THE AGE OF UN-REASON - -
"Postmodernism"
Nothing makes sense? It's not supposed to make sense. We've moved into The Age of Un-Reason - - the age of things not making sense - - popularly called "Postmodernism." Yeah? Whut? Hunh?
Brief Overview
Once there was an official "Age of Reason" beginning in the 1700s - - a freer time emerging from medieval lockdown of thinking, with its threats of punishment to heretics here and later. One could at least begin to speak and think openly - - and this broad movement was linked also with Thomas Paine (and of course the US in general).
Since that 1700s-plus movement, the US and West in general have stayed in that general pattern of Reason - - or at least trying to make sense - - seen in ever-freer thinking, exploratory thinking (science on the march).
In recent decades, that type of progress and at least trying to make sense has been called by many "modernism."
Therefore, the era of not making much sense is surprising. It's confusing. It's disturbing.
And it's identified by thinkers and in cogent books as "postmodernism."
I've called it the Age of Un-Reason - - same thing.
THE NEW WAVE IS UN-REASON
We have the Mary Settegast book, Mona Lisa's Mustache. The cover picture sets the tone - - "It Don't Make No Sense." Nohow.
And we have the Chuck Smith, Jr. book, The End Of The World … As We Know It. He makes a superb start on exposing and explaining the phenomena - - takes us deep into it. Despite then not coming to the conclusions that I reach, I highly recommend it.
From today's news and general atmosphere, we have George Orwell's 1984-type gobble-speak such as that torture isn't really torture. We have such degrees of "spin" that any thought-structure can be "spun" into so many different forms, that we don't have a grip on any of them.
The insane financial concept from 1980 forward, that "debt doesn't matter," is plunging the world into fiscal chaos. A corollary dictum that "greed is good" is morally inverted, secularly dangerous, and hard to mentally assimilate. Yet we roll on as if nothing is different from before. It's the Age of Un-Reason.
We have lost the line between serious news important to our lives, and Hannah Alabama's latest fling. Mixed in side by side in the "newscast" in the mornings we have 60 people killed in a tornado and that tonight will be a brand-new episode of "Desperate Housewives."
Computer graphics of high quality blur the line between real and fictional.
Aided by such new graphic capabilities, "entertainment" has taken to exaggerating tornados, shark attacks, volcanos, wars and the like - - as if the real things weren't bad enough.
"Promos" for entertainment are so violent and all-around awful that I wonder why anyone would want a full half-hour or hour more of what's shown, tonight at 8 or whenever. Where sex remarks are used in the promos to pull one into a later show, they are so lame, so unoriginal, and the people so drab of mind, that I can't imagine why one would tune in for more, if those jokes or remarks or people were supposed to be prime and exciting examples of a lot more to follow if one tunes in at 8 or whenever.
We live in "enclaves" of entertainment. Computer games put viewers/players into deep enclaves of their own to a degree far beyond the mere temporary escape of movies of 40 years ago.
We live in vicarious enclaves where our sense of identity, progress, and victory is connected with the lives of others in sports, money, glamor, acting, celebrity.
We once went vicarious for brief periods only, "escaped" into a theater for a couple of hours max. But now, friends, we're in multilayered 24/7 vicarious, enclave, or escape situations of many types at any given time.
Once we were interested in "Who am I, and Why am I here?" but today, we look for those answers in vicarious ways, places, people, sports, places, products.
It's un-reasonable to search for our own identity where we will NEVER FIND IT.
We are attached to one gladiatorial one-left-standing tournament after another.
We find it reasonable to pay people who hit or catch or run with a ball or put it through a hoop, more in a year than we will earn in a lifetime. We find it reasonable to pay one baseball player a quarter-billion dollars. That's billion. And that - - and the whole sports payment phenomenon - - is un-reasonable. It exposes the importance of these people to our psyches.
I think Stan Musial made $22,000 - - something like that. We didn't need Stan for our psyches. We didn't need to live vicariously through him in any way. We only needed him for the American pastime - - an event on a Saturday afternoon after a week's work. A change of pace. Some excitement. Like a movie. A few hours, then back to regular life.
The more that the vicarious life excites us - - elimination tournament after elimination tournament in sports, game shows, who's the best singer, and on and on, the rock concert, all presented with tremendously glamorous stagecraft, lights, music, spectacle, important announcers and so on - - the more the average bloke and gal feel insignificant. And the more they seek the glamor and glitz of the tube or the lives of others. Reason, balance and regular life has been replaced with a total new framework and ambience. Could it be "postmodernism"? You bet. And un-reasonable? Absolutely.
Once, a sanitized single murder intrigued us in murder mysteries. Today, we have sordid-in-the-extreme murders, and often, "body bag" shows of multiple murders.
Preachers leap about, yelling, pointing, jabbing - - all hyper-emphasis and semi-hypnosis - - without an appeal to reason. Pointing is bad manners, I wuz always taught. But in addition, the jabbing is intended to impart some intensity right through that TV screen. I turn it off.
In TV ads, cars drive into our face, sling mud, startle, endanger the viewer. What are we selling? - - to buy this thing so that you can menace or show your superiority and road rage to others?
More on losing the line between reality and fiction: Before a TV boxing match began, the announcer was building up the two fighters with their history, stats, types of fighting to expect, and so on. But in the middle, the announcer spied Stallone in the audience, and switched his pitch and the cameras to the movie actor who had played a fictional fighter - - and babbled on and on about him, the line of distinction totally lost, the fictional character and related events not only considered to have been real, but more real than the fight that about to start in the ring.
There is a great discussion today about "reality" and "virtual reality." We can create pseudo-reality - - and we like it. It's much more interesting, dramatic, final, satisfying, and we don't get hurt or eaten or whatever.
When a kid in New York in the early Forties, I saw many great stage plays and the greatest actors and actresses. The theaters were small then, and the players and actions very real, especially in near-deserted matinees where I could sit close to the stage. Murder, hatred, agonizing emotions, betrayal, loss - - terrible things went on! But at the end, all actors came out, resurrected, happy, cleansed of their sins - - and took bows. And audiences loved it and loved them. But today, the hard-nosed "reality" fiction with the best that stagecraft and computer wizardry can contribute, is not only deeply embedded but permanent in thought. No one comes out and takes bows and says in effect, We were putting on a show. Everyone's OK. Glad you liked it. Tell your friends.
Disorientation is promoted in today's advertising. It's done deliberately to change one's mindset of the moment, and thus enable the sellers to push in their thing. Hundreds of images cut so quickly that we can't focus on any single one. Controlling-type voices and sound tracks compete. Trucks go backwards on freeways, buildings collapse….
"Sickness commercials" are designed to produce symptoms of the very diseases their sponsors claim to cure - - even create disease, some say. Fear is aroused that even if you don't have this or that disease, you might get it. Allergies, once a minor thing, are now said by one poll to be suffered by 80% of Americans. Highly-dramatized toe-microbe demons with scratchy voices create discomfort and the purchase of preventive substances. Some medical professionals have outright said ads have changed the minor nuisance of a restless leg into a "disease." Check PBS.org, Bill Moyers, May 16-08, archive, transcripts, for a free download of his interview with Melody Petersen regarding her book, Our Daily Meds. In only the US and one other country can drug companies advertise directly to consumers, and suggestion campaigns boom the sale of remedies. Doctors are secondary - - and that's un-reasonable. We used to see them first, now the sale of diseases and pills comes first and the ads then say, "Ask your doctor." Many doctors don't like this usurping of their primary place and expertise.
Ad tricks in what I call "sickness commercials" include first getting the viewer to "identify" in the picture. The grandmother in the happy garden planting flowers with her granddaughter. How nice. Suddenly, she cries out and raises her gloved hand and stares at it. Of course! She had arthritis - - doesn't everyone? Then she claims the disease as her very own - - "My arthritis…." Some commercials feature a star and the very first words, "My XYZ disease…." There's a slight identity transfer if a sucker is still listening. The vendors don't really need disease, only symptoms, which psychologists have known for a hundred years or more can be created by suggestion. TV won't wise us up because it receives a huge portion of its revenue from the ads.
Sadly, side effects disturbing or even deadly - - requiring a TV list of possible problems, and for print ads, a full page of tiny type - - accompany great expectations.
Do we get healed? Or is it more fair to say these are maintenance programs requiring a dosage regimen maybe forever.
Today, medical horror stories or encyclopedic descriptions are in the news as a regular segment - - "today's medical segment." Instead of just reporting some news that came in, staff works up the segment.
And have you noticed? Human interest stories - - a main attraction in news media in all time - - now almost all have a sickness theme? Arghh.
"Motivational research" by the psychologists working on your head on behalf of vendors, is digging for the deep, instinctive, bad or fearful nature of humans instead of the former nice psychological buttons once pushed.
Cars are no longer sold as much on beauty, style, the neighbors standing around admiring it, and so on, as on colossal menacing front ends. Pill ads induce fear, make one believe disease is everywhere, and assume in their approach that you have maybe several conditions needing treatment - - and if not, that you will have.
In the ad business of old, one major element was to always leave a lasting good impression - - that this was a big chunk of what one paid for when buying space or time. The happy kid with the band-aid, having been lovingly mothered. The greatest good family brand Chevrolet. The nice feeling left by presenters like Dinah Shore. Today, the aggressive pill ads leave the viewer feeling vulnerable, apprehensive. The Chevy logo is driven right into the viewers' face and rammed there filling the entire screen. Presenters use voices from the grave or some gravelly sewer pipe to tell us to "Buy - - now!" They want to come through the screen and force viewers to buy. The impression left by commercials today is - - un-reasonable.
Some ads just leave the impression, "Stupid."
The aim of TV today is to come through the set, grab your psyche and close the deal. The viewer is set down and pummeled with aggressive sales power ramming the vendors' decisions into his or her mind - - totally different from respecting the viewer and eliciting the viewers' decision. No time for that today. This is the new age of - - well, you know what.
Obesity? We have created it by keeping a low level of appetite alive even in people who have just had a filling meal. Those Subway sandwich ads, those pizza ads dripping with cheese and goodies, are pushed into my face after my evening meal. I couldn't eat any more, yet twinges of appetite are aroused. And sooner rather than later, I'm nibbling in the kitchen.
On so many TV shows today which I click into briefly, nothing funny is said, nothing funny is done, but the monotonous "laff-trak" is repeating itself over and over again. I know they assume we're stupid, but how stupid?
Drumming on Nightline, a supposedly intellectual show, is not only totally unnecessary but it overrides the voices. I turn it off half the time. I can't believe they think their audience needs this ridiculous "stimulus." It's counterproductive in its basic idea and in its overly-loud, irregular, insulting pounding.
Can't we think for ourselves? Do we only act today if someone tells us to act or buy or read, or says they have tried it? Or if a celebrity endorses a product, even when we know he or she was merely paid to do so.
Troubling the entire world today is a religion that sends its children (and others) out in suicide bombings that kill innocent civilians. (These aren't Kamikaze warrior acts as in WWII by an enemy in desperation against combatants, which is still strange, but a different category entirely.)
Art - - reasonable and un-reasonable
I studied art history - - real art (and also real cave art and so forth). As early as the 1960s, I remember my mother (who knew something about art) being horrified at how the top prizes in art shows were going to junk things that would have no stand-up qualities. In the late 1970s, I attended an art show in Florida that had hundreds of examples of very good contemporary art. But the prize went to a 6-foot-wide, 4-foot-deep piece of plywood covered with burlap sacking, on which were nailed two rusty tops cut with jagged torched edges out of 55-gallon drums. That was it. The "art." Get it? I don't. But - - the best in the show! It was probably thrown out afterwards. Reasonableness had fled, un-reasonableness had taken over in this forerunner of an entire "Age" of Un-Reason.
Multitasking
Chip the teenaged lad in the "Hi and Lois" comic strip, has the TV on, the stereo blasting, and is talking on his cell phone while doing his homework. Chuck Smith Jr. brings out that multitasking - - what one might call having several balls in the air at once - - is widely seen in this age. Our focus is split. But, it seems to energize some.
ROADS RUNNING OUT
In California, I often remarked at roads that ran out as they just ended at hillsides. I had come from country where roads went on and on.
Some world theories just "run out of road." They do fine for a time, and great things are built (or they do evil, and great destruction is wrought) before the "road runs out" and new systems of thought come into place.
We'll have to keep an eye on "Postmodernism" - - on the Age of Un-Reason. And see if it runs out of road, or gets worse and enters another dimension, or is gradually replaced with something higher, such as a new level of spiritual awakening.
© 2008 Karl Roebling. All rights reserved.
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