Crisis of modernity: Jonathan Pageau on wisdom and identity in the West

Everyone knows this: The West is declining, and it doesn’t seem like there’s much we can do to stop this collapse. We have entered a hall of mirrors, and only the most perverse among us feel at home. While it may seem inevitable, there might be ways to slow down this decline or even reverse it. But first, we must diagnose the illness that is tainting our civilization. Why is the West so sick?

On “Zero Hour,” Jonathan Pageau — writer, artist, and host of “The Symbolic World” podcast — sits down with James Poulos to discuss the West’s civilizational decline, the nature of identity, and the loss of wisdom in modernity.

Asked about the causes of the civilizational collapse, Pageau answers, “You’ve heard people talk about the clown world. Our civilization has reached a carnival point. …The whole aesthetic of the carnival, or the fringe, is that there’s a loosening. And that loosening can be expressed as maybe a lot of liberty but also libertinage to move into excess with your desires. But that also quickly becomes a kind of breakdown.”

They also talk about the West’s loss of identity. Pageau pins this loss on a misunderstanding of what identity is, explaining that identity is most fundamentally tied to a participation in the world: “We tend to forget that identity is something you engage in. Singing the national anthem, for example, is much closer to identity than thinking about who we are. Volunteering for something, participating in the world, being a father, husband, member of your community. … In practice, a lot of the identity problems just go away because you don’t have time to think about it.”

Of course, there is also the problem of technology and the modern scientific mindset. We have discarded questions of what we ought to do in favor of if and how something can be done: “There’s a difference between wisdom and understanding. We have a lot of understanding and capacity to explain things now, but we have put aside the notion of wisdom, which is which path we should be following. We don’t ask ourselves the question of why we should do anything, especially in the technological world.” He uses the example of the theologian, who, in the old days, was “the man who prays.” Today, the theologian is simply an expert in theology, who may even be an atheist.

Poulos and Pageau go on to talk about Pageau’s work on retelling traditional fairy tales. Recognizing what Disney was doing to fairy tales, he has taken it upon himself to do them justice in a modern context.

To hear more about what Jonathan Pageau has to say about identity, religion, civilizational decline, and the reclamation of fairy tales, watch the full episode of “Zero Hour” with James Poulos.