the cost of modernity

If the questions “Why?” and “What to do?” find an answer neither in our biological instincts nor in the secondary instincts of our postmodern culture, then what to do? Where do we go from here? What do we do when the truth is exposed and the truth is that life is meaningless?

Several, ultimately futile possibilities exist on both the individual and social levels for at least temporarily denying meaninglessness and its associated depression. One strategy is to return to our primary instincts. The pioneering sociologist Emile Durkheim described the failure of culture as deculturation, a state, he said, that reduces its victims to the animal level of chronic fighting or fornication. If I find direction or meaning neither in culture nor in more self-conscious attempts to answer the why questions, then I may find solace in my body, emotions, and pure, unmediated experience. From the perspective of these strategies, meaninglessness is not the problem; thinking self-consciously is the problem. Avoid or deny the questions, concede that you are nothing more than an instinctual animal in an indifferent universe, and you've solved the problem. Alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual obsessions, and adventurousness—in which meaning remains, but only while engaged in extreme and risky activities, including violence—have all been attributed to misguided and finally self-destructive attempts to suppress the question of meaning by drowning in instinctual behavior. The climber Mark Jenkins articulates perfectly the experience and joy of losing oneself entirely in the body this way: "At this moment, all I know is movement. I'm not even thinking; I'm just climbing. I shut down the brain and let the body be what it is: an animal. Unbeknownst even to myself, somewhere high on the Sheila Face, I unlatch the cage. . . . The cage door swings open and out steps the beast.

On a social level, as early as 1941, Erich Fromm was writing about our collective Escape from Freedom. Why the need to escape? From what are we escaping? Fromm argues that a long history of liberation—from first nature, race and family, the authority of the Church and then the state (the Reformation and the rise of democracies, for example)—terminated in the achievement of individual freedom. But having attained that cherished goal, the question became "freedom not from what but for what?" Having progressively rejected the guidance and authority of revelation, community, tradition, and reason, freedom becomes a burden, and we have the absurd situation of being free to choose anything we wish but having no choices worth making.

Knowing neither what we must do nor what we should do, nor even what we wish to do, Fromm argues, we typically look for clues by watching what others do, or willingly abdicate the burden of freedom by reverting to the authority of others, whether the latest guru, pop celebrity, or political leader. Conformity and authoritarianism are thus collective strategies for relieving the anxiety that absolute freedom elicits. We willingly exchange our anxiety and freedom for compulsive activity and the answers provided by others. Conformity to the cultural norms modeled by members of our family, friends, and associates or obedient loyalty to the goals of our leaders and nation protects us from the debilitating experience of nothingness resting at the heart of modernity.

Philosophically, the modern, debilitating ideology that humankind is nothing but a complex mechanism of chemical reactions or social forces and its attendant experience of nothingness is, itself, the culmination of a long skeptical tradition. The notion of the Absurd arose when humankind's desire for meaning and purpose confronted the indifferent universe that the skeptical tradition projected. On the one hand, modernity was a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of the existential vacuum, and thus a source of the problem. On the other hand, modernity is also a solution. If one believes that the universe is indeed indifferent and without purpose, then the absurd is merely nostalgia for a world that never existed.

The modern idea that the universe, and in turn humankind, is meaningless, without intrinsic value or purpose, is both a cause of and a solution to the problem posed by the experience of nothingness. Living in the modern universe of indifferent and mechanical causation may require honesty and courage, but it is finally not absurd, whenever the nostalgia for purpose and meaning is abandoned. All one has is this world as it is, and many would claim that is sufficient. Firmly within a modern perspective, there is no answer or resolution to Tolstoy's question "Why?" Our best course of action, as a consequence, is to enjoy and make the best we can of this world as it is. Or as the literary critic Lionel Trilling expressed it poetically: "If we are in a balloon over an abyss, let us at least value the balloon. If night is all around, then what light we have is precious. If there is no life to be seen in the great emptiness, our companions are to be cherished; so are we ourselves."

- Dennis Ford

Cop-out: delegitimization of traditional sources of meaning --> no meaning --> regression to self-destructive hedonism --> suppression of the question of meaning (losing yourself).

Cop-out: delegitimization of traditional sources of meaning --> no meaning --> look to another external authority for meaning (political, celebrity, guru) --> suppression of the question of meaning.

Better: delegitimization of traditional sources of meaning --> no meaning --> appreciate life for what it is --> proactively create a new myth, a new narrative for meaning and purpose.