Chesterton on the madness of modernity

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is always worth reading. If he weren't so Catholic, he'd be very nearly a neo-Calvinist. Here he is on the trouble with the modern age:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful (Orthodoxy).

One needn't follow Chesterton's negative view of the Reformation, but I do detect in him a certain affinity with the kind of christian antireductionism some of us support on this side of the Tiber.