Seeing the Gods Clearly

Whatever else we may be learning or unlearning through this global tribulation, this much at least, I hope, is clear:

Sobriety is needed. And that word, moreover, in a context we are hardly familiar with, and in a sense in which we Global Moderns wouldn't normally dream of using the term.

Because if this Bold New 21st-Century World (1995-?) doesn't start seeing certain things more clearly, things in general are definitely going to get foggier and clammier, and colder. If we Westerners in particular don't start taking a more sober and hardheaded, more unpoetic and unromantic view of certain things we've hitherto been drunk and mystical about, if we don't start scrutinizing our gods, our fetishes, our ideals and obsessions with a less enwondered and enraptured eye . . .

But what sort of ideals, etc? you ask. Oh, things like, you know, our practice of everybody from everywhere moving about all the time, wheresoever in the globe that money and ambition take them (spouses and children be damned!); things like the social benevolence of digital technology; things like the economic benevolence of Communists who magically stimulate entrepreneurship, and of magical Belts and Roads stretching from Beijing all the way to Rome and Milan and beyond! . . . 

. . . If we don't start brutally examining and interrogating these gods with all our heart and soul, well, things may indeed get somewhat better for some period of time. But then they're going to start getting much, much worse, all over again.

(Edited.)