Guenon on modernity and humanity's descent

To the standard European conviction of the possibility and the desirability of progress, Guenon replied that progress was an illusion masking regression. Changes that most Europeans saw as improvements were actually degeneration. The growth of individualism, for example, did not bring any real freedom, but rather the atomization and homogenization of society, and so the reduction of real freedom (Guenon 1945). The decline that Guenon saw everywhere was, he argued, inevitable. The true direction of humanity's movement was not ascent but descent. Modernity constituted the last and lowest stage of this descent. [8]

-Mark Sedgwick, "Guenonian Traditionalism and European Islam," in Producing Islamic Knowledge: Transmission and dissemination in Western Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), ed. Martin van Bruinessen and Stefano Allievi, p. 172.