Philip Rieff 'Sacred Order/Social Order'

I have titled our coming all-consuming godless third world culture, for want of an unequivocal name, 'anti-culture'. Following Nietzsche, Max Weber titled our coming culture “this nullity”. This nullity thinks itself safely arrived, however god-threatened, at heights achieved by no earlier civilisation. Now men are endangered mainly by the oldest device of their safety from themselves: culture itself, our present yet absent danger. Modern culture is far more dangerous than archaic nature or pagan mythologising and polytheisms ever were.

Philip Rieff 'My Life Among the Deathworks'