Apocalypse of the Modern Mind is the second volume of Daniel Polikoff’s groundbreaking Reset or Renaissance series. The first (An American Scholar’s Covid Chronicle) tells us what really happened during Covid. This compelling sequel tells us―not only how―but why.
The democratic impulse that emerged with such dramatic effect (first in America and later in Europe) grew out of a rich soil of ideas revolving around the most profound and far-reaching concerns: the status of divine and natural law and the relationship of the one to the other; the respective provinces of reason and of faith; the nature and destiny of humanity.
It is in reviewing and recollecting that rich intellectual history that we can gain insight into the principles underlying the philosophy of democracy and (more generally) the truly liberal impulse that engendered modernity. It is that order of comprehension, as well, that enables vision of the counterfeit side of that precious coin: the deformation of liberal and democratic ideals implicit in the nefarious “dialectic of enlightenment” and its frightening consequence: the technocratic authoritarianism so dramatically displayed in the Covid era.
Polikoff is concerned here not only with the dark shadows that creep in under the door of our enlightened modernity, but with radical solutions to the problems thus posed: solutions suggested by those bearers of a renewed Romantic or Transcendentalist idea of what enlightenment really means.
Apocalypse Of The Modern Mind
INTRODUCTION
Humanity today stands at a turning point in time, a crossroads demanding clear discrimination between the paths of good and evil. A pitched battle has long been underway between those heart-lit torches that guide humanity towards a more enlightened future and the obscure tools―now subtle, now brutal, now subtly brutal―that would deliver us into hands that crush us.
In point of fact, the forces of destruction appear ascendant today; even on the verge of triumph. Apocalyptic signs of crisis disfigure the face of the globe. Ecological degradation imperils the survival of life on earth; gross economic disparity grows ever worse, endangering the well-being of all; religious fundamentalism and widespread militarism foment intolerance and violence, tearing at the social fabric enfolding human existence. On all sides, the very sinews of the world seem stretched to the point of snapping whilst the flame of spirit appears nought but a feeble candle soon to be extinguished by the gale-force winds of fate.
This grave situation is both new and not new. The novel place in time wherein we find ourselves represents an advanced stage of developments long in the making. In the aftermath of the epochal disaster of World War II, Paul Brunton―one of the first 20th-century figures to bring Eastern wisdom into wide circulation in the West―authored a book titled The Spiritual Crisis of Man. On the first page, Brunton writes:
Post-war times are noteworthy for their supreme suspense, for the unpleasant chaos and insecurity which grips whole countries or even continents, and for their state of continued crisis. . . . Never before were so many people plunged in so much uncertainty, so much perplexity and unsettlement. Signs of this condition are plenty and plain for all to read. The confusions come with the morning’s breakfast. They move with terrific speed. Our newspapers give us in a single issue what was once the history of a whole month. Their pages dismay and distract us.1
Brunton could easily have penned these words today, except that the daily chaos may well not be encountered in a newspaper, but read or viewed on a screen. Meanwhile, the terrific speed of human affairs has accelerated beyond anything he could well have imagined and the crises (offspring, no doubt, of those to which Brunton alludes) are still more global and earthshaking.
How have we come to this pass? Why has human history taken such a dark turn, or marched so brazenly for so long down what may well be no generous boulevard but a deadly cul-de-sac? Why does the unfolding plot of humanity’s life on earth look more and more like an ancient tragedy moving rapidly and inexorably toward its last devastating act?
The causes of the ubiquitous distress that so afflicts the globe today can hardly be superficial. On the contrary, these must be sought at the root of the matter: the dominant forms of culture that mold prevailing ideological norms and thus the conduct of life.
The emergencies confronting present-day humanity reflect not only drastic perturbations in the material order of things but critical developments in the history of consciousness. At the deepest level, the spiritual dilemma to which Brunton refers constitutes an intellectual crisis. Our predicament derives from our habitual mental construction of the nature of things: what we―whether consciously or not―hold to be, or not to be, true and real. The gist of the matter may be stated thus: today, we find ourselves face to face with the catastrophic deficiency of the belief systems that have largely dominated Western culture since the Renaissance and Reformation, the crippling insufficiencies inherent in the Modern worldview.
Those insufficiencies pervade and shape the texture of most every facet of human culture. They manifested spectacularly in Covid, spelling disaster on a previously unheard-of scale, the extent of which we have not yet begun to compass.
Not everyone, however, sees it that way, even with the benefit of hindsight. Therein lies a conundrum as well as a critical challenge.
