The Second Religiosity

John Michael Greer sounds angrier than usual in this reflection on magic, religion and the end of the "Age of Reason". 

Here are some extensive quotes:

>>>You know that an age of reason is coming to an end when magic escapes from these marginal environments and begins to find a home in pop culture. That inevitably faces savage pushback from the managerial caste and their hangers-on, and understandably so; the rise of magic is an exact measure of the failure of reason, since people turn to magic when the officially approved options of their society don’t work. Since no managerial caste anywhere seems to understand that their pushback just makes rejected ideas more popular, that guarantees the spread of magic through the crawlspaces of society.

>>>The revival of religious institutions comes a little later in the process. What drives that revival is the terminal collapse of the claims of rationalism to provide meaning and value to human life, and that collapse is driven in turn by the failure of the managerial caste to follow through on its grand promises. In the wake of that failure, people left adrift by the collapse of the rationalist promise look for other sources of meaning and value, and a great many of them find it in the old religious institutions of their society. Oswald Spengler, who studied this process carefully in half a dozen civilizations, referred to it as the Second Religiosity.

>>>Thus there’s a real point to Naomi Wolf’s concern about the presence of supernatural evil in our lives. The Unseen responds to human actions, for good or ill, and a significant number of people in recent years have been going out of their way to invoke malign influences in the mistaken idea that they can use those forces to benefit themselves and hurt the people they don’t like. The law of magical repercussion—or as I called it two weeks ago, the raspberry jam principle—remains in force, as relentless and impersonal as gravity. It will play its usual role in sorting out the very mixed bag of operative occultists in the wake of the age of reason. While that process works itself out, however, there’s going to be an unusual amount of noxious spiritual influence around.

>>>You can deal with that by practicing a traditional religion—and the operative word here is “practicing,” not merely believing; the rites, sacraments, and everyday practices of traditional faiths have as one of their benefits the attunement of the individual to positive spiritual currents, which drive off the noxious influences just mentioned. You can also deal with it by practicing some form of traditional occultism. Ethics won’t do the job by themselves but they’re a necessary ingredient in either path. Pretending that the Unseen does not exist, though, emphatically won’t cut it any more.

Beyond Thaumatophobia: The End of the Age of Reason