The self-absorption that is so prominently on display in the present day precludes such transcendence. It involves an inflation of the self that results in the eclipse of all phenomena transcendent to it. The question that materializes in this age is not so much, what do I matter, but what does anything else matter but me?

People grow less self-aware the more self-absorbed they become. An explanation for this apparent incongruity would be that genuine self-awareness entails the overcoming or transcendence of the self. The principle of self-denial, so foundational to Buddhism or asceticism more broadly, exemplifies this ancient piece of wisdom. Enlightenment demands a degree of perspective or proportion that brings with it an eclipse of the self and invites that humbling and liberating awareness: What do I matter?

But the self-absorption that is so prominently on display in the present day precludes such transcendence. It involves an inflation of the self that results in the eclipse of all phenomena transcendent to it. The question that materializes in this age is not so much, what do I matter, but what does anything else matter but me? In the ego-centric cosmos, the I is the center around which all else revolves.

To appreciate the mindset that prevailed in an earlier day, consider the cathedrals that arose in Europe in the Middle Ages, as William Manchester invites his readers to do in A World Lit Only by Fire. For their erection, centuries were needed. In that time and in those endeavors, uncounted lives were spent. Yet of those lives, hardly anything is recorded. Their architects, their laborers are blanks, unknowns.

It is not so much that the passage of time consigned them to oblivion; rather, as individuals, from oblivion they never emerged. As Manchester notes, “Early man’s lack of ego was total.” Man may have occupied a privileged place in God’s creation, but there was nothing privileged or exceptional about men qua individuals. In an age when the average life expectancy was just north of thirty; when a quarter of those who came into this world departed within a year of arriving and half never made it past fifteen; when hunger, disease, and violence, were constant companions, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Yet it was egoless men who constructed Chartres, Canterbury, St. Stephen’s, and the like.

Of what comparable glories can modern man boast? Of comforts and conveniences, he has aplenty. And such innovations do merit astonishment, however commonplace they now may seem. But the wonders of the modern age are self-serving and, in the end, abasing. They are the impetuously-begotten brainchildren of beings whose paramount aim is to preserve themselves—and in view of the success they have enjoyed, to do so comfortably. The predictable rejoinder: But is that not the fundamental aim of all organisms? Maybe. The notion that animate matter possesses purpose is dubious, particularly when one spurns all teleological presuppositions, as every devoted votary of modern science must. In a purposeless cosmos, how did the brainless jellyfish, drifting hither and thither wherever the oceanic currents may carry it, acquire a target?

But if one insists that the purpose of all the fishes of the sea—jelly-ones included—is to preserve themselves, so be it. That such a verity might serve as a standard by which to determine or justify man’s raison d’être merely attests to his diminution. Man, who once sacrificed himself for something loftier, now declines to sacrifice himself, for as it turns out, there is nothing loftier. If that is progress, it is one of a strange and a paradoxical sort—the sort that points to nothing higher, or rather, to nothing whatsoever.

There is an oedipal madness that impels modern man’s quest for knowledge—a quest predicated on the conceit that the only knowledge that can be qualified thus is that of the scientific variety (a madness, it is worth adding, that cannot be readily squared with modern science’s purported commitment to objectivity). In relentlessly probing the material universe—the only one that matters or the only one simply—man has blinded himself to the spiritual outlook of an earlier day, an outlook that inspired works of sublimity that man no longer appears capable of conceiving. Of course, if that vanished perspective is devoid of validity, as contemporary sages aver, blindness to it might be a mark of enlightenment, a necessary condition for the mind’s maturation and liberation. But if those erstwhile follies, superstitions, myths—let today’s sages call them what they will—spawned splendors that embody or bear witness to the greatness of man, is there not at least something to be said for them? Might human greatness necessitate the belief that man is more than the sum of his material parts, even if that belief is but an illusion? Indeed, might not illusions be integral to the human condition so that man risks becoming dehumanized in the absence of them?

Science would never concede such a point for it would be antithetical to its objective, which is to disillusion man (an objective grounded more in faith than science, but no matter…). All the same, the truth that science yields is superficial, not apodictic. It does not explicate nature so much as interpret it and it does so by reducing and categorizing the incalculable diversity of existence with an eye to, in Descartes’ formulation, mastering and possessing it. Nature appears orderly because man has ordered it.

Science too, then, is man’s attempt to make sense of and his home in this world onto which he has been tossed. As such, there is something mendacious about the reductionist and materialist pretensions of modern science, though insofar as its partisans are likely to be commensurately misguided on this score, it may be more a question of delusion than duplicity. Whatever the case may be, honesty is wanting; courage too. That lack can be discerned in the inability or unwillingness to confront what science discloses about the nature of reality, namely that it is completely meaningless. The gospel of science, so effectively disseminated and ubiquitously imbibed that any questioning of it is tantamount to heresy, reveals that man is but a brute, the product of chance mutations and a blind evolutionary process, occupying some random and remote rock circling an incidental star at the center of a solar system belonging to a galaxy of more than one hundred billion stars in a universe—an expanding one no less—that embraces an estimated two trillion galaxies. One daresay that the discovery of the New World did more to unsettle the equilibrium of Renaissance man than did the revelation that man’s entire world, in substance, amounts to nothing.

If modern man were a stoic he might be fit to laud, but he is as emphatically unphlegmatic as they get. The ostensible equanimity that he preserves in a cosmic abyss is not the result of his self-mastery and self-possession, but his expected mastery and possession of nature. The promise that man will one day become the master of fate and cease to be the plaything of it provides a sense of solace to which he obstinately clings now that his privileged standing in the cosmological order has been abjured. One despairs of being lost at sea only when all hope of being rescued has been abandoned. But man has no need or use for such despair. A castaway in a cosmic ocean he can hardly begin to fathom, man does not worry about being rescued for he already has been saved—or at least apprehended the key to salvation. Science will illumine the path ahead; better yet, it will clear and pave it. Man the savior of himself! Science the means of his salvation! A cosmic saga composed not by some divine dramaturge, but by the protagonist, the hero, by man himself!

On closer inspection, it turns out that this epic hero is decidedly unheroic. His hubris belies a state of fragility, a diminutiveness of soul that is difficult to reconcile with genuine heroism. Without danger, without uncertainty, without sacrifice (including, of course, self-sacrifice), there can be no heroism, but it is precisely those elements that man as savior cannot abide; that he strives to dispel. Modern man is not simply unheroic, but anti-heroic. He labors to build a world in which not only heroism, but the very preconditions for heroism have no place. Yet in spite of all this, he maintains an air of self-importance that, on the one hand, allows him to discount the nihilistic consequences of his convictions and on the other, makes it so difficult for him to countenance any depreciation of his self-determined worth. Thus, the same person who is utterly unperturbed by the knowledge that he is aimlessly adrift in a cosmic void becomes hysterical when microaggressed or misgendered.

Those who came before were able to endure so much not simply because it was their lot, but because their ego was limited, if not altogether lacking. In a world riddled with uncertainty, they beheld and accepted the precariousness of life; that it could be lost at any moment. What today would be considered the intolerable transience of existence was made bearable by the knowledge that one belonged to something much larger than oneself; that one was inextricably entwined with generations past and generations to come; that one’s sojourn on this earth, however ephemeral, was a prelude to eternity. Their children are able to endure so little not only because they are so unaccustomed to hardship, but because their egos are all-consuming. In making themselves the centers of the universe, if not universes unto themselves; alphas and omegas with whom the only life that matters begins and ends, every harm is to be avoided because it carries with it too great a risk. While the inhabitant of an earlier day understood that the divine comedy would play on once he exited the stage, the inhabitant of this age knows that his one-man show cannot go on without him.

If man is but an animal, he is an animal like no other, an animal without parallel or precedent, one that can defy and thereby transcend his animality. It was this inner tension—“an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself”—that in Nietzsche’s estimation gave man depth and made him such an extraordinary creature: so extraordinary, that “divine spectators were needed to do [him] justice.” In making self-preservation his summum bonum, man has been reduced—has reduced himself—to an ordinary creature, one whose fitness to survive is the definitive measure of just how far he has evolved. In becoming the most evolutionarily advanced of all the animals, a veritable king of the beasts, man has dethroned the gods and banished them from his kingdom, as far as his telescopic eye can see. Though born from a spirit of resentment and retribution, the revolt ultimately and unwittingly signified an act of charity: to oblige those divine spectators to watch a navel-gazing jester strut and fret his hour upon the stage would be an injustice to them.

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