Martin Gurri has aptly described the times we live in as The Endarkenment (City Journal, Autumn 2024). The Enlightenment’s commitment to criticism and power has finally turned in on itself to destroy every semblance of reason and decency in American life.
America, Gurri argues, has experienced a mass decline into unreason. Ours is an age of “delusion, impossible longing, and ritual self-mutilation.” “The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future…The Endarkenment is experienced collectively as the disintegration of institutions, a traumatic fracturing of social life, and the seemingly endless perpetuation of political conflict.”
Gurri shows in brief how this descent occurred over a long period as the instruments of enlightenment—criticism and power—eliminated transcendence and history and were turned on themselves to destroy reason and truth and divide society into competing power groups. Belief in God is gone. Reason is gone. Common sense is gone. Traditional values have been turned into individual preferences. And the Internet has become a dreamland escape into impossibility for multitudes.Gurri wonders if anything can be done to repair this situation. He believes we must return to an age of “prophets and philosophers who conceive a dramatically updated spiritual vision, with the rational and the sacred, truth and meaning, reconciled in the righteous life.”
In Christian terms, that sounds like revival, renewal, and awakening.
T. M. Moore
