“A person’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.”
—Marcus Aurelius, 121-180 CE
In Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, the 20th-century French philosopher Rene Guenon wrote that humanity is in the end-throws of an epoch of profound materialism. He described ours as the bleakest period in a long cycle—the final stage of the Kali-Yuga in the Vedic tradition—a dark age in which ignorance is king.
In this age, spirit is absorbed into matter, creating the illusion that matter is all that is real. Though we live in a sea of forces that cannot be measured by physical instruments—pervasive forces of life, sensitivity, consciousness, creativity—our societal worldview steadfastly denies the reality of the invisible. These phenomena, which are the very stuff of direct experience, are considered subjective and unreal byproducts of material processes.
In the present epoch, Guenon suggests, we value only quantitative measurements as indications of reality. This worldview cuts us off from the higher powers and neuters intrinsic harmonics of meaning. The reality of correspondence expressed in metaphor and symbol are shunted to the unserious spheres of the liberal arts and poetry. Our education teaches that what we sense and experience is unreliable and unreal. Only the calculations of indoctrinated experts are to be trusted, even when contradictory to direct experience.
Money is the lingua franca for measuring and assessing value in life. We miss the irony that money is a pure abstraction with no practical value. How interesting that the dollar bill reads “In God we trust” thus advertising that “God” has become “mammon” (materialism). In this sense, as St. Augustine wrote, the Devil is the great counterfeiter, “the ape of God,” substituting the genuinely valuable with worthless abstraction.
Alienated from a direct connection with our own nature, we measure the health of a person on the basis of algorithms counting invisible particles. Gender is untethered from biology. And cut off from the natural world, of which humanity itself is a part, we assess the health of Great Nature by counting parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air.
In the epoch of quantity, democracy is the mode of governance in which the powerful majority always overpowers the weaker minorities and could equally be called “mob rule.” Guenon writes: “It is only in the reign of quantity that the opinion of the majority can claim to be taken into consideration at all.”
In contrast are philosophies transmitted through traditions of the mostly forgotten past when the pendulum tilted in the direction of quality. The current paradigm views the religions, gods, and mythology of ancient cultures as superstitious and ignorant. And yet a careful study reveals that many myths reflect cosmic processes like the movement of celestial bodies conveying a harmonic meaning beyond the simply mechanical. In the ancient pantheons, Gods are cosmic forces available to direct experience—but only through a cultivated attitude of devotion.
We must admit that the materialistic Enlightenment has not led to happiness and harmony in humanity. It is more a mind-virus of collective alienation from self and world. The advent of materialism denuded of spirituality could more accurately be called “the endarkenment” and its influence is nearly exhausted.
Living in the age of bean-counting under the despotic reign of quantity is a desolate existence. It is nihilistic and devoid of meaning and leads human beings to ignorance, addiction, destruction, and personal and collective suicide, for why go on living when one is so cut off from an inherent meaning, purpose, and natural matrix for existence?
Within this context some of us have a shadowy memory or premonition of humanity living in a way that is organized by subtler and higher powers. For those who hear the call, our task is to live inwardly as outsiders in the current age; to have solitude in the crowd; to be guided as far as possible by one’s own pole star of values.
The task, as I see it, is not to reject anything about the current state of the world. Rather it is to guard one’s mind and attention from the flawed premises of the current worldview. We are invited to give attention to the real mystery, the energetic and relational within ourselves and in our human community and in nature. Feed the mind and being with influences arising from a more holistic and less partial view of the world. Find means of connecting to the higher powers and oneself, and work to germinate the seeds of a future humanity here and now.
This article appears in October 2023.
