It seems I’m not the only one pointing out the intellectual, moral and spiritual bankruptcy of the Enlightenment:
[W]e humans, probably unlike animals, need death to be more than just dying in a Darwinian sense, and like a dead fish, rotting and stinking on the beach. If that’s all death is, biological death in that sense, then life loses its meaning. If death doesn’t have meaning, one doesn’t need to argue this, one just needs to look at the great stories and the great paintings, the great wrestlings with precisely this question, from Tolstoy right back to Shakespeare and then back to the Greeks. It just is the case with us humans. If death has no meaning more than the biological sense, then life loses its meaning, and life becomes absurd, or horrible, to quote Nietzsche. So yes, looking back over 500 years of Humanism, Humanism was doomed from the start, and I think this is precisely Shakespeare and Holbein’s point in the Renaissance.
Humanism, like Communism, Feminism and Secularism, was absolutely doomed from the start. The only reason it hung around as long as it has is that it was sustained by the Christian tradition. Severed from that, it can’t last, one need only look at how much the Humanist creed has transformed in the two iterations since the first one to know that it is a transient thing.