The charge against the modern world by those who hate it is fundamentally a charge of impiety. That basic point remains. What the German radical right showed was that the hatred would remain even if or when those leveling the charge lost their own piety. Because the objection to living in a secularized modernity is not that secularism is false, but that it is unacceptable even when it is believed to be true.
The animus behind the charge stems from an underlying fear of living in a world in which death is final and justice has no cosmic support. The German radical reaction to that situation was to deliberately set about creating a replacement of myth for the faith that had been lost. The same motivation lies behind modern radical Islam. The only difference is that there are various shades of honest belief, myth-making, and cynicism in the latter camp.
In that myth making, Strauss and Camus did not follow the Germans. Both kept their allegiance to morality on rationalist and humanist grounds without any support of faith. Strauss, more than Camus, considered it entirely implausible that any large number of people could or would do the same - that is, he thought most people's allegiance to morality, and contentment with modernity, depended in the last analysis on faith or on myths. Which all involved seem to agree, modernity systematically undermines.
The "existentialist mind trip" as you put it certainly has its sillier elements, and anyone can see as a replacement theology it leaves much to be desired. It is a reaction, perhaps an unsuccessful reaction, to a real cultural-political issue and problem, however. The dominant one in the modern world, both in their day and in ours.
There is a nihilist revolt against modernity as soulless. It has had many manifestations and it will undoubtedly have others in the future. Radical Islamic fascism is just one version of it. Original Nazism was another. Conscious myth-making and deliberate rejection of reason as a standard characterize that revolt. The root of it, psychologically, is not a SNL skit or a sophistic verbal game.
It is the fear of millions of human beings, newly without faith in historical terms, of their personal annihilation, and a frantic attempt to conceal that real prospect from themselves. Which leads them to hate anyone teaching anything that reminds them of why they came to doubt in the first place, anyone who reminds them of the harshness of the world. At the same time, feeling a release from all moral restraints, and a hatred of the imagine hypocrisy of those still upholding them.
If anyone wonders what is uniting the infantile pacifist left here, the fanatics in the Muslim world, and secular leftist intellectuals in Europe, look no farther.
Camus is better than the other existentialists of his day, left or right - along with someone like Ortega y Gasset. He held morality foremost, higher than politics or philosophy. I would not call him a wise man, but he was at bottom a decent one, trying to grapple with what are effectively the theological difficulties of his age. And doing so honestly, without evasion, without letting himself off easy with some facile inward lie.
He faced the political problems of fascism and the French war in Algeria, as well. There is nothing wrong with the recommendation to read him, particularly "Plague" (which is fundamentally about the futility of a hyper-political reaction to mortality) and these days, "Stranger".
Incidentally, Strauss is more important than the linked article suggests, as well. He not only understood this whole terrain better than just about anyone, he understood its links to the inter-civilizational struggle presently underway. He was not ignorant of Islam, or of medieval attitudes still very much alive in the modern world, nor of some of the inconsistencies and difficulties within modernity that give them points to aim at. He knew as much of Averroes as of Socrates. It is not the first time a similar issue - a destruction of legitimacy through widespread loss of faith - has arisen in history.
I don't think Eddie Murphy's got any answers to all of that. But thanks for offering.
Yes. Thanks for posting that.