The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

The Big Lie: A Thesis on Modernity and Contemporary Intellectual History

I have recently been reflecting on the overwhelming role that lies play in the contemporary world and contemporary discourse.

When I say this, I do not primarily mean "lies" in a polemical sense, referring to ideas I do not like--though I will, I confess, engage in a great deal of polemics in this essay, in a manner sure to offend nearly everyone. I mean, rather, things that are acknowledged by all, including their creators, to be lies; and, in fact, to a great degree, are valued because they are lies.

In itself, this is not a new phenomenon, but a very basic intellectual and spiritual problem as old as the human race. Lies originate with the human intellect and will; and are therefore often more natively comfortable and congenial to it than truth. Lies provide the illusion of what we want; especially when what we want is merely control, power, freedom, which is to say, escape from the reality and goodness of things and the power they have over us through desire and fear. In its most benign form, this impulse merely leads to fiction; but much more malign forms have been a feature of human culture almost from the beginning. There is a reason why the Scriptures speak of the devil as the "father of lies," and define sin as "loving and making lies." Properly understood, to prefer a lie because it is a lie is only a cogent and philosophical name for Hell. 

Still, there can be little question that, in the year 2025, our cultural fixation with lies has accelerated to a point rarely, if ever, seen before in human civilization. Assorted smart people have, since the year 2016, been talking about our entrance into an allegedly "post-truth" era. In reality, we have been there for a while now, though there is no doubt that the Internet and smart phone proliferation have accelerated the process.

We are a people whose most basic activity, taking up more and more and ever more of our lives, consists in sitting alone and passively absorbing video and text and audio, nearly all of which is false in one sense or another, and nearly all of which we know is false. The characteristic forms of this modern fixation with lies are, as I have said many times before, advertising and pornography, the two (united) pillars of our culture--both of which are valued precisely because they take us into realms where truth simply has no meaning. The supposed "AI revolution" takes this cultural fixation so far that it may actually have permanently broken it, flooding the Internet with lies that are so obvious, so incoherent, and so unattractive that they threaten to undo the system altogether. 

I have more and more begun to suspect, however, that a certain preference for lies over truth is more or less a characteristic feature of modernity as such, going back to its origins. And I think I have perhaps come to understand some of the actual reasons for this preference: the Big Lie, so to speak, behind the lies.

I have put the above in terms of a preference for lies qua lies; and I think this is the most correct and philosophical way to put it. However, what I have called "lies" are a genus that has in the past five hundred years generally gone by other names; and put in its originating philosophical and religious and historical contexts, have very different connotations. To understand the preference, one must understand the context behind it; or, in other words, the Big Lie behind the lies. 

So here is the Big Lie, divided up into its essential nature, is variable embodiments, and various ways to understand and deal with it.

The God in the Machine

Here is a thesis: every single modern philosophy centers around blind faith in an immanentized deity. 

I first noticed this phenomenon in the obvious places, the places where one is taught, as an American, to look for them: that is, in the great totalitarian states of the 20th century. The "history" beloved by Soviet Communists is a very odd thing indeed: a blind god working its inevitable way through innumerable, deepening cycles of undirected violence to reach an era of mass directed violence, to lead inevitably to a humanistic, individualistic utopia. Faith in the goodness and worthwhileness of this entity, faith that one (official Soviet Marxist-Leninists) has correctly understood its operations and laws, faith that all the violence involved in it is necessary, faith that one can be sure that it will in fact end in a utopia of humanistic values...this is taking fideism to a rather extreme degree. 

And then, of course, the essence of Naziism was found in faith in a different version of history, an incarnate struggle for life leading through overwhelming violence and the annihilation of lesser types to the perpetual dominance of the highest and purest form of biological being. How can one be sure that this struggle is good, that it is worthwhile? How can one be sure that one's own race is the highest race? How can one be sure that the highest race will in fact prevail? And why does it matter that it does? Again, whatever trapping of reason may be present, only a fideistic, explicitly irrationalist, voluntarist faith can do: the Triumph of the Will.

The above is fairly standardly understood by most people--indeed, often taken too far, to the point where Naziism and Soviet Communism become bizarre and utterly irrational aberrations. To read the history of the 20th century, though, is to realize that both ideologies stood squarely at the center of a much broader intellectual and moral and religious landscape, a landscape that shared nearly all the salient features of these ideologies. 

Belief in history as a sort of imminent deity inevitably leading to better and higher things and to a perfect utopia was not unique to Communism; it was, for instance, nearly universally believed by Americans, great and small, as justification for their own utopian project, which in the 19th and early 20th centuries frequently involved imaginations of infinite territorial expansion throughout the entire globe. Throughout Europe as well, it took dozens of forms; as did belief in a moralized, deified struggle for survival between racial types or nations or individuals.

These, though, are only some of the more obvious forms of this concept; forms that have in some way been discredited in the contemporary world. There are many, many forms of this concept that have in no way been discredited. 

Among these, the most obvious and among the most impactful is the concept of the "free market"; an abstraction of all economic activity in a society conceived, in many of its most influential forms, precisely as a sort of super-human mind engaged perpetually in allocating resources perfectly and correctly according to information which no one human operator knows, or indeed could ever know, for the inevitable benefit of all. I have had many long conversations with believers in this deity, and read many hundreds of pages by such believers, and have had them again and again inform me, with the kind of fideistic faith that only the most devout can display, that it is absolutely certain that this super-human mind never makes mistakes, or could ever make mistakes; that all apparently harmful and destructive outcomes of its operations, for the lives and bodies and souls of actual human beings, are either inevitable, sanctified means towards a higher good, or else the result of the flawed, transgressive meddling of artificial human wills into the market's natural operations, of the imposition of merely human and personal and philosophical and religious conceptions of the good and value and ends and goals and peace and happiness and salvation over and above the pure, perfect, overriding Value dictated by the Market. 

None of them, though, have ever really answered my fundamental questions, the same fundamental questions that apply to the other fideistic immanentist systems of modernity: namely, how they know that this higher mind exists at all, how they know that it does not make mistakes, how they know that all the violence and evil it causes will be worthwhile in the end, and how they know that it will in fact lead to any outcome we would recognize as good. In response to one such question, I was informed that we know that the Market always acts correctly because this is the assumption we bake into our models of the Market. Amen.

This, though, is again a fairly obvious example; and there are many others. A less "respectable" example would be what is most properly called the Church of Science; or perhaps more accurately the Church of Technology. The belief that "scientific progress" is a natural process that inevitably leads to greater and greater technologies along a kind of infinite curve leading to utopia was still, I think, accepted by most people in America during my childhood and youth. Though more controverted now, echoes linger today in the still-common ideas that the creation, production, and proliferation of any given new technology is inevitable and cannot, or at least morally should not, be resisted, banned, or regulated in any respect. What were once counsels of optimism, though, have recently begun to appear more like counsels of despair, at least when it comes to technologies like cell phones or AI. 

A much older and more diffuse form of this belief, so pervasive in our society that few of us ever really question it, is sometimes referred to (polemically) as "liberalism," but is, I think, better referred to as "procedularism": that is, the belief or tendency to think that all that is required for the establishment of goods like justice, peace, security, etc, is the fashioning of, and blind, total commitment to, a perfect set of pervasive rules to govern human behavior and action. The various American religions and para-religions, right and left, around the Constitution or the American System or the American Way of Life fall under this genus; so, too, does much of corporate leadership and systems theory; so does most free-market economics; so, most fundamentally, does the modern consensus around a definition of "democracy" and "the rule of law" defined entirely in procedural terms. Most sympathetically, 19th century radical European Republicans really did often and explicitly believe that the establishment of Republican institutions and voting regimes would guarantee justice and peace; less sympathetically, so did the Neo-Cons who clustered around George W. Bush twenty years ago and did their best to set the world on fire so that everyone could have a vote. 

Considered from a more distanced perspective, modern institutional forms have some of the worst substantive track records (measured in terms of actual substantive economic and political justice, the actual establishing of international peace, the actual maintaining of social peace, etc) of any species of political forms in history; a point I cannot here defend in detail, but for which I can at least gesture vaguely in the direction of the absolutely unprecedented wars and social dissolutions of the last 150 years. Yet this is, of course, not really the point, positive or negative; and as with techno-doomerism, a view on modern political forms that takes them as uniquely or irredeemably evil would miss the point as profoundly as the opposite perspective. The remarkable thing historically is not our failure to establish perfect peace and justice on the vague, shifting foundation of a historically-unique mix of (largely British, French, and German) models for joint-stock corporations, electoral oligarchies, mass-suffrage voting systems, industrial production plans, scientific research regimes, and mass-conscription military systems; it is that anyone ever thought we would.

Then, of course, there are the actual religious forms of this belief: beginning with late Medieval and modern forms of fideism, which define faith and the practice of religion entirely in terms of an act of belief not considered in classical theological terms (that is, as a rational act of trust in response to the demonstrated fact of a revelation of the transcendent), but precisely as an act of the will contrary to reason, or in other words, a commitment to lies. I will for the most part merely pass over these, though not without recognizing the enormous importance, to American history, of Protestant sects defined by increasingly and deliberately radical and exclusive and irrationalist forms of belief, by a desperate desire for the absolute commitment of intellect and will as such; and the continuing importance of both Evangelical and modern forms of religion tied to this principle as well.

Contemporary Threats

I will pause this list of movements here, only pausing briefly to note the many 19th and 20th century German systems focused on kultur or race or meaning or the absolute, which embody this principle to rather extreme and literal degrees, but deserve fuller treatment than I can give them here.

For the moment, though, I wish to focus, not on Germany, but on contemporary America, where there are particular, and particularly virulent, forms of this more general modern concept growing ever more and more potent and pervasive.

In contemporary American and global politics, the preoccupation with historical forms has more or less been superseded by an obsession with persons as symbols. For the most part, most Americans today more or less take our institutional forms for granted as the most perfect conceivable or at least absolutely normative and necessary in every respect, and now fight merely about which ideological party--defined in purely or almost purely symbolic forms--will control these institutions and use them for their own purposes. Increasingly, we do not believe in systems, or even ideologies in the classical sense; we merely believe in people, who in turn embody symbols that do not point to anything, but increasingly are simply treated as the good, political or social or religious, itself. What matters is not what our leaders do, in substantive terms, but how they embody our fantasies, affirm and communicate our symbols, and oppose the symbols of our enemies; and we are sure that, if they do so, they will bring about all goods whatsoever. What matters, in other words, is not what system we have; only who wins the election.

In my judgment, however, these "public" and "political" defects are mostly mere instantiations of the far more extreme deviations contained within more "private" systems and our personal lives: beginning with the utter cultural and economic dominance of advertising-pornography and proceeding through a thousand professionalizations and indoctrinations and arts and fantasies built on the idea that what we need to do is just let go and embrace what is contrary to the good and the true, embrace violence as such, embrace fantasy as such, embrace the irrational as such, buy the product, obey the rule, be free. 

These things, though, can be understood themselves as instantiations of a more basic and pervasive cultural belief, which is not so much justified theoretically as practically incarnated in the most basic assumptions of our institutions and cultures and politics and economics and education. This belief can be understood as a kind of pervasive ethical libertarianism or libertinism; but is best understood, I think, as a mere practical, overriding consumer preferentialism. Whatever a person wants, or can be made to want, is good; so long as someone else can sell it to them. 

This has become, to an extent for centuries but to this degree only in my lifetime, a kind of baseline moral assumption of almost everyone, if not in words than emphatically in deeds: namely, that what matters most of all is the ability of people to be free and do what they want, to have their preferences fulfilled as much as possible, to choose their own values and their own highest end. In more intellectual forms, it is embodied in the hopeful arguments of libertines who argue that the end of the human will is precisely some transcendent sense of freedom or creativity as such; which will, as if by magic, always produce good results rather than bad, always lead to fulfillment rather than violence, to the artist rather than the heroin addict or pedophile.

This position is sometimes taken as a political one, rooted in the political tradition of liberalism; but I think this is an error. There is a legitimate and indeed necessary sense of liberty and even of liberalism that acknowledges that the human will is meant to operate, not mechanically, rationally and responsibly and freely, and that to do so a limited degree of freedom from coercion, violence, and do is both beneficial and often necessary. The kind of complete ethical libertarianism often proposed or unthinkingly believed in by contemporary Americans, though, has nothing really to do with politics as such.

The human will, as such, aims always at a set of definite ends or goods; and these are naturally and inevitably shaped and embodied and delimited by definite reality, human and social and legal and ethical and metaphysical. This is always true; and the only real alternative is for human beings to will as much as possible in a state of isolation from, or rather active protection from, or rather violent aggression towards, government, reality, other people, and reason itself. The only practical way for anyone to do this to any great degree, though, is for them to possess enormous, and largely unchecked, power over other people, the world, and/or themselves. And this power intrinsically cannot belong to everyone, but only to a few--since it is precisely power over all other people, to make your will override theirs and your preference take precedence over their desires and will and existence and good.

Historically speaking, these kinds of libertarian ideals have only been successfully implemented within tiny oligarchic classes where everyone has independently a great deal of power. Within such domains, it is even true that one can craft sets of rules, procedures, veritable systems, that aim at letting everyone within this class have as wide as possible a domain of free action and expression as possible. 

A governing class can, then, be liberal in this sense; but that governing class cannot govern liberally. And it cannot govern liberally for precisely the same reason and to the same degree it wishes to be liberal among itself. 

Law is precisely what directs and regulates the human will; government is precisely what educates the will and applies retributive and distributive justice to human power. A whole society cannot do without government or politics, for very practical reasons: namely, that that society would cease to exist. The state of nature cannot exist in reality, for many reasons, among which are the simple realities that people differ in power and cannot survive alone and are born from sexual intercourse as dependent children. The only way for such a libertine ethos to exist, then, is for a class to actively exempt itself from the effects of law and justice; and the only way for them to do so is wield enormous power over everyone else within society. A properly ethical libertarianism or libertinism is, in the final balance, a form of aristocratic politics.

It is, then, by no means a coincidence that the most immediate result of the growth in libertine consumer preferentialism has been the extreme, unchecked growth of what may be called the "security state" or "technological surveillance state." Of all the trends of my brief lifetime, none is more striking, or has advanced so far, and has continued to advance at every phase of my life through many changes in culture and government and a genuine change in epoch. 

Ultimately, though, the reason for this advance is not difficult to see. Put simply, in a world where freedom is the highest end and the highest value, it turns out that the only kind of truly unifying good that we can posit as the basis of our society is simply a desperate, self-protective fear: the panic brought out, in different ways, by both the 9/11 attacks and the COVID 19 pandemic. Hence, to precisely the extent that more substantive goods have dropped out of our politics, to precisely the same degree real or imagined "security" concerns have grown more and more important. To take only one instance, it is precisely because and to the extent that the American conservative movement gradually lost any sort of substantive commitment to a Christian or familial social order that its unifying issue became the largely fictitious security threat of migrants flooding our borders. 

Yet the reality is that the goal of total security is, on its own terms, entirely impossible; and the only way to even pretend to achieve it is in fact to rely, explicitly or implicitly, on faith in some imminentized deity. Citizens can have faith in the government or military; the government or military can have faith in technology; and all failures can be blamed on someone or something else, the supernaturalized terrorist or the forces of chaos or the devil or the Republicans or Democrats. 

Hence, the extension of security into a society is in fact in every instance the retraction of conscious, considered, rational governmental action. When government is understood as aiming, not at justice, but at complete security, then government can no longer act in any rational considered way; it can only embrace one extreme technological solution after another, and violence is the inevitable result. 

One way to think about the current discourse on Artificial Intelligence, and the security and surveillance states to which it is intrinsically wedded, is to take it as a desperate, last-ditch effort to build, by artificial means, the demiurgic, imminent deities in which modern society has, to a great extent, lost faith. The true peril of "artificial intelligence" is not anything particularly to do with the economy or any straightforward application in military or other spheres of life. The true peril is merely that automation acts as spur for a revival in utterly blind faith in technology. In a truly fitting final piece of bathos, the thing most fervently worshipped today, alternately as a beneficent savior and as the destroyer of mankind, is in its most immediate manifestations largely a shitty generator of ugly, ineffective, laughably incompetent advertisements and pornography. Artificial Intelligence is the last and the most idiotic of the deities of modernity.

Metaphysical Deities

I could multiply instances of this principle, I think, almost without end; but that would hardly be particularly illuminating without some idea of what I even mean by an immanentized divinity, the broader, positive framework within which it should be understood, and what I am framing as the alternative, as the normative, as the thing that isn't just another immanentized divinity.

To begin with, then, the systems I'm talking about can be analyzed, like most things, in two overlapping ways, the metaphysical and the ethical. 

When I talk about an "immanentized divinity" as residing at the core of these systems, this terminology can be somewhat deceptive. Transcendence and immanence are not, at their core, opposed concepts; indeed in their normative philosophical senses both necessarily involve the other. For something to "remain in" (immanere) something, even itself, requires a kind of transcendence of what it remains in; and transcendence in turn implies and necessitates a kind of presence in what is transcended. In classical theism, God's total transcendence of all things as cause is precisely what makes him present in things, present more immediately and totally to things than the things themselves.

What makes all these systems odd, or even self-contradictory, though, is that they all treat as transcendent things that are not, in fact, transcendent at all; or rather, that they treat things as transcendent precisely because they are not transcendent; or even more precisely, that they treat things as transcending human goods and reason and will precisely because they do not.

It is easiest, I think, to see this feature in the modern worship of technology. Properly understood, technology is always and everywhere precisely what does not transcend human goods, intellect, and will: precisely because technology is nothing more than a means, reification, and extension of the human will. This is a rather extreme instance of natural transcendence, insofar as technology is not even rationally comprehensible, in a real sense does not exist apart from the intentions imposed on it by the human will. A computer considered in itself is merely a pile of metal, or, more abstractly, an array of shifting electrical charges; it is only with reference to human language, human and goals that we can understand that the electrical charges represent (human) binary language that in turn serves to represent and carry out human ideas and intentions. 

Yet many many people today treat technology as though it did transcend human will and intentions and understanding and values; as though it had a higher finality, inherent in it in and of itself, that naturally encompasses and overrides and dominates human finalities. This is put in different ways: that the finalities of machines or mechanical systems are more "objective" than human ethical values; that the finalities of machines or mechanical systems are simply always perfectly effective, regardless of  circumstances, in making human lives better and human beings themselves happier; that the finalities of machines or mechanical systems are simply natural and inevitable and will go their own way regardless of what human beings do. "Transhumanisms" that pose that machines will naturally surpass human beings and replace them is only a more extreme and literal version of this common belief.

All of these claims, though, are lies--not one of them can even conceivably be true. A means for the human will cannot possibly be more real or true or comprehensible than the will that defines it; cannot possibly be inerrant when the will that governs it is not; cannot possibly be inevitable when the will that directs it is not. What we have in this system, then, is something very close to a contradiction in terms; and this contradiction in terms is in fact the point.

This basic generic complex--namely, to take something defined by its being subject to the control and domination of the human will and treat it, for precisely this reason, as if it were something that transcended human will and understanding and finality--is what defines all the systems I have spoken of above. A "free market" that exists entirely as a reification and abstraction of human will and choice and value cannot possibly take precedence over those wills and choices and value, cannot possibly embody a higher value, cannot possibly act perfectly, cannot possibly possess full knowledge. A governmental system that is (at least treated) as nothing more than a framework for human goals and choices cannot possibly act perfectly and justly in and of itself, apart from the perfection and justice of the human wills involved. And so on and so forth.

It is my contention, then, that at the heart of modernity lies the transgression of a very ancient commandment indeed: you shall not adore the works of your hands. 

Ethical Deities

Considered merely metaphysically, though, the situation I am describing is extremely puzzling, and extremely difficult to account for historically or rationally or in any other way. There have been any number of intellectual history narratives, secular and Protestant and Catholic, that have attempted to explain some or all of the above in terms of various philosophical complexes and ideas, from voluntarism to divine univocity to fideism to racism to sexism to Imperialism to colonialism to Orientalism to Christianity to Gnosticism and back again; as well as any number of historical narratives that have attempted to account for all this more mundanely in terms of economic and cultural and political trends.

Here, though, is a thesis I cannot fully defend, but which I have become more and more convinced of over time: namely, that the fundamental roots of what I am describing do not, in the end, reside in any particular metaphysical thesis (even if they have been embodied in such), but rather in the realm of ethics.

In any case, whether or not this is true, if the same lie is described in ethical rather than metaphysical terms, I believe that certain aspects of it become a great deal clearer.

In the basic Greek senses, ethics and metaphysics are domains that differ in almost every respect, and indeed are difficult to reconcile with each other. Ethics studies human actions; metaphysics studies existence itself with all its gradations. It is not trivially easy to see how these two domains relate to each other.

Nevertheless, beginning from the time of Parmenides, philosophers have proposed various ways of reconciling or combining or connecting them; and a few versions of this became, at least in the Platonic and Christian domains, more or less pervasive. This reconciliation has consisted, most simply, in identifying the ends of ethics with the causes of metaphysics; or in other words, with making arche and telos equivalent. In the hierarchical universe of Platonism, the "goods" sought by the human will are precisely the "principles" understood by the human intellect as causing and unifying reality on higher levels. For Aristotle, the supreme cause and explanation for the universe is cause and explanation precisely because of its status as supreme end of the universe, an unmoved mover who moves the world precisely through the necessary desire of all beings for himself. In Christian philosophy, similarly, from Justin Martyr to Duns Scotus, the "happiness" which unifies all of ethics, at which the human will aims necessarily in every one of its actions, is precisely the God who is the direct cause for the existence of both the universe and the human person. Ethics and metaphysics are unified, then, precisely in the identification of the fundamental concept at the core of each domain; a unification that can, but does not always need to, result in a more general mapping of the transcendent hierarchies of human ends onto the transcendent hierarchies of the universe. 

Understood in these terms, the "lies" characteristic of the systems discussed above can be understood in a complementary, and somewhat more illuminating way, as a radical dislocation of the domains of being and will, metaphysics and ethics, or, rather, as a radical reinterpretation of ethics as such, relocating the end of all human action within the human will itself. 

This is, again, more or less a self-contradictory goal: treating some contingent action or set of actions as the transcendent end of all action, overriding all rational thought and intention and value, while at the same time denying that it transcends the will at all. The means is treated as the end; or, rather, a particular set of means is reinterpreted as an end, while still being acknowledged as a mere means.

To take an example from above, "freedom" or "efficiency" or similar concepts cannot be the end of the human will, because they are concepts that are only comprehensible with reference to the human will itself oriented towards some definite end. Freedom as such cannot be an end for the simple and straightforward reason that it is a means; nor can laws be separated from ethics, since law is precisely what regulates the human will, and ethics is precisely the principles by which the will is regulated. Likewise, an economic system defined entirely in terms of the ethical values of the human will can only be made rational sense of in terms of ethics, that is, of the actual, definite ends at which the human will aims; it cannot override or be separate from those ends, nor can it posit economic means to ethical goods as an end overriding the ethical good. What applies here applies also, mutatis mutandis, to all the modern systems discussed above. 

Origins

All of this will, hopefully, serve as helpful illustrations of why I believe that ethics ultimately allows for better explanations of these historical systems than metaphysics. Taken not as metaphysical beliefs so much as ethical habits or even institutions, these phenomena are much more understandable, and even, to a degree, rational; since the human will, to function at all, must most of the time be aimed at immanent rather than transcendent ends. To the extent the human will focuses on means and immanent ends rather than on its ultimate end, it naturally begins to treat those means and immanent ends as though they were transcendent; and whenever and wherever the human will entirely lacks a transcendent finality, it necessarily treats its supreme immanent finality as its transcendent end.

This hypothesis allows, too, for a much more subtle reading of the historical trends and evidence; and does not need to posit some act of evil quasi-Gnostic idea-genesis out of nothing at some definite point in history. The (very gradual and partial and still incomplete) movement from more or less religious civilizations to more or less modern civilizations does not result from some proliferating, conquering idea from without; it results merely from the effects of habits operating on the human will from within. Every civilization and culture and institution and society is defined by, and embodies, certain definite ends or goods, toward which it directs its members' wills. To the extent people and institutions focus more on means, they have a natural and increasing tendency to treat those means as ends; and to the extent they focus more on immediate ends, those immediate ends have an increasing tendency to be treated as final ends.

Ultimately, then, the historical process I am describing would perhaps best be summed up in the simple term "secularization": which, properly understood, is emphatically not the process of people believing less in God or the supernatural or becoming more rational or becoming less spiritual or religious, but the process, within some domain necessarily containing both the transcendent and the immanent, the divine and the human, the eternal and the temporary, a gradual shift in focus and attention from the former categories to the latter. Most immediately, "secularization" consists precisely in the habitual choice of what belongs to the saeculum, the temporary or passing world, over what belongs to eternity. This process need not coincide with, and to an extent is incompatible with, actual denial of supernatural; and it embodies precisely the choice of lies, the choice of the means as end qua means, of the immanent as transcendent qua transcendent, of which I have spoken of above.

A proper historical narrative of modernity, then, I suspect, would consist less of narratives of explicit ideas as accounts of social systems and cultures and economic systems, accounts of what may be called "practical ethics," noting how people's actual habits and values and goals were brought to focus on the immanent over the transcendent and the immediate over the final.

Here, I suspect that capitalism would ultimately be less impactful for its economic structure (i.e. the dominance of capital over labor) as of the resulting habits of mind found in capitalist managers directing labor for profit and the imposition of these habits on others through economic power. Similarly, I suspect Protestantism would ultimately be of less moment for particular (variable) beliefs around fideism or sacraments or predestination as for its practical abolition of a distinct sacred realm, of habitually chooseable embodiments of the sacred: religious orders and feast days and sacraments and sacramentals and pilgrimages and sacred objects and sacred texts and sacred authorities. 

The whole claim of Christianity as an ancient religion was in its division of the world into the sacred and the secular, the eternal and the temporary, and its consequent claim to be able to take the final end of man, God and happiness, and embody it, Incarnate it, in persons and institutions and practices and times and places capable of being chosen habitually over their "secular" counterparts and capable in this way of ordering the human will to God. In abolishing these things, Protestantism more or less abolished Christianity; or, more sympathetically, failed to abolish it. Yet in a more accurate narrative, the move to elevate the secular over the sacred, to sacralize secular life as a final end in itself, is much older than Protestantism. In the most accurate narrative, it is as old as humanity. 

Alternatives

Posed in these terms, the "alternative" to the systems described above is mostly rather mundane. In the domain of metaphysics, the alternative is a vision of the world defined by various forms of rational, ordered transcendence. There are many, many, versions of this; including versions I emphatically do believe in. To explain the world and its features, we necessarily have to appeal to some cause or cause(s); whether this is a God or Epicurean atoms or a multiverse or the back of a turtle. In our experience of the world, some things transcend other things in various fairly straightforward and uncontroversial senses, at minimum in the sense that they go beyond them; just as, say, causes transcendent their effects by pre-existing them, or intellectual thought transcends physical action by being incomensurate with it, or color transcends grayscale by containing elements it does not. We can try to figure out the world and how it works, at every level, so long as we keep this in mind. 

Ethically, too, the alternative is simply responsible, limited human action, situated ultimately within some sort of framework that acknowledges, or at minimum leaves room for, some kind of ultimate transcendent end. There are also many, many versions of such ethics possible, including many I hate with all my heart. 

Given all the above, though, our most immediate duties are practical and not theoretical. We can simply recognize that there is no transcendent end inherent in technology or the market or liberty or the individual or the state or anywhere else overriding all ethics and metaphysics and relieving us of all responsibility to think and plan and act reasonably and infallibly dictating what we must do or do not do. In all these domains, there is merely human action, which is governed by rational ends and calculations of means and, finally, by a hierarchy of transcendent goods culminating in a final end.

In politics, we can simply recognize that what we refer to government has a few principal tasks, which may be simplified under the headings of education, distributive justice, and retributive justice; and that these tasks can only be carried out by human persons acting responsibly and rationally to seek these ends. No magical political system, no magical free market, will do any of these things for us or take away the actual responsibility of human beings to act and plan to do so. In culture, we can simply recognize that the human will is always seeking, not freedom, but some definite good; and that this good must be real, and rationally justified.

And in our immediate, present plight, we can do what we can to resist the practical, dominating logic of symbolic politics, consumer preferentialism, and the security state; and try to habitually shape and mold our wills towards true, rational goods that really exist and really transcend us. Among these goods are such things as other people, the world, families, communities, and God; and they are not hard to find. So let's get to it.