Hypermodern Faith from the Ashes

The quixotic pursuit of secular spirituality

AI-generated image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Suppose a nuclear bomb detonates, levels a city, poisons the earth and water, and covers the area with lethal gamma radiation.

Now suppose that instead of staying clear of the contaminated zone, seemingly foolhardy individuals journey directly to it and decide to set up camp there, using the damage done by the blast to erect rude imitations of houses, collecting the ruined earth and water to pretend they could still be consumed, and singing a cheerful tune and happily breathing the tainted air through a gasmask as though no cataclysm had occurred.

This analogy may help us understand postmodern spirituality's desperation and futility.

Digging through the debris of hypermodernity

The word “postmodern” used to be fashionable a few decades ago, which is ironic because postmodernists reduce knowledge to a series of fads. Whatever you wish to call it, though, be it “hypermodern,” “metamodern,” “supermodern,” or some more pretentious abstraction, the phenomenon itself is real in secular industrialized cultures.

I’ll call it “hypermodern” to emphasize that what I’m talking about is modernity’s self-undoing. Science, freedom of thought, skeptical philosophy, capitalist industry, and democracy are only messengers bestowing the power on the masses to discover their true worth.

This is the dropping of the atomic bomb.

When pushed to its limit, for example, philosophical reason eats itself. Religious myths become mere “metanarratives” or grand fictions that we can continue to revere only ironically, knowing they’re false and the social function of their rhetoric is to bless some privileged minority’s gaining of power over nature and an underclass.

But the hypermodernist turns reason against secularism, too, leaving nothing undoubted. Whenever we talk, we’re only playing a “language game” or we’re scheming for power in some underhanded fashion. Relentless skepticism has desecrated our institutions, leaving their dogmas hollow and their rituals as mockeries. The results are relativism, narcissism, cynicism, apathy, ennui, anxiety, and depression.

Hypermodernity has been exacerbated by globalization: we can’t trust our local stories because the internet and the global village present us with a plethora of foreign convictions and lifestyles. Everyone has their truth, so the depth of subjectivity trumps the facts — especially when objectivity becomes little more than a tool for the humanist’s hunt to maximize pleasures. All we need are our fifteen minutes of fame as we express the heartfelt authenticity of our little truths on social media, whereupon those truths are drowned out by a stream of equally insignificant vanities.

We cope with this deluge of conflicting contents by appreciating the diversity of perspectives, knowing there’s no absolute foundation of knowledge since everything is suspect. We become eclectic connoisseurs, combing the games and fictions for items that strike our fancy, which we piece together to add to our private story. We rummage through the sciences and the religions, ignoring historical context as we pluck nuggets from the ancient and the contemporary worlds alike.

This is the excavation of the contaminated debris.

Religious faith in Godot

Whatever feels right, whatever works, since anything goes — but there’s one forbidden zone, one Ground Zero where the bomb went off. This is the canon of the dead white European men who were the champions of modernism, the Enlightenment, and humanistic progress.

You can crib from any period you like, says the hypermodernist, but you risk setting the alarms off if you speak earnestly about the merits of those hypocritical forerunners who were insufficiently cynical since they fell for their hype.

Thus, egoism is the community-killer (whereas Frank Herbert in Dune had said that “fear is the mind-killer”). Belief in yourself as sovereign is a toxic and even excessively masculine vestige of a naïve, patriarchal fraud.

By contrast, the humility and tolerance of hypermodern communities build on feminine impulses. Instead of attempting to dominate conversations, a hypermodern philosopher will ask questions like Socrates, confessing all her biases and insidious privileges out of deference to social justice and cybercultural transparency. She’ll invite others to speak their truths, share perspectives, and cooperate to preserve or bring about some fair social arrangement.

This is another reason to speak of these tendencies as “hypermodern” because the values of modernity remain in force, namely liberalism and social justice. If anything, these values have become more sacrosanct since now they’re applied more strictly even if the result is our societal breakdown.

The hypermodern faith is that some “Game B” will emerge, some viable, fair-minded civilization that isn’t exploitative or sustained by lies. To help us build this Utopia, the hypermodernist indulges in creative word games to capture a new vision, one fit for a jaded religion that can inspire and guide us without dictating to or controlling anyone.

See, for example, the intellectuals and gurus of Rebel Wisdom, who will talk your ear off about this or that technological or political trap or conspiracy, some overlooked source of wisdom and spiritual vitality. Their confections of “sensemaking” are often couched in neologisms or trendy hodgepodges of prose poetry that derive from leftist French philosophy. At their worst, these teachings are pretentious and obscure, while at their best they’re timely and thought-provoking.

Late-modern culture as a hollow, fragmented shell

Hypermodern spiritualists are attempting to rebuild Humpty Dumpty. Arguably, modern reason undermined not just the institutions and dogmas of organized religions, but the validity of spiritual longings.

Granted, those longings persist, as do organized religions. In developed countries, these religions have been drained of much of their authority and power since the “modern development” in question is just the empowerment of secular organizations such as transnational corporations and democratic governments. Synagogues and temples have been secularized, marginalized, or labeled as potential hotbeds of radicalization and terrorism (as in the case of antimodern mosques).

While the religious organizations are thus either harmless hollow shells or they’re targeted for destruction, what may have been lost is the reason for caring about spirituality and wisdom. We know that the agents of modernity, including globalization, capitalism, democracy, technological advances, and secularism are rife with dangers. We may hope there’s some key to saving us from our aggression and vanity, some lost knowledge or art that can perfect us. But perhaps this is to lose sight of what’s revealed by the dropping of the bomb of “modernity.”

Again, we have to be clear on what we mean when we speak of the modern since the elites of every period from history have boasted that they’re in the vanguard of social progress, that they’ve surpassed earlier or foreign forms of backwardness. The transition may indeed be cyclical rather than linear, but judging from the subsequent accelerated pace of historical change, a unique threshold was crossed with the harbingers of so-called modernity, namely with the Reformation, Renaissance, and scientific, industrial, American, and French revolutions.

The upshot of all of those transitions is that not only do we understand what we really are and how we fit into the universe, but we can prove it; we have the receipts. There were insights and innovations in the ancient world, as in Greece, India, and China, for example, but the ancients’ data were necessarily limited. Their worldviews were in one way or another anthropocentric. At the heart of “modernity” is the overthrowing of that presumption, as was symbolized perfectly by the Copernican Revolution, the shift from the Ptolemaic to a heliocentric cosmology.

The cooptation of wise rebels

The longing, then, to be spiritually complete, to live in peace and fairness in a hypermodern society that knows mass religion has always been a con and that the natural universe is amoral and godless begins to look reckless rather than wise and mature.

Indeed, there are signs that hypermodern spirituality is as shallow as what William Davies called the “happiness industry.” It’s as though those intrepid builders who venture to the site of the atomic blast of modernity had been drafted as employees of the company that built the bomb.

The eclecticism and cosmopolitanism of late-modern spirituality look like aftereffects of capitalist expansion (globalization) and computational multitasking. Rather than having found rebel wisdom, we may rationalize our adaptation to the new, unjust, and absurd environments.

We add a little of this philosophy and a pinch of that one and think of ourselves as innocent, inquisitive connoisseurs when perhaps we’re just trying to think like computers that can perform a thousand tasks at once without understanding any of them.

The backlash against masculine egoism is part of the fallout of feminism, which has likewise been co-opted by commercial interests. Equal rights for women make for more customers, more dupes of capitalist enterprise, which is to say more consumers eroding the ecosystem and more ruthless corporate elites.

In patriarchal societies, women were kept in private domains; by sheltering them, men took the brunt of the indignity of having to earn a living in a world that’s indifferent to our survival. Women fought for entry into the public realm, which exposed them to comparable corruption. Masculine men who spend too long in the limelight become infamous for their sociopathy. Feminine women and feminized men who take up women’s banners become myopic social justice warriors, Twitter mobsters, or zealots of totalitarian “cancel culture.”

A farcical cycle

In any case, if we reflect on the nature of the nuclear winter we’re living through, instead of whistling past the graveyard like shell-shocked deniers of the trauma, we may be less sanguine about our prospects.

The revelation of hypermodernity is the sinking realization that we’ve lost our pride or at least our right to it, whereas we were once naïve mammals that deemed themselves central to cosmic being. If we’re still actors in a spotlight, we’re shining the light on ourselves and we can do so as long as we’re able to keep up the pretense that a trick performed in a backwoods sideshow is worthy of having an audience.

Although occultist undercurrents connect the medieval and modern worlds, hypermodern spirituality went viral in the 1960s, with the Hippies. Their drug-fueled explorations of Eastern religions were meant to support their fight for civil rights. The counterculture was a reaction against the hypermasculine degeneracy of Nixon’s Watergate and Vietnam War scandals.

But the Hippies’ optimism petered out in the 1970s, when OPEC sent the global economy into a tailspin and the corporate powers of neoliberalism waged a counterattack, leading to the conservatism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the collapse of the Soviet Union (that once great hope for a realistic socialist alternative to capitalism), and the selling-out of America’s bohemian ideals. It became hip to be square, as Huey Lewis said.

Now we’ve come around again to a neo-Hippie renaissance, to a seeker’s smorgasbord. Once again we think entheogens are the answer, love is the only way, and we have the power and the right to heal the world as long as we unite against the common enemy.

Instead of just protesting in the streets, we hang out our shingles on the internet with our mighty blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, podcasts, Facebook pages, and self-published screeds.

Neck-deep in surveillance capitalism, we flock to the latest products of Big Tech, flattering ourselves by deeming us “content producers” or “influencers” in the gig economy. We’re convinced our motives are pure because we’re after world peace, wisdom, and tranquility.

Alas, if those ideals are just distant memories or were only ever childish dreams or naïve delusions, this movement isn’t so inspiring. If reason has long since subverted those ideals so that the toy versions of God and spirituality we can reformulate are incapable of rousing support from the shallow, fickle public, there may be no signal in the noise we’re generating.

Greek wisdom and existential dread

Indeed, any hypermodern religion should begin with something like existentialism rather than old-fashioned spirituality, and with cosmicism (cosmic horror) rather than an uplifting pastiche of the world’s philosophies and religions. The goals shouldn’t be happiness, peace, or wisdom, but an overcoming of angst and horror with the grim duty to wage a war of humanization against nature’s absurdity.

For example, the ancient Greek ideal of wisdom was based on an anthropocentric cosmology that took nature to be a cosmos, an ordered whole whose balance deserves to be maintained. That’s what the Olympians were for, to hold back the monstrous Titans who would upset nature’s harmony and bring chaos.

And that was the meaning of Plato’s cave analogy: misled by our senses, we’re distracted by shadows or copies of an ultimate, mental reality that reason grasps and that redeems even those shadows with its “goodness.” Aristotle’s naturalism was likewise infused with teleology, with valid purposes strewn through natural processes.

Wisdom was the discernment of those objective goods and purposes, the knowledge of which trains you to be virtuous enough to live in harmony with nature.

None of which is valid any longer since reason has detonated anthropocentricity. Goodness and purpose, meaning and harmony are human value judgments, projections of the conditions we need to retain our sanity and self-esteem. The real world at large is perfectly inhuman, in that we couldn’t be less significant in the universe than if the Big Bang were arranged by a demon bent on humiliating the lowly denizens that would evolve to mislead themselves.

True, nature includes patterns that we detect and explain. But contrary to the ancient Greeks, Daoists, and all stripes of theists, including the Jungians and other hypermodern spiritualists, these natural patterns aren’t good or harmonious. There’s no obligation to preserve the natural order unless we need to do so out of self-interest. However sublime it may be, the natural order is all the more monstrous for being godless and therefore pointless.

Nature creates and evolves itself for no good reason and towards no reassuring end. We need to begin with that sobering truth if we want some guidance in the deadly afterglow of secular enlightenment.