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A central thesis of both Spengler and Toynbee is that the world of late civilization was resacralized – made religious again – not because critical intelligence was persecuted and repressed, or starved of resources, but because it ended up attacking and refuting itself. Rationalism ate itself. Today, postmodernism is a hyper-cynical and skeptical critical philosophy, laying waste to all truth claims, including, arguably, its own. This can never satisfy anyone, so the world moves on to something else. It rediscovers religion. It’s more fun, if nothing else. All philosophical traditions turn on themselves and kill themselves. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he might as well have said, “Philosophy is dead.” And he was arguably its leading assassin. He was Brutus plunging the dagger into Caesar. When you do that, Christ appears where Caesar once stood. It’s essential for intellectuals to make absolute truth claims. If they don’t, priests, prophets and gurus will do so, and fill the vacuum. Jordan Peterson increasingly postures as a guru proclaiming absolute truth (the Logos). But at least he’s a guru exposing the people to the great intellectual ideas of Nietzsche and Jung.
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John Tierney (Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon)