“The treatment of the individual as a mere part of a community is a denial of the personal relation between the soul and God and is a substitution, for the worship of God, of a worship of the human community Leviathan. It must be wrong to worship a man-made institution which is ephemeral, imperfect, and often utterly evil in its operation” Arnold J. Toynbee
The drastic changes the world went through from the onset of the industrial revolution onward has been blessedly unprecedented, but brought with it insoluble cultural dilemmas. Looking past the technological achievements that underpinned human progress in the past two hundred years, and elevated mankind to the pinnacle of mastery over nature, which, became the basic unit of measurement for humanity’s material advancement, we are confronted with ‘moral enormities’ as Toynbee describes them, consisting largely of the reemergence of the Epicurean worldview at the cost of a portentous spiritual recession. The intransigent treatment of religious and spiritual traditions in this case corresponds with the presiding expression of material consciousness over the realm of modern human civilization, the abolition of religious institutions was made to be a necessary condition for the achievement of modernity, and the nascent scientific leaps in the fields of archaeology, astrophysics, anthropology and biology, served to categorically validate the transition from the religious to the man-made substratum. In consequence to this historically-reoccurring trade off, and the ensuing void left by the religious tradition, the leviathan, was now the new deity, and man, practically speaking, reverted to his antediluvian, pre-historic state of instinct-over-reason, and this is all but evident in the fact that any human emotion, behaviour and state of mind entails an “evolutionary” interpretation, and any alternative explanation is dismissed as religious heresy.
This subsequent association of the religious/spiritual with the primitive and backward, is now embraced at the mainstream level, all thanks to individuals like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, prolific writers and speakers in their own right. The very fact that this switch (from the religious to the man-made) can influence substantial societal changes, and engender correspondingly different modes of psychosocial and political expressions is indicative of the intrinsic role of ideology in the morphology, growth and decline of civilization. ‘Horror vacui’, to say nature abhors a vacuum is to say society is Kenophobic, however, the average modern man is not Aristotelian, but rather Epicurean-minded, in the same light, our ruling class is functionally both, in the sense of being both absolute materialists and subscribers to the Aristotelian belief of ‘natural slavery’ which purports that people to whom the attribute ‘savagery’ is ascribed (people whose lives aren’t governed by complex legal and political institutions in ancient times) are, as the father of western philosophy Aristotle puts it in the ‘Nicomachean ethics’ “by nature slaves”, at one point purporting that such people “are like the beasts as are some of the races of the distant barbarians”. It is no surprise that the person upon whose philosophy the west ascended to global dominion thought that way. This rightly outdated, and in retrospect, appallingly false outlook on the structural diversity of mankind driven by the misconception that non-complex societies (not governed by western-style institutions) are inherently primitive, and thus its subjects irrational and therefore worthy of enslavement and if necessary-deracination, has become the ruling class’s indelible mondus operandi over the years.
In the collective unconscious of society, which Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung asserts, has a profound influence on the life of the individual, lay the keys to understanding the course in which civilization ventures, as well as the keys to ascertaining whether our modern secular civilization, guided by the centrifugal force of the scientific method away from the religious crux is ultimately symptomatic of its decline. “In what sense can there be progress in this world?” Toynbee. I’d briefly mentioned that the assumption of the foundational role religion played for centuries by the powers of secularism is no recent phenomenon, looking back, it seems that both concepts have had their full share of historical sparring in the Greaco-Roman world, and their respective triumphs proved transformative both within and beyond the fringes of that ideologically tumultuous world. This transformative effect is off course, subjective in interpretation, for instance, English historian Edward Gibbon describes the decline of the Roman empire as being a by-product of the “triumph of barbarism and religion”, whereas Toynbee thought otherwise, highlighting the historical solecism upon which Gibbon drew his conclusion, and stating that Christian Church itself arose out of the spiritual travail which was a consequence of the breakdown of the Graeco-Roman civilization, suggesting the religion to be analogous to a chariot whose wheels represent the downfall of civilization.
If, the inward spiritual force that creates and sustains the outward manifestation of what we call civilization as Toynbee puts it, then what sort of fate awaits the unsuspecting westerner?
