THE BLACK BOX

The world today is witnessing the terminal breakup of the great materialist belief systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that so powerfully shaped the secular modern mind. No metaphor better encapsulates that breakup of the visionary theories and credos of nature, man, and society advanced by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than The Black Box. Each of the materialist faiths generated by modernitys famous quartet of founders contained an unknown chamber of surprises, a black box that its author could not, or did not see into. Today the black boxes stand open. First, the intricate cell of life, which the crude optics of Darwins time could not penetrate, is indisputably a structure designed by intelligence. Second, the hidden component of mass killing that proved organic to Marxist revolutionary regimes. Third, the propensity of Nietzsches bold vision of trans-moral overmen to produce, not the aesthetic ideal, but cold totalitarian monsters. Fourth, the widespread subversion of individual moral behavior legitimized by the deluded Freudian assertion of the primacy of subconscious drives over the rational mind. In the early twenty-first century, our civilization looks back upon the tragic legacy of materialism