It may come as a surprise to few of my readers, on this Sexagesima Sunday, when I express a generalized frustration at the standard of public debate in our time. This is perhaps a reaction to my inbox—wherein correspondents who refuse to engage with any argument instead plague and fray with pettifogging objections to this isolated statement or that, by way of comforting themselves in a glib worldview.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: modern man is mesmerized by words and numbers. He believes the latter are especially scientific, but he is similarly awed by jargon, whether or not it is correctly applied, or indeed, has any meaning.
Code-words and repeated numbers are talismans to him, conferring priestly authority on those who speak them. Almost everything he “knows” he has taken on faith, from the pedagogical bombardment that begins in daycare, to the media bombardment that continues on his deathbed (I saw a poignant example of this last week). And now we have also the Internet—a bottomless goldmine for the factitious—with its Wikipedic parodies of authority, crawling with half-truths.
I have also tried to give, over time, a crude explanation of how this came to be: not through “technology” in itself, but through technology as a mode of being. Modern, or more precisely, postmodern man, is a city dweller, or more precisely, a dweller in vast conurbations that do not much resemble cities in the historical sense—which were compact, delineated, unified and relatively small.
Until little more than a century ago, there were never more than a handful of cities out of which a pedestrian could not walk in half an hour. Having thus walked, he would find himself in the countryside, one low hill away from leaving the city entirely behind him. He could then shake the dust off his feet.
Moreover, even without walking so far, he was exposed to public institutions that confirmed the basic realities of human life—from the streets where hawkers cried their various wares, to the stalls and shops of craftsmen, to the organized markets where raw food was presented vividly to the nostrils. He could see the economy with his own eyes.
If he looked up, in any Western city, or upon the city as he approached from afar, he saw a forest of steeples (or minarets, in the Islamic world, or equivalent temple ornamentation elsewhere). Whether or not he listened, he could often hear bells and public prayer. It was in many ways a much different world, until quite recently.
I am not arguing against the invention of antibiotics, or even against cars. (Not yet.) Gains have accompanied many of our losses. It is true I am a bit of a Luddite by disposition, but this article is being typed on a laptop, and my point is only about how things have changed.
How, for instance, the economy has been transformed from something one could see and smell, to something represented by numbers; how, more generally, science (which means “knowledge”) and society have ceased to be tangible and become instead almost purely conceptual.
The conurbation dweller lives in a sprawl with few ennobling points of reference, and little to remind him of the background conditions of life—only of the foreground conditions of urban (or more precisely, post-urban) slur. He is, with the passage of time, more and more profoundly disconnected, or atomized, or “alienated” as the Marxists used to say.
Even his home is impermanent (whether he rents or owns, he is likely to move repeatedly in his lifetime), and in the last couple of decades, the structure of his family has likewise become subject to “the change you better believe in.”
All of this is extremely significant—by which I mean to discount the quantitative, and stress the qualitative nature of postmodern change. Not only our children, but for the most part we, were raised in a world where true empirical knowledge is almost unobtainable for the individual: where it at least requires a heroic, non-statistical investigative effort. Yet, we glibly believe that only empirical knowledge has value. Our faith is commanded by the custodians of the words and numbers, by the “experts” who claim to be working from “facts” that we can seldom check or touch in themselves, let alone contextualize.
Add the toxic sproo of “political correction”—ideological demands to censor which words and which numbers may be used in public discussions—and we have what I think may be seen all around us: unprecedented ignorance of the most elementary facts of life.
Is there a way out of this wilderness?
Yes, but it is not a way that can be legislated by a Parliament, decided by a court, or sold in a store. I would characterize it as penitential. In order to restore the “rootedness” that is a condition of being fully human, one must find a way to shake the dust of postmodernity itself off one’s shoes. This requires giving up things that are not important, to make room for the things that are.
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