In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was 'naturally' possessed of life, liberty and the pursit of happiness, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, though the most logical liberal thinkers preferred not to put this in the language of 'natural rights'. In the course of pursuing this self-interest, each individual in this anarchy of equal competitors, found it advantageous or unavoidable to enter into certain relations with other individuals, and this complex of useful arrangements--which were often expressed in the frankly commercial terminology of 'contract'--constituted society and social or poltical groups. Of course such arrangements and associations implied some diminution of man's naturally unlimited liberty to do what he liked, one of the tasks of politics being to reduce such interference to the practicable minimum. . . . Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 235-36)
When seen in this stark description of its primitiveness, I don't think it's hard to understand why not only reactionaries have resisted the the spirit of the new age. Hobbes through Bentham and the whole tradition of classical economics and Neoliberal politics and political economy accepts this narrative or variations of it as the most accurate description of the human condition. From a Christian perspective it is a description of Hell, a nightmare world to be saved from.
While a good part of me is revolted by the spirit of Liberalism, there's another part of me that accepts it as the inevitable--a kind of Noah's flood to wash away the inequities and corruptions of an ancien regime that lived past its usefulness. It would have been nice if another way could have been found, but humans being who they are, that was never likely.
If modernity can be likened to a flood, we can acknowledge its cleansing and fertilizing 'utility', but it does not have within it the resources for constructing something new. That something new will arise--I am certain of it--but it will come from Logos bearers and people who carry seeds of things that grew before the flood worth preserving and cultivating in a brave new, no-longer-modern, that is, no-longer-flooded world. The flood waters have not quite receded, but when they do, it will be time for planting.