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“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost; for none now live who remember it.”
Cate Blanchett as Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring

The quote above from Galadriel’s prologue to the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems prescient. The world has indeed changed. The liquidity of modern life, the commodification of attention, and whatever this latest illiberal tide rolling over the West is,¹ not to mention COVID-tide, erode the foundations of society. We live in a era where trust is an act of courage. These are just the latest convulsions. The last century saw the rise of communism and fascism and a series of world wars culminating with ‘Fat Man’ and ‘Little Boy.’ One might make the case that things are trending in a better direction at the moment. Abject poverty is on the decline around the world. Environmental degradation seems to have plateaued, at least in the developed world. Still, I am not optimistic.

All advanced civilizations fail. The value of every fiat currency eventually goes to zero. The oceans and atmosphere are vast, but finite nonetheless. Eventually growth for the sake of growth runs up against planetary boundaries. And as our destructive power increases so do our chances of annihilation. We can assume that whatever weapon we build will eventually be used. Wendell Berry describes the mass produced madness:

The mentality that exploits and destroys the natural environment is the same that abuses racial and economic minorities, that imposes on young men the tyranny of the military draft,² that makes war against peasants and women and children with the indifference of technology. The mentality that destroys a watershed and then panics at the threat of flood is the same mentality that gives institutionalized insult to black people and then panics at the prospect of race riots. It is the same mentality that can mount deliberate warfare against a civilian population and then express moral shock at the logical consequence of such warfare at My Lai. We would be fools to believe that we could solve any one of these problems without solving the others.
Wendell Berry, Think Little (1970) published in The World-Ending Fire Collection

Still, there is no reason to believe collapse is necessarily immanent. It seems to me that we are squarely in the ‘bread and circuses’ phase of decline. Reality TV, TikTok memes, and billion dollar sports and video game industries all attest to this.

It is a mistake to focus solely on these patterns of life rather than on the underlying cosmologies. The world is, and always will be, changing. Patterns are in constant flux. We may or may not like the change. For example, our neighborhood might be improving or on the decline. Either way, the fundamental nature of the universe remains fixed. Revolution occurs when the cosmology itself is overturned. This is what causes an existential crisis. For example, the shift from pagan to Christian cosmology in the 4th century or later the Native Americans upon encountering Europeans. It is great that communism and fascism are out of fashion at the moment. But I am not optimistic because the cosmology that spawned fascism and communism is stronger, not weaker, today.

The dominant cosmology no longer sees man as “created and sustained by a holy and just God who declares on matters of right and wrong.” Instead, man is the “autonomous ruler of himself, able to define right and wrong and frame statutes according to whatever he defines as just.”³ We are not beyond religious superstition as people like to think. We merely substituted one religious precept for another. Instead of God substituting Himself for man, man substitutes himself for God. Man is not just free to obey or disregard moral law, but to choose which moral standards he adopts. A Christian may adopt any number of patterns to accommodate their cultural circumstances. But the pattern of martyrdom is the only option available to a Christian asked to adopt this new cosmology.

The fundamental question for Christians is whether the changes occurring today with regard to sexual differentiation, procreation, marriage, and family have roots in a cosmology, or are merely customs we must adapt to.⁴ Is human nature given or chosen? Is moral law discovered or decreed? If we are honest, we now live in a different cosmos. Meaning, significance, and fullness are all sought without any reference to the transcendent. Consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s mystical definition of personhood, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”⁵ In light of this definition, isn’t it clear why orthodox Christianity is now seen as an impediment to progress? Contrary to popular belief, faith is alive and well. But it’s a faith in the radically autonomous Self.

I don’t think such a thing as a ‘society without religion,’ in the sense of having a metaphysical framework, really exists; to me, that’s akin to imagining a society without a language, or some notion of kinship, or ways of preparing food. I’m not an anthropologist, but it seems clear that any human society worthy of the adjective “human” is going to articulate some metaphysical system that makes sense of reality and offers consolation and a sense of meaning in the midst of natural vicissitude…

Imagine taking as an anthropological platitude the claim that human beings will be religious and, moreover, that civilizations are built upon the metaphysical systems they create (or which are revealed to them, to give credit to the metaphysical on its own terms). It’s obvious from such an assumption that the collapse of the metaphysics entails the eventual collapse of everything else. This should be deeply alarming to anyone who cares about the West’s tradition of humanitarianism, which emerges—and it would be wonderful if we could all agree on this—out of the original Judaic notion of imago Dei and later from Christian humanism. Secular humanism has been running for quite some time on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian religious inheritance, but it’s not clear how much longer that can go on.
Louis Betty, scholar of French literature who wrote a book about Houellebecq’s metaphysics, in an interview ‘France’s Master of ‘Materialist Horror‘ by Rod Dreher for the American Conservative

Like the pagans in the 4th century and Native Americans in the 19th century, Christians are facing assimilation. Churches may carry on hosting weekly pep rallies and providing social services. But this increasingly revolves around the sovereign Self. As a result the church has nothing to offer a dying world that can’t be found somewhere else. The fact remains that we derive our modern concept of human rights and the dignity and equality of all people from Christian cosmology. You cannot remove the foundation and expect the edifice to remain standing. What happens when we exhaust the reservoirs of belief and commitment and meaning that once sustained us? The picture that comes to mind is that of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff right at that moment before he looks down and begins to fall. It’s hard to say how long that period of suspended animation might last. But one thing is certain. The fall is inevitable. We might as well turn our attention towards sticking the landing.

Although I considered myself a Christian, I never paid much attention to competing cosmologies until recently when the bottom fell out from under me. A family crisis, one I should have seen coming, blindsided me. Prior this I was the poster child for the moralistic therapeutic (anti)culture. I never questioned the myth of progress or the science of control. I spent a considerable portion of my adult life serving my country. It never occurred to me that internal rot could pose a greater existential threat than some near-peer adversary. The family situation turned everything upside down. Disillusioned, I looked for anything that could explain the current moment. I stumbled onto the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre⁶, Charles Taylor⁷, and others. MacIntyre wrote about social atomization and moral fragmentation almost forty years before I noticed it. Taylor convinced me that deficiencies of the modern vocabulary stifle imagination and prevent us from speaking intelligibly about what’s happening. Others⁸ made me see that my picture of God was only a caricature. Over the course of about a year and a half I accrued a pile of notes approaching book length.

I decided to make those notes available here after talking with a friend who is the local director of a national evangelical organization. He confided that he and his staff are poorly equipped for what he knows is coming. None of their training and experience prepared them for combating the lies that are now pervasive about human nature and the very nature of reality itself; not to mention the lies about the church’s own history. His organization always had a laser focus on communicating the gospel. Their approach took the goodness and truth and beauty of the gospel as givens. The world now openly mocks these virtues. And even those inclined towards the gospel who want to believe find that they simply cannot. Belief is just too unbelievable. Kids raised in the church are simply walking away.⁹ These concerns resonated. And I wondered how many other pastors and parents were struggling to get their bearings. I decided to share what I could muster.

It bears mentioning that I am not a moral philosopher. I come at this as someone from a STEM field. The growing chasm between man’s technical proficiency and our meager capacity for moral reasoning alarms me. I am convinced that the greatest threat facing us is moral and spiritual in nature. I certainly don’t have all the answers. And I hope people will gently point out where I have it wrong. Maybe my feeble attempt at sorting this out will inspire a true authority to step up and set us all straight. That would be success.

I want this site to be a resource for anyone drowning in liquid modernity, particularly parents, teachers, pastors, and students. The core of this project centers on understanding our role in the present and its origin in the past, and imagining what the future could be. The glossary attempts to recover lost terminology needed to speak intelligibly about basic questions of value and meaning. Book reviews introduce other important works. I plan to post more ephemeral announcements or commentary like this occasionally. I wanted to include a section devoted to creative writing; something akin to Paul Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain Project. Frankly, if I were a capable writer of fiction I would only write fiction. When done well, art and literature create encounters with an inarticulate aspect of objective reality that is otherwise opaque. But I’m afraid fiction is beyond my capacity. Consider this a standing invitation to any creative writers inspired by the themes discussed here, e.g. immanentization, the relationship between form and content, liquid modernity, etc.

Lastly, this is a self-funded project. Your privacy is important. I do not sell ads or user data. I have no interest in holding shares of the attention economy. You won’t find me on social media. The intent is to provide an online sanctuary from all that.

UPDATE: I decided to give Twitter a try. You can follow me at @LeoWyhl.

^{Photo credit: “Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner” by Mark Gilmour is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0}

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