From the Enlightenment to Postmodernism in a Few Paragraphs

In last Sunday’s Gospel reading, Jesus tells us that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

In other words – our burdens don’t come from Jesus.  In fact, as we looked at yesterday, Jesus desires to ease the burdens we bear.

So, where to those burdens come from?

From the fallen world.  And from our fallen nature.

Some of the burdens are incidental – we get sick, there’s a traffic jam on the way to work, something breaks down at home.

Many of the burdens of products of intent.  We do something that hurts someone we care about, and it weighs on us.  Or, vice versa.  And then there are the many burdens of living in a fallen world and with some genuinely wicked people controlling the levers of power.

Oddly enough, that same fallen world would have us believe it can provide everything we need for our happiness.  There’s a diagnosis for when the same entity both causes our misery (at least in part) and then claims to be able to provide the cure.  It rhymes with “Munchausen by Proxy.”

The secular world was convinced that the Enlightenment would solve everything.  No more of that knuckle-dragging, witch-burning, superstitious faith of the middle ages.  Now we had reason.  Now we had science.

Well, that didn’t work out too great on the human happiness front.  Science created greater means for waging war and enslaving people in sweatshops.  And reason just opened the door to more un-answerable questions (why does the universe exist?).

It’s not to say that Enlightment was a total failure.  Or that there’s anything wrong with intellectual rigor and the scientific method – those are simply using our God-given intellect.  The problem was pushing God to the side, rather than letting faith and moral principles guide the Enlightenment project.

In any event, the Enlightenment having failed to make everyone delirious happy, opened the door for the existentialists, like Nietzsche.    This was the “God is dead, we’re all alone in the universe, and no one is coming to save us” crowd.  They weren’t exactly a lot of yuchs.  In general, they didn’t believe in God or in any absolute truths.  But they did hold out the hope that each us could individually carve out meaning during our few years on this otherwise miserable rock.  That was the “will to power.”  By shear will, we could grab hold of something that brought some measure of meaning and happiness.

Well, the existentialists turned out be even worse marketers than the Enlightenment thinkers.  Miserable and angsty lot that they were, few were lining up to buy what they were selling.

And that gives us the post-modern mindset that is all the rage today (critical race theory, cancel culture, and so on).  With post-modernism, not only are there no absolute truths, but there is no meaning whatsoever and no hope for puny individuals to ever overcome oppressive collectives and eek out some sort happiness.  The best you can do is create or join a winning collective, so you can be at the top of the pile and be the oppressor rather than the oppressee.  Or something like that. 

Does any of that sound like a recipe for happiness to you? 

It doesn’t to anyone else either.

It’s three strikes and you’re out for secular philosophy.

That is why the secularists are giving up on philosophy and chomping at the bit for transhumanism.  The reasoning is something like this –

“We’ve been trying and trying to figure out a philosophy that will make humans happy, and it keeps failing.  The problem couldn’t possibly be our god-less philosophy.  So the problem must be that we’re human. 

Let’s just make humans into something new.  New brains.  New bodies.  Poof!  Instant happiness.  Easy peasy.”

Yes, that’s a cartoonish summary – but it’s a very realistic cartoon.

Christ says, “come to Me all you who labor and are burdened and I will give you rest.”  After four centuries of failed secular philosophy, we could all use some of that R&R.

Blessings on your journey with Christ –

Steve and Karen Smith

Interior Life

Postscript:  Mt 11:25-30

At that time Jesus exclaimed:  "I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones.  Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will.  All things have been handed over to me by my Father.  No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him."

"Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden light."