But dark powers are abroad, and their grip is strengthening.

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The Public Square ([link removed])
January 2023

That Haunting Nihilism

by R. R. Reno ([link removed])

I’m becoming an N. S. Lyons fan. “A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism” is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author’s Substack. (He writes under a pseudonym.) This extended essay provides an arresting account of the deepening crisis in the West. By Lyons’s reckoning, Lewis and Tolkien were right. We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

Lyons notes “the disenchantment and demoralization of the world produced by foolishly blinkered intelligentsia” and “the catastrophic corruption of genuine education.” Our public culture provides ample evidence of “the inevitable collapse of dominating ideologies of pure materialist rationalism and progress into pure subjectivity and nihilism.” The transformation of the thin truths of scientism into something dark and despairing has daunting political consequences. It’s tempting to avert our eyes and read another book on the genius of our Founders. But dark powers are abroad, and their grip is strengthening. We ignore at our peril an “inherent connection between the loss of any objective value and the emergence of a perverse techno-state obsessively seeking first total control over humanity and then in the end the final abolition of humanity itself.”[… ([link removed]) ]
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The Public Square has featured a column by the editor of First Things since our inaugural issue in March 1990. This article appeared in our January 2023 issue.

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