Humanities, Arts and Sciences - Surrogates for Religion?

Any of you who are familiar with the intellectual and cultural history of western civilization are aware that we have witnessed the gradual demise of religion and the disappearance of God from modern secular consciousness. With this radical shift from a religious to a secular sensibility we have also seen the displacement of religion by the humanities, arts and sciences, each in its turn attempting to serve as an exclusively immanent "immortality project," to borrow a phrase from Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death." Western modernity is a nothing if not a secular temple raised up to the Worship of Nature and Man.

Is there not now some irony in the fact that in today's post-modern technological age the secular historical consciousness of the humanities, arts and sciences, along with the memory of man's religious consciousness, has itself become increasingly displaced by the philistine culture and marketing society with its own profane trinity of obsessive Sex, Money and Power? Who can observe the dumbing down and vulgarizing trends of our mass media and entertainment industry and not conclude that we are moving toward a post-literate and post-civil society? Is this not perhaps an example of the devolutional and unintended consequences of historical dialectic? Perhaps the day is not far off when Ugliness, Violence and Obscenity will finally eclypse the classical ideals of The Good, the True and the Beautiful? Perhaps the death of Beauty, Love and Eternal Being does not mean the end of religion but only the occasion for the rise of a new religion of Banal Nothingness in Perpetual Flux? Without the intuition of transcendence does not man sink to become, as Emerson warned us, a managerie of monkeys? Camus thought we could live "without appeal" to any higher power or transcendent purpose that death does not entirely annihilate? Perhaps Nietzshe's Ubermensch (Over-Man) can achieve such a tragic and heroic feat, but that leaves most of humanity to be scattered among what Matthew Arnold called the Barbarians, the Philistines and the Populace. What do you think? What do you see as the future of humanity in an age defined by the secular titans of mass advertizing, superficial entertainment and global consumerism?