“History passes on, from one turmoil, from one catastrophe to the next, with brief intervals of happiness, little islands which it spares for a time, until they too are engulfed. All in all — as Max Weber put it — a road paved by the devil with demolished values. … Once again we are faced with the question is it God or the devil who governs the world? And though we may believe that ultimately the devil is in the service of God, there is no proof of it.” — Karl Jaspers
“…There is progress in knowledge, in technology, in the prerequisites for new human possibilities, but not in the substance of humanity. Progress in substance is refuted by the facts. The peoples which had reached the highest levels perished, succumbing to those inferior to them. Cultures were destroyed by barbarians. The physical annihilation of the highest types of men by the oppressive realities of the mass is a fundamental phenomenon of history. The average that multiplies the most, the growth of the thoughtless populace, triumphs without a struggle through mere existence en masse over that which is spiritually higher. There is a constant counter-selection of those who are inferior, e.g. in conditions under which cunning and brutality promise lasting advantages. One inclines toward the proposition: Everything exalted perishes, everything inferior endures. Against such a generalisation, we can point to the recurrence of the great, even if it remains silent for centuries and longer. But how fragile, how dubious and uncertain is this endurance!” — Karl Jaspers
“In history as a whole there has been progress only in technology and in the rationalization of existence; in the areas of true humanity and of the human mind, a history that brought forth the extraordinary has simultaneously been the triumphal parade route of destructive forces. … If the technological wrecking of the foundations of all human existence were a possibility, there is small doubt that some day it would be a reality. By our activities we can impede things, put them off, win periods of grace, but all the experience of human history suggests that some day, somewhere, somebody will do the worst that can be done.” — Karl Jaspers
“Modern man, in creating the world of technology and setting it in motion, signed with his own name a debt that he is now obliged to pay. Technology, his creature, turns against him, reduces him to its own instrument, and threatens him with destruction.” — Julius Evola
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1980s, I was taught that the first serious doubts about progress arose after the Holocaust, when historians were confronted with the horrors of the Nazi era and found that they could not be reconciled with faith in Western civilization. Later trends in historiography, I was told, point to the shocking calamities of [World War I] as the moment when scholars began to voice their first doubts about the idea of progress. … To question the possibility of progress is not the same as questioning the fact of change. In living systems, change is a common phenomenon that is easy to explain; what is difficult to explain is stasis. Moreover, many trends in human history appear to be directional, in part because many types of change involve choosing a path from which there is no turning back. For example, there is a significant difference between the world of humans in the Pleistocene and the world of humans today. But change is not progress. Progress is a moral claim asserting that today’s world is better than the world of the past. Just as no paleontologist would claim that modern creatures are better than dinosaurs, fewer and fewer historians are inclined to say that the modern world is morally better than the past. Belief in moral progress is, in fact, an exception in Western historiography, since Western historians writing before the 19th century rarely assumed that any moral progress had taken place over time. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the concept of progress was seriously incorporated into historical narratives. Thus, the discipline of history has been moving away from the idea of progress for roughly as long as it has embraced it. But when history began to shed the notion of progress and abandon the framework of Western civilization through which it had once been mediated, this created a serious interpretive vacuum for people whose moral cosmology is grounded in a belief in progress. If you believe in the values of Western civilization, you were probably dismayed to discover that historians no longer wish to promote it.” — from the book “The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence” (translated from Russian)
“Everything that history tells us is, in essence, nothing more than the long, heavy, and confused nightmare of mankind.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“Can we live in this world, where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?” — Edmund Husserl
“There is certainly scientific and technological progress, but no one has yet seen people as a whole become smarter, and certainly not morally better.” — Carl Gustav Jung
“…The present time … represents a catastrophic impoverishment in the areas of spiritual life, humanity, love, and creative energy; and only one thing — the achievements of science and technology — truly constitutes its greatness in comparison with the entire preceding period.” — Karl Jaspers
“Nietzsche was the first to draw a frightening picture of the modern world, which has been relentlessly repeated by everyone ever since: the collapse of culture: education is replaced by empty knowledge; spiritual substance — by the universal facade of fake life; boredom is drowned out by drugs of all kinds and thrills; every living spiritual germ is suppressed by the noise and rumble of the illusory spirit; everyone talks, but no one listens; everything decays in the flow of words; everything is blabbed and betrayed. None other than Nietzsche showed the desert of the mad race for profit; showed the meaning of the machine and the mechanization of labor; showed the meaning of the emerging phenomenon — the masses. But all this is for Nietzsche in the foreground, a ripple on the surface. Today, “when the whole earth is trembling, when everything is cracking at the seams,” the main events take place in the depths, and what we observe are only consequences; a resident of a cozy age of calm and complacent bourgeoisie, Nietzsche writes with a shudder of genuine horror about what no one has yet noticed: the main event is that “God is dead”. “Here is the monstrous news that will not reach the consciousness of Europeans until a few centuries from now; but then — then it will long seem to them that things have lost their reality…”. “The rise of nihilism,” Nietzsche predicts, “will be the history of the next two centuries. Our whole European culture has long been moving with agonizing tension, with trembling and grinding, increasing from decade to decade, toward catastrophe; not moving calmly, but convulsively, in rapid spurts, as if by force: “I wish it would end sooner rather than later, if only to avoid waking up, because it is so terrible to wake up and come to your senses”… Whereas for Christianity the general course of history was predetermined and the question of the salvation of the soul remained open for each individual, for Nietzsche the direction of the general process is in question: in which direction it will go depends on the will and activity of man. Hegel refused to pose the question of the future; Marx urged to hasten the coming of what was already coming by virtue of necessity, which, as it seemed to him, was irrefutably proven by his science; but Nietzsche saw in the future the most terrible danger: man can perish, can become an ape again, if at the last moment he does not succeed in decisively changing the direction of history.” — Karl Jaspers
“Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is inexorably degenerating. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices — rejection of religion as a prejudice, amoralism as an overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as arrogant ignorance, stupidity elevated to a norm. Reality becomes ghostly. Aristocratic ideals oppose the false ideals of liberalism; they are replaced by the lowbrow tastes of the crowds — the market and entertainment, social conformism and intellectual anarchy. Rationalism, criticalism, relativism and all such mutilated trends carry a profane element that has completely permeated the modern world.
The end of the modern world is but the end of illusion.” — René Guénon
“Whoever believes that he lives for the sake of his descendants is deceiving himself. It is a false statement. The path mankind has travelled is not the path of progress. Progress is only imaginary. Only a few of the sons of men have really progressed. Circle is not progress. We must break the circle, or we will achieve nothing. Those who think that life begins with birth and ends with death do not see the circle. How can they break it!” — Gustav Meyrinck
“It is precisely because the reality of Progress was never defined that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been able to treat it as an object of religious faith. To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not of primary importance. For them the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals to achieve the final end of man.” — Aldous Huxley
A new understanding of the human condition appears necessary to overcome the naive Rousseauian anthropology, as you mentioned. And our other present dilemmas.
I believe a deep study of trust as a phenomenon can be central to this effort. Trust can connect a variety of phenomena from individual development to the importance of upbringing and family all the way to the creation of shared knowledge and the functioning of the economy. It also provides deep implications for the organisation of society (and what has gone wrong). There is plenty of academic research on the topic, but it is all quite disparate so far, people have not quite connected the dots yet.
This understanding built on the connective concept of trust does not provide for our metaphysical needs, but can definitely form a secular plank of the new understanding needed.
“History passes on, from one turmoil, from one catastrophe to the next, with brief intervals of happiness, little islands which it spares for a time, until they too are engulfed. All in all — as Max Weber put it — a road paved by the devil with demolished values. … Once again we are faced with the question is it God or the devil who governs the world? And though we may believe that ultimately the devil is in the service of God, there is no proof of it.” — Karl Jaspers
“…There is progress in knowledge, in technology, in the prerequisites for new human possibilities, but not in the substance of humanity. Progress in substance is refuted by the facts. The peoples which had reached the highest levels perished, succumbing to those inferior to them. Cultures were destroyed by barbarians. The physical annihilation of the highest types of men by the oppressive realities of the mass is a fundamental phenomenon of history. The average that multiplies the most, the growth of the thoughtless populace, triumphs without a struggle through mere existence en masse over that which is spiritually higher. There is a constant counter-selection of those who are inferior, e.g. in conditions under which cunning and brutality promise lasting advantages. One inclines toward the proposition: Everything exalted perishes, everything inferior endures. Against such a generalisation, we can point to the recurrence of the great, even if it remains silent for centuries and longer. But how fragile, how dubious and uncertain is this endurance!” — Karl Jaspers
“In history as a whole there has been progress only in technology and in the rationalization of existence; in the areas of true humanity and of the human mind, a history that brought forth the extraordinary has simultaneously been the triumphal parade route of destructive forces. … If the technological wrecking of the foundations of all human existence were a possibility, there is small doubt that some day it would be a reality. By our activities we can impede things, put them off, win periods of grace, but all the experience of human history suggests that some day, somewhere, somebody will do the worst that can be done.” — Karl Jaspers
“Modern man, in creating the world of technology and setting it in motion, signed with his own name a debt that he is now obliged to pay. Technology, his creature, turns against him, reduces him to its own instrument, and threatens him with destruction.” — Julius Evola
“When I was a graduate student in the late 1980s, I was taught that the first serious doubts about progress arose after the Holocaust, when historians were confronted with the horrors of the Nazi era and found that they could not be reconciled with faith in Western civilization. Later trends in historiography, I was told, point to the shocking calamities of [World War I] as the moment when scholars began to voice their first doubts about the idea of progress. … To question the possibility of progress is not the same as questioning the fact of change. In living systems, change is a common phenomenon that is easy to explain; what is difficult to explain is stasis. Moreover, many trends in human history appear to be directional, in part because many types of change involve choosing a path from which there is no turning back. For example, there is a significant difference between the world of humans in the Pleistocene and the world of humans today. But change is not progress. Progress is a moral claim asserting that today’s world is better than the world of the past. Just as no paleontologist would claim that modern creatures are better than dinosaurs, fewer and fewer historians are inclined to say that the modern world is morally better than the past. Belief in moral progress is, in fact, an exception in Western historiography, since Western historians writing before the 19th century rarely assumed that any moral progress had taken place over time. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the concept of progress was seriously incorporated into historical narratives. Thus, the discipline of history has been moving away from the idea of progress for roughly as long as it has embraced it. But when history began to shed the notion of progress and abandon the framework of Western civilization through which it had once been mediated, this created a serious interpretive vacuum for people whose moral cosmology is grounded in a belief in progress. If you believe in the values of Western civilization, you were probably dismayed to discover that historians no longer wish to promote it.” — from the book “The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence” (translated from Russian)
“Everything that history tells us is, in essence, nothing more than the long, heavy, and confused nightmare of mankind.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
“Can we live in this world, where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disappointment?” — Edmund Husserl
“There is certainly scientific and technological progress, but no one has yet seen people as a whole become smarter, and certainly not morally better.” — Carl Gustav Jung
“…The present time … represents a catastrophic impoverishment in the areas of spiritual life, humanity, love, and creative energy; and only one thing — the achievements of science and technology — truly constitutes its greatness in comparison with the entire preceding period.” — Karl Jaspers
“Nietzsche was the first to draw a frightening picture of the modern world, which has been relentlessly repeated by everyone ever since: the collapse of culture: education is replaced by empty knowledge; spiritual substance — by the universal facade of fake life; boredom is drowned out by drugs of all kinds and thrills; every living spiritual germ is suppressed by the noise and rumble of the illusory spirit; everyone talks, but no one listens; everything decays in the flow of words; everything is blabbed and betrayed. None other than Nietzsche showed the desert of the mad race for profit; showed the meaning of the machine and the mechanization of labor; showed the meaning of the emerging phenomenon — the masses. But all this is for Nietzsche in the foreground, a ripple on the surface. Today, “when the whole earth is trembling, when everything is cracking at the seams,” the main events take place in the depths, and what we observe are only consequences; a resident of a cozy age of calm and complacent bourgeoisie, Nietzsche writes with a shudder of genuine horror about what no one has yet noticed: the main event is that “God is dead”. “Here is the monstrous news that will not reach the consciousness of Europeans until a few centuries from now; but then — then it will long seem to them that things have lost their reality…”. “The rise of nihilism,” Nietzsche predicts, “will be the history of the next two centuries. Our whole European culture has long been moving with agonizing tension, with trembling and grinding, increasing from decade to decade, toward catastrophe; not moving calmly, but convulsively, in rapid spurts, as if by force: “I wish it would end sooner rather than later, if only to avoid waking up, because it is so terrible to wake up and come to your senses”… Whereas for Christianity the general course of history was predetermined and the question of the salvation of the soul remained open for each individual, for Nietzsche the direction of the general process is in question: in which direction it will go depends on the will and activity of man. Hegel refused to pose the question of the future; Marx urged to hasten the coming of what was already coming by virtue of necessity, which, as it seemed to him, was irrefutably proven by his science; but Nietzsche saw in the future the most terrible danger: man can perish, can become an ape again, if at the last moment he does not succeed in decisively changing the direction of history.” — Karl Jaspers
“Progress is pure illusion. It affects only the sphere of matter, while the spirit is inexorably degenerating. What our contemporaries pass off as achievements are in fact shameful vices — rejection of religion as a prejudice, amoralism as an overcoming of complexes, contempt for the past as arrogant ignorance, stupidity elevated to a norm. Reality becomes ghostly. Aristocratic ideals oppose the false ideals of liberalism; they are replaced by the lowbrow tastes of the crowds — the market and entertainment, social conformism and intellectual anarchy. Rationalism, criticalism, relativism and all such mutilated trends carry a profane element that has completely permeated the modern world.
The end of the modern world is but the end of illusion.” — René Guénon
“Whoever believes that he lives for the sake of his descendants is deceiving himself. It is a false statement. The path mankind has travelled is not the path of progress. Progress is only imaginary. Only a few of the sons of men have really progressed. Circle is not progress. We must break the circle, or we will achieve nothing. Those who think that life begins with birth and ends with death do not see the circle. How can they break it!” — Gustav Meyrinck
“It is precisely because the reality of Progress was never defined that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been able to treat it as an object of religious faith. To the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy, the question whether Progress is inevitable or even real is not of primary importance. For them the important thing is that individual men and women should come to the unitive knowledge of the divine Ground, and what interests them in regard to the social environment is not its progressiveness or non-progressiveness (whatever those terms may mean), but the degree to which it helps or hinders individuals to achieve the final end of man.” — Aldous Huxley
Excellent article Luca, thank you.
A new understanding of the human condition appears necessary to overcome the naive Rousseauian anthropology, as you mentioned. And our other present dilemmas.
I believe a deep study of trust as a phenomenon can be central to this effort. Trust can connect a variety of phenomena from individual development to the importance of upbringing and family all the way to the creation of shared knowledge and the functioning of the economy. It also provides deep implications for the organisation of society (and what has gone wrong). There is plenty of academic research on the topic, but it is all quite disparate so far, people have not quite connected the dots yet.
This understanding built on the connective concept of trust does not provide for our metaphysical needs, but can definitely form a secular plank of the new understanding needed.