After the House Was Torn Down
The Enlightenment did something extraordinary.
It tore down the house we had been living in.
That house was old. Some of its rooms were dark. Some were unjust. Some hid cruelty behind tradition and authority. Its foundations were not rationally designed, and its structure could not always justify itself. The Enlightenment was right to open the walls, to let light in, to ask dangerous questions.
And it succeeded.
The house was dismantled piece by piece.
Hierarchy was flattened.
Authority was questioned.
Tradition lost its automatic legitimacy.
Inherited roles were exposed as contingent rather than sacred.
From that space, visibility improved. Abuse could be named. Arbitrary power could be challenged. Paths once closed could be chosen freely. For many, this was a genuine liberation.
But an open space is not a home.
The Enlightenment assumed that once the old structure was gone, human reason would be sufficient to build a new one. It assumed that the human being, freed from tradition, religion, family obligation, and inherited meaning, would naturally orient himself toward the good, the true, and the sustainable.
That premise has not survived contact with reality:
Man is not primarily guided by reason.
Reason is a tool, not a compass.
Left without inherited structures, people do not become rational architects of meaning. They become consumers of distraction, curators of identity, or followers of whatever offers belonging with the least resistance. Reason can explain why something is inefficient or unjust. It cannot tell you why you should endure suffering, accept limits, or sacrifice yourself for something that will outlast you.
Tradition, family, nation, and social roles were not merely constraints. They answered questions that reason alone cannot answer:
Why am I alive?
What am I responsible for?
What is worth protecting?
What will continue when I am gone?
When these structures are treated as optional or suspect, the answers disappear with them.
What are people supposed to live for if there is no family to transmit to, no country to belong to, no shared story that places a life inside something larger than itself. What are they supposed to fight for if everything is provisional, negotiable, and endlessly revisable.
The Enlightenment cleared the ground.
It did not build a replacement.
What was dismantled had grown over centuries. It was reinforced by ritual, habit, obligation, and repetition. It was not designed by committees or justified by argument. It was lived into existence, generation after generation.
What replaced it was an abstraction: autonomy, choice, self-realization.
These are not structures.
They are permissions.
For a time, societies survived on inherited meaning while publicly denying its legitimacy. Family bonds persisted out of habit. Moral intuitions lingered without grounding. Work ethics continued without metaphysical support. But habits decay when their reasons are denied.
We are now living in the after-effects.
People ask what they should do with their lives and are told to choose. They ask what matters and are offered preferences. They ask why they should endure and are given techniques for coping. None of this answers the question.
The problem is not that the Enlightenment went too far, the problem is that it stopped halfway. It dismantled inherited meaning without understanding how long meaning takes to grow, and without knowing whether it can be consciously constructed at all. You cannot rebuild in decades what took centuries to sediment. You cannot fabricate obligation on demand. You cannot legislate belonging into existence.
The open space where the house once stood remains.
The question is no longer whether the old house deserved criticism. It did.
The question is whether a civilization can live indefinitely without shelter.