Our Spiritual Crisis

Roger Berkowitz
Francis X. Maier interviews N.S. Lyons, and asks “What are the main factors—political, cultural, technological, spiritual—in our historical moment that cause you the greatest concern?” Lyons’ answers:

My initial concern was that the logical end point of this upheaval I’ve described could well be either civil conflict or totalitarianism, or both. My professional background is partly in the study of China, including the history of Chinese communism, so parallels between the destructive ideological madness of the China’s Cultural Revolution and what has been happening in the West today were immediately apparent to me and deeply unnerving. I set out to examine the ideological, political, sociological, and technological aspects of what might be pushing us in this dangerous direction.

Something unexpected happened in the course of this, however. In trying to trace back the roots of the present madness, of our various ideological and cultural maladies, I found that each kept running to a level much deeper than I expected. To be honest in my investigation, I soon found it wasn’t enough to blame Foucault, or Marxism, or liberalism, or whatever; these ideas and ideologies were only responses to the same patterns stemming from human nature. Deep atomization and alienation. A rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality. Boundless ego of the self. A void of higher meaning. Unmitigated fear of suffering and death. Existential anxiety. Nihilism. Anger at life, anger at all of creation. A desperate, limitless thirst for technological control as a reaction. Deluded hopes for utopia on earth and the end of all suffering. Relentlessly, every issue I was investigating began to converge on our modern society’s lack of ready answers to the same uncomfortably metaphysical questions: Why are we here? What is truth? What is real? How do we explain suffering? How do we justify existence? How do we live in the world? And so on.

We thought we had resolved or at least successfully set aside these questions in our modern, secular age. But it turns out this neutrality was always impossible; they are unavoidable and have to be answered. If they aren’t, something else will inevitably rush in to fill the void, no matter how crude, ill-considered, disordered, or dangerous that something is. That is what we are seeing everywhere now: “the return of the strong gods,” in the phrase of R.R. Reno.

So I’ve had to conclude that, at bottom, our civilization’s crisis is first and foremost a spiritual crisis. And that the great struggles underlying our present upheavals are really struggles over essentially theological questions, such as whether there is any inherent dignity in human life and the human body, or whether all matter is inherently evil and only pure spirit good. Most of all, at the core, there seems to be a great struggle between two competing visions about what it means to be human: whether Man exists as, in essence, machine or Imago Dei. As someone who previously thought theology was surely an irrelevant anachronism, having it turn out to still be the Queen of the Sciences has all been a bit of a shock. But here we are.