The world survived World War II. Not only did the West survive—it got freer, richer, more prosperous than ever. Human wealth expanded exponentially. Life spans increased.
But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans—Enlightenment ideals about the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology—had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte. The post-Locke Enlightenment project had been a Tower of Babel, with the common goal of supplanting reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their own. And then the tower fell, and the land was left barren.
Europe had buried millions of its sons and daughters; the West had placed its bets on mankind, and reaped the whirlwind.
But God did not return. Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on “regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.” Religious practice remained the norm in Europe until the advent of the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as the children born around World War II reached adolescence, religious observance plummeted.
Faith in human reason, too, had waned. After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient. The Enlightenment hope in mankind’s collective capacity to better itself had collapsed.
Without God, and without the collective, all that was left were individuals. Alone.
Thus, the philosophy of existentialism came to the fore.
But there remained a hole at the center of Western civilization: a meaning-shaped hole. That hole has grown larger and larger in the decades since—a cancer, eating away at our heart. We tried to fill it with the will to action; we tried to fill it with science; we tried to fill it with world-changing political activism. None of it provides us the meaning we seek.
By the end of World War II, European optimism was dead and buried beneath six feet of human ash. The philosophies of the Europeans—Enlightenment ideals about the value of human beings and the need to move beyond God or Greek teleology—had ended in tragedy. Hitler claimed ideological forebears in Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche;1 Stalin took his cues from Marx; the eugenicists took their ideas from Darwin and Comte. The post-Locke Enlightenment project had been a Tower of Babel, with the common goal of supplanting reason for religion rather than seeking the congruence of the two. As the tower began to challenge God, its builders went to war with one another, speaking languages all their own. And then the tower fell, and the land was left barren.
Europe had buried millions of its sons and daughters; the West had placed its bets on mankind, and reaped the whirlwind.
But God did not return. Magna Carta, the first great charter of Western liberties, was signed by King John in 1215, and set limits to monarchic powers based on “regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honour of God and the advancement of his holy Church.” Religious practice remained the norm in Europe until the advent of the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as the children born around World War II reached adolescence, religious observance plummeted.
Faith in human reason, too, had waned. After the catastrophic insanity of not one but two Great Wars, the Biblical warning not to place faith in princes had been proved prescient. The Enlightenment hope in mankind’s collective capacity to better itself had collapsed.
Without God, and without the collective, all that was left were individuals. Alone.
Thus, the philosophy of existentialism came to the fore.
- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.
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