The way things are today is novel enough that to get a grip on it you have to look at the grand sweep of history, and at basics like what people think about themselves and the world. Here’s an attempt:
Before the first cosmopolitan civilizations arose in antiquity, men lived in a world that seemed all of a piece, in which the traditions of their people or city defined for them the nature of things. Later on, trade and empire, written records, technological advances and so on made it easier to identify and describe the mechanical, technological and amoral aspects of the world and see that they formed a system that had to be taken very seriously. Once that had happened, to view the world as real and all of a piece was to view it as an amoral mechanical or random system. Hence the views of Democritus and the ancient Chinese legalists, as well as those of modern physicalists.
Such views do not describe a habitable world, so very few if any have ever accepted them thoroughly as the final truth of things. Everyone needs to make sense of the world so he can make sense of his own life. To do that we need a dimension beyond the material here and now, and mechanism and randomness won’t give that to us. Hence (humanly speaking) the higher religions that accompanied the rise of cosmopolitan civilization and told men that in addition to the secular and pragmatic world around them there was another more important transcendent world. And hence, upon the decline of higher religions in modern times, the substitutes for religion that attempt somehow to create ultimate standards and objects of devotion out of things immediately present to sense experience:
- Human desire is the most obvious choice to provide the additional dimension we need beyond our bare material surroundings so that our lives will have some definite sense. But desires fluctuate and come into conflict, so it doesn’t seem they can provide us with an ultimate guide. Besides, to understand our actions or anything else is to see them as part of a larger setting that’s real in the sense that it doesn’t depend on what we happen to want at the moment. So simple desire won’t work as an ultimate principle. Therefore, men have abandoned simple desire and turned desire into a grand impersonal principle: the principle of equal freedom, which is the principle that all desire should be satisfied to the extent possible simply because it is desire. That principle is obviously much more stable and reliable than desire itself. To the extent one accepts it, he makes progressive politics the meaning and justification of his life (and incidentally turns personal indulgence into a public benefit).
- Not everybody’s a progressive, of course. If desire is too wandering and conflicting to serve as the ultimate standard that gives sense to things a lot of people think it’s stupid to try to make it work by substituting for desire as a simple reality desire as an ultimate principle (a.k.a the cause of equal freedom). Rejecting both understandings of desire as a standard, they ask what in the world around them can be viewed as supremely reliable and authoritative and decide it is not Desire but Success that rules everything. They therefore make success their God. The political form of that view is fascism, the cosmic form evolutionism.*
Neither principle really works as a religion. The human function of religion is to bridge the gap between us and the world so that we have a place in which we can live. Hedonism doesn’t do it because it’s not clear what our pleasure simply as such has to do with the way things are. And worship of success doesn’t do it either, because it’s not clear why the way things happen to end up should have anything to do with anything we’d be inclined to favor. Hence the instability, superficiality and hyperactivity of the modern world. To the extent we accept modernity, we’re stuck with a choice between two religions, neither of which works, so we end up avoiding thought and understanding as much as possible and ruin our lives trying to force the world into the mold of what we think we want.
It’s hard to avoid seeing the higher religions (some more than others) as the most stable configuration for human life and thought. If that’s right, and man is fundamentally an animal that tries to make sense of things, then the current state of the West is an anomaly that won’t last. Which indeed is what demographics and other social statistics would lead one to believe.
[* Conceivably a third possibility might be worship of form as such. That possibility appears in aestheticism and played somewhat of a role in fascism. I don’t think that in the absence of a definite understanding of the transcendent it can have an important function as an independent principle because form is hierarchical and anti-transcendentalism destroys hierarchy. In the case of aestheticism love of form has to be backed by snobbery and social position that are based on something else, and in the case of fascism it had to be backed by violence and worship of power.]