Following a sermon by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Edward Feser examines the elements which have governed the modern age, and he charts a postliberal path for putting this diabolical modernity behind us.
What strikes me about the whole liberal - rationalistic - capitalistic paradigm in our day and age is the increasingly destructive power of the anomalies that it can't really solve. One example is mass migration. The Westerner's answers have been either open boarders or more capitalist investment in developing countries, but few question the ideologies that created these failing policies to begin with. Another is the problem of loneliness and isolation. We've destroyed the family in exchange for excessive production, individualism, and social mobility, and 'solve' the problem with technologies that just heighten individualism, social mobility and excessive production. As Feser says, it seems diabolical.
Feser blames modernity on democracy, science, and markets as if they were separate temptations. He misses the deeper shift a prominent cross-partisan critic calls inverted totalitarianism (Sheldon Wolin). Here, science, markets, and democracy are managed together to pacify populations. The problem is not appetite but the loss of civic power. Citizens become consumers and spectators.
Feser points to theological virtues, but without confronting corporate power and the state, this is escape—offensive to conservative wisdom, as Tocqueville warned when citizens trade political agency for managed comfort. The cross to bear is political: to rebuild democratic energy before it disappears into managed irrelevance.
What strikes me about the whole liberal - rationalistic - capitalistic paradigm in our day and age is the increasingly destructive power of the anomalies that it can't really solve. One example is mass migration. The Westerner's answers have been either open boarders or more capitalist investment in developing countries, but few question the ideologies that created these failing policies to begin with. Another is the problem of loneliness and isolation. We've destroyed the family in exchange for excessive production, individualism, and social mobility, and 'solve' the problem with technologies that just heighten individualism, social mobility and excessive production. As Feser says, it seems diabolical.
A small quibble about an otherwise excellent article - lust and anger are choices, temptations by the diabolic.
Mental illness is not a choice (it is far too painful for that) - it is an infliction by the diabolic.
Feser blames modernity on democracy, science, and markets as if they were separate temptations. He misses the deeper shift a prominent cross-partisan critic calls inverted totalitarianism (Sheldon Wolin). Here, science, markets, and democracy are managed together to pacify populations. The problem is not appetite but the loss of civic power. Citizens become consumers and spectators.
Feser points to theological virtues, but without confronting corporate power and the state, this is escape—offensive to conservative wisdom, as Tocqueville warned when citizens trade political agency for managed comfort. The cross to bear is political: to rebuild democratic energy before it disappears into managed irrelevance.