Lost in the Chaos: Immanence, Despair, and False Hopes of the Age

On Thursday, March 14, Dr. R.J. Snell delivered a lecture at the Lonergan Institute entitled “Lost in the Chaos,” sharing its name and topic with his upcoming book.

Dr. Snell received his M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College as a Lonergan Fellow and now serves as the Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute; his talk was delivered to a room of familiar faces from Boston College’s faculty and staff.

The small Bapst Library hall was packed to the brim with an encouraging mix of professors, graduate and doctoral students, and even a large contingent of undergraduates. Several could be seen taking prodigious notes on the talk.

The lecture concerned the despair of the modern world resulting from, as Dr. Snell argued, its inability to provide any actual hope or direction after abandoning the transcendent in favor of a restricted and completely immanent secularity. Without a notion of something greater than humanity, humanity itself loses meaning.

The title of the talk draws heavy inspiration from a 1983 book by Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos. Although the book expresses similar critiques against secularism as Dr. Snell’s lecture, the latter pressed the point that Percy’s work has become outdated, not due to any errors but rather a deep “existential longing” and dread which have worsened far beyond their state just 40 years ago.

To illustrate the present condition of secular culture, Dr. Snell gave a synopsis of a highly disturbing book by Elena Ferrante entitled Days of Abandonment, in which a woman is left by her husband and subjected to increasing isolation and loss of contact with the world. Dr. Snell took this as a symbol of modern secularism, which expresses similar feelings of disgust and apathy toward the world, and utterly lacks enchantment or a notion of a transcendent God.

Dr. Snell likewise employed the critiques of Charles Taylor to trace the gradual shift of modern culture from a transcendent and “porous” view of the world to a thoroughly immanent and “buffered” one, as well as the practical fallout of this philosophical and cosmological revolution.

The essence of this shift, he argued, concerns the conditions of belief, what people look to first for answers. As opposed to earlier ages, faith is now one option among several apparent equals; as a consequence, the world is “disenchanted,” a word Dr. Snell intended to denote deadness and inertia, the refusal to ask whether anything lies beyond the visible and everyday world.

Dr. Snell argued that the adoption of a “buffered” world, where the divine is given no purchase, spawns a paradox: although it grants confidence by giving people a sense of responsibility for their own failures and successes, it inspires terror for the very same reason. As proof, he gestured to the endless succession of crises, which suggest that humanity’s very grasp of mastery over the world has led to a self-tyranny without boundaries or principles, where someone must always be to blame for setbacks.

In response to this paradox, immanent secularism spawns various false idols and hopes. Dr. Snell first focused on ‘negative humanitarianism,’ by which he meant the self-adoration of humanity while ignoring particulars and individuals. 

By abstracting from particular circumstances and persons, such negative humanitarianism is unable to actually will any good, but falls into political dissent and eventually the recently coined phenomenon of “slacktivism.” This in turn leads to the social phenomenon of negative spirals of critique and factionalism, an enterprise of mere empty intentions and platitudes.

Dr. Snell also addressed what he called the “false idol of rationalism,” which strives for a “politics of perfection,” allowing for no contingency or flexibility in solutions. Dr. Snell gestured to many forms of perfectionist planning, but he specifically targeted what he described as right-wing movements espousing “Papal States, Nietzschean vitalism, and ‘Rome-will-fix-the-world.’”

In contrast, he proposed the reality that humans remain as they are: “dependent, rational animals” with agency and freedom, with a politics that acknowledges limitations to forethought and power. Dr. Snell urged that “political sensibility is in concrete details.”

In response to the downward spiral outlined, Dr. Snell offered a response of hope. By hope he meant not blind optimism but the virtue, the persistent disposition to acknowledge a higher viewpoint tending to first choose the good and orient all things toward it. It resists what he described as the “oscillation…between extravagantly optimistic plans and ‘everything’s-over-run-for-the-hills.’” Real hope grounds itself on the reality of the unknown with the firm decision to pursue the good regardless.

Snell contended that fundamentally there is no way but up, no political solution but to humbly acknowledge that it is “perhaps simply incompetent…in the departments that matter most.”

Interested readers may find a more thorough exposition of Dr. Snell’s ideas in his upcoming book, also titled “Lost in the Chaos.”