Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In the film Master and Commander, Russell Crow's character, Captain Aubrey,

describing a new piece of technology, says, what a fascinating modern age we live in.

The joke works, given the film setting in 1803, which is at the beginning

of the modern age. This time of technological advances, which seem to come quickly and often

pave the way for our current cultural moment, and it struggle with the very concept of truth.

Most historians identify 1789 as the beginning of modernism, with the storming of the Bastille and the French Revolution,

and the end of modernism, 200 years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism.

The era in between featured a great and growing faith in human ingenuity.

Confidence was high that given enough time, effort, and advances in technology, science, and productivity,

most of the problems that plagued humanity could be solved.

In short, the modern age was defined by utopianism and hubris.

Though the solutions offered varied greatly, there was a shared certainty that the solution would be found.

But that confidence collapsed in the face of ongoing wars that were fueled by industrialization

and destructive ideologies such as nationalism, scientific racism, and communism.

The combined bloodshed unleashed in the 20th century alone was on a scale unprecedented in human history.

In the end, the Soviet gulags, the Nazi concentration camps, and the threat of global nuclear destruction turned modern optimism into despair.

And few explained this whole turn of events as well as the late Christian thinker Francis Schaefer.

In the How Should We Then Live film series, Schaefer showed how art and literature had abandoned

the pursuit of beauty and transcendence for what he called fragmentation. Modern optimism was devolving

into a postmodern hopelessness, and confidence in the truth waned. Postmodern philosophers

...