What is The Problem of The Modern World, Really?

We all know there is something wrong with us, collectively. Today's world is leaving us increasingly disconnected from ourselves, our peers, and emptying us of purpose.

Brown Concrete Columns — Photo credit byrahul on pixels

Nihilism is a response to the lack of meaning that we can observe in today's world. Global, integrated communities have done so much good, but they have left us devoid of the common principles which used to bring us unity. Everything is offensive to someone, this is a fact. The solution is not authoritarianism, not obsessive self-policing, not nationalism or segregation. The solution is looking beyond the artificial polarities which are as superficial as our culture itself.

We’re moving into a stage of human society, where we must find universal aspects of experience which draw us together, rather than focusing on the negatives that diversity creates.

Atheism is simply not possible. We all worship something whether we know it or not. God isn’t a man in the sky, it’s the value at the top of a value structure.

Materialist, empirical nihilistic views, which have spread like a badge of rational thinking, are in fact quite the opposite. The failure to integrate the empirical with the intangible is creating a culture that idolises an imbalanced mode of existence. They have come to embody one's allegiance to the new religion of the west: science.

However, science, by definition, cannot touch life’s more pressing questions. Where did we come from, why are we here, where are we going, why are we living the way we are, what happens when we die?

Science is an incredible tool, but a dangerous ideology. The achievements and progress of modern scientific materialism, which cannot be understated, are not an end unto themselves, they require a guiding force of wisdom and empathy. Things that cannot be measured or created in a lab.

All that progress has left us more empty than we have ever been, despite having more than we ever had. Could we be missing the point? Today, we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how, yet at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness, loss of imagination, aesthetic impotence, creative sterility. Our lack of ability to create meaning is the new illiteracy

• We pursue happiness, yet are measurably less happy
• We value independence, yet become bound by rules we never assented to, never before has any population been spied on to this extent
• We pursue leisure and free time through progress, yet the average working day is longer than ever, and many people can never switch off
• Our means are as unlimited as ever, yet we have less sense of what our ends should be
• Science has become so concerned with prestige, citations and hero-worship, that true advancements in thinking have become rare
• Many university students feel so afraid of the truth not conforming to a particular social theory, that they demand to be excluded from discussions that examine the model critically. Teachers, who should be teaching balanced thinking and debate, in a serious failure of duty, comply
• We over sanitise and cause vulnerability to infection
• We make drugs illegal to protect people, and in doing so create the most lucrative ever market for crime
• We pursue education through the aims of better curriculums and exam results, yet free-thinking (the mark of true education) is discouraged

It is clear that to survive as a species, we must have shared values, shared stories and narratives. The age of social media bubbles and extreme polarisation has meant that each inhabits a world unto themselves. How then, can we expect to live in harmony, pursuing shared goals?

This is the true problem of our age. Not anything else.

Culture wars, the polarization of the political sphere, geopolitical tension, government over-reach, technocratic hubris. These are all manifestations of a multitude of solutions to a single problem. That is: how do we embody shared principles in a world where we have so few values which we share, and what kind of world do we need to create.

The path we are heading down right now is a dangerous solution, one where people are subjugated and handed a narrative to artificially create a shared goal. Is that what we want?