{"id":83486,"date":"2025-06-19T06:00:47","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T10:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=83486"},"modified":"2025-06-19T07:46:45","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T11:46:45","slug":"what-comes-after-the-knowledge-system-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/06\/what-comes-after-the-knowledge-system-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"What Comes After the Knowledge System Collapse?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As we have blogged about, a number of observers have been sensing a \u201cvibe shift<\/a>,\u201d the impression that something new is in the air, that the culture is changing in a new direction.<\/p>\n

Specifics of what that shift entails are harder to come by.\u00a0 Cultural critic Ted Gioia, though, is making more definite claims and is citing evidence to back up his observation.\u00a0 Yesterday we blogged about<\/a> his theory that we are undergoing a cultural and intellectual change on the order of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe are experiencing a total shift\u2014like the magnetic poles reversing,\u201d he writes in the Free Press<\/a>. \u201cBut it doesn\u2019t even have a name\u2014not yet. So let\u2019s give it one. Let\u2019s call it The Collapse of the Knowledge System.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Now I would argue that \u201cthe Collapse of the Knowledge System\u201d is not a very good name for a new civilization-wide movement, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.\u00a0 He goes on to give evidence that the public has lost its trust in science, experts, and our educational institutions and for good reason.<\/p>\n

But to say the old order is falling apart doesn\u2019t tell us much about what comes next, though it can give us clues.\u00a0 That the medieval world picture collapsed tells us little about the positive nature of the Renaissance, that is, its rediscovery and new applications of classical antiquity.\u00a0 The Enlightenment was a rejection of the so-called \u201cDark Ages\u201d of ignorance and superstition, but it also put forth the positive alternative of an \u201cAge of Reason,\u201d in which people of those days trusted the findings of rational inquiry and the newly flourishing science over and against the beliefs, including the religious beliefs, of the past.<\/p>\n

So, if Gioia is right that our existing knowledge system is collapsing, what might we expect to come next?<\/p>\n

Gioia himself says that he isn\u2019t sure.\u00a0 But he thinks it will resemble what replaced the arid rationalism of the Enlightenment:\u00a0 Romanticism.<\/p>\n

He sees a parallel with what happened at the apex of another age of technology, the Industrial Revolution.\u00a0 At the turn of the 19th century, Gioia writes,<\/p>\n

Rationalist and algorithmic models were dominating every sphere of life at that midpoint in the Industrial Revolution\u2014and people started resisting the forces of progress. . . .They celebrated human feeling and emotional attachments\u2014embracing them as more trustworthy, more flexible, more desirable than technology, profits, and cold calculation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is from a separate essay entitled Notes Toward a New Romanticism<\/a>, in which Gioia explores that possibility today.<\/p>\n

I would say that today\u2019s shift away from scientific rationalism that he chronicles already started with postmodernism and its reaction against modernism.\u00a0 Just as modernism had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and the authority of science, postmodernism arguably had its origins in a particular kind of Romanticism.\u00a0 Both are highly subjective and are opposed to objective reason.\u00a0 The exaltation of the \u201cwill to power\u201d was first articulated by Nietzsche.\u00a0 The claim that our experience of reality is a \u201cconstruction\u201d of the human mind derives from Kant.<\/p>\n

Postmodernism with its relativism, political reductionism, and constructivism can be said to have collapsed the knowledge system of modernism, especially once it came for science.\u00a0 This is part of what Gioia was seeing, and it is intrinsic to what has happened to universities and the public schools.<\/p>\n

Science and technology are related, but they are not the same.\u00a0 \u201cScience\u201d comes from the Latin word for knowledge<\/em>, having to do with discovering objective knowledge about the natural order.\u00a0 \u201cTechnology,\u201d though it builds on scientific discoveries, is about making and using tools to force nature to do our bidding.\u00a0 As such, it is \u201cconstructivist.\u201d\u00a0 So it is little wonder that postmodernists, while rejecting objective truth as scientists will never do, are quite enchanted with technology.<\/p>\n

There were, however, other aspects of 19th century Romanticism that might be coming back.\u00a0 The \u201cEnlightenment\u201d thought that the past was all dark until the 18th century light of reason switched on.\u00a0 But the Romantics rediscovered and reappropriated the past.\u00a0 That this movement was called \u201cRomantic\u201d was not due to an emphasis on love; rather, it was a reference to the medieval stories called \u201cromances.\u201d\u00a0 These were often about what would be called \u201cromantic love,\u201d but they were also imaginative fantasies involving adventure, heroic deeds, and the supernatural.\u00a0 (Examples would include the King Arthur sagas and Fairy Tales.)<\/p>\n

The romances became a literary influence, but they also led to a rediscovery of the Middle Ages.\u00a0 In the 19th century, wealthy industrialists built castles for themselves, modeled after medieval architecture.\u00a0 Churches were built modeled after medieval chapels and cathedrals.\u00a0 While Romanticism gave us highly subjective religion, it also gave us religion that drew on its past, as in the Anglo-Catholic movement in England and in the confessional revival among Lutherans.\u00a0 Instead of the Enlightenment project of recasting Christianity according to reason and reason alone, many 19th century Christians appreciated the mysteries of ancient Christian doctrines and liturgies, including a Sacramental revival.<\/p>\n

Perhaps we are seeing glimpses of this shift in the popularity of the technology-satiated Generation Z in the Latin Mass and, more broadly, in liturgical worship.<\/p>\n

Another contribution of Romanticism was nationalism, found among the German romantics in an idealization of folk culture and a love for German \u201cblood and soil\u201d\u2013a nationalism that did not end well\u2013though it arguably had more benign manifestations elsewhere in a new appreciation for communities and the necessity of a \u201crooted\u201d life.\u00a0 We may see a new expression of this not only in MAGA patriotism but also in today\u2019s localist movement.<\/p>\n

As Christians, I don\u2019t think we can expect any cultural shift to be in completely in our favor, necessarily.\u00a0 Overall, the Enlightenment was hostile to Christianity, and so was Romanticism, though for different and opposite reasons.\u00a0 Enlightenment thinkers found Christianity to be insufficiently reasonable and too subjective, while many Romantic thinkers\u00a0 found it to be too reasonable and not subjective enough.\u00a0 Yet the church thrived in both eras nevertheless.<\/p>\n

Any new era might value spirituality, but in a New Age sense.\u00a0 A reaction against both modernism and postmodernism might go back as far as a premodern paganism.\u00a0 But it may well have room for a premodern Christianity.<\/p>\n

What do you think might come next if our current \u201cknowledge structure collapses\u201d?\u00a0 What new worldviews might arise from the rubble? What would a new knowledge structure look like?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Photo by\u00a0form\u00a0PxHere<\/a><\/strong> via Picryl, Public Domain<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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