The Age of Rational Abandonment: How the West Learned to Forget Itself
From cathedrals to skyscrapers, from candlelight to LEDs — and why postmodernism is just the old darkness with better plumbing.
I. Prologue – The Great Forgetting
Once upon a time — and not all that long ago in the grand ledger of civilisation — the West hauled itself out of the muck by the most unfashionable of means: reason, science, and markets. It was a grubby, quarrelsome process, full of mistakes and false starts, but the general direction was up. Plagues receded, food became plentiful, the lights stayed on, and more people lived long enough to grow old and grumpy. These were the dividends of a culture that took seriously the idea that truth was not whatever the priest, prince, or mob said it was, but something discoverable, testable, and subject to the stubborn constraints of reality.
Today, that inheritance is being squandered. We are drifting, willingly, into an age of emotive politics and fashionable irrationality — where feelings stand as evidence, narratives outrank facts, and the hard disciplines that built the modern world are treated as suspicious relics of an oppressive past. This is marketed as postmodernism, the “next” stage of thought. But there’s nothing new about it. It is pre-modernism in secular dress: the same rejection of objective truth, the same suspicion of causality, the same elevation of authority (now ideological rather than theological) over reason. The robes have changed, but the thinking underneath would be comfortably at home in the courts of medieval Europe.Subscribe
The conceit is that we’ve moved beyond the “naïve” belief in facts, logic, and universal principles. The reality is that we have simply abandoned the tools that made our extraordinary prosperity possible. This essay will make the case, bluntly, that what passes for intellectual sophistication is, in fact, a regression — an undoing of the Enlightenment bargain that turned stagnant kingdoms into industrial democracies. We will look at the historical climb from scarcity to abundance, the economic mechanics that keep that abundance growing, and the unpleasant but unavoidable truth about what happens when reason is no longer the referee.
The great forgetting is upon us — and if history is any guide, forgetting comes before falling.
II. The Pre-Modern Mind vs. the Modern Mind
The pre-modern mind lived in a world where truth was not discovered but delivered. It came from the pulpit, the throne, or the local magistrate’s desk, stamped with the seal of divine right or hereditary authority. To question it was not simply error — it was treason, heresy, or both. History was understood not as a story of forward motion but as a cycle: kingdoms rise, kingdoms fall, the harvest comes, the harvest fails, and the gods or the fates decide which. Social mobility was a curiosity at best; a serf’s grandson was likely to be a serf, and the idea of “self-made” was as implausible as flight to the moon. Existence for most was subsistence — one bad season or outbreak away from hunger.
The modern mind tore a hole in that canopy. Truth became something that could be sought through observation, tested against reason, and — most scandalously of all — open to being proven wrong. This was the architecture of science and the Enlightenment: ideas could be falsified, and a theory that failed a test was not heresy but progress, because it cleared the way for something better. History shifted from the circular to the linear, from endless repetition to the possibility of improvement. A farmer’s grandson might become a merchant, a merchant’s daughter might become a doctor, and the conditions of life could be improved deliberately rather than endured stoically.
This shift unlocked material and intellectual revolutions. Modernity assumed that, while human nature might be constant, knowledge could grow, and with it the capacity to shape the world. Logic, evidence, and universals — rules that applied no matter your station or creed — became the common currency of serious thought.
Postmodernism, for all its claims to novelty, is a quiet retreat from this hard-won position. Its defining feature is scepticism toward the very concept of truth. Evidence is subordinated to narrative; universals give way to identity; causality is reframed as a construct rather than a constraint. The postmodern mind may not kneel before the church or the crown, but it kneels nonetheless — this time before ideological consensus, enforced by academic orthodoxy, cultural gatekeepers, and the punitive machinery of public shaming.
The parallels are inescapable. In the pre-modern world, truth was what the bishop or the king declared, and dissent was punished. In the postmodern world, truth is what the consensus of the “right” circles declares, and dissent is punished. The costumes and liturgy have changed, but the structure is the same: a small elite defines acceptable belief, and the individual is expected to conform.
Modernity’s radical promise was that truth did not need a custodian — it could stand on its own, tested by anyone, anywhere, without regard to status. Abandoning that for the security of consensus is not evolution; it is regression. It is the comfort of the village square where everyone nods along, paid for by the abandonment of the tools that made escape from the village possible in the first place.
III. Rationality and Logic as the Engine of the West
The West’s defining leap was not a sudden burst of moral virtue or a miraculous change in human nature. It was the decision — halting, uneven, and fiercely contested — to make reason the common authority. This shift crystallised in the Enlightenment, when three great disciplines began to work in concert: science as the method for discovering truth about the natural world, markets as the feedback mechanism for allocating resources, and law as a neutral arbiter that bound ruler and ruled alike.
Science replaced appeals to tradition with a repeatable method: observe, hypothesise, test, and verify. It did not guarantee perfection — no method can — but it created a framework where error was not a crime but a necessary step toward truth. Markets applied a similar discipline to commerce. They did not ask whether a producer was noble or well-connected; they measured value through the unblinking verdict of voluntary exchange. If a product met needs at the right price, it survived. If not, it vanished, regardless of pedigree. Law, at its best, ensured that these processes could operate without being hijacked by force or fraud, holding even the powerful to the same rules as the powerless.
The dividends of rationality were extraordinary. Medicine moved from bleeding and leeches to vaccines and antibiotics, turning plagues into manageable outbreaks. Industrialisation expanded output beyond anything imaginable in an agrarian economy, replacing famine with surplus. Food security improved to the point where hunger in developed nations became a problem of distribution, not production. Information technology collapsed the time and space required for knowledge to spread, making collaboration possible across continents in real time.
Underlying all of this was logic — the only reliable universal language. Cultures differ, languages multiply, religions diverge, but logic’s rules do not change: a contradiction is always false, a conclusion is only as sound as its premises, and cause precedes effect. This made it possible for ideas to travel and be tested across boundaries, for engineering from Japan to be integrated with design from Germany, for a medical protocol developed in Boston to be replicated in Nairobi.
It is important to stress that reason is not a substitute for moral frameworks; it is the tool that disciplines them to fit reality. A moral code untethered from reason can demand the impossible or sanctify the harmful, as history’s long record of fanaticism shows. Reason asks: will this work? Will it achieve the ends you claim? It subjects ideals to the trial of consequences.
In making rationality its engine, the West did not abolish belief, tradition, or aspiration — it forced them to pass through the filter of reality before they could claim legitimacy. This discipline is what made the leap from superstition to science, from subsistence to surplus, from isolated markets to global trade. Abandon it, and the West will not simply slow down; it will reverse course, back into the comfortable but stagnant certainties of a world where truth is declared rather than discovered.
IV. Capitalism: The Material Expression of Rational Values
Capitalism, in its real form rather than the caricature used in slogans, is what happens when rational principles are applied to the exchange of goods and services. It is the material expression of logic in economic life. Its mechanisms are brutally simple, but their simplicity is what makes them both resilient and universal.
The first principle is voluntary exchange. Transactions occur only when both parties believe they will be better off afterwards. There is no edict from above, no forced requisition, no “contribution” extracted at sword point or by bureaucratic fiat. This mutual consent forces a kind of discipline: to gain, you must offer something the other party values more than what they give up. It is a permanent reality check on ambition.
The second is prices as information. A price is not simply a number; it is a condensed signal carrying the collective knowledge of buyers and sellers, scarcity and abundance, preference and substitution. Prices rise when demand exceeds supply, signalling producers to make more; they fall when supply outpaces demand, signalling resources should be redeployed. No central planner, however brilliant, can match the speed and accuracy of millions of decentralised decisions conveyed through the price mechanism.
The third is profit and loss as feedback. Profit is the market’s way of saying, “You created value and did it efficiently enough to keep the difference.” Loss is the opposite verdict: “You used resources in a way that failed to meet demand or match alternatives.” This is not sentiment; it is the impartial verdict of reality. The feedback loop is unrelenting — and it works regardless of the social standing, rhetoric, or political clout of the producer.
This arrangement represented a radical break from pre-modern economics. Before capitalism, markets existed, but they were ring-fenced by privilege-based mercantilism. Guilds, charters, and monopolies granted by the crown dictated who could trade, at what price, and in what quantities. Entry into the marketplace was not determined by the ability to serve the customer but by one’s place in the political and social order. Such systems were designed to preserve hierarchies, not to deliver value.
Capitalism blew a hole in that wall by allowing open competition. Anyone could enter if they could meet the needs of buyers better than existing suppliers. This made the consumer, rather than the court or the clergy, the ultimate arbiter. It was an invisible parliament in which every purchase was a vote — a constant, decentralised referendum on the quality, price, and utility of every offering. The consumer did not need to organise a protest or petition the ruler; they simply stopped buying what they didn’t want. That silent defection could topple even the mightiest producer.
The impact on the West’s material wealth has been direct and unprecedented. Without capitalism’s mechanisms, the leap from scarcity to abundance — from small workshops to skyscraper construction, from herbal remedies to industrial-scale vaccine production, from local barter to global trade — would have been impossible. Skyscrapers exist not because one man envisioned a tall building, but because capitalism’s feedback loops made it profitable to gather the steel, labour, engineering talent, and financing to create them. Vaccines were not distributed worldwide because a king decreed it, but because a network of competitive firms, logistical providers, and research labs had the incentives and resources to do so at scale. Global trade was not orchestrated by benevolent councils but emerged from countless exchanges seeking mutual advantage.
Capitalism aligns self-interest with service under the discipline of competition. It does not make men angels, but it makes them useful to strangers. In this way, it has done more to lift living standards, extend life expectancy, and broaden choice than any alternative system tried in human history. And it has done so not because it guarantees virtue, but because it makes inefficiency and indifference too costly to sustain.
The skyscrapers, vaccines, and container ships are only the visible artefacts of this logic. The deeper achievement is the invisible infrastructure of trust, prices, and feedback that allows millions of people who will never meet to cooperate in producing things no single mind could design or deliver. Remove that logic, and the prosperity it sustains will not gradually fade — it will collapse, as surely as a building with its foundations removed.
V. The Dream of the Past — and Its Reality
The past has always enjoyed a better publicist than the present. In memory, “simpler times” come draped in the soft light of nostalgia: cobbled streets, open-air markets, neighbours who all knew your name, and the comforting rhythm of a life unhurried by modern complexity. The inconvenient details — the smell of sewage in the street, the grinding labour from dawn to dusk, the cold that seeped into your bones in winter — rarely make it into the brochure.
The truth is far less romantic. In pre-modern Europe, infant mortality hovered between 20 and 30 per cent; in some regions, half of all children died before their fifth birthday. Famine was not an exceptional catastrophe but a recurring feature of life, striking every decade or so with enough force to reshape populations. Disease was a constant companion: plague, typhus, smallpox, cholera. Medicine, such as it was, often did more harm than good.
Illiteracy was the norm. In England in 1500, only about one in ten men could sign their own name; for women, the figure was far lower. The ability to read was largely confined to the clergy and the elite, and the content available to read was often dictated by them. Social mobility was minimal. A peasant might live and die in the same village without ever travelling more than a few miles from where he was born, his role in life predetermined by birth.
And this was in the relatively “advanced” parts of the world. For the majority of humanity, existence was a precarious balance between hunger and disease, with the occasional war or raid to tip the scales. Poverty was not merely a lack of disposable income; it was the gnawing uncertainty of survival itself.
Contrast this with poverty today in much of the developed world. A household considered poor by modern statistical measures is still likely to have access to clean running water, electricity, refrigeration, and healthcare that would have been unimaginable luxuries even for the wealthy two centuries ago. A “low-income” family may own a mobile phone — a device that can summon emergency services, access global libraries, and coordinate supply chains that stretch across continents.
The romantic illusions about the past survive because we remember the art but not the toothaches. We admire the craftsmanship of medieval cathedrals without counting the decades of backbreaking, dangerous labour required to build them. We hear the music of the 18th century without remembering that to hear it then required being in the right room at the right time, or having the wealth to hire musicians. We admire the clothing in paintings without recalling that the dyes came from toxic chemicals and that bathing was rare enough to be remarked upon.
What capitalism and modern science delivered was not simply more stuff, but the systematic removal of the sharpest teeth of nature and circumstance. We no longer expect to bury half our children. We do not regard famine as inevitable. We do not accept disease as divine judgement. We have traded the “simplicity” of the past for the complexity of abundance, and while the trade has its challenges, the balance is overwhelmingly in our favour.
Those who long for the past are usually longing for a present with better aesthetics, not the actual conditions of history. The “simpler times” were simpler because there was less — less choice, less opportunity, less life. And that simplicity came at a cost no sane person would willingly pay again.
VI. Postmodernism as Secular Pre-Modernism
Strip away the self-congratulation and academic jargon, and postmodernism looks less like a bold leap into the intellectual future and more like a reversion to an older, more primitive template. The names have changed, the robes have been swapped for conference lanyards, but the structure is eerily familiar. Where the pre-modern world drew its authority from divine right, the postmodern world draws it from lived experience and identity group membership. The mechanism is the same: authority is conferred, not earned through reasoned argument or tested evidence, and the holder of that authority is treated as beyond legitimate challenge.
In the pre-modern order, truth was anchored in the will of God as interpreted by His appointed representatives on Earth. This meant bishops, kings, and scholars with the right pedigree could declare the shape of the universe, and dissenters could be branded heretics or traitors. The truth was not to be discovered through investigation; it was to be accepted on faith, delivered whole from the top down.
In the postmodern order, the divine seal has been replaced by the imprimatur of identity and subjective narrative. The authority to speak on a subject is often granted or denied not on the basis of expertise or demonstrable evidence, but on whether one belongs to the “right” group or has the “right” personal history. This is not universalising — it is the opposite. It insists that truth is fragmented, localised, and, most importantly, bound to the speaker’s category.
Both systems share a core belief: that truth is a social construct. In the pre-modern world, it was constructed by theology and hierarchy; in the postmodern, it is constructed by ideology and consensus within defined groups. In both cases, universal reason is viewed with suspicion — in the first because it might contradict divine revelation, in the second because it might challenge the primacy of lived experience.
And in both, rational dissent is treated as heresy. The pre-modern heretic was burned or exiled for defying the Church’s doctrine; the postmodern heretic is deplatformed, ostracised, or professionally ruined for questioning the ideological consensus. The methods differ, but the aim is identical: to enforce conformity and suppress challenges to the prevailing orthodoxy.
This regression has a deeper cause. In the pre-modern world, God served as the ultimate organising principle. However imperfectly, He was a conceptual anchor — a constant against which moral codes, laws, and social structures were measured. When the West moved into secular modernity, that anchor was replaced by reason: the idea that truth could be established through evidence and logic, and that moral and political systems should be constrained by reality.
Postmodernism has removed God but failed to replace Him with reason. The result is a vacuum in which power becomes the sole organising principle. Without an appeal to either divine command or objective reality, what remains is the ability to impose one’s will through control of institutions, language, and norms. Truth is no longer what can be demonstrated; it is what can be enforced.
The Enlightenment’s great achievement was to break the link between authority and unquestionable status, replacing it with a system where authority had to be justified, tested, and continually re-earned. Postmodernism is an undoing of that achievement. It offers the comfort of belonging to a protected group, the security of having one’s narrative validated, and the insulation from challenge that comes with being untouchable — all at the expense of the universals that made progress possible in the first place. Remove God without enthroning reason, and you are not left with freedom. You are left with factions, each convinced of its own infallibility, waging an endless war for dominance in a world where might is the only remaining right.
VII. The Regression’s Consequences
The abandonment of reason in favour of postmodern pre-modernism is not merely an intellectual curiosity; it has consequences that are already undermining the very foundations of Western prosperity and liberty. Once truth becomes a matter of consensus within factions rather than something tested against reality, the institutions built to protect freedom and progress become tools for enforcing conformity and dispensing privilege.
The first casualty is free speech. In a rational order, speech is protected not because all ideas are equally valid, but because even flawed ideas must be heard if they are to be refuted. In the postmodern frame, the value of speech is judged not by its truth content, but by its impact on feelings or group status. “Offence” becomes a sufficient reason to suppress, and entire subjects become off-limits because they might disturb the comfort of an approved narrative. Pre-modern heresy trials are replaced by cancellation campaigns and deplatforming, but the underlying impulse — to silence dissent rather than answer it — is the same.
The scientific method fares no better. When lived experience or group identity trumps empirical data, experiments and evidence lose their status as arbiters of truth. Peer review becomes ideological review. Funding and publication are steered toward research that confirms prevailing dogma, while uncomfortable findings are ignored, reinterpreted, or branded as harmful. Science becomes less about discovery and more about affirmation — a priesthood in lab coats, safeguarding orthodoxy instead of testing it.
Economic liberty is eroded under the same logic. Markets are treated not as mechanisms for coordinating voluntary exchange, but as arenas in which “acceptable” and “unacceptable” actors are chosen by political preference. Capital allocation is directed toward causes that look virtuous on paper, regardless of efficiency or outcome. Entire industries are stigmatised out of existence without realistic alternatives in place, because the optics of action outweigh the costs of failure.
Policy itself becomes an exercise in emotion and virtue signalling. Instead of cost-benefit analysis, we have legislative theatre — grand declarations and symbolic gestures that ignore practical constraints. Laws are passed for their press releases rather than their performance in the real world. The modern tools of policy evaluation, designed to measure results against intentions, are sidelined in favour of moral posturing.
Meritocracy, the central pillar of both capitalism and the modern scientific enterprise, is rebranded as oppressive. If outcomes differ among groups, it is assumed that the process is biased, not that skill, effort, or risk-taking vary. The solution, in this mindset, is to dismantle merit-based systems in favour of demographic balancing. The predictable result is bureaucratic mediocrity: positions filled by those with the right affiliations rather than the right abilities, institutions run by people skilled in politics rather than performance.
The economic consequences are already visible in the form of neo-mercantilist “green” protectionism and corporate capture. Under the guise of saving the planet, entire sectors are being reshaped into subsidy farms for politically connected firms. Regulatory frameworks are written to suit incumbent interests, locking out innovators and small entrants. Green policy is wielded not as an open challenge to improve technology, but as a barrier to competition, a way to funnel public funds into private hands while signalling moral virtue.
What emerges from all this is a society with the outward appearance of modernity — smartphones, high-speed internet, climate summits — but the inward mechanics of a pre-modern court. Speech is policed, science is politicised, commerce is monopolised, and policy is divorced from performance. The West becomes a theatre of progress draped over a machinery of regression, congratulating itself on its moral clarity as it drifts steadily backward into the old hierarchies it once fought to escape.
VIII. Why Capitalism Still Delivers — Even When Its Enemies Use It
Every convenience, comfort, and minor miracle of modern life exists because markets worked. Not because committees decreed them into being, not because manifestos demanded them, but because voluntary exchange, disciplined by competition, made them possible and sustainable. The device in your hand streaming music from a server on another continent is the product of a vast, decentralised choreography of design, manufacturing, logistics, and finance — each step governed by prices, profit, and the unromantic need to serve a customer better than the next firm. The antibiotics in your medicine cabinet, the refrigerated produce in your kitchen, the electricity lighting your home: all of them rely on supply chains whose resilience comes from market incentives, not central planning.
The irony, so glaring it ought to be obvious, is that even the most committed anti-capitalist relies on capitalist products and infrastructure to promote their own message. The smartphone used to tweet about the evils of capitalism was built by competitive firms sourcing components from multiple continents. The internet platform hosting their video lectures is sustained by advertising revenue or subscription fees. The microphones, the cameras, the cloud storage — all born of private investment, iterative improvement, and the promise of profit.
Capitalism’s critics tend to see this as a side-effect, as though these tools emerged in spite of markets rather than because of them. But the opposite is true: only a system that rewards problem-solving at scale could make such technologies ubiquitous. Streaming video for free to millions of people is not something you can do in a subsistence economy or under the constraints of central rationing. It takes the surplus of a capitalist system — the excess capacity created when production consistently outpaces basic survival needs — to make such “luxuries” routine.
This is the deeper irony: capitalism produces so much surplus that entire classes of people can spend their lives attacking it without risking their survival. In a pre-modern economy, everyone worked at or near the margin of subsistence; ideological crusades against the system that fed you were luxuries you couldn’t afford. In a capitalist economy, you can earn a living writing books, hosting podcasts, or teaching courses on dismantling the very mechanisms that make such careers possible.
The critics are correct about one thing: capitalism doesn’t promise virtue. It does, however, deliver prosperity, choice, and the infrastructure that makes dissent possible at a global scale. The same feedback loops that put antibiotics in pharmacies and streaming services on laptops also make room for anti-capitalist conferences and publications. That is not a flaw in the system. It is the surest sign of its success. In capitalism, even the opposition gets to eat well and broadcast in high definition.
IX. The Binary Choice: Progress or Decay
History offers no shortage of warnings for civilisations that grew weary of the disciplines that made them strong. The pattern is almost tediously consistent: a society rises on the back of hard rules — reasoned law, economic openness, a culture of merit — then, once wealth and stability are secured, begins to treat those rules as optional. In the short term, the abandonment feels liberating. Freed from the grind of testing ideas, justifying authority, and earning one’s place, the culture indulges itself in comfort and self-congratulation. But the underlying machinery begins to rust, and eventually, the collapse arrives.
The West is not immune to this cycle. Rationality, logic, and capitalism are not decorative philosophies; they are the structural supports holding up everything from our medical systems to our energy grids. Remove them, and you remove the feedback loops that punish failure and reward adaptation. Without reason, policy becomes a pageant of feelings untethered from cost or consequence. Without logic, law turns arbitrary, bending to whoever can shout the loudest. Without capitalism, production is no longer disciplined by the need to please the buyer; it is shaped by privilege, subsidy, and political whim.
Progress is not a natural state. Left to itself, the human condition reverts to scarcity, hierarchy, and stagnation. The abundance we take for granted — food in every supermarket, light at the flick of a switch, instantaneous global communication — is the result of systems engineered to be self-correcting. They are defended against decay only by the constant willingness to test, to measure, to compete. These systems do not run on autopilot; they require maintenance, and they punish neglect.
The choice before the West is brutally simple: continuous improvement or slow, comfortable collapse. Improvement demands the humility to recognise that prosperity is conditional. It requires keeping the channels of criticism open, the markets contestable, and the rules grounded in reality rather than in fashion. Collapse, on the other hand, will arrive disguised as stability — the quiet ossification of institutions, the gradual acceptance of lower performance, the soft censorship of dissent “for the common good.” It will feel safe until it isn’t.
Civilisations do not fall in a single dramatic moment; they rot from within, their foundations hollowed out long before the walls come down. The West can choose to remember why it rose in the first place — or it can keep dismantling the very mechanisms that made its ascent possible. There is no third option. The laws of history are as unyielding as the laws of physics: neglect the structures that hold you up, and gravity will finish the job.
X. Coda – The Boring Miracle of Reason
The miracle of reason is not the stuff of parades. It does not march under banners or promise the rapture of utopia. It works in increments, quietly, without spectacle. A new seed variety that yields 5% more grain. A shipping route shaved by a day. A medical protocol refined so recovery is quicker and complications fewer. None of it will trend on social media, but over decades these modest, logical gains compound into revolutions.
Progress is not a thunderclap; it is the steady drip of improvement that lengthens lives, lowers infant mortality, makes food cheaper and more abundant, energy more reliable, water cleaner, and choice wider. The miracle is that these gains do not depend on a single ruler’s benevolence or a visionary’s dream, but on the discipline of systems designed to reward what works and discard what does not.
It is precisely because the miracle is boring that it works. There is no grand emotional surge to carry it, no intoxicating myth to blind it to reality. It is built on feedback, correction, and the unglamorous willingness to admit error and try again. This is civilisation’s great, unheralded strength: that its foundations are not in slogans, but in the quiet competence of millions of decisions aligned, however imperfectly, with reason. And if we can keep that discipline, the miracle will go on working — whether or not we bother to notice.