![\"Augusto_Del_Noce\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/305\/2018\/01\/Augusto_Del_Noce.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAugusto Del Noce<\/a> was an Italian thinker from back in the 1960s who predicted much of what we are facing today.\u00a0 A Catholic Christian, Del Noce explored the connections between the sexual revolution, the technological revolution, and totalitarianism.<\/p>\n Two of his books\u00a0are newly available in English: The Age of Secularization<\/a>\u00a0and The Crisis of Modernity.<\/a>\u00a0 Francis X. Maier reviews them for First Things<\/em> in\u00a0The Most Important Thinker We Don\u2019t Know<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Says Maier,<\/p>\n At the height of Soviet power, Del Noce predicted with stunning accuracy the collapse of Marxism-Leninism. He foresaw the sexual revolution in its weirdest forms, including the\u00a0<\/span>transformation of the political left from advocate of the working classes to defender of sexual \u201cfreedom.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>He explained the link between the fierce rejection of traditional morality in the 1960s and the same decade\u2019s ferocious moralizing for radical change. And he described in great detail the fundamentally totalitarian nature of the West\u2019s emerging tech civilization.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n As Maier explains Del Noce\u2019s thought, Marxism had the effect of repudiating all transcendent truths in favor of a rigorous materialism.\u00a0 But in its moral critique of capitalism, its apocalyptic utopianism, and its revolutionary zeal, Marxist-Leninism retained a religious impulse.\u00a0 This contradiction, among others,\u00a0cannot\u00a0be sustained, and Soviet-style systems\u2013still at their strength when Del Noce wrote\u2013will eventually collapse.<\/p>\n But that collapse will simply usher in a system that will also repudiate all transcendent truths and embrace a rigorous materialism only without any religious impulse whatsoever.\u00a0 Scientism will reign supreme, with the conviction that technology will solve all of our problems.\u00a0 In this climate, purged of any higher meanings, feelings will\u00a0become the most important facet of human life.\u00a0 And the most intense feelings are sexual, so we will have a sexual revolution with no moral limits.<\/p>\n The totalitarianism of Marxism and Fascism promoted \u201ctotal\u201d state control, governments that regulated the \u201ctotality\u201d of human life.\u00a0 The emerging new \u201ctechnopoly\u201d will promote totalitarianism of a different sort.\u00a0 Science would become \u201ctotalitarian,\u201d asserting authority over all of existence and, as with Communist and Fascist leaders, insisting that it is the only<\/em> authority.<\/p>\n Del Noce was worried, in the words of Maier, \u201cabout a culture addicted to science and technology as the only \u201creal\u201d forms of knowledge; a culture hollowed out and stupefied by the material well-being its tools provide; a culture subject to the resulting philosophy of scientism that renders questions of transcendence irrelevant by confining the human horizon to the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n By discrediting traditional moral ideals and comprehensive systems of belief\u2014including even belief in itself\u2014Marxism clears the way for a more effective, pragmatic materialism that has little need to attack religion directly, because it renders the supernatural useless and implausible. The more well-being technology provides, the stronger its momentum toward technocracy. And technocracy becomes technopoly\u2014becomes\u00a0totalitarian<\/em>\u2014not by gassing dissidents, but by gradually commandeering the human imagination and excluding human reason from appeals to any higher rational benchmark, any higher moral authority, than itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The technological society is opposed to both religion and revolution.\u00a0 \u201cIn this regard, it truly represents the bourgeois spirit in its pure state,\u201d says Del Noce, \u201cthe bourgeois spirit triumphant over its two traditional adversaries, transcendent religion and revolutionary thought.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo Di ignoto \u2013 http:\/\/www.centroculturaledimilano.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/denoce.jpg, Pubblico dominio, https:\/\/it.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=6407651<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n