After Progress

What happens when a civilization achieves everything it set out to achieve — and discovers it has lost itself in the process? Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, the liberal project is consuming itself. In its effort to protect the sovereign, therapeutic self, it has dismantled the very moral architecture that made a coherent self possible. Reason and science have advanced beyond anything anyone could have imagined — but morality has not kept pace. Ethics are fracturing. Community is dissolving. We are more connected than any people in history, and more isolated than ever. More free, by every measure, and less able to say what that freedom is for. By seeking to transcend our limitations, we've entered a time where limits -- the guards we need to thrive as humans -- are unknown to many of us. Alasdair MacIntyre called it a new dark age. This book agrees and argues we are not without hope. Drawing on three twentieth-century thinkers who saw it coming — Robert Nisbet, Max Picard, and Christopher Lasch — this book traces how the promise "be whoever you want to be" became a trap, diagnoses the rootless modern self with uncommon clarity, and argues that the answer is not a better politics, a more sophisticated therapy, or an accelerated science. The answer is an ancient institution: the church — a home for the restless self, a story that does not revise itself, a community that makes binding demands and keeps binding promises. Mankind is a story-telling being. This is a book about which story is true and why we need it now more than ever before.