1. Modernity is characterised primarily by five converging processes: individualisation, through the destruction of old forms of communal life; massification, through the adoption of standardised behaviour and lifestyles; desacralisation, through the displacement of the great
2. religious narratives by a scientific interpretation of the world; rationalisation, through the domination of instrumental reason, the free market, & technical efficiency; & universalisation, through a planetary extension of a model of society postulated implicitly as the only
3. rational possibility & thus as superior. This movement has old roots. In most respects, it represents a secularisation of ideas & perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics, which spread into secular life following a rejection of any transcendent dimension.
4. One finds in Christianity the seeds of the great mutations that gave birth to the secular ideologies of the first post-revolutionary era. Individualism was already present in the notion of individual salvation & of an intimate & privileged relation between an individ. and God
5. that surpasses any relation on Earth. Egalitarianism is rooted in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity. Progressivism is born of the idea that history has an
6. absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan. Finally, universalism is the natural expression of a religion that claims to manifest a revealed truth which, valid for all men, summons them to conversion. #Benoist
