Through the foggy nihilism of our present age and in very different figures across the ages, there remains imprinted on the human heart the traces of a wisdom not our own, calling out to us through the fog of our ennui, meaninglessness, and confusion and binding the human race together by an unbroken thread. But the book is most profitably and appreciably read through the paternal concern for the fate of Ahmari’s young son. What kind of people will our children become? What will they see, and how will they think? Will they be able to think? How will they live humanely in a posthuman world?Ĭoncern for the fate of a civilization rapidly consuming itself forms the backdrop to The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in the Age of Chaos by Sohrab Ahmari, an Iranian émigré, Catholic convert, and editor of The New York Post. This bleak picture is even more worrisome, or should be, for parents of this generation: perhaps the last generation to have lived some portion of its life without a permanent connection to the internet from birth or parents of the first generation not to. Radical new political ideologies negate human nature, human reason, even the very language by which we recognize a world in common, revealing the nihilistic essence of modern freedom and confirming that the “death of God” leads ineluctably to the destruction of his image within ourselves. The relentless dynamism of technological change creates a yawning chasm between each new generation and those that preceded it, who can hardly be said to inhabit the same world. Our technology no longer seems to be our servant and is rapidly becoming our master, in ways too numerous to count. Liberal democracy seems to be rapidly transforming into a totalitarianism less obviously violent, but more total than any that has preceded it. With the “death of God,” the modern world exchanged hope for optimism, but now the objects of this false hope seem to be failing us. The “creative destruction” of our techno-capitalist order is increasingly creating whole classes of obsolete people and desolate places, leaving many homeless as well as rootless. Actual places where people once met face to face have been obliterated in favor of virtual “spaces” experienced in isolation, a phenomenon well underway before the onset of Covid-19. The digital conquest of time and space has dissolved past and future into a bland presentism. The nihilism of these days is now too obvious to ignore, as all the once-solid realities seem to be melting away before our eyes. These are worrisome times for all thinking people.

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