Ross Douthat (NYT):
- I tend to assume that on this side of eternity there is some of what you are describing as "tribalism" in human nature. It is eradicable without also eradicating things that are good about human nature. There are some "package deals" built in. And a lot of the sort of global supermind stuff assumes a loss of human personality along the way.
- A big part of the exhaustion that I'm describing is a sense of futility that, I think, people feel about having a coherent picture of what human beings are and how they relate to the Universe. I feel like the Western civilization sort of tried to go
beyond Christianity in various ways. Marxism and Fascism are two examples...
- You mean going beyond in the sense of having different underlying views of human nature or different conceptions of teleology?
- All of that. In the sense of looking for a comprehensive world picture that was not Christianity. I think that's what Marxism was for the people. It was a theory of history and morality, and teleology. And people were not happy with where those attempts ended up. And so there was this brief Christian revival in the West I talked about in my book about Christianity "Bad Religion", and that fell apart in the 60s and 70s. And since then we've had this sort of mixture of certain amount of scientific materialism in certain parts of the inteligentsia, joint to a certain kind of liberal idealism that does not really know what its idealism is grounded in, a certain amount of New Age spirituality that's very interested in experience but hasn't really translated that into a theology or metaphysics of what that experience means. All of that is part of what I'm describing as "decadence". A society in that position is either looking for a new synthesis or a new set of competing syntheses that make people feel that they know what the meaning of life is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4lC9nF1uhk&feature=youtu.be