The world today is witnessing the terminal breakup of the great materialist belief systems of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that so powerfully shaped the secular modern mind. No metaphor better encapsulates that breakup of the visionary theories and credos of nature, man, and society advanced by Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than The Black Box. Each of the materialist faiths generated by modernity's famous quartet of founders contained an unknown chamber of surprises, a black box that its author could not, or did not see into.
Today the black boxes stand open. First, the intricate cell of life, which the crude optics of Darwin's time could not penetrate, is indisputably a structure designed by intelligence. Second, the hidden component of mass killing that proved organic to Marxist revolutionary regimes. Third, the propensity of Nietzsche's bold vision of trans-moral overmen to produce, not the aesthetic ideal, but cold totalitarian monsters. Fourth, the widespread subversion of individual moral behavior legitimized by the deluded Freudian assertion of the primacy of subconscious drives over the rational mind.
In the early twenty-first century, our civilization looks back upon the tragic legacy of materialism: a worldview that declared God to be a human invention, the galaxies and life on Earth cosmic accidents, and morality a factor of need and situation in an aimless universe. God substitutes emerged to fill the void. Religion-hostile National Socialist and Communist party regimes assumed in the twentieth century higher moral authority to kill their unwanted subjects and alien victims on a scale unprecedented in modern history. The stories of this book dramatize the life-crises of five acolytes of the famous four gospels of materialism that so powerfully shaped the violent twentieth century world, along with a sixth who returned on the eve of the millennium for a second look. In these stories, irony and humor could not be avoided.