How U.S. Businesses are Embracing the Future

Civilization has been intricately linked with religious devotion since its inception—a useful reminder that the "cult" at the heart of "culture" has always been a shared religion. It is not unexpected that when man first noticed the order of the skies above him and the patterns of the seasons around him, he sought to comprehend his own place in that order. And so man joined time, for the order in which we live is inextricably linked to both cyclical and linear time. Every man, like every living thing, has a life from beginning to end, but the tribe, like the seasons, follows a cyclical pattern of birth and death that spans many generations.With this knowledge, man's view was no longer restricted by what the next uncertain day would bring, and his concerns grew beyond his immediate family group. Bonner describes this new mode of thinking as characterized by a "belief in the importance of a shared past" that "also suggests a particular view of the future" in which the living "can look forward to veneration as ancestors after death." Our idea of life was abruptly extended far into the past and future, bringing a sense of cultural permanence to what had previously appeared to be a capricious and precarious struggle for survival.

Civilisation arose from this insight, and its development 

was distinguished by the three primary characteristics that Bonner associates with a civilized way of life: clarity, beauty, and order. He gives a chapter to each of these topics, demonstrating how abandoning them leads to stagnation and corruption. Perhaps when they succumb to stagnation and corruption, they reject these beliefs. It's not entirely clear which way Bonner believes the causal relationship runs—and I don't think it has ever been clear to chroniclers of decline—but there appears to be something inherent in civilization that eventually leads to decay, just as the inevitability of death is deeply embedded in our cellular structure.Bonner views an ideological devotion to progress as the adversary of civilization. Following the arguments of Robert Nisbet, James Burnham, Ryszard Legutko, and Augusto Del Noce, Bonner traces this progress ideology back to a shift in the scientific method at the beginning of the Renaissance, when men like Francis Bacon began to believe that we could master and subordinate the natural world to human ingenuity rather than trying to understand it according to its internal laws. We came to see the natural environment as something to be exploited rather than stewarded, and we lost touch with creation. We stopped following natural law or the Dao and instead trusted pure reason.

Bonner finds the pinnacle of this arrogance 

in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, which is mostly forgotten now yet brilliantly sums up the twentieth century's reckless, rocket-fueled journey into the unknown. Even after two industrial-scale world wars and seventy-five years of living under a nuclear shadow, our desire for novelty has not abated, even as our playthings have become more lethal, demonstrating man's failure to learn from his mistakes. We're no longer satisfied with tinkering with turbo-props and Tesla coils; instead, we're rushing headlong into a future of unregulated deep fakes, AI, and gene treatment. All of this came to me while reading Bonner's characterization of the liberal attitude.Liberals of the nineteenth century saw the dissolution of institutions as a work of progressive freedom, and their descendants do as well. However, those who valued stability, rootedness, consistent moral ideas, cultural and religious continuity, and human interconnectedness saw things differently. They only saw upheaval, confusion, a sense of purposelessness, loneliness, and an unfulfilled need to belong.We must never forget that Silicon Valley's unofficial motto is "Move fast and break things"—the exact antithesis of what a good parent teaches a child. We shouldn't be shocked that this toddler culture has generated a child's perspective of culture, one that is ignorant, disruptive, and unconcerned about the disruption it causes in the world. Bonner describes the liberal aim as a world of "disaggregation and atomization," promising a break with the past by freeing individuals from ancestral and institutional bonds. 

Its ultimate purpose is to liberate us 

from reality and transport us to a world of our own fabrication, a derivative reality that, in the end, is anti-reality. A person wearing a protective face mask looks at their phone as they walk past a big emoji face painted on the boarded-up windows of a store on Robson Street in Vancouver on Wednesday, May 6, 2020. Darryl Dyck / The Canadian Press.If liberalism is the problem, then the cure entails rejecting liberalism, or at least its most harmful assumptions, and insisting on seeing reality clearly (Bonner's criterion of "clarity") and organizing our lives around it. According to Bonner, this must begin by rejecting a commitment to radical autonomy that is separated from concern for the common good. We need to reclaim the fact that "[a]utonomy, rightly understood, is better exercised by groups and communities with a common wisdom and shared capacity greater than those of any single person." Only then can we replace society's false and unrealistic nightmare, in which "the solitary individual" serves as the fundamental building block, with the older natural community of interrelated intergenerational families.In his first Christmas message to the Curia, Pope Benedict XVI exhorted us to reconcile our way of life with the natural law.