When I was living in St. Louis around 2006, I re-read Theodor Adorno’s darkly acerbic Minima Moralia. I recalled, just today, one of his searing lines about “indiscriminate benevolence”:

Indiscriminate benevolence towards all constantly threatens that coldness and remoteness against each, which are once again communicated to the whole.

Francis Fukuyama and Phil Zuckerman (in his book Society without God, which is about the year he spent in Aarhus, Denmark) have a real thing for Denmark. I did too. Who hasn’t been smitten at least once? In Aarhus, the cobblestone-dotted streets are clean, the people nice, the cafes bustling, the whirling bikes endearing. We cannot possibly quibble: the Latin Quarter is pretty darn charming.

Yet I can’t abide their opinion any longer because I don’t see how a society without God shall not succumb, in the end, to a world in which “indiscriminate benevolence” holds sway.

Danes’ looks upon foreigners are nice enough yet cold, for to be mildly, blandly, distantly kind to all is to exhibit coldness in one’s heart. My memory attests to stiffness. You can’t abdicate charity (caritas) forever by resorting to a social welfare system alone. Philip Gorski, in his book The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe, tells us that Calvinists replaced ad hoc Catholic charity with systems of care. All right. And yet, however helpful such systems for the poor have been, it’s still the case that there are “negative externalities”: you can’t outsource your heart.

I don’t want to live in a society in which “matters of ultimate concern” (to cite Tillich) have gone by the wayside. And if there’s any shorthand we can use to allude to “matters of ultimate concern,” it must be, most surely, the name “God” (as in Jacob Needleman’s aptly titled book What is God?). And I certainly don’t want to see, firsthand, how a quiet, distant, cold smugness settles in once metaphysical questions are not ruled out because they’re too hard to answer but when they’re no longer asked because, as Zuckerman plainly states, for Danes they’re simply a “non-topic.” “Good God!,” Norman exclaims in Old Golden Pond.

In the absence of a culture in which matters of ultimate concern matter, what are we left with? Nice streets–sure. Care for the elderly–good going. But where is there room for thoughtfulness? Where for heartfeltness (atma bhava)? And where, most especially, for a deep humility that is felt in the face of the greatest of all mysteries?

I am no advocate for a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson. These are just straw men anyway, no more than fodder–fresh or fusty–for New Atheists. No, I stand for perennial philosophy, whose greatest theorist, Rene Guenon, asserted that metaphysics is the lifeblood of any great civilization. Without metaphysics which everywhere mightily proclaims that “All this, verily, is One” and should, as radical right figures portend, nation-states collapse, where shall we turn but–alas! alas!–to tribalism once more?