How Modernity Discarded Value by Confusing It with Causation

This perspective identifies a catastrophic Category error at the heart of modernity: the collapse of the distinction between causation and value. When Enlightenment rationality exposed the poor causal models embedded in religious institutions, the corrective overreached. Rather than simply updating our causal knowledge, we discarded the entire normative and relational apparatus that religion had carried — frameworks for meaning, community, embodied practice, and the discernment of good choice. The baby went out with the bathwater on a civilizational scale.

The substitution that followed replaced embodied, relational value with abstraction: financial instruments, utilitarian calculus, effective altruism's aggregative logic. But value, the argument holds, is irreducibly embodied — it lands in the body, in life, in the particular. No amount of causal understanding generates normative knowledge, because choice must be understood in terms of choice itself. This is not an anti-science claim; it is a claim about the boundaries of what causal epistemology can deliver.

The consequences are now existential rather than merely philosophical. civilizational-scale risks — climate destabilization, AI Alignment, ecological overshoot — demand multi-generational, coherent normative responses. Yet our dominant institutions (markets, electoral cycles, technocratic governance) are optimized for causal manipulation, not value discernment. The Meaning crisis, on this reading, is not a symptom of insufficient information or inadequate technology. It is the structural consequence of having collapsed the category of value into the category of causation, leaving us extraordinarily capable but normatively incoherent at precisely the moment coherence matters most.