Modern man is inferior to past Men in many, probably most, respects - and it seems likely to me that there are more evil people alive now in The West, in total and as a proportion, than in the past and elsewhere. However the news is not all bad! - and Modern Man has one important superiority that may, in the end, prove crucial to his salvation and spiritual progression towards divinity.
That superiority is his sense of being an unique individual, who bears an ultimate responsibility for himself - as contrasted with being a person defined by a social role or social group (caste, class, profession etc). .
Of course, this understanding is partial and distorted, and has been largely inverted in its significance (for example being diverted into the pseudo-identities of the hedonic sexual revolution; or diverted into the materialist and resentment politics of socialism, feminism, antiracism etc).
But (I believe) underlying such materialist distortions and inversions there is a solid but unconscious spiritual knowledge that we should only be satisfied when we are fulfilling our own and unique destiny.
Modern Man is unaware of this underlying knowledge, because he denies the reality of the spiritual; but it is there - and indeed it can be seen in his dreams and fantasies, as well as in the perversions of Leftist socio-politcs. The result is an intractable self-contradiction: Modern man hates to be defined, even as he embraces victim definitions; wants to be free even while insisting on totalitarianism; craves depth and connection and love - even while agitating for ever more and intrusive and mechanistic bureaucracy...
What is necessary is easy to state, difficult to achieve: awareness of what is unconscious, understanding that this is spiritual (not material) in nature; and living by this in one's thinking: a transformation of our thinking to embrace intuition as primary.
But this would not have been possible for many or most people in the past - even in theory; because apparently this aspect of human consciousness - this individuality - has developed, unfolded and spread-out, throughout the history of Man.
Now - we are (in the West) in a situation where it has happened; Modern Man, Now, just is an individualist, just is intrinsically and immovably dissatisfied by anything less than an unique destiny tailored to his distinctive nature.
There are innumerable ways this can be, is being, distorted (such as the offer of fake individualism in virtual reality, or fashion, or pick and mixed from a narrow spectrum of mandatory choices...).
But this is the destiny of men, as divinely ordained, and I think Christians therefore need to accept individuality as given, and work with it, in the direction God hopes for us.
