless, self-centered pleasures and tell them that they’re fine if they will clean up a bit?

“Finding a goal we can all get behind is a good place to start.”

     >>How do we go about that? The UN? A one-world government? Who has the power to enforce better lifestyles on every culture?

“Going to Mars”

      >>That’s escapism. Leave the majority behind to wither.

“Having babies”

     >>This simply furthers the problem, since the current generation will train their children in a culture of meaninglessness and sex.

     >>Strom’s ultimate goal is to being peace to the world. Won’t happen.

     >>The Ultimate Solution: Introduce as many people to Jesus as possible, so they can escape God’s coming judgment. “As in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man.” Luke 17:26. God put Noah and a handful of believers in a boat, then God drowned everybody else. God did not destroy the earth. He removed evil and then put Noah back on the earth.

     >>Building a better world by bringing back the Divine is commendable and God may allow such a thing to happen. He has never revealed His timeline for His coming judgment. Jesus even said in Matthew 24:6, "And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet." That was over 2,000 years ago. Humanity may be looking at another 2,000 years of reset wars and intermittent periods of peace.

Humanity is not going to save the planet. Jesus came to earth to free people from such false hopes. And since we don't know when God will pull the switch for the final war, our entire focus needs to be on fighting our own sins, dragging more people with us and leaving when He calls.

P.S. I love everything that David Strom writes.

I'm still figuring out how to set up "comments" on this website. If you are driving to make one, send it to my email: floydschneider@protonmail.com. In my world, comments fall into three categories: one's I will answer, one's I won't answer, and one's I'll give more thought to. Thanks for anything you send, even if you disagree with me.

--Floyd

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