The 7 Deadly Sins of Modern Civilisation
From greed to the greatest of all
C.S Lewis once opined that ‘every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.’
Hegel saw humanity as passing though different stages as the contradictions that bind our thinking melt away to give birth to ever-greater ever more all-encompassing encapsulations of reality — this being the unfurling of freedom for the philosopher.
Every age has its own style and substance and, simultaneously, there is a quintessence that perdures throughout all ages and sits at the heart of what it is to be human.
The following is a survey of the seven deadly sins of our time. You may decide for yourself just how much these truly are oddities of our epoch and just how much they run in saecula saeculorum throughout the whole gamut of human history.
Number One — Essentialism-solipsism — post-truth/my truth
Eminem once sang; ‘I am whatever you say I am’. Twenty years later and the contemporaneous compulsion flips this on its head: I am whatever I say I am; the world is the way I say it is.
At root, this is both a species of solipsism and essentialism.
The former being self-centred and overly self-involved, or, in a more philosophical sense, the notion that only the self exists or can be known to exist.
The latter, essentialism, is the idea that the nature of things can be boiled down to certain core sets of characteristics which give any one thing its essential ontic being.
Essentialism is mostly self-evident when it comes to inanimate objects and animals. Can you imagine a rock that you can stretch like rubber or a vegetarian lion? Of course not; rocks may vary in hardness and rigidity but they’re all hard and inflexible and lions are carnivores. ‘Rockness’ and ‘lionness’ are comprised of a set of traits and qualities which are essential to our understanding of the thing itself.
When it comes to humans, however, solid earth and assuredness give way to quagmire and animus.
So many of the dark isms hold in their dark hearts essentialism — racism, sexism, Nazism, colonialism. It matters naught about deeds and actions for the ultimate act which obliterates all else is the essential being of the other, and this by the very same token makes them guilty and inferior a priori and entirely beyond redemption.
Essentialism is typically applied to individuals of a particular group by individuals of another group, however, here, once again, we have an inversion with the individual telling the world what their core base identity is.
In fact, this is a weird marriage of essentialism and existentialism; two forces which are usually diametrically opposed: I am whatever I say I am. I will force the world to go along with my own self-assigned essential identity, thereby truly becoming what I really am.
This phenomenon is exemplified by people, even children, who identify as animals and adults who identify as children. There are also famous cases such as the fabulously indulgent Sam Smith forcing the world to shut its mouth, keep a straight face and agree with nodding heads that he’s a ‘them.’
And then we have the nightmarish and deeply troubling notion of transgender children, where humans that are still developing in ever sense of the world, whom we do not allow to consent to sexual relations or to work or to vote or to make any big decision in life because they’re simply not equipped to make such decisions, are being put in the driving seat on deciding a core part of their identity, with any who cast doubt or dispersion on such a practice publicly hung, drawn and quartered.
This is so dark and so fraught with danger that the first country to legalise gender reassignment for kids, Sweden, has already banned it.
And the power of the particular to decide its own truth unchallenged by science, logic and fact spans out further to encompass what it says too. And here we see the advent of the post-truth era and the hyper-solipsism it embodies. This is best epitomised by one man— Donald Trump.
In the mouth and mind of Trump, the truth becomes a malleable plaything to be chewed up and masticated this way and that until it takes the shape of whatever he wants to be true at any particular moment. Facts don’t matter. History doesn’t matter. Science doesn’t matter. What he said yesterday doesn’t matter. All that matters is whatever he needs to be true for the sake of the sentence he happens to be saying right now.
Number Two — More, more, more — the parasite must feed, the parasite must multiply
Money is a parasite that has hijacked our minds and burns only with the need to multiply and make more of itself.
We need money for stability, security, predictability and peace of mind. But how much does one actually need for this?
And money doesn’t want just enough, it wants more than enough and then more again. Many ills in society are far less pervasive but far more maligned than the febrile delusions money induces in its hosts, and yet the unquenchable thirst for ever more of the green flies under the radar by and large.
I suspect, however, that money has so successfully hardwired our brains that we love it even in the abstract; not just what can be bought with it or what it represents, but the stoking of a fire whose only desire is to burn ever bigger, ever brighter and never ever go out.
And this is at the very heart of every mania — the very fact that the sufferer is helpless to recognise the condition for themselves is central to the syndrome. Much like both ideology and the Devil, the greatest trick the such madness ever played was making the world think he didn’t exist. We are deep in the miasma of une folie des masses and few are the people who see it for what it is.
And I don’t think this is commodity fetishism as Marx supposed, where things take on more life than the humans that create and lust after them. I suspect, however, that money has so successfully hardwired our brains that we love it even in the abstract; not just what can be bought with it or what it represents, but the stoking of a fire whose only desire is to burn ever bigger, ever brighter and never ever go out.
Number Three — Cancelleth that which offendeth
The will to snuff out the voices that shake our belief systems to their core and send shivers through our being has always lived in us.
But the Liberal West was supposed to have finally usurped this intrinsic flaw in our make-up. The West has been responsible for a great many abominable acts — from slavery to genocide to colonisation to its present practices. Notwithstanding, its citizens gained a voice over time and it enshrines freedom of expression as a cynosure to be defended as one of its highest values.
And yet, something seems to have gotten away from us and is moving further adrift as a I write this line. And this assault comes from left and right.
The woke left will knock your door down, extort an apology at gunpoint and excommunicate you from mainstream society if you won’t kowtow. Capital offences include not keeping your brand sufficiently in line with ever-shifting woke ideology, calling into question any aspects of transgenderism and transgender children and God have mercy on your soul if you demur to use the language you are told.
And wokeism will tell you all this hysteria has simply been cooked up by the right. And there’s a degree of truth in that; this is the modus operandi of some on the right. But just because the right uses the left to scare society, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be scared of.
Not to be outdone, the right has brought back book banning with a bang, with thousands of books being targeted and Texas and Florida vying for who can banish the most demonic texts from school libraries. Some are intent on ratcheting up the temperature until we hit 451 Fahrenheit and only the Bible is left standing.
And the right is busy hunting out its own witches and the left is ‘grooming and manicuring’ literature in the form of sensitivity readers foisted upon authors by publishing houses who care only for their bank balance and not a jot for the sanctity of literature.
Number Four — No quarter given; no inch relinquished
No compromise. No reconciliation. Zero sum games. Yes or no. Growing polarisation. Deepening intransigence. Moral absolutism. The other as mortal foe. No dialogue with the Devil. I will end you or die on my hill.
The sheer irreconcilability of so much now is staggering. This is true both for within the Western World and between the Liberal West and the Anti-Hegemonic Powers.
This does not bode at all well for democracy.
There is strong correlation between wealth and democracy: most countries that are wealthy are democratic and most democratic countries are wealthy.
No one really knows why this is, but there is a theory which posits that as democracy is a form of sanitised conflict and issue management, which instead of suppressing disagreement and divergence actually welcomes it in order to find best-fit solutions for all, it will be uniquely destabilising for nations where issues are of the first order and can mean life or death. Moreover, liberal democracy must be undergirded by a strong rule of law, absent or weak in developing nations.
The corollary to this is that liberal democracy should flourish in richer societies for the reason that issues are not of the first order and such a system best approximates what can be called the common will in crude terms.
And yet the Western World is awash with obdurance, antipathy and hate, and the social and political values that underpin liberal democracy — dialogue, deliberation, compromise, tolerance — are crumbling at their foundations.
Number Five — The cult of self and freedom of chaos
At no time in the past has human consciousness been as interconnected and interpenetrated as it is now. The book shrunk the world. The plane shrunk the world. The T.V shrunk the world. And the internet and social media hit like the Chicxulub asteroid.
Before, small sets of folks in studios and ivory towers decided what information we should receive and what we should be entertained by. These gatekeepers of fame and knowledge wielded great power and manned the gates with an iron fist and a razor-sharp eye. They chose who would be a star and decided much of what was going to be in our heads. Now, the gates are down, anyone can be a star and everyone is choosing what to stick in their own heads.
A form of informational and entertainment tyranny has given way to a form of chaos. Before, we would worship the idols we were told to worship; now millions of people clamour to be an idol, if only for 15 minutes. Midst the chaos, the one message that seems to reign supreme is ‘me, me, me!’
Number Six — The fragmentation and fissiparation of knowledge and thought
Modern Western society breaks existence down into parts, patterns, mechanics and material; it does not build it up into wholes that carry meaning others than connoted by reference to the aforementioned.
What is a galaxy? A galaxy is a vast collection of stars, solar systems, planets, gas, dust and debris all held together by the force of gravity — its essence is a function of material and mechanics.
What is a plant? A plant is a sedentary living organism consisting of a stalk, roots, leaves and stems. It produces its own food using the Sun and a chemical called chlorophyll, which gives it its green colour.
The how of everything in existence up to and including ourselves is the singular question. The what is understood by reference to the how. And the why is neither asked nor acknowledged.
And galaxies and plants are placed in relations with other astronomical phenomena and flora in terms of how close or how far away as regards material, mechanics, morphology and functionality.
The how of everything in existence up to and including ourselves is the singular question. The what is understood by reference to the how. And the why is neither asked nor acknowledged.
The how of everything in existence up to and including ourselves is the singular question. The what is understood by reference to the how. And the why is neither asked nor acknowledged.
The above is awesome and spellbinding in its scope, use, understanding and achievement, and so, you may be scratching your head and rubbing your eyes, confounded as to why in the hell this would constitute one of my seven deadly sins of modernity?
Well, two reasons.
The first is that our cogno-epistemological worldview is fatally lobsided.
The second is that because we only look at the material, mechanics and how of all around us, we end up seeing the world in terms of use, utility, instrumentalisation and control. This means we survey existence and think to ourselves how something can be used to our advantage, and not why it should be used, or why not?
Our understanding of how is one of the main reasons for our success. Yet, without thinking of the why, we have ended up abusing our powers, abusing our planet and putting most every species including ourselves in terrible danger.
This tendency towards diremption and fragmentation has made its way into all facets of our lives and is becoming ever more pronounced. From films and longer programmes to half-hour series to YouTube to TikTok. From books to articles to snippets. From larger and longer units digging down deep in one spot to smaller and shorter units skimming along the surface.
We are serial snackers that are caught in an endless cycle of slow gluttony; we do not eat one decent meal to then retire to digest. This is the fragmentation and fissiparation of thought and knowledge which prides material, mechanics and how over all else and breaks everything into ever-smaller pieces.
Number Seven — The end of civilisation
It seems that we are inescapably similar to the animals we are: wondrously adept at making a mess and wholly inept when it comes to cleaning it up.
All that can be said about this greatest of failings and failures is just so much vaporous grandeur before the fire that awaits us.
We will be the generations that ushered in, presided over and will bear witness to the cataclysmic changes that have been wrought by our actions. To make it many times more tragic, we know perfectly well what is happening but just cannot feel the future as a species of the present with sufficient fear to pull back from the looming inferno and change course from imminent oblivion.
All that can be said about this greatest of failings and failures is just so much vaporous grandeur before the fire that awaits us. This is the last and greatest of the seven deadly sins of modern civilisation.
A shout out to 🌬️Mitch for our recent engaging discussions on the above topics.
