What Can Mediate Modern Life?

Religion no longer mediates much of modern life, philosophy doesn't, science doesn't (other than a sort of technocracy), and politics doesn't, not in meaningful ways. What seems to lead us now, as Pierre Manent pointed out (Modern Age, Winter 2015), is conquest through expansion of the human commercial empire and the claim that it “lifts all boats.” That is how we try to relieve the tensions and mediate between everyone, rich, poor, different ethnic groups, nations, etc, this is our modern “universalism.” This has left modern man, individuals and nations, without much deeper meaning and direction.

The proposed form here of mediation or “political science,” between “what we are and what we do,” is the following: We start with the universal activation of life to survive, we include universal human nature as being essentially group-selecting, then following real human nature we separate ourselves politically and culturally into a natural ethnopluralism of ethnostates, protected by some form of federalism---which can be accommodated by many conservative traditions, then we mediate our biological and cultural evolution with the evolutionary and sociobiological sciences, and finally more deeply we mediate with the religious philosophy of theological materialism, which specifies that material life is universally evolving to supermaterial Godhood, with starts and stops along the way, and we consciously, religiously, philosophically, scientifically, politically and culturally help that sacred evolution along.