Despite the endemic uncertainty in the 20th and 21st centuries, it can be difficult to seriously question the idea that the modern era is the best era of all—that today is the best of all days. God is dead, more or less, and at least in all practical matters, so get on with your life and be happy. This itself is the current cultural myth, the foundation for many aims, such as the total freedom of technological development and the elevation and mystification of the individual will. But is it a true myth? That is the key question. Or have some of the popular post-Enlightenment moods and philosophies—positivism, objectivism, historicism, rationalism, narcissism, radical individualism, scientism, and what have you—converged into a false foundational myth and led the West astray?

To clarify, true myths are connected with truth, and false myths are not. In this case I mean extant and intelligible Truth. Capital “T” Truth, the target of cynical cynicism and postmodern suspicion. Truth, which fell with Valhalla and the rest of metaphysics.

Percy Bysshe Shelley dwelt on immanent beauty and read through the entire morning. Then in an instant, he found that all within him declared Neo-Platonism to be true. He rushed from his apartments, tore down the streets of London with wild abandon, and—happening upon a perambulator with an unsuspecting attendant—swept up the baby and demanded it reveal the secrets of heaven. Alas, the baby only cried, protecting the eternal matters from the prying Romantic.

It is strange; if the metaphysical realm is bunk, sober scientific reason should prevail.

It doesn’t.

Modern understanding, from Hume and Kant on, has abandoned a poetic understanding of the world, but not actually replaced it with unemotional reason, the logical alternative. A disfigured poetry remains. No, priests and philosopher-kings do not direct the course of peoples and nations today. But if Valhalla has fallen and burnt entirely, a new breed of entrail-readers has emerged to lead the world and to mediate reality and common understanding. Politicians, celebrities, business leaders, and economists read into the Economic State or Market Mood or the CO2 IR Absorption Spectrum with, compared to an actually scientific view, all the religious ecstasy of the Oracle at Delphi.

Physicist Herbert C. Clarke slumped awkwardly near a superconducting magnet in the Large Hadron Collider, deep in contemplation. On the one hand this extensive experiment may well find the truth about the Higgs Boson. To justify the Standard Model and keep the quest for the Ultimate Truth—the Unified Field Theory—moving forward would make everything worthwhile. Humanity will lay bare The Secrets of the Universe, led by the Physicist. On the other hand, should this create meta-stable quantum black holes, the end of the world was nigh. Was the worst possible? No. Humanity would survive somehow, and to stop the march of progress at this point would be the worst sort of sin.

1    2    3