Patterns of Deceit

When we're orientating patterns in an historical-cultural context, we always have to be careful because the particulars do matter. While I've been drawn to meta-theories, like spiral dynamics, I do see more problems than good from them. First, historic paradigm shifts as not as clean as often depicted, such that many of these patterns overlap with prior epochs. These theories often privilege recent cultural trends over many of the high culture achievements in more pre-modern times, often dismissing these periods as "less-evolved" than ours. Moreover, these models often represent trends and patterns to justify speculative non-empirical outcomes.

When looking at a meta-view, I can empathize with the Levinas position that responsibility precedes any "objective searching after truth". Or another way to consider this is while the part is always in the whole, the part always needs to be made whole.

Maybe that's why I prefer how Kreeft depicts these historical-cultural patterns, since he doesn't attempt to place them hierarchically. We can see how Kreeft draws on Christianity as a synthesis of virtue in theory (Hellenism) and practice (Hebraism): or the True and the Good.

He also sees the postmodern period as leading to a new axial age resulting from the Western Enlightenment and Continental Romanticism. I am not sure if it's a revival or a dead-end, but there many people attempting to grope for the next, new thing.

In the dead-end camp, David Bentley Hart eviscerates the notion that we have come up with a deeper ethical stance in our postmodern milieu... 

“Even when we have shed the moral and religious precepts of our ancestors, most of us try to be ethical and even, in many cases, “spiritual.” It is rare, however, that we are able to impose anything like a coherent pattern upon the somewhat haphazard collection of principles and practices by which we do this. Our ethics, especially, tends to be something of a continuous improvisation or bricolage: we assemble fragments of traditions we half remember, gather ethical maxims almost at random from the surrounding culture, attempt to find an inner equilibrium between tolerance and conviction, and so on, until we have knit together something like a code, suited to our needs, temperaments, capacities, and imaginations. We select the standards or values we find appealing from a larger market of moral options and then try to arrange them into some sort of tasteful harmony.”

And he also does a beautiful job deriding our approach to religion, and how cultural sophistication has undermined spiritual depth and rigor...

“As for our religion, much the same may be said: few of us really feel that the creeds we espouse are more important in giving shape to our ethical predispositions than are our own judgments. We certainly, at any rate, do not draw near to the “mystery of God” with anything like the fear and trembling of our ancestors, and when we tire of our devotions and drift away we do not expect to be pursued, either by the furies or by the hounds of conscience. This is especially obvious at modern Western religion’s pastel-tinged margins, in those realms of the New Age where the gods of the boutique hold uncontested sway. Here one may cultivate a private atmosphere of “spirituality” as undemanding and therapeutically comforting as one likes simply by purchasing a dream catcher, a few pretty crystals, some books on the goddess, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a volume of Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or Robert Graves, a Nataraja figurine, a purse of tiles engraved with runes, a scattering of Pre-Raphaelite prints drenched in Celtic twilight, an Andean flute, and so forth, until this mounting congeries of string, worthless quartz, cheap joss sticks, baked clay, kitsch, borrowed iconography, and fraudulent scholarship reaches that mysterious point of saturation at which religion has become indistinguishable from interior decorating. Then one may either abandon one’s gods for something new or bide with them for a time, but in either case without any real reverence, love, or dread. There could scarcely be a more thoroughly modern form of religion than this. It certainly bears no resemblance to the genuine and honorable idolatries of old, or to the sort of ravenous religious eclecticism that characterized the late Roman Empire. The peoples of early and late antiquity actually believed in, adored, and feared their gods. No one really believes in the gods of the New Age; they are deities not of the celestial hierarchy above but of the ornamental étagère in the corner, and their only “divine” office is to give symbolic expression to the dreamier sides of their votaries’ personalities.” 

And in regards to our god(s) today...

“They are purchased gods, gods as accessories, and hence are merely masks by means of which the one true god—the will—at once conceals and reveals itself.”

Ouch! But probably more accurate than not. I often believe postmodernism is a result of modernity's tantrum with civilization than a true step forward. Patterns may emerge, but whether you see things progressing or not comes down to where (and how whole) you stand.