Rationalism, the idea that the material world can be understood in terms of the way objects and people behave without an appeal to the authority of a cosmic presence, has brought humanity a lot of good things: clean water, cleaner air, longer life spans, technological achievements our ancestors couldn’t have dreamt of, and better functioning systems of governance.

But rationalism has drained the world of meaning in a cosmic sense. When a society or civilization can’t hold on to the meaning of the acts it has accomplished, that civilization fails. Sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes with a whimper. But either way, civilizational failure is on the docket. This is because meaning is not imbued in the things we have as human beings, or even the life spans we live, or the systems we construct.

Meaning exists at a cosmic level and then filters down to us. It doesn’t start at the bottom and then rise up.

Being able to peel a layer from the great block of stone known as reality and figure some things out makes human beings arrogant and full of hubris. Pushing the materialist boundaries of reality further and further, and ignoring opportunities for finding and making meaning.

It is a long way back to meaning from the hubristic victories of materialist rationalism. But it’s a journey back worth making, when a society finally, collectively realizes that it can solve a lot of materialistic problems, but it has lost the words to describe what solving all those problems means at a cosmic level.