Living in a Post-Significance Society

I'm writing this blog post feeling tired and disillusioned, and it's a good mood in which to write about something that really bothers me about the modern world.

This is it: that modern society spends so much time talking and writing about things whose significance (or even whose existence) it simultaneously denies, or at least downplays.

God is probably the main one. Modern society isn't inherently atheistical, but it does seem to insist that we can't have any real knowledge of God except (perhaps) for direct numinous experience. There is no coherent theology. So the modern world is full of talk about salvation, hell, eternity, grace, Nirvana, karma, enlightenment, etc. etc. but none of it really means anything. It might be a metaphor or it might be meant literally or it might be something in between. There's no way of knowing.

Nationality is another example. The modern world is committed to the idea that, ultimately, nationality doesn't matter and it would be best if there was no such thing. And yet-- it can't stop talking about it. Stand-up comedians constantly resort to national character or national quirks as material. Film-makers and novelists and poets use it for "flavour". Indeed, the whole idea of "diversity" can't get away from nationality and ethnicity, because what else is diversity built out of? What are the colours of that rainbow?

The same applies to sex. I won't labout the point here. It's an article of faith today that differences between men and women are mostly socially constructed, and basically undesirable in any case. And yet-- they are the theme of countless romantic comedies, songs, poems, conversations, etc. Perhaps not the innate differences, since these are denied or minimized, but the perceived (or socialised) differences at least. For instance, you might have a book about a woman trying to make her way in the tough world of sports management. The underlying assumption is that it would be best if there was no difference between the masculine and feminine realms-- at least, not enough of a difference to create a "fish out of water" scenario-- and therefore it would be best if the book had no reason to exist. Society is basically hostile to the man-woman difference, but it can't stop chewing on it. Becase we have to chew on something.

(The fact that people subconsciously want these differences to endure seems obvious to me. A few years ago, I came across a book called Sea State by Tabitha Lasley in which a female journalist chose to spend a year, or some period of time, on an oil rig-- presumably one of the last purely masculine environments in existence. She has an affair with a rigger who, as the Guardian reviewer solemnly informs us, has attitudes to women and immigrants which leave much to be desired. Do I need to point the moral here?)

And what about life itself? Life itself no longer seems to be the bedrock, since euthanasia is becoming increasingly accepted. There's nothing sacred or ultimate or self-justifying about life. When it becomes irksome, we can (and perhaps should) just shrug it off. Life isn't sublime or infinitely valuable in itself. It's not holy.

There's no innate meaning or purpose or direction to anything. We are left observing the phenomena passing through consciousness-- "Hey, look, that's cool!". There's nothing to build on, nothing to delve into. Everything "is what it is", which I think should be the motto of the modern world-- for all its notorious (and highly selective) denials of reality.

I will probably take this blog post down soon because it's so whingy. (Even though I came back to it overnight, no longer feeling tired but still disillusioned.)