I agree with most of this and I think it's interesting that this point about the moral emptiness of enlightenment didn't come out so clearly in our earlier conversations. This is something I've tried to highlight, the strangeness of an enlightened perspective when interpreted from the benighted one.

This needs highlighting because there's a cottage industry of incorporating spirituality or existential authenticity within the happiness movement, the idea being that enlightenment is socially uplifting in all respects (rather than being the least bit challenging to the ego or to religious excuses for gross politics). There even ends up being an "enlightened" defense of capitalist exploitations, of material wealth, and so on. I take it you agree that this cooptation is a sham.

Now if it doesn't matter that neither altruistic morality nor selfishness and criminality matters, in what direction does that final negation point the awakened person? Wherever the wind blows? In that case, the Beat movement may have been on to something. The sage would be a bohemian hobo, a wandering, alienated creature dispensing random bits of wisdom but not attached to any situation or to any result of his or her interactions.

Kronman's book is certainly long and it's somewhat repetitive, but some points bear repeating. The book is a landmark, I think, in that's it's a thorough revaluation of Western philosophy and of Christianity, from what I'd call an old atheistic perspective. From this perspective, religion should be taken seriously rather than dismissed. But Christianity is worthless, so where does that leave Westerners of good faith? We want an ennobling religion, but we seem to lack the resources. Kronman shows that we have the resources after all, in Aristotle, Nietzsche, Spinoza, and Walt Whitman. Kronman even substantiates the aesthetic reconstruction of moral values that I've dabbled in in some of my writings.