The key word is industry. I would say that we are witnessing the same thing as what happened with animism and later non-duality when they got coopted into polytheism and monotheism respectively. Only now, the context is secular. But yes, it's a sham either way, and it permeates the whole society (planet-wide) -- just see the swathes of "red pilled" and "woke", utterly lost people on respective sides of the imaginary divide.

That's also one of the reasons I tend to tiptoe around "moral emptiness" as it may really invoke the notion that anything goes. Well, it does, but the consequences are quite clear-cut. I mean, if one e.g. steals (and also kills some folks in the process, either directly or indirectly), chances are that one also attracts a lot of backlash. Sure, there are countermeasures (one can e.g. buy protection or suitable propaganda with the stolen wealth), but such lifestyle is clearly unsustainable in the long run (e.g. Julius Caesar's direct blood line vanished some hundred years after his death, and the empire he founded seems to be, after ca. 2K years, in the final stages of its collapse).

So yes, Beat movement was certainly a step in the right direction. But the notion of a sage as a bohemian, wandering hobo is just a romanticized image taken straight out of Buddhist and Taoist lore. One thing that I learned during my life within "underground" culture during the 90s is that obsession with the tragic disillusioned hero, unhinged "king of disgust", or disinterested mysterious intellectual is just a snobbish pose. It looks cool and revolutionary but it leads nowhere. It's just a mental masturbation. Then again, living "morally" in current social system may, indeed, very easily result in homelessness. After all, it's telling that we are informed abut every fart of British royals, but I don't remember to see any notice that Ferlinghetti died in February this year. If nothing else, his age of 101 years is certainly respectable.

As for Kronman -- looking at the ToC, I had the feeling that his book is a summary of Western thought. Thanks for confirming my notion. I agree that Christianity is useless, but the same can be said about all world religions. While I know next to nothing about Whitman and I see Aristotle to be to "Socratic" tradition as what is Confucius to Lao Tzu and Taoism, I'm a big fan of Nietzsche but especially Spinoza (Heidegger is also quite interesting). That being said, I don't think that what we need is a new "ennobling religion". I also don't quite understand the "aesthetic reconstruction of moral values" as it seems pretty arbitrary to me (beauty's in the eye of the beholder, as they say), but I may be just missing something. I would also say that philosophy (or inquiry) is only one quarter of the whole equation. The other three quarters being mindful observation (meditation), acceptance of natural world (i.e. mortality), and subsequent "informed" action. I elaborated on that here.