The Age of Performance

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

Shakespeare, As You Like It

This life is the world of illusions. It always has been. It likely always will be. But there’s an interesting paradox about illusions the modern world exposes. It’s a subtle paradox, but a real one:

The more materialist the world becomes, the more illusory it becomes - and through this becomes disillusioning.

It makes no logical sense at first. But bare with me.

This is the age of relativism. Not inherently nihilistic, nor fully post-Christian. A more accurate term could be a ‘post-certainty’ age. Nothing is certain anymore. Nothing is absolute. Least of all axioms, beliefs or faith in anything beyond ourselves. Every man has become his own church. Religion is personal preference. Every person is forced find their own way, their own beliefs and their own path. It seems little wonder to me people feel the strain. It’s an experiential and existential weight. It’s no wonder mental health outcomes are poorer though the world becomes richer. And since we mortals are finite, concrete, lustful creatures, people often turn to what can be perceived over what can’t. The rise of materialism isn’t so much a philosophical question; it’s more an existential response to a world that now refutes absolutes.

So how does this tie into the world becoming more illusory? In a pernicious and subtle way. When there are no absolutes, the result is there are only perspectives. Though our day and age rarely grapples with this question, it is worth contending with. If there is no God, no creator, no universal morality, no transcendent or ‘immaterial’ reality... then there is no truth. Not really. Though many laud science as a source of truth, it is a pursuit of truth, which is a very different thing. Science is not truth in of itself. Science always changes, and rightly so. I could extrapolate and discuss the ‘changing nature of science’ ad infinitum, but I’ll be very brief:

• Newton himself saw physics and mathematics as tools to understand God

• Hume undermines the ‘irrefutability’ of science by pointing out the problem of induction

• Kant destroyed metaphysical speculation about the immaterial, but concluded that reason always points beyond itself, and cannot know what lies beyond itself

• Nietzsche, who declared himself the Antichrist and declared the death of God acknowledged ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’

• Popper’s notion of falsifiability shook the certainty of certain scientific claims that are not falsifiable – some theoretical physics are a good example

• And more

  
  

These in no way refute science as a tool of truth. But science only works in submission to truth. It is not the truth itself. It is a common and subliminal belief of out age that the decline of feudalism, aristocracy and the church were factors of ‘the Enlightenment’ of civilisation that led to more science, scepticism, rationality, individuality and freedom. I contend that nothing is further from the truth.

For all of medieval civilisations’ cruelty, poverty, anarchy and oppression from the church, there is another side to the coin. The Middle Ages gave people a stronger framework than we have now. Far beyond a ‘Catholic’ church telling everyone what to do. There was metaphysical stability in comparison to now. Some things could be taken for granted. That order could be made from disorder. That all ends have a beginning. That all causes have a first cause. That logic can uncover reality. That there is truth and falsehood.

It was a harsh age no doubt - but the university, the college, the modern hospital, the monastic scholar and the illuminated book are all products of medieval civilisation. The foundations of the scientific method were discovered and applied not by individuals who believed in ‘individuality.’ The scientific method was nurtured by monks, priests, deans and scholars of religious universities. Science was given to us from Christian and Islamic scholasticism, looking back to the ancient Greeks they both preserved. Science does not come from the Enlightenment period. Nietzsche saw this more clearly than any contemporary thinker. Christendom undermined itself not by repression nor the inquisition, but by its own philosophical claim that Christ himself said:

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

John 8:32

Nietzsche viciously, unflinchingly, correctly contended that Christendom undermined itself by its own offspring - rational science. It was not a ‘war of reason’ from the Enlightenment scientists that undermined Christianity’s worldview – it was familial abandonment by its own child over a much longer period of time. The threads of modern science predate the Enlightenment by centuries, and scientific theories go back to and beyond ancient India millennia ago. Nietzsche also understood that ‘the death of God’ and the familial separation between theology and science would not lead to the blossoming of strong, resilient, steely-eyed, uber-rational missile men. That was the mistake of the Enlightenment. The absence of God would lead to chaos, nihilism, despair and the collapse of Western civilisation. Read the rest of his infamous proclamation that so many redditors laud. Nietzsche’s declaration is not a celebration, but a declaration of loss - of a crime so horrific there are no waters in the world that could wash our hands:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Nietzsche was a master of words, and many misunderstand his rhetoric and point. In my much less eloquent words, Nietzsche’s point was not God is literally dead. God cannot die, whether God or exists or not. God’s fate is worse. God has become irrelevant. God might as well be dead. And that is the age we live in. The age of relativism. The age that sidelines the truth in favour of ‘your truth’ and ‘my feelings.’ Are these the terms the Enlightenment optimists would revel in? I doubt it. And I doubt few in our age notice this semantic shift.

Note the wording of everyday life nowadays. ‘My truth.’ ‘Your truth.’ It is a logical conclusion based on the assumptions of the day and age. There is no truth with no absolutes! Science becomes not a pursuit of truth, but a pursuit of ‘my truth.’ The pandemic exposed this horribly. It revealed why we have scientists that are as ideological as activists. Scientists who are tools of political repression. Scientists who are half-mad. Not in the mould of Shelly’s Doctor Frankenstein who tried to make a man from the dead. Rather moralising know-it-alls who sap life of any certainty, vitality or spontaneity based on limited findings that shouldn’t be generalised, let alone applied to people and populations.

Science when detached from its religious roots is extremely dangerous. And science is drifting more and more away from its roots. Science is a means to an end, but not an end alone. Yet few make this distinction. Few will want to make this distinction. Yet there is an irony here. It seems that science is slowly undermining itself in a manner similar to how religion undermined itself. By eroding its own reason for being. Post-truth science is as corrosive and repressive as post-truth religion. Because the absolute certainties of hell and salvation have been replaced by the near-absolute certainties of predictive modelling and statistics. And through this rigidity and doctrinal declaration it slowly loses its purpose, its vitality, its flexibility and its raison d’etre. Put another way, it appears to be gradually eroding its relevance to the average person under its own relentless drive. A drive not towards universal truths that stand up to all scrutiny and testing... but a drive to ‘become gods, simply to appear worthy’ as Nietzsche declared. Religion without science indoctrinates. Science without religion suffocates – because it has nothing to pursue without its foundation intact. Put another way, post-truth science doesn’t illuminate; it disillusions – which leads me back to my thesis.

Rational materialism leads not to illumination but disillusionment. That is the paradox of modernity. Whilst it’s easy to dismiss philosophy as a toothless discipline that over-complicates the simple (it can) these ideas permeate into each person born into our civilisation. It’s rarely a conscious process. More so a pernicious, supple and ever-present tide. Not a conspiracy of philosophers on thrones or fatalistic destiny, but something more akin to the stars and planets slowly ‘lining up’ over centuries.

What results from modernity’s vacuum of metaphysics is deep disillusionment and a hollowing of the soul or mind. And a soul-starved or even completely soulless world always tends to world of material domination, since all immaterial truth is abandoned – God, soul, religion, metaphysics, beauty, meaning. And purely material conditions often determine materialist responses. Put another way, material performance becomes more important than true being. If being is only a vague concept at best and fluff at worst, then why spend so much time nurturing it? Does anybody water a plant that they cannot see? In a world that rejects the unseen, the appearance of being seen well becomes more important than before. The stage-performance of being well becomes paramount. And the consequences are visible everywhere:

• Self-worth becomes tied to likes and response times

• Identity becomes constructed and curated by others rather than revealed over time by being true. Morality becomes aesthetic, subjective, convenient and materially bound rather than universally binding

• Relationships become less about relating and more about material considerations or what I dub ‘selfships’ – relationships that are curated around the self rather than two selves (here’s me with my partner)

Relationships are a very good indicator of the vacuity of modernity. It’s not that people have inherently become worse. It’s more subtle. It’s something closer to the very structures of modern relationships incentivise ‘selfships’ more than true relationships. Whilst history is often over-romanticised, there were real differences in love and marriage compared to today. Across cultures and times there are themes of:

- Social scripts and social norms

- Duty to one another and each other’s family

- Sacrificing novelty and self-pursuits

- Longer periods of courtship

- The union of two families

- Vows before God and or family

- Shared values

- Permanence

- Loyalty

- Covenant

Modernity has slowly chipped away and inverts these:

- Social relativism and multiculturalism

- Duty to your truth and feelings

- Sacrificing nothing to anybody

- Speed equalling intensity and excitement

- Two families having a get together

- Vows to each other

- Relative and subjective values

- Reversible arrangements

- Loyalty to one’s feelings

- Relational

It isn’t a longing for the past nor naivete that the good old days were better. It’s an observation that incentives, structures and perceptions have changed. The result is love is less permanent. And impermanence leads to unreliability. And unreliability leads to chaos. And chaos leads to disillusionment. Though material reality oft improves in modernity, relational reality has gradually been weakened. Over time, in the background, subtly but notably. We slowly reap the consequences.

The ascendancy of relativism leads to the modern mantra of ‘my truth.’ This is devastating in every day life, because truth becomes contextual, bendable and arguable. It is no longer absolute, but relative. And this can erode family life, friendship and relationships. The things in life that modern logic doesn’t value nor understand well, yet remain the things that make life worth living. They’re undermined by relativist logic. Because when human interactions become strained (as they inevitably do from time to time) these outcomes often occur:

- Memory is not shared nor real but becomes negotiable and relational

- Promises are contextual, time-based and feeling-based

- Accountability becomes ‘oppressive’ instead of stabilising

- Contradictions are confused for seductive complexity

It’s why we have some psychologists proclaiming they ‘help others’ but cheat on their significant other. It’s why we have lawyers who argue the law should defend the guilty. It’s why we have addicts who are pharmacologists. It’s why we have policemen who think they make laws. It’s why we have terrorists who can claim they’re the victim. Because if everything is relative, then where does the truth begin?

There is no easy answer. But I do know it cannot begin with us, the subject and be purely ‘subjective.’ Subjective truth is an oxymoron. A self contradicting statement. An absurdity akin to ‘atonal music’ or ‘living corpse.’ The truth often hurts because it can go against our wishes. Which eludes to it being against and therefore beyond ourselves. A conclusion that Kant calculated, Newton knew and others know. And even though the pursuit of truth is often painful, isolating and a path to loss, the alternative is far worse. To become a maker of illusions and a master of phantoms, which is the path to disillusionment. To the fallout of our age – the age of performance.