I do not know why the company behind Facebook chose the name Meta, but it captures our age perfectly. The word—or prefix—“meta” refers to something beyond or behind something else; more precisely, the Greek means “beyond” or “outside.” Metaphysics describes a supernatural world supposedly existing beyond the visible one, a world whose reality is somehow deeper than anything we can touch. A metalanguage is a language we use to describe the language we speak. And so on.
The Enlightenment, modernity, empirical science, and everything associated with them rest on a simple principle: our ideas about the world must withstand confrontation with observable reality. The world around us—the world we can observe and measure—was regarded as the standard by which our ideas were tested. When an idea conflicts with what we can observe, it is the idea that must be revised.
One of the signs, and causes, of the decline of the past generation is the explosive spread of precisely the opposite habit of mind: the conviction that what we see with our own eyes cannot, in principle, be the whole truth. The real truth must lie somewhere behind the visible world. What matters is hidden and must be uncovered.
When people feel that they are living well, there must be “structural oppression” behind their experience, waiting to be exposed. When whites and blacks talk and work together normally, there must be “systemic racism” beneath the surface. And so on. The crucial point is that the oppression, discrimination, and racism to be fought are not ordinarily visible. Even the people supposedly affected by them may be unaware of them. They must therefore undergo special training in which someone explains that they are being mistreated and discriminated against. And that training must be conducted by experts in hidden realities. Left to ourselves, we would never see them.
At the other end of the political spectrum, different subjects are discussed, but the underlying pattern is the same. This is, in fact, one of the clearest signs of civilizational decline: the problem is not confined to a single political camp but spreads across them all. When the Spanish government fails to protect its own country’s borders, the obvious explanation—the failure of the Spanish government—is rejected in favor of a hidden one: the Jews must be behind it. When the Islamic world has for decades been witnessing a war between the orthodox and the even more orthodox, of the sort that has occurred there for more than a thousand years, it cannot simply be a matter arising within Islam; it must instead be a secret American operation. When a prime minister appears corrupt and incompetent, he cannot simply be corrupt and incompetent. Someone behind the scenes must have instructed him to pretend to be incompetent.
The fundamental problem with this way of thinking is that it removes the most important mechanism for correcting bad ideas. If the decisive facts are always hidden, then we can no longer reject foolish ideas simply because they conflict with observable reality. Any contradiction can be explained away by appealing to something we cannot see. And once bad ideas can no longer be eliminated through confrontation with reality, we become susceptible to ever greater absurdities.
Eventually, the process leads to a loss of our sense of reality itself. Instead of adjusting our ideas to fit the world we can observe, we begin adjusting our perception of the observable world to fit our ideas about a hidden one. The relationship between reality and theory has been reversed.
After all, human beings lived this way for centuries. Why shouldn’t we?
There is, however, an important distinction. For us, this reversal represents decline because it means abandoning an empirical understanding of reality that became fundamental to our civilization. The Muslim world can live according to a different relationship between visible reality and hidden truth without necessarily being weakened by it in the same way.