The God That Failed

Sigmund Freud captures the disillusionment of those who in the early years of the twentieth century embraced the liberal view of man as inherently good, a Promethean shaper of a glorious future, an Olympian god:

"A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met in its path but also shattered our pride in the achievements of civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes for a final triumph over the differences between nations and races. It tarnished the lofty impartiality of science, it revealed our instincts in all their nakedness and let loose the evil spirits within us which we thought had been tamed for ever by centuries of continuous education by the noblest minds. It made our country small again and made the rest of the world far remote. It robbed us of very much that we had loved, and showed us how ephemeral were many things that we regarded as changeless."

Sigmund Freud --On Transience

Those earlier humanists who thought man to be the closest thing to divinity in the cosmos were devastated by the horrors of WWI. The same thing happened when the full extent of the holocaust became known after WWII, and it happened again when the crimes of totalitarian communism were exposed in the second half of the last century. Yet the project of deifying man is resurrected every generation. The liberal, humanistic faith that man can be his own deity, that he doesn't need a transcendent God, that he can create heaven on earth all by himself, is as irrepressible as it is manifestly false.