Hmm …

… Secular faith has no answer to the coronavirus - Catholic Herald. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Lying behind this was the conviction – central to the modern religion of progress – that the human species advances incrementally, with the gains of the past being embedded and extended in future. There might be nothing strictly inevitable in the process. Periods of regression could and did occur. But overall, the arc of history tended to move in a direction in which the achievements of earlier times were conserved and improved upon. The pandemic shows that the advances of the past cannot be preserved and enlarged in this way. There will be vast losses of income, wealth and opportunity, together will large political upheavals, in countries throughout the world for many years to come.

But in recent decades much of the past has been rejected, at least if associated with dead white males. Contemporary society is ignorant and uncultivated.