You can see it in the news. Rather than hearing about supposedly sophisticated, enlightened people, every day there are stories that seem to have been ripped from history pages about ancient barbarians and medieval vandals.

Halls of government are increasingly characterised by political theatre more than rational, civil debate.

We continue to grapple with the multiple long-term effects of a pandemic reminiscent of the Black Death.

A former president, a leading candidate for the next presidential election, has been found liable in civil court for sexual battery.

Meanwhile, hundreds of citizens are being arrested, tried and convicted for violent acts undertaken to thwart democracy. Innocent people — including children — are being shot by private citizens simply for playing, sleeping, going to school or trying to pick up younger siblings at the wrong house.

We drag kids to adult entertainment.

The US's most-watched political commentator apparently doesn't believe a word he says.

So much for human progress.

Whatever belief one might have held in the possibility of this idea, such a belief seems less tenable with each passing day.

The notion of progress is a modern one

By "modern," I mean the modern age birthed by the Enlightenment and the very real advances it made in human knowledge.

What made the modern age modern was the scientific revolution, a dramatic shift in the foundation of what we call knowledge. Once rooted in religion and myth, truth would now be rooted in reason and science.

The modern age, however, still carries a myth of its own.

The modern age myth encompasses many things, but perhaps can be boiled down to a belief in the idea that our world and we can be governed by reason alone and that because of our reliance on reason our societies (and we) are more advanced than were people and civilisations of ancient times.

The myth of the modern age, as a friend of mine observed the other day, is slowly unravelling.

Yes, civilisations rise and fall. Along the way, they have peaks and valleys.

Those of us who've been around for half a century or more can attest to an overwhelming sense that 21st century American civilisation has entered a valley.

Our recent days are "defined by cruelty, lawlessness, the shattering of norms and traditional boundaries, and an eagerness to annihilate truth and trust in institutions," Peter Wehner observed in a recent essay at The Atlantic.

The confidence in human potential, accomplishments and mastery over the natural world (one might more properly term such confidence "pride") that the modern age cultivated is misplaced. It is all part of the myth.

Having given too much weight to this myth myself, I am at once chastened and cheered to see it unravelling.

But recognising it as a myth — in order to see ourselves and the world we have made more clearly — is perhaps our best hope.

Science, technology and knowledge march forward, all based in reason. But the human condition remains unchanged.

If we thought we are doing things better than our parents, our grandparents or our ancestors from long ago, we were wrong.

Yes, we are doing better on some things.

Women can vote now!

We don't auction fellow human beings in the town square!

We sneeze into our elbows instead of our hands!

But even in these advances, we lurch forward by emotion, acting out in partisan enmity, with little optimism about human reason.

We rarely show ourselves to be governed by our rational powers.

I've spent the past couple of years researching and writing about some of the striking parallels between the 19th and the 21st centuries for a forthcoming book.

As is our own day, the Victorian age, too, was convinced of its potential for both individual and social progress. Yet, in the midst of these hopes, wiser artists and philosophers offered prescient warnings.

One fitting warning for us can be found in Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1864 novella, "Notes From Underground."

The story's narrator, an unnamed recluse, offers personal confessions about his past life and cynical analysis about his present society, a society taken with its own sense of progress and improvement, symbolised by the Crystal Palace, a real-life British monument built to showcase the best inventions from around the world.

Amid such breathtaking human accomplishments, the narrator imagines "a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance" who rises to say, "hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!"

Dostoevsky's Underground Man concludes, "he would be sure to find followers⁠—such is the nature of man."

Indeed, in the midst of America's general prosperity, not just one ignoble gentleman but legions of people seem gleeful, with arms akimbo, to be kicking over the whole show.

Whether such destructiveness is for the purpose of fame, power, wealth (or all three) it is hard to tell.

Watching certain social media influencers gain followers by the millions with flame-throwing posts, I can't help but wonder if the purpose is merely, and more basely, to fulfil some sadistic delight in causing others to suffer.

The Underground Man can relate to this too:

They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate.

The "halcyon days" of modern progress and prosperity lead to boredom — "It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people," he says — which leads him to conclude, "I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins … "

What is the entire outrage industry but the fruit of bored people, people who do not know how to find satisfaction in the quietness of a book, the work of the hands, or the love of family and friends?

What is rage farming — the enflaming of passions that overtake reason for the sake of clicks and personal profit — but proof of the myth of the modern?

The myth of the modern is that the truth that will set us free is a truth of our own making.

Perhaps the unravelling of this myth will lead us out of our current valley.

• Karen Swallow Prior is a Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and the author of "Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More — Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist."
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.

Hajime Konno, in his book "Benedictus PP XVI, Renovatio Europae Renovatio", draws attention to the Western presumption that wants to impose its values on the entire world.

The author wrote that this leads to cultural conflicts, not only in the West between progressives and conservatives, but also in the East, as for example in Japan between universalists and nationalists.

Konno wrote that Christianity was the source of modern values in the West.

But the Church is now in conflict with the anti-Christian consequences and impositions of this modernity.

The Catholic Church is therefore like an "East" in the West.

And Joseph Ratzinger, first as a theologian and finally as Pope, was a lucid protagonist of this global encounter/clash between the Church and modernity.

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In an opinion piece on abc.net, Archbishop-elect Anthony Fisher wrote that "modernity struggles with any kind of love that goes beyond feelings".

"People today are less and less willing to commit, for the long haul, to another person or a small community of persons, come what may, even when the loving is hard," he added.

It is this "fundamental problem" that faces the family, rather than the "hot button" issues in the media during the synod on the family, the archbishop stated.

Factors contributing to the "shrinkage and fragmentation" of the modern family include urbanisation, industrialisation and a view of the institution as being founded solely on the affections of the couple for each other.

Archbishop-elect Fisher wrote that there are some positives in the modern outlook, such as greater respect for freedom and the equality of the sexes.

But when "concepts of love and sexuality are unmoored from religious values and mores . . . major stress points become evident".

These include: "disconnection of domestic relations from marriage; disconnection of sexuality from love and procreation; and the relegation of the family to the private sphere".

Archbishop-elect Fisher stated that the results are plain to see.

"In our grandparents' day, nearly everyone was married; now fewer than half are.

"Of those who ever give marriage a try, it's generally only after a long period of experimentation and cohabitation, even though this radically reduces marital sticking power," he wrote.

"Many adults think children are an optional extra for their marriage.

"Many children grow up without the experience of a Mum and Dad committed to each other and to them over the long haul. "

Archbishop-elect Fisher wrote that the memory of a genuine marriage culture remains, but sometimes this manifests itself in the phenomenon of serial monogamy.

Sources

• ABC
• Image: Catholicism Pure and Simple

However, outside of Europe, modernity is emerging without secularism. In modernised India for example the organisation of public space and the place of religion in it is quite different. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested that Indian history challenges western conceptions at their core. Given that India became "modern" without it secularism, do we in fact need the concept of "secularism" at all?

While religious experience and practice seemed to be declining in many parts of the world there was no need to question western presumptions, says Lois Lee. The the impact of the realisation that decline in religion is not inevitable is hard to overstate. "It amounts to a dethroning of one of the longest-held and deepest-seated aspects of modern understandings and identities. It has led to one of the most profound shifts in general and academic thought about what modernity means and how it can be conducted most progressively," she says.

Read Lois Lee in the Guardian

Image: The Guardian