As Joseph Minich argues in "Bulwarks of Unbelief", modernity — empiricism, rationalism, industrialism, and consumerism — culminates in practical which in turn implies disenchantment and the absence of the divine. In modernity, nature is no longer mysterious: we have the meta-tool of science, which allows us to pry open every hidden corner and plunder its secrets.
Likewise man himself, being part of nature, has also lost his mystery — no longer are we made in the image of God; instead, our race represents only a transitory phase between what came before and what comes next. Our value exists only within the context of a relentless materialistic progressive logic which battles entropy by greedily hoarding orderly power. But such logic has a fatal fallacy — entropy always wins.
Shintoism — the distinctively Japanese form of animism — appeals strongly to me. Their worship of nature and its multitude spirits created a culture of incredible beauty, realized in honor culture, craftsmanship, and ritualism. But this crystalline beauty proved fragile when Matthew Perry arrived in Japan in 1853. Since then (and particularly since WWII) Western materialistic and consumerist values have infected Japanese animism, causing its fruit to wither on the branch. Centuries of tradition have been shed, leaving the Japanese without much hope for the future.
In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argues that the "spectacle" (also described as "hyperreality" by Nicholas Carr) is a form of non-living which colonizes life itself, evacuating it of meaning by converting direct lived experience into pure mediated imagery. For Debord, the spectacle is the culmination of a bourgeois consolidation of power, which takes on a life of its own, expanding the proletarian underclass to the whole of society in the absence of revolutionary resistance.
But the revolutionary subversion of materialism he advocates is no less fatalistic than the optimistic progressivism of materialism itself. It is not the Hegelian synthesis it claims to be; it is merely an antithesis, orienting human action towards immediate, rather than deferred entropy. It is itself the premature collapse of the system it criticizes, and is therefore essentially oriented to it.
Materialism is a disease of modernity, which kills its host, either through the ennui of hopelessness, or the auto-immune response of critical theory, which indiscriminately seeks to dissolve every structure of power, whatever its predicate. These reactions cannot kill the disease, but they will make the host sicker.
I cannot guess what the synthesis of these forces will be, but I do know one thing that neither materialism nor Marxism can touch. In the words of 1 Corinthians 13:
Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.
That which is perfect has come, and will come again. Man's pride comes before his fall, and the beauty of nature may be marred by it. But the God of transcendent love, in whom nature finds both its origin and its purpose, is also the God who upholds creation, and has purchased it by his very own blood. He is not dead, he is alive. His perfect love endures forever, and it is this love which governs every current of history, teaching us the error of our ways and pointing ever more clearly to Christ, who is
the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation... All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.
This perfect love is the only place we can hide from the storms of life. He is the Rock, cloven to make a hiding place for everyone who feels "weary and heavy laden":
Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee ... Nothing in my hands I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling