Why the Age of Reason Became a Cul-de-Sac and What Older Wisdom Still Knows

When one is faced with a close loved one hovering between this world and the next, survival on this plane still moot, much time is spent waiting in hospitals and in self-reflection between the prayers and the managing of anxious friends and relatives.

A reply to my article about the Brothers Tate yesterday got me thinking. The discussion was about how we have got to a state where society is in so much moral conflict about basic principles that used to be universal across the West: in particular the sanctity of life and the divinity in all human beings, even those who carry out the most heinous of evil.

As a keen student of the utopianism of the 20th Century, it has appalled me how the evil of Marx has risen again to a point where it is now the basic worldview of a majority of young educated people, either in its lite form or the inevitable consequences of communism. On reflection there should be no surprise that our Western societies have been incapable of countering its resurgence. After all, we have utterly abandoned any pretence of an overarching moral and spiritual authority in place of ‘western values’ – the vapid platitudes spouted by grey men selling themselves as Prime Ministers. It is no surprise that when confronted with the spiritual conviction of the Marxist or the Islamist, it crumbles.

I used to place great store in the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. I no longer do. Not because the material gains it unlocked were illusory – they were real and immense – but because I have come to see it as the kindling that eventually produced Marx, the utopian experiments of the 20th Century, and much of the spiritual desolation we inhabit today.

There is no serious argument against the material leaps. The rapid refocus on the material, on rationality and measurable cause-and-effect, grew most vigorously out of the culture of no-nonsense Anglo-Scots Protestantism. It first drove the agricultural revolution in Britain, then the Industrial Revolution. The same energy spread quickly through the daughter nations of the Anglosphere and the Protestant states of Germany. The Catholic world was slower. In places it imploded: revolutionary France, later Russia. By the 19th Century the focus on materialism had become near-total among those who held power. Spirituality was relegated to a private hobby. The Protestant world, and the secular culture that emerged from it, wrote off the pre-Enlightenment centuries as backward, superstitious, contemptible. A thousand years of human Christian civilisation, history, philosophy, art, architecture and spiritual insight were dismissed as primitive barbarism.

The Newtonian engine and its limits

The primary engine of the Age of Reason was Newtonian conservatism in its most basic form: put in x energy, get out x energy. Balance. Determinism. Reversibility. A clockwork universe in which, if you knew the positions and momenta of every particle, you could in principle predict the future and reconstruct the past with equal certainty.

Since the mid-20th Century that picture has been steadily undermined. Thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, the irreducible role of irreversibility – all suggest a universe far stranger than the Enlightenment imagined. Other dimensions are no longer the exclusive province of mystics. On our physical plane, x still roughly equals x most of the time, but that local regularity does not equip us with the tools to understand the deeper reality. Homines sapientes have walked the planet for roughly 250,000 years. Written history covers perhaps the last 4,000. Archaeological evidence of organised, non-subsistence activity – civilisation in any meaningful sense – appears around 15,000 years ago. The great ice sheets of the last glacial maximum scoured much of the northern hemisphere clean. We simply do not know what was lost.

Jordan Peterson, in his earlier work on myth, suggested that the great stories we still tell are often allegorical records of events that occurred long before writing – warnings of events or societal models that need to be avoided. I am not endorsing the more extreme of the ancient wisdom proponents – Graham Hancock’s more extravagant conclusions, for example; I have a degree in archaeology and find many of those leaps of imagination unpersuasive. But the questions themselves are legitimate. Time and again we assume that the fundamental problems of the human condition are being encountered for the first time. History suggests otherwise. We have faced them before.

Material triumph, spiritual bankruptcy

Look at where the Age of Reason has actually delivered us. The gains are staggering: penicillin, modern agriculture and food preservation, machines, the harnessing of electricity, a degree of mastery over nature that previous ages could only dream of. Yet the same rationalist temper produced a lethal arrogance. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler and their lesser imitators all built on the premise – refined in the French Revolution and codified in 19th Century materialism – that man is wholly material and can therefore be treated as a material unit, to be planned, improved, liquidated or redesigned according to the latest rational scheme.

Experience keeps teaching the opposite lesson. Humans are not material units. Christ’s reply to Satan remains one of the most precise diagnoses available: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” The rationalists killed God, or at least declared Him surplus to requirements, and in doing so denied the spiritual hunger that is demonstrably part of our nature. People will, and do, sacrifice comfort, status, even life itself for causes they believe in. The current spectacle of activists risking long prison sentences for performative political gestures is only the latest illustration. When a culture systematically starves the spiritual dimension, people do not become calm rationalists. They seek meaning in political fanaticism, in crank ideologies, in the endless chase of vapid stimulation. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre have spent decades examining the wreckage. In After Virtue and later work he argued that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in pure reason – severed from any shared teleology or tradition of the virtues – left us with emotivism: moral language as disguised preference. We retained the fragments of an older moral vocabulary while losing the framework that once made the words coherent. The result is a society rich in technique and poor in purpose.

What the monks would have understood

Consider thermodynamics and the deeper implications drawn out by Ilya Prigogine in his later work. Present the second law, entropy, irreversible processes, and the spontaneous emergence of order in far-from-equilibrium systems to a gentleman scientist of Franklin’s or Banks’s generation and he would struggle. The Newtonian framework he inhabited treated time as reversible and systems as tending toward equilibrium. Dissipation was an inconvenience to be minimised, not a creative force. Take the same ideas to a learned monk at one of the great medieval universities and the reception would likely have been more open. The ‘God particle’ of the Higgs boson would not have struck them as absurd; the notion that the deepest levels of reality involve something closer to participation, relation, and creative emergence than to billiard-ball mechanics would have felt continuous with their metaphysics. Prigogine’s central insight, developed across Order Out of Chaos (with Isabelle Stengers) and the End of Certainty, was that classical science had privileged the reversible, deterministic description of nature while treating irreversibility and complexity as secondary or illusory. In non-equilibrium conditions, however, systems can generate order out of chaos through dissipative structures. Time’s arrow is not a statistical artefact of our ignorance; it is fundamental. The universe is not a closed, predictable machine but an open, creative process in which novelty and organisation continually arise.

That is a universe in which purpose, meaning, and the spiritual are not embarrassing add-ons. It is closer, in temperament if not in technical detail, to the world of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante than to the closed system of high Enlightenment rationalism.

I have been reading those older writers again. Augustine and Aquinas lived 1,600 and 800 years ago. Give an undergraduate a substantial passage from either, stripped of identifying marks, and ask them to date it. The guesses routinely fall somewhere between last month and three centuries ago. The same experiment works with Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle. The shock when the true dates are revealed is instructive. These minds were not primitive. They were operating with different assumptions about the nature of reality – assumptions that modern physics, in its more adventurous reaches, has begun to make newly plausible.

Not a call to smash the machines

None of this is an argument for discarding technology, abandoning Newton where he still works, or romanticising the pre-modern past. The material achievements of the last three centuries have saved and improved countless lives. The problem is imbalance. We built a civilisation that is extraordinarily powerful at manipulating matter and extraordinarily inept at nourishing the non-material needs of the creatures who inhabit it. In striving to become as gods through pure reason and technique, we have constructed something that increasingly resembles a Tower of Babel: impressive, unstable, and generating its own confusions of language and purpose.

The path forward is not regression. It is rebalancing. We need, deliberately and without embarrassment, to restore the spiritual dimension that human beings demonstrably require. Without it, societies either decay into hedonism and meaninglessness or devour themselves in ideological fever. The old books – the ones the Age of Reason taught us to despise – still contain resources for that work. So does the science that has moved beyond the closed, reversible universe of the 18th Century. Prigogine’s later thought is one bridge between them: a rigorous recognition that the world is not a finished mechanism but an unfinished, creative, irreversible process.

From the early 1800s there was a growing concern that the headlong dash to industrialisation, the prioritising of materialism above all else, was a path with a cost for both individuals and humanity. The Methodist movement, Anglican and Catholic Christianity of the period, and the huge growth in working-class church attendance across the Anglosphere in the 19th and early 20th centuries reversed a decline that had seen church attendance collapse to almost modern numbers in the later 1700s. Others found their hope and spiritual succour in the inevitable destination of materialism – that man can become a god, that utopia could be reached if only we did this, that, and the other, ignoring human nature utterly.

In Britain, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien both saw the danger and shaped their writings to counter it. In Russia, Dostoevsky saw it too – the Brothers Karamazov is a treatise on precisely this subject. In Rome, Pope Leo XIII saw it and cautioned against losing our spirituality and therefore our humanity. Now Leo XIV is issuing the same warning, having chosen his name precisely to reflect Leo XIII’s concerns.

Western values without the moral core of faith that once underpinned them are hopelessly unable to resist the spiritual ‘kool-aid’ of the Marxist utopian. Passive and paralysed when faced with a resurgent Islam, and despite our formidable power and weaponry, these two movements will destroy the West unless we recognise that Western culture cannot be sustained on materialism alone – that we must recapture and cherish spirituality, and specifically that spirituality which underpins our society and its values. I have seen people I know begin attending church again, not through conviction of faith but as an acknowledgement that this is what we need to do. These are the gestures we need as a society to preserve our civilisation.

The increasingly wayward Richard Dawkins said recently in an interview that he would “rather live in a Christian culture” and that he would choose Bach’s Mass in B minor for his funeral. He has a great love of the fruits of Christian culture – fruits of a faith he has personally spent the last 30 years trying to destroy. Just as Western values cannot stand without their founding moral core, Christian culture and civilisation needs Christianity in order to exist.

We have progressed. The question is to what end. Bread alone has never been enough. It is time we remembered that.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.