The Modern World is best described as the World of Man.
Even the scientific community has opted to label our present era the "Anthropocene". Since the Industrial Revolution, nearly every drop of human agency--every skill, every art, every discipline of knowledge, every technology--has been conscripted in service to the needs and wants of Man. Today, everything around us is designed and built specifically for the convenience and consumption of Man. Billions of tons of logs, concrete and other materials are mobilized to furnish Man with shelter. Billions of tons of crops and meat are harvested to furnish Man with nourishment. Billions of dollars are spent creating TV shows, sports matches, games and music to furnish Man with entertainment and leisure. Further, billions of Man-hours go into the creation and maintenance of machines and systems whose sole purpose is to increase the ease and decrease the cost of furnishing Man with shelter, nourishment, entertainment and leisure. All that may seem fine, but it exposes and interesting fact: to Modern Man, nothing is more important than Man. Therefore, nothing is to be hated more than something that is Anti-Man. Anything that even slightly impedes Man's access to the objects he desires to consume is to be eliminated. Anyone who believes that there is more to this world than Man is a misanthropic scoundrel.
To make a long story short, in our Modern era, humanity has become obsessed with humanity. Like Narcissus, Man cannot stop staring at himself in the mirror. Nor can Man stop singing his own praises. He believes he is capable of everything, having convinced himself that his techniques have an infinite capacity for improvement. By that logic, Man has 'rationally' arrived at the conclusion that all things that exist in this Universe belong to his domain. He has convinced himself that he is entitled to the dominion of all things living and nonliving, and that includes his fellow men. Hence it follows, according to Man's logic, that the whole World ought to be brought under his singular rule, that every nation and territory should be united, every race and ethnicity conjoined and conmingled into a universal "Brotherhood of Man". When that happens, says Man, instantly all conflict would cease, and everybody would live in perpetual harmony, for all issues that arise could be mediated using Man's flawless reason and intellect. If only those "misanthropists" would give up their countries, cultures, religions and individuality, says Man, then we could all live in a global utopia. If this sounds a bit like liberalism, you would be right. After all, the liberals claim to be the ideology "of the people".
But isn't there a problem with this? Ask Man and, as you might expect, he will tell you no. You might as well ask God if there is a problem with his dominion over all Creation. However, ask men, and most of them will tell you that the last thing they want is to be assimilated into a so-called "Brotherhood of Man" with myriads of people across the world whom they've never met and have nothing in common with. This is due to a problem that Man, blinded by his own arrogance, is unaware of. That is, there is no such thing as Man.
At the end of the day, Man is merely an abstraction. An abstraction consists of only what all of its instances have in common. In the case of men, who are as numerous and diverse in their natures, appearances, ways and spirits as are the places where they dwell, that leaves very little--besides four limbs and red blood--belonging to "Man". A Manchurian is not the same thing as a Frenchman, and both differ even more drastically from a Kenyan; how, then, are we at liberty to apply the term "Man" to all three of them? Of course, they are all are men, but the naturally-occurring diversity which God imparted to this world has resulted in the divergence of both their biological and spiritual features. In such a context, indeed, "Man" is a word that has little meaning. If we are left to rely on what few things all men have in common for the very foundation of our identity, then we would be left quite impoverished in that regard. It would be difficult to say that we even be left with any identity at all. “Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world," says de Maistre, "In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.”1 Indeed, that image Man is constantly staring at in the mirror, one would be hard pressed to find a single man on this Earth who resembles it. French, Italian, Russian, those are all nations, which are men in addition to their history, language, culture and religion. Man, however, is just an animal.
Unfortunately, we live in a time period where this simple fact, which was accepted for thousands of years, has been forgotten. In the past five centuries or so, we have seen emerge the doctrine of Humanism. As the name might imply, Humanism asserts that Man is the end-all be-all of everything, and that Man is the measuring stick of the Universe, the lens through which we ought to view every issue, the very raison d'être of our society. On a basic level, all that might seem innocent enough, but thinking about it with any level of depth should reveal that it is a nasty, slow-acting poison in disguise. That is because of the simple law that whenever and wherever the primacy of Man is increased, there the primacy of God decreases. When we substitute the transcendental with the the physical and fleshy, what naturally results is atheism and the loss of objective meaning. The notion of Humanity as an "end-all be-all", despite the warm and fuzzy feeling that it evokes, could not be more pointless. That is because Man is temporary and imperfect; like all physical things, he decays and erodes with age. Further, nothing that Man builds ever lasts, another fact which has been forgotten by the Humanists. The greatest nations and empires all meet their end eventually, because they too are bound by the laws of physical decay; like the seasons, their rise and fall is scheduled, their lifespans are fixed. By recognizing these laws, the ancients realized that the temporary flesh is secondary to the immortal soul, that an unchanging Heaven has dominion over a malleable Earth. Thus emerged the great civilizations of Eurasia which belonged to the Traditional type. But when these civilizations, too, passed away from the world, those truths were forgotten and people began to entertain the idea that Man was primary. We have seen the decay and degeneration that have taken place over the past five centuries, especially just this past century. We have seen atheism and secularism emerge to the detriment of all that is pure and virtuous. Is this not the logical conclusion of Humanism?
Of course, I won't try to lie to you and say that the Renaissance Humanists or their intellectual successors, the Enlightenment thinkers, were atheists. But as I said, the poison of Humanism is a slow-acting one. In the beginning, it was not a debate between God and atheism, but a debate between public religion (like Catholicism) and more private religion (like Protestantism). Most of the Enlightenment thinkers, including the American Founders, simply wanted a government that doesn't tell Christians specifically how they should worship God. Fast forward to the 21st century, however, and what we ended up with was not private religion, but state-sponsored atheism and the removal of even the idea of God from all spheres. Now this is all in the name of "the separation of Church and State", but can we honestly believe that when the Enlightenment thinkers wrote such words they intended some day for public society to altogether renounce God and effectively declare war against Heaven? And this is by no means an exaggeration. In nations of European heritage, including the US, the social fabric once held together by Christian principles, to which Europeans have subscribed for the past two millennia, has been completely disintegrated. Pornography, lewdness and sodomy are legal. Greed and usury are legal, and are the staple of all economic life. Even murder is legal in the form of abortion. The nations founded on the principles of decency, liberty and temperance are now filled with millions of people who are slaves to the flesh: sodomites marching through the streets, alcoholics and opiate abusers on every corner, families torn apart by infidelity and divorce, and a public stage where the sportsball player, the prostitute, the actress, the comedian and the merchant are held in the highest regard. These are the exact types of things the ancients warned us about. Is this what the Enlightenment thinkers had in mind when they wrote about "life, liberty and property" and "the separation of Church and State"?
It goes without saying that they didn't, but that means absolutely nil! Because one generation's interest in personal liberties and the "rights of Man" became the next generation's focus, and the subsequent generation's obsession. Imagine how much you would have been laughed at if you told Rousseau that if his philosophy won the day, in two hundred years we would have "welfare checks" and "transgender rights". You would have been made into a prime example of the slippery slope fallacy. And yet the slippery slope turned out to be true. How quickly the zeitgeist jumped from "Man should have the right to free speech" to "Man should have the right to dye his hair green and put on a dress"! Where did all this insanity arise? It arose from the simple reality that Humanism, without even knowing it, unleashed the animal that lies just beneath the surface of "Man". Nevermind what Man should be, their only concern was what Man was. And the reality is that Man is a two-legged beast with a Godlike soul. When that soul was no longer of any importance, all that was left was the beast. Thus the "rights of Man" conversation quickly devolved from a discussion of property and taxation to one of sex and desire. Individual liberty became erroneously conflated with individual license. In the end, the vestiges of the ancient Tradition were abolished one by one, in every case because they interfered with the human animal's insatiable hunger for license and so-called "liberty". Indeed, when you are the most important thing in the Universe, how can anything be allowed to stand in between you and what you desire? Hence the emergence of Modernity. Man's newfound obsession with himself is what has eventually lead to the moral and spiritual bankruptcy which is on full display everywhere we look around us today.
As we see today, that "liberty" Man has endowed himself with is altogether false. It is not true liberty, which is the freedom of the soul, but it is merely license, the freedom of the body. Today, thanks to Humanism, people can practice more vices without societal consequences than any other time in history. This has caused their appetite for vice to grow and grow, until they become dependent on vice. At that point, these "free" people are no more than slaves. As St. Augstine put it (and I have yet to encounter any author who has put it better), "Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices."2 When Man has no God but himself, ruin, evil and slavery are all that can result. Therefore I make the argument to all those who wish not to be slaves, that we must renounce Humanism and the Enlightenment, and embrace the premodern Tradition of Eurasia, which had been transmitted from prehistory and through high antiquity, where it matured into the various high cultures of the great civilizations of the East and West.
In order to do that, we must first accept the reality that Humanism as a concept is fully at odds with this Tradition. As virtually every culture across Europe and Asia prior to the Modern era agreed, Heaven is primary, not Man. And Nature, which consists of the decrees dispatched by Heaven, is an expression of Heaven's will. Historically, Eurasian societies and spiritual beliefs were Nature-oriented. In other words, they held Nature to be sacred due to its being the physical manifestation of God's will. They understood that the natural phenomena and awe-inspiring natural manifestations were worthy of fear and respect because of their ability to both create and destroy. Thus, the original axiom of the Traditional worldview was that Heaven's laws, when accorded with, bring one prosperity, when opposed, bring one destruction. Recognizing the supremacy of Heaven means accepting and following Heaven's decrees: the ironclad laws of Nature.
Humanism, on the other hand, holds that Man is somehow above the laws of Nature, that man is more powerful even than God, and that Nature exists merely to serve Man. This is an arrogant and foolish worldview, and it is not Eurasian. At some point during many centuries of gradual decay, it was introduced by external influences, and slowly but surely it proceeded to unleash its poison. If this pure theory is not sufficient to persuade the reader, then all I can say is to take a look outside. Right now we are living in a world which is the fruit of the Enlightenment delusion and ultimately of Humanism.
Footnotes:
- Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France.
- St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God.
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