This is not shameless promotion as I have barely any time to write on here anymore but it probably touches on the kind of thing you are talking about. Popper's poitn about the transition from Closed to Open Society is somethign I feel is too readily overlooked:
Open Society, Open Wound

One is to read them proleptically as laying the groundwork for dealing with the new demands of the modern age through decluttering the views of their predecessors from dogmatic, superstitious and irrational elements. This may indeed be what they saw themselves as doing, not knowing where modernity would lead. Another way to read them is to view them as trying to create space in an enchanted world that remained more vivid to them than it does to us for newer social and scientific realities. — Pierre-Normand

So would the efforts of Schiller, Goethe, Schelling, etc. (and later echos in the 20th century) then be a sort of inversion of the bolded, an attempt to clear space in an increasingly mechanistic and instrumentalized world for a sense of "enchantment" that was ever less vivid?

But if that has to be one's goal, doesn't that already say a lot? Perhaps it's a worthy goal, but if you compare Romantic literature to its inspirations, say to Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it seems obvious that the older goal, of simply holding back the darkness (or basking in the glory of the cosmos and ordering oneself to it, as in Scipio's Dream or the Consolation of Philosophy) is always going to be more romantic. And yet, while I wouldn't want to say Cicero or Boethius are naive, I do think there is something gained (as well as lost) in the distance the Romantics have from the sentiment they want to capture.

To borrow a metaphor from the Enlightenment, a common theme was that man had just reached "adulthood" with the Enlightenment. This often took the form of what Taylor calls a "substraction narrative," where "childish superstition and dogmas are overturned an man comes into his own, into the flourishing adulthood on the new reason." Enlightenment adulthood is what is left when childish error is put aside. But I might ask of the lifecycle metaphor if we might not perhaps still be in our adolescence (we certainly seem to be grappling with uncontrollable passions, courting ecological disaster for instance). And with adolescence can come greater levels of clarity, but also greater levels of self-delusion (normally a mix of both!).

So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference. — Jamal

But that's not how they would see it, right? Their argument is rather that the Enlightenment systems leave men enslaved, and what is worse, not merely as outwardly the slaves of tyrants or kings (which it might also do, e.g., communism)—leaders who might be more or less wise and just—but what is worse, inwardly slaves to unrestrained passions and ignorance. The result is that "leaders" are generally as fully enthralled as those they rule over.

And this complaint need not rely on any appeal to a "Golden" or even a particularly "better" age, only the notion that freedom requires self-governance, which requires a level of cultivation that Enlightenment thought generally fails to provide because it operates on a "thin" (often wholly formal) vision of freedom.

That is, liberalism and consumerism, communism, capitalism, technocracy, etc. "leave most men, even its societies 'elites,' firmly entrenched in something like 'Plato's cave,' and what is worse, convinces us that watching shadows on the cave wall is the fullest attainment of freedom and power, the most a man can hope for," (the famous cave analogy of course being put to many different sorts of uses, some more or less plausible, in this sort of critique).

Now, it might be easy to dismiss the maximalist versions of this sort of critique, but I think most people will invariably agree with some form them. For instance, for most, Huxley's A Brave New World is not a utopia simply because virtually all of its citizens consent to their state and find its rule pleasurable. Rather, it is a dystopia precisely because all of the citizens "freely" consent to it. (And, unlike many fictional dystopias, ABNW is very honest about how it functions, and the Alphas and Betas at least know exactly how and why it is organized as it is). Likewise, I think most people can sympathize with J.S. Mill's desire to refine utilitarianism by speaking to some degree of differentiation between "higher" versus "lower" pleasures (e.g., pornography and fast food versus learning to appreciate fine art) to at least some degree. We might have the suspicion that Rawls' man who wants to spend his life counting blades of grass does not have a good conception of what it means to "live a good life" and "be an excellent person," or that a system that tends towards something like Idiocracy at the limit is not, in the end, making men free, regardless of if the "choosing agents" involved "choose" such a system "without coercion."

That is, while "reactionary" (but also many Nietzschean) attacks on Enlightenment values, particularly exclusive humanism might be dismissed as "aristocratic," caricatured, etc., they also exist on a spectrum and to dismiss them all is to be pushed very far to one side of that spectrum. I am not sure if attempts to stake out some middle area of the spectrum, such as Nussbaum affixing "internal" and "external" as prefixes to "transcendence" (the "external" being the bad sort) really resolve the issue here either.

Of course, not everyone feels this way, some are happy to deny any real distinction between the lower and higher, or any "proper ordering" of desire and the authority of logos over thymos (honor and regard) and epithumia (pleasure and safety). For those who do want to hold on to something of such a distinction though, the question is whether they can justify such an ordering of goods on the "thin" anthropology common to liberalism and the Enlightenment more broadly, and I think that is where traditional critiques tend to make their hay vis-á-vis Enlightenment thought's inability to promote true liberty. (And not all such critiques are wholly negative either, sometimes Enlightenment thought plays the role of Stoicism for Boethius, a sort of initial medicine for promoting negative freedom, that is none the less at best prepatory for deeper therapies).

Also, there is the more general notion that categories are oppressive, or at least suspect. Whereas, there is contrary the argument that, since knowledge and understanding are liberatory, and categories are essential to human understanding, an undue skepticism of categories and the universal is in fact corrosive and oppressive.



Well, in the post you're responding to I pointed out that Medieval thought is (and is widely acknowledged to be) largely refining earlier paths, or synthesizing and harmonizing them. This has both good and bad elements. The bad comes in the form of slavish appeals to authority (although the best authors tend to transcend this to some degree), and a lack of flexibility in some areas, or the fact that some novel paths that predict ideas in modern thought are never developed.

Early modern thought tends to be much more original and creative. I also think it is noticeably far more amateurish, and so in some ways it ends up being more creative in the way self-trained artists might be when compared to artists well-trained in some particular school (although this analogy has its risks). This isn't really surprising considering the massive shifts in who is doing philosophy, the type of education they receive, the incentives they face, the factors determining which works become popular, etc. The explosion in creativity is itself not an unalloyed good (just as an explosion in creative medical treatments is not necessarily a good if the treatments are not themselves effective).

But here is a key difference. The medievals and late-antique thinkers' negative tendency to give undue weight to authority is also paired with a strong understanding of their own historical dependence. The general modern tendency to equate multiplicity and potency with freedom tends to obscure this sort of dependency, which in some ways only makes it more potent and inescapable. It's a bit ironic given the huge focus in modern thought on historicism, but I think it's precisely this sort of historicism (e.g., claims that the true thoughts of the sages of yore are wholly inaccessible to us, whereas a medieval might easily think of a thinker, even a Pagan or Muslim, centuries dead as a close teacher and mentor) that actually allows the influence of the past to become transparent, precisely because it becomes inaccessible and so in a sense inert. But the "problem" here isn't the influence of the past, but its transparency, and not even so much its transparency as the fact that what is being passed on (e.g., the conflation of voluntarism with freedom) is corrosive.

One issue here is that many of the foundational categories and dialectics of modernity were themselves self-conscious inversions of past thought, of the via antiqua, etc. They were, as @Pierre-Normand puts it, "exercises in clearing space," (sometimes with good motivations, sometimes political power moves), and so in some sense instrumental and time/goal limited. But the space has long been cleared and yet we are still left holding the same old tools because we think they are essentially an extension of our arms. So, re the "inaccessible past," I think the past, particularly re realist ontologies, the Analogia Entis, the Doctrine of Transcendentals, etc. is not so much necessarily inaccessible, as rendered alien and inaccessible by the very transparency of what were originally self-conscious inversions of these ideas, and that is what I mean by a "failure to transcend modernity."


Just as a quick example, there are innumerable ways to attack teleology and realism, or to argue positively for varieties of nominalism. Yet the fact that arguments on this front so often (and across diverse modern schools) fall into the same dialectic of pitting realism and teleology (often as "authority") against freedom (or creativity) strikes me as one particularly robust manifestation of the old Reformation struggles haunting modern thought.

I appreciate your view, and I understand why people might think that way.

I just don’t see how one can move from the belief “All there is matter” to the rest. I also don’t see how physicalism, individualism, human rights, the scientific method, or whatever these days are considered enlightenment thinking, precludes the experience of beauty, love, or meaning. I suppose Nietzsche is prophetic in this regard, but the only way one could reach such a state of nihilism is if one was already steeped in the defamation of the world and the worldly, and have laid the foundation of all subsequent thought on some variation or other of supernaturalism.

Observe the metaphor “stripped of meaning” when pointing the finger at the use of scientific language to describe the cosmos, as if some words or symbols were a kind of paint thinner when applied to celestial bodies. The language has changed since Galileo’s time, sure, but the cosmos has hardly changed at all. It’s the same with the evolution of the human species. Ideas and words just don’t have the evolutionary effect that people imply, and we’re practically the same animal as we’ve been for thousands of years. We’re just privy to more information than we once were.

At any rate, given the propensity to blame modern authors and words, and harken back to the authors of less enlightened times, it’s clear that they do not like the language of modernity rather than modernity itself, especially now that the means of communication are practically open to anyone and literacy rates are much higher. They fear the ugliness and disorder that comes with freedom of thought and speech.

If I think about what could be lost should anti-modernism be turned into political action, it may turn out to be the most dangerous form of egoism we’ve ever seen.

If I think about what could be lost should anti-modernism be turned into political action, it may turn out to be the most dangerous form of egoism we’ve ever seen. — NOS4A2

In many ways I agree. But to be clear, at least personally, I'm not "anit-modernism" nor do I hold a desire to return to the days of old. There's no looking back (other than to understand where the present has come from historically). There's only looking forward.

Yes, that was not pointed at you. I believe one can witness a nascent anti-modernism in politics and popular thought. In my view, they’re blaming the wrong things, and should they push their resentment into political action they’re going to pull the rug right out from under themselves. Thanks for the back and forth.

Very true :pray:

Namaste

Maybe one could just say that is fine, people can make up their own minds. But as I alluded to earlier I doubt that is true, maybe for the philosophical types it is, but not for most.

I think a lot of people learn by mimicking and copying others (children certainly do), hence the success of all these influencer types today. And so if you don't have organised religion anymore and the state is supposed to be secular and value-neutral... the only ones left with enough resources can almost only be commercial actors, who end up molding the minds of people, for their interests. — ChatteringMonkey

I agree with you that many, if not most, people are not philosophically reflective and/ or do not have a good grounding in critical thought. The influence of advertising and the transnational corporations is certainly problematic, perhaps mostly significantly so when it comes to politics and unnecessary consumerism.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing?

For my part, I think ethics should be taught in school as early as possible.

I disagree with you that the state is "value neutral"―the laws of the state reflect the most significant moral injunctions. So, what is missing according to you? Are you advocating something like the "noble lie" when it comes to instilling religious belief in children?

I don't see why we would need a transcendent authority (God) as lawgiver, when we already have the state as lawgiver, and I think it is arguable that most people do not think murder, rape, theft, corruption, exploitation and so on, are acceptable. So just what is it that you think is missing? — Janus

The noble lie maybe doesn't work anymore, after the 'dead of God'. But the need religion fulfilled before the dead of God presumably hasn't gone away. What is missing in secular states is a sense of the mythopoetical, the Dionysian or however you want to call it... something that moves or inspires people to des-individuate into or unite with the group. There is still some kind of tribal desire if you will to be more than atomised individual subjects of a rational state.

And what we precisely don't want it seems to me, is the state taking up that role, because that is to road to nationalism or worse... fascism. If you don't have some other force like religion, you always risk some great leader type stepping up and using these unfulfilled desires for his ends.

I'm not convinced. I see people uniting into all kinds of groups. Organised religion, in my view, is a particular worldview, imposed if not by force like in totalitarian systems and the churches in the Middle Ages, at least imposed by indoctrination. Is that what you'd like to see?

Is that what you'd like to see? — Janus

No ideally not, but I'm just not convinced that the current way of doing things will work out in the long run, if you project that forward say a couple of centuries. What I don't want to see is things devolving again like they did in the 20th century.

The church told us in an authoritarian way that God was watching every single thing we did, could even see in our thoughts to see if we were a sinner. This along with a strong moral code, reinforced every Sunday in church, enabled us to pull through the dark ages into the enlightenment without falling back into warring tribes, or corrupt competing kingdoms.
In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability.

Forget the moral or ethical challenges―given all the physical challenges humanity faces, do you believe human life will look anything like it does today in a couple of centuries? I mean do you believe there will still be a huge population, technological societies, preservation of historical culture, religion?

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.

So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?

This along with a strong moral code, reinforced every Sunday in church, enabled us to pull through the dark ages into the enlightenment without falling back into warring tribes, or corrupt competing kingdoms.
In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability. — Punshhh

The stability of feudalism was imposed by a combination of church and aristocratic rule. The people were illiterate―so we have no way of knowing what their real thoughts were. They were compelled to give lip service or be punished. I think your view is rosy and simplistic.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. — Janus

So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted—human dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine. He says that many secular cultural “goods” have Christian roots. He argues we need to recognise this transformation if we’re to assess religion’s legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture.

Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense — the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upaniṣads would say, to know the divine is to become like it.

He argues we need to recognise this transformation if we’re to assess religion’s legacy honestly, whilst also acknowledging that Christian culture has its faults and shadow sides. For sure it wasn't always beneficial but it demonstrably was foundational to the formation of Western culture. — Wayfarer

It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? Ultimately the idea of Christian culture means many different things, from Nationalist bigotry to rainbow flag diversity. A belief in transcendence of itself doesn’t really say much.

I’m interested in why you think we should acknowledge Christianity’s impact on our history. In what sense do we need to do this as we move forward and deal with tribalism, authoritarianism and climate change? I would imagine that your belief is that modern culture had borrowed the values without the teleology and transcendence that gave them meaning. Does this in your view lead straight to Vervaeke, et al?

It interests me that Hart has called fundamentalist Protestant Christianity (as is practiced widely in the US and throughout MAGA lands) a cult and heresy. Which is not hard to see. But it does beg the question what counts as the real thing? — Tom Storm

It doesn't beg the question. Begging the question would be 'The Bible is the word of God, because God says it is.' What I was responding to, was the blanket assertion, often made on this Forum, 'religion is belief without evidence'. To which I respond, what counts as evidence? I was pointing out the fact that Christianity, for instance, had a huge impact on the formation of Western culture. That furthermore the sacred literature and testimonial evidence of world religions amounts to an enormous corpus of actual information. Of course most of it is not subject to peer-reviewed scientific analysis, which as good as invalidates if for many of our number.

I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it:

Plato was clearly concerned not only with the state of his soul, but also with his relation to the universe at the deepest level. Plato’s metaphysics was not intended to produce merely a detached understanding of reality. His motivation in philosophy was in part to achieve a kind of understanding that would connect him (and therefore every human being) to the whole of reality – intelligibly and if possible satisfyingly. He even seems to have suffered from a version of the more characteristically Judaeo-Christian conviction that we are all miserable sinners, and to have hoped for some form of redemption from philosophy. — Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament

Or Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:

I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook.

(Although as far as empirical evidence is concerned, I recall a 2025 NY Times article on the review of so-called miraculous cures associated with candidates for Sainthood, written by a medical doctor who was called on to revew a case. It might make for an interesting discussion.)

It doesn't beg the question. — Wayfarer

Oops, typo - should have written, "it raises the quesion".

I'm not seeking to revive Christianity so much as the 'sense of the sacred', in light of which human life and suffering are meaningful and intelligible, and not just something to be borne, Sisyphus-like. As I've said already, it's why I've always sought the cosmic dimension in philosophy. As one of my analytic philosophy heros, Thomas Nagel, put it: — Wayfarer

Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. How do we approach those who seek a Christian worldview as a solution? Surely, what counts as Christianity is a crucial question that comes directly out of the meaning crisis and the questions you keep positing.

You may not seek to impose a white nationalist Christian theocracy on the world, but many who benefit from undermining liberalism and secular culture certainly do.

This isn’t just a shadow side of faith; it is faith at work.

As it happens, I was in a bookshop in October looking at DB Hart’s translation of the New Testament when a couple of fellow browsers asked me about the text. They were young Christians and we got talking. And guess what? In their view, liberalism had failed, Nietzsche was right about the death of God, secular culture had collapsed, and people were flailing in contemporary culture because their lives lacked a spiritual dimension. The solution: Christianity and Trumpism.

I know what you think of this, but I’m more interested in understanding how we can assess the merits of the spiritual beliefs some people propose as an alternative to secular culture. Who's going to be the door bitch?

Sure but this isn't just about you and your individual take on the meaning crisis. — Tom Storm

Subjective, right? Personal preference. Edifying, but personal.

I know what you think of this, — Tom Storm

That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion.

That there is bad religion, and it's worse than no religion. — Wayfarer

Maybe. The quesion I keep asking is if there's a big hole in modernity, just who chooses what we fill it with? We can’t just overthrow the status quo without expecting that even worse alternatives may be waiting in the wings to fill the void. As Žižek has said, “the problem with the revolution is the morning after."

The stability of feudalism was imposed by a combination of church and aristocratic rule. The people were illiterate―so we have no way of knowing what their real thoughts were. They were compelled to give lip service or be punished. I think your view is rosy and simplistic.

Not rosy, I realise how the people were controlled with brutality. But at least the rulers realised the benefits of the ideological stability provided by the church.

Forget the moral or ethical challenges―given all the physical challenges humanity faces, do you believe human life will look anything like it does today in a couple of centuries? I mean do you believe there will still be a huge population, technological societies, preservation of historical culture, religion? — Janus

No, I think a lot will change given the physical challenges, how that exactly will look like I wouldn't know... But I do think these changes will inevitablely also included societal organisational and ideological changes. That is what I see myself doing, looking at a different ideas and how they might fit with a changing world.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. That works as long as people give lip service because they are cowed by fear of punishment, as was the case in the Middle Ages, or as long as they are illiterate and impressionable, which was also the case for most of human history, or as long as they are not capable of critical thought.

So what do you propose? A return to imposed beliefs, theocracy?

I really don't have a concrete proposal in mind, I'm mostly exploring the possibilities... But since religion (and not necessarily organised religion like we have had it) has been an important part of most of human history except maybe for this small slice of Western history we happen to be living through, it seems like something worth thinking about.

I think the picture you paint of religion there is a bit one-side, evaluated from a perspective of the Western tradition that elevates reason or critical thought itself as the summum bonum. It's also merely a belief that it is good that everybody be taught critical thinking skills in order to make up their own minds... as we estabilished earlier, not everyone can or is even interested in doing that.

We "impose" beliefs on people anyway, no matter what societal and religious organisation, just by virtue of the fact that humans don't suddenly pop into existence as blank slate adults.... there's allways a set of beliefs and underlying assumptions people are enculturated in. And if secular states teach people they should look for evidence and examine their beliefs critically and rationally, then yes that would make any mythopoetical belief problematic.

None of this is to say we should do away with critical thinking, if such a thing were even possible, just that perhaps we have overvalued it.

Not rosy, I realise how the people were controlled with brutality. But at least the rulers realised the benefits of the ideological stability provided by the church. — Punshhh

I'm not arguing that it didn't benefit the rulers.

I think religion, in various forms is still a very significant part of modern culture. I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs.

I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs. — Janus

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? Not that many I'd say, even on this forum, and if they change their minds it's often because of some life-changing experience they had, not because they examined their beliefs rationally.

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? — ChatteringMonkey

Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on?

As to how many people change their minds, have you ever heard an argument to support the position that murder, rape, theft, exploitation or torture are morally permissible?

Yes by and large, but i don't think they come to these convictions by reasoning or considering evidence.

This is probably way beyond the scope of this thread, but the way I see it, is that we inherently/biologically have an emotional wireing, of shame, guild, empathy etc etc that isn't formed or shaped yet in the sense that it is tied to specific moral rules.

Then we get educated into tying these emotions to more specific moral rules according to what the group one gets educated in, deems important. Usually there some people who, rightly so or not, have more of a say in determining what those are.

Because of the interplay of human biology and certain structural demands the world places on us, these will often be similar across different groups. That is maybe a bit similar to something like convergence evolution where different species develop similar attributes, like say wings, because the physical demands are the same.

After all of that we get adults with already formed moral intuitions, moral intuitions that are not properly basic, but the result of biology and eduction. If nothing's going particularly wrong they tend to follow that moral 'programming' by and large the rest of their life.

And then some become philosophers for whatever reason, and question these things incessantly, but one shouldn't presume that everybody is like that.

Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on? — Janus

Perhaps. But isn’t it also the case that religious and political groups will hold beliefs that allow for those things - think underaged marriage, wife burning, execution of gay people, use of extraordinary rendition under Bush, corporate exploitation of workers, etc. It’s not hard to imagine medieval style initiatives becoming more popular with MAGA for instance.

The task now, as John Vervaeke spells it out in his Awakening from the Meaning Crisis is to rediscover a living integration of science, meaning, and wisdom—to awaken from or see through the divisions that underlie the meaning crisis. — Wayfarer

This is where Nietzsche details that any long obedience in the same direction seems to always reveal something worth living for, as it is that long obedience which begins the process of building a transfiguring mirror. We can see this as early at Birth of Tragedy 3, but also in his later periods in aphorisms like 188 of Beyond Good and Evil.

Yes, normal moral intuitions can be countermanded by religious or political ideologies. It usually takes the form of "offering" it seems.

Yes by and large, but i don't think they come to these convictions by reasoning or considering evidence. — ChatteringMonkey

Right, and I haven't anywhere said otherwise.

Edit: "offering" should have been "othering". Damn spellcheck!

Why, thankyou. Nietszche is not among my normal sources, but I'll take that on board.

Np, but figured I'd add that imo, more or less, the predicament of modernity comes down to man taming himself. Turning away from his instincts.

I'm not arguing that it didn't benefit the rulers.

My point is that Christianity provided the moral framework which enabled the development of Western civilisation. Wayfarer put it better than I could. Can anyone suggest an alternative that would have achieved that, I wonder.
I think that part of this crisis of modernity is that society has seen through this legacy and seen it as outdated and causing more problems than it prevents. We are unshackling ourselves from the religious code and looking around for a new moral code for the future. I would suggest it is not going to be easy as the code we are rejecting is much more deeply embedded in our culture than we might at first realise.
Capitalism has sort of stepped into the breach, and along with law and jurisprudence has provided a helpful framework. But now even that capitalism is turning toxic, we might only be left with jurisprudence. The problem here is that government can, in theory, change what the law says and government can become corrupted.