From the Age of Reason to Postmodern Sophistry

They spoke once about an Age of Reason, when “Renaissance men” were hailed as geniuses because of their intellectual discoveries and innovations.

Yet we’re living now in a so-called postmodern condition of apathy and cynicism.

Our heroes are gross anti-intellectuals like Donald Trump, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2016 and 2024.

The internet was supposed to unite everyone by presenting us with the same information and opportunities, but the opposite happened: we’re encouraged to explore our walled gardens and clash with endless streams of opposing worldviews. Deranged conspiracy theories flood social media platforms because the truth is too complicated and unsexy for the big tech companies. Our discourse is increasingly dominated by spoiled, enfeebled left-wing ideologues and their toxic counterparts on the authoritarian right.

Ours looks like a sophistical Age of Post-Reason. Rationalists, we assume, were always naïve in thinking that reason can tell us the neutral facts. That was only ever a myth, a “metanarrative,” since everything is politicized and all we’re doing when we think or speak is telling ourselves and each other various stories. Nonfiction is still a genre of storytelling, we assume, as even journalists call their reports “stories.” There’s the story of how a third of Americans re-elected Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and there are the news stories of global warming, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, and Israel’s demolition of Gaza.

All just stories. How so?

It’s because our media for consuming this “content” splashes these reports across our screens that host in the next minute cat videos, podcast rants, AI-manufactured images, and other inanities. There’s only an equalizing stream of content, in which case the medium is the message, and the distinction between fact and fiction is lost along the way.

There are no gatekeepers any longer to tell us authoritatively what’s true and false since the liberal and neoliberal technocratic professionals disgraced themselves by overpromising progress. In the 1980s and ’90s, bankers and titans of industry co-opted the pseudoscientific field of economics to promote the fiction of trickle-down wealth and the presumption that capitalism is compatible with democracy. Ever since the scientific and industrial revolutions, the Global North has been racing to “progress” by growing its economies, conquering the wilderness by exploiting its resources, and inventing technologies to raise living standards.

But then we discovered that this progress was unsustainable and self-destructive all along, that we’ve perpetrated the sixth mass extinction to support our infantile consumer lifestyles. We’ve been overconsuming trash to enrich the top half of the richest one percent of the population, relying on the Global South to manufacture disposable, trendy items for slave wages.

We don’t trust experts anymore. After all, the internet makes us all feel as though we can master any field just by watching the relevant ten-minute tutorial video. Who needs doctors’ diagnoses when there’s WebMD? Who needs politicians when lobbyists dictate their policies and write the legislation? Who needs masterful artists when there’s bottomless AI-generated content? Who needs warehouse workers when there are gigantic machines that do all the heavy lifting?

Over the last two decades, we’ve shown that we prefer authoritarian leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and Nicolás Maduro. These leaders reveled in the authenticity of their corruption and audacity, revealing themselves to be the rot that remains when we no longer believe in our religious or secular myths of progress.

Share

A few centuries ago, science and philosophy undermined religion, but then reason undermined itself. We see this even in the institutions of science, which capitalism has largely captured just as it’s captured democratic governments and artists’ pursuit of creativity.

There’s the replication crisis in the soft sciences, and even a crisis in fundamental physics, as the physicist Sean Carroll explains. The business of theoretical physics in colleges prevents the department heads from gambling by hiring physicists who don’t subscribe to mainstream theories and whose models might prove fruitless in the long-term. Thus, because its early promoters oversold string theory’s theoretical richness and bullied competitors, a cult of string theory has prospered for decades even though it’s not supported by data.

Due to Donald Trump’s foregrounding of his alliance with big tech companies, and his crass pay-to-play schemes, the transparency of Trump’s oligarchy in his second term as president relieves Americans of any vestige of liberal pride. Evidently, democracy has always been just as vulnerable to corruption as a monarchy. As Plato and Aristotle said, democracy is liable to be swayed by demagogues who exploit unregulated discourse and the weakness of most people’s critical faculties.

And while there are still countless starving artists, including novelists, musicians, and painters, most artists have become “content creators,” serving in the gig economy that big tech companies have established. We marvel at how technology enables us all to create art, but as we immerse ourselves in this content, we succumb to the bathos of realizing that the very overabundance cheapens the artworks, so that we presume the consumption of art ought to be free.

If anyone can produce art with the new technologies, maybe art has no value. Maybe AIs should be welcome to colonize these fields. If soulless quasi-AIs can generate art of all kinds, maybe there’s never been a neoshamanic quest for self-knowledge, as in the heeding of a daemon’s call to sublimate your unconscious intuitions. Maybe the artist’s mystique has always been a sham, just like the mystique of “modernity.”

Practically all cultures have deemed themselves the height of human achievement, just as every well-adjusted individual thinks of himself or herself as the star of the show. This is the foolishness of pride that our genes ingrain in us since otherwise we wouldn’t think life is worth living or struggle to survive and reproduce despite the scarce resources and unfair odds.

But how much of this is just the whining of spoiled consumers who mistake First World annoyances for grave “crises”? We speak of the “meaning crisis,” for example, which is supposed to bedevil developed societies. But we’re so shallow that we can find meaning in tea leaves, cloud formations, or burn marks on toast. We’re like Narcissus who is entranced by his reflection, and we see our reflections everywhere. We’re liable to personify everything to avoid the feeling of being alone. We project mental and social properties onto inhuman, asocial facts, to extend our home territories.

Thus, a third of Americans found meaning in the cult of Trump, the Democratic third will find meaning in opposing American quasi-fascism, and the third that didn’t vote finds meaning in drinking beer and watching television after a hard day’s labour.

If there really were a meaning crisis, why wouldn’t the masses flock to hear what philosophers are saying, enriching those intellectuals rather than the big tech giants? In a sense, there’s no crisis because most of us are so easily misled. We elevate mundanities, making idols out of profanities. When a fad passes, we’re quick to concoct a replacement, and the endless stream of content brings us a smorgasbord of possible “meanings” or diversions.

We may nevertheless whine about a meaning crisis to feel heroic and prophetic. Yet the real crisis is that we might lose sight of the mystery that hides in plain view. Metaphysically speaking, there’s something afoot when conceivably there might have been nothing, so the something-maker is present in everything, in Trump, Kamala Harris, and the nonvoter, for example, or in both the rich and the poor, or our planet and all the others. Recognizing the strangeness of existence should inspire a sacred, ennobling way of life.

The real meaning crisis is that we lack the discipline to pursue such a course because, again, we’re so easily distracted. Perhaps the postmodern condition, therefore, is the proliferation of profane life options. We fixate on our personal liberties so that we welcome a society that caters to our myriad tastes. Possibilities beset us until we lose the inspiration to deem any of them especially worthy. Postmodernity is when too much progress becomes poisonous.

The Global South, or the relatively undeveloped nations, must look at those of us who complain about having too much progress, and say to themselves, “Cry me a river.” In which case we deserve our brutish, authoritarian leaders since we spoiled consumers regard our societies as automated and invulnerable, so we elect brutes for their entertainment value.

Everything’s a cynical, ironic game in the postmodern condition. But the liberties unleashed by science, capitalism, and democracy were supposed to make us all kings and queens of our castles. Maybe that’s just what happened, and we’re all as vapid and selfish as aristocrats once were, engrossed in our trivial pursuits when we should be humbled by our greater mission: to undo the absurdity of nature’s godlessness.