"Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life"
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Modernity’s malaise, Van Dyke suggests, isn’t just industrial grime or spiritual drift; it’s the compulsion to stand back from life and score it. His target is a recognizable modern posture: the permanent reviewer, trained to appraise everything and commit to nothing. The word “bound” is doing heavy lifting. Criticism isn’t merely common; it has become an obligation, a social role people feel sentenced to perform. That sense of duty drains the world of joy, replacing participation with surveillance.
He frames the result as “secular unrest” and “profane sadness,” pairing psychological agitation with a moral diagnosis. “Secular” signals life unmoored from transcendent meaning; “profane” implies not just nonreligious but actively despoiled. The subtext is that constant judgment turns experience into something less sacred, less lived. When everyone is a critic, everything becomes a product, a performance, or a case to be argued. You don’t belong to a community; you evaluate it. You don’t fall in love with art; you grade it.
Context matters: Van Dyke writes from a turn-of-the-century Protestant-humanist milieu, anxious about a culture sliding from shared reverence toward prestige, taste, and opinion as stand-ins for purpose. His complaint lands cleanly in today’s attention economy, where hot takes are a civic currency. The line works because it doesn’t romanticize ignorance; it warns against a life spent at arm’s length, mistaking perpetual assessment for wisdom, and calling the resulting loneliness “discernment.”
He frames the result as “secular unrest” and “profane sadness,” pairing psychological agitation with a moral diagnosis. “Secular” signals life unmoored from transcendent meaning; “profane” implies not just nonreligious but actively despoiled. The subtext is that constant judgment turns experience into something less sacred, less lived. When everyone is a critic, everything becomes a product, a performance, or a case to be argued. You don’t belong to a community; you evaluate it. You don’t fall in love with art; you grade it.
Context matters: Van Dyke writes from a turn-of-the-century Protestant-humanist milieu, anxious about a culture sliding from shared reverence toward prestige, taste, and opinion as stand-ins for purpose. His complaint lands cleanly in today’s attention economy, where hot takes are a civic currency. The line works because it doesn’t romanticize ignorance; it warns against a life spent at arm’s length, mistaking perpetual assessment for wisdom, and calling the resulting loneliness “discernment.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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