Religious Thinking Replaces Realistic Thinking

With the nineteenth century begins the winter of the West. Its thousand years of cultural vitality are over; there is no true artistic creativity left. The preceding centuries were marked by an instinctive sense of form and style—Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque—but the new age is inchoate and confused.

It is the rise of the middle classes that explains this cultural incoherence. They resent the aristocracy with its refined manners and sure taste; they pursue untrammelled freedom as an end in itself; their ignorant artistic forays produce meaningless fluctuations of style—the warfare of Classicism and Romanticism leads to endless barren “experiments.”

Political life is equally meaningless. Parliamentarism provides a talking shop that obscures the basic political reality—the triumph of money. Before the power of financial speculation everything gives way: constitutionalism, democracy, even socialism. Politicians are the agents of financial interests.

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Yet their power is not eternal. Blood, ethnic pride, cultural chauvinism, territorial instincts and natural aggressiveness, will soon assert themselves against the world of money, science, and technological prowess. An age of violent conflict is opening, and with the First World War of 1914-1918 it is obvious an era of perpetual warfare has begun.

New Caesars with armies of fanatical devotees struggle for mastery. Meanwhile the mass of mankind looks on with growing bewilderment, apathy, or resignation, prepared to accept the fate that determined soldiers, terrorist movements, fearful police and militarised states impose.

But long before this comes about, political ideologies and parties will have lost their meaning. Life in a globalised world falls to a level of uniformity where local and national differences virtually cease to exist. The only places that matter will be a handful of gigantic “world cities”—New York, Berlin, Tokyo or Beijing. These will be what Hellenistic Alexandria and Imperial Rome were to the ancient world—vast assemblages of people all living on top of one another, a mob following anyone who keeps them amused.

The lives of the masses will be an empty rehearsal of dull tasks and brutal diversions—arenas and gladiators, gross spectacles of sensuality and sadism watched by drunken roaring crowds. Music will be similarly depraved. Intellectual activity becomes mechanized, practical, cold, and merely clever. The educated lose their feeling for language, and the same basic speech—a coarse argot filled with obscenity—is spoken by intellectuals and workers alike.

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Then when every trace of cultural form and style has disappeared, a new primitivism begins to pervade all human activity. Even the feeling for scientific truth—which may for some time outlast the dissolution of culture—grows vague and uncertain. Superstitions thrive; men believe anything; their appetite for the mysterious and supernatural expands and flourishes. It becomes hard to tell fiction from fact or fact from fiction.

In vulgar credulity the common people try to escape the universal boredom of work in a mechanized and bureaucratized world. Then out of the desolation of city life arises a “second religiosity”, a fusion of popular cults and dim memories of forgotten piety. In this way the uncomprehending masses seek to assuage their misery.

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