Substituting an anthropocentric world view for a theocentric one

“What went wrong in Europe?”

https://www.genetherapy.me/life-extension/timothy-leary-turns-100-americas-lsd-messiah-remembered-by-those-who-knew-him-vice-uk.php

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What happened in Europe—the birth of secular modernity—is the great exception to the general historical and cultural pattern. Religion has been the most formative influence on virtually all historic civilizations, whether one looks at the role of Hinduism in India, Islam in the Middle East, or Christianity in Europe. A culture’s particular orientation to transcendent reality gives form to its distinctive pattern of social, political, ethical, artistic, and intellectual life. But Europe by the eighteenth century began to break from this traditional form of culture and gave rise to a new cultural form that Nasr correctly characterizes as anthropocentric. The particular characteristic of anthropocentric culture is that it is not oriented to any reality beyond man himself, and regards “human self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”4 In consequence, social institutions as well as moral and aesthetic values tend to become desacralized, uprooted from any spiritual foundation, and reflective of purely worldly themes and purposes.

The ideas and material culture associated with European modernity are now so widely diffused throughout the world that its promises and challenges cannot be escaped by any civilization. The pleasures, comforts, and wealth it made possible have proved an inescapable attraction. At the same time, the perceived threat modernism poses to traditional cultures around the world has inspired movements of resistance—not all benign—as indigenous religious traditions endeavor to reassert themselves.5 Indeed, the struggle between modernism and traditional forms of culture is defining the world of the twenty-first century. The significance of secular modernity is so vast that its genesis calls for account.

In what follows I shall suggest two broad conditions that may help provide answers to the descriptive question of why modernity first emerged in Europe—first the synthetic character of Europe’s culture, and second the process by which the Christian humanism of the Renaissance unraveled. Each of them is related to dualities that are quite particular to the West. First there is a duality between the classical and Christian traditions of Europe. But there is also a duality within Christianity itself between the divine and the human. This has manifested itself historically in Christian civilization as the division between the spiritual and the temporal. In secular modernity the balance between these elements was disrupted by the effort to create a purely anthropological civilization from which the divine is excluded. And yet Christianity itself contributed to human affirmation through its belief in a transcendent human dignity. Thus modernity must be understood through investigating the particular evolution of Western humanism. How did this defining element of European culture–one with profound classical and Christian roots—end in a hyperbolic humanism that elevates man to the highest being?

https://isi.org/intercollegiate-review/what-went-wrong-in-europebr-a-reflection-on-western-modernity/

A post-Marxist culture—one that kept Marx’s radical materialism and denial of religious transcendence, while dispensing with his confident predictions about the self-destruction of capitalism—would naturally tend to be radically bourgeois. By that, Del Noce meant a society that views “everything as an object of trade” and “as an instrument” to be used in the pursuit of individualized “well-being.” Such bourgeois society would be highly individualistic, because it could not recognize any cultural or religious “common good.” In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels described the power of the bourgeois worldview to dissolve all cultural and religious allegiances into a universal market. Now, ironically, Marxist ideas (which Del Noce viewed as a much larger and more influential phenomenon than political Marxism in a strict sense) had helped bring that process to completion. At a conference in Rome in 1968, Del Noce looked back at recent history and concluded that the post-Marxist culture would be “a society that accepts all of Marxism’s negations against contemplative thought, religion, and metaphysics; that accepts, therefore, the Marxist reduction of ideas to instruments of production. But which, on the other hand, rejects the revolutionary-messianic aspects of Marxism, and thus all the religious elements that remain within the revolutionary idea. In this regard, it truly represents the bourgeois spirit in its pure state, the bourgeois spirit triumphant over its two traditional adversaries, transcendent religion and revolutionary thought.”      

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dead-end-left.

And from same link: On the other hand, our culture has largely embraced a form of “scientism” that excludes all mythical, philosophical, and religious narratives from the public debate except one: the myth of never-ending technological progress. But, as Del Noce remarked, the technological mindset is “the most conservative in the history of the world” because it radically denies the possibility of “another reality.” Technological progress keeps changing the means of production, but does not bring about any moral change. The paradox is that these two trends (the leftist critique of authority and conservative technocracy) converged into what Del Noce called prophetically “the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left.” Its result has been that “separation between the ruling class and the masses becomes extreme.” Indeed, one plausible interpretation of the election of Donald Trump is that today many people who do not benefit from the expansion of technology feel that the only political choice is between an alien liberal technocracy and tribalism.