On Asking Big Questions
Every era has asked big questions about its culture. Are we asking any now, or is modern life little more than a "festival of insignificance"?
PART ONE
Introducing the Question(s)
The ancient Greeks asked a lot of questions. Socrates asked so many that he gave rise to a system of questioning named for him and was put to death for asking, according to the Athenian court, the wrong kind of questions of the wrong kind of people. The Greek philosophers asked some of the foundational questions of human living, and some of their answers still resonate today. Many of their enquiries tell us much about what preoccupied their culture; in particular they were interested in the question of how to structure a society.
Leaping forward via the time machine of the mind to reach a fuzzily defined period in Western history in which Christianity dominated the cultural scene, and casting our eye with interest over the Protestant Reformation, we can see that a prominent cultural question was how to position oneself in relation to the divine. Revelation or natural evidence? Personal relationship to the godhead or hierarchical mediation? Culturally contextual or timeless? The Age of Enlightenment later superseded such problems with questions of how to position the individual within humanity as a whole. Returning to the here and now: what, we might wonder, are our epochal fixations? What big cultural question are we asking in this moment?
When Milan Kundera – in the opening of The Festival of Insignificance – puppeteers one of his marionette characters down a Paris street, the story begins with a question. More precisely, it opens with a series of interrelated questions. The introductory character is Alain, who is the act of existential enquiry given human form. And on these opening pages, Kundera – via Alain – attempts to raise lechery to the status of philosophy as he gazes at “the young girls, who – every one of them – showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short”.
This literal navel-gazing is at the centre of Alain’s curiosity about historical obsessions with various parts of female anatomy. If an era views breasts as the pinnacle of “female seductive power”, that might suggest a certain sanctification of woman as mother; the Virgin Mary as an ideal; “the male sex on its knees before” the female sex. If an era fixates on the thighs, this might suggest a “metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road ... that leads to erotic achievement”. If another era obsesses over the buttocks, this might indicate a “brutality” that seeks the shortest route to “the goal”.
Some readers might wonder about the sincerity of such pontification. If its author is serious, isn’t that evidence of pretentiousness and a lack of critical self-insight? In the popular vernacular, wouldn’t he be a douchebag? Yes, and also no, and yes again. Kundera is infatuated with humour and irony, and self-deprecation is not beyond him. All of the aforementioned leering at young girls and philosophising over their anatomy is the set-up; the punchline lies in where this arrives, with Alain’s gaze turned to the navel. So, what is this playful opening winking at?
PART TWO
The Joke Is No Longer Funny
Alain’s interest in the navel indicates modernity’s relationship to grand narratives and cultural questions: such things are mere exercises in navel-gazing. A preoccupation with Big Questions is like the feather hovering near a ceiling in a later scene and which captures the attention of another character, Charles. A friend observes Charles’ strange fixation on the feather and thinks: “What a pleasure not to worry about something happening up there, what a pleasure to be right down here.” This is the complacency of contemporary culture at its worst: How nice not to be bothered by high-minded, difficult problems; how nice to be vacantly absorbed in nothing.
This is the posture towards life’s complexities taken by Nietzsche’s “last men”, who avoid great lows and highs of emotion, preferring to stay comfortably middling in life, neither achieving nor losing very much. There is an awful echo resounding in the absence at the heart of their lives that they attempt to drown out with the noise of consumerism, the busy rush of buying, buying, buying. This is the posture of those who retreat from the pain of a world that is not how it ought to be, by sacrificing their sense that things could be better. Hope of that kind, requiring commitment and consideration, is dismissed as mere navel-gazing.
Having shunned philosophical enquiry, sincerity, and optimism as gauche, the Last Men of our time strike a pose of sophisticated boredom. The academic heuristic known as postmodernism achieved dominance, decades ago, in pop culture as a flippant irony that comes to us as bathos and sarcasm. But this perpetual shrug demands a salve to its own boredom, a salve that’s provided by a cultural fixation on the ephemeral and the insignificant. Objects of mass culture that pop in and out of existence faster than anyone can keep up with, and which are engaging enough to distract but not so deep as to invite the discomfort of a meaningful meeting with reality – these are the amusements of a complacent culture.
This is an era that places the belly button on a pedestal, its postmodern view of things built around a hollow. If the thighs represent the long road towards a worthy goal, and the bum indicates the short path to pleasure, the navel symbolises the emptiness of nihilism. To see Kundera’s rather crude imagery to its natural conclusion: you can’t have sex with the navel, and so as a sexual object it provides no fulfilment. It’s as pointless in erotic terms as postmodernism and nihilism are in a cultural sense. Little wonder then that so much of mass culture is so utterly boring. One of Kundera’s characters, in a despondent mood, says:
“We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power. ... All you get out of it is weariness and boredom.”
Here we find ourselves, bored of our boredom, incapable as a species of centring our sense of meaning around an insistence on the meaningless at the centre of everything. As Penelope Lively writes in her ever-relevant Moon Tiger, “By the time we have reduced everything to entertainment we shall find that it was no joke after all.” Our cynical, world-weary boredom cannot sustain itself or us; but inside this failure we find a reminder of truths that we might revive.
PART THREE
The Lost Question Their Loss
There is a section of society that hasn’t forgotten what we once knew. This cultural group prides itself on being society’s memory, its backwards glance acting as a reminder to those who would look only ahead at tomorrow and would forget what we knew yesterday. We tend to describe this group as “cultural conservatives”. They are not necessarily capital-C Conservatives, and this group includes many who were once or now remain only tentatively on the Left. This group tends to include those known as centrists, a term now disparaged in the way agnostics and bisexuals have been denigrated in the past for a perceived inability to “pick a side”.
People of this persuasion are prone to asking Big Questions: What have we lost? they wonder out loud, and How have we lost it? and What (if anything) is taking its place? Jeffrey Eugenides’ 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, set in an American suburb in the 1970s, describes one generation watching the world they know passing away, with little sign of what might take its place. In Eugenides’ novel, the Lisbon family become detached from the rest of the world as one by one the teenage daughters kill themselves. There is a poignant scene that marks the macroscopic decline within a microscopic descent, in which the neighbourhood collectively burns piles of autumnal leaves in their yards. The Lisbon family remain absent from this annual act of communal cleansing, “one of the last rituals of [the community’s] disintegrating tribe”.
By the end of The Virgin Suicides, that once-unified neighbourhood has atomised into constituent families and isolated individuals who “rarely ran into one another anymore”. Their rituals have been lost, their shared past forgotten, and they are left wondering what can take its place. A pessimistic answer is given when a new couple move into the old Lisbon house and “set themselves so purposefully to removing signs of the Lisbon girls”. The couple have the whole house sprayed with a paste called Kenitex, predicted to be the future of house painting, but “it took less than a year for chunks of Kenitex to begin falling off like gobs of bird shit”. It’s telling not only that the new couple cover the house with some modern crap that does not last, but that they do so as part of a project to erase what the house used to be. The past is the victim of cultural amnesia.
If, symbolically, the ancient Greeks with their love of wisdom and asking questions represent an Age of Discovering Ideas, and the Printing Revolution represents an Age of Disseminating Ideas, what does our modern, Internet-based age represent? Cultural conservatives note the near-total lack of restrictions on our capacity to store or seek information with the internet, which has led (so their theory goes) to a frivolous view of the content we commit to the web’s memory. We would not bother to scribble as a note most of what we freely and frequently tweet or send as an online message. And when information can be summoned instantly, and so much of it has barely any relevance to our passing interests, there is less perceived need to remember any of it. Ours, then, is an Age of Amnesia.
PART FOUR
A Well-Meaning Interlocutor Objects
Two objections to this accusation of cultural forgetting raise themselves, but can be shot easily down. The first is that, in its seemingly infinite capacity to store information, the internet actually preserves our history. Everything we’ve learned can be discovered with the ease of a Google search. But you have to search for it. If no one bothers to look up the history of Soviet atrocities, or the causes and outcomes of hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, or the syllogistic structure of the Socratic method, then that information is as good as forgotten. And in a culture that offers a constant supply of “new content”, increasingly designed to be as attractive as possible, and in which the urge to know something can be perpetually deferred in the belief that it will always be there to look up later, there is decreasing incentive to search for this knowledge.
The second attempted refutation is that the increasing number of reboots and remakes demonstrates some desire to engage with the past. To this, the ripostes are numerous. The “history” these remakes draw on generally comes from only the last fifty years, in the case of television and cinematic rehashes. They only draw on a relatively small cultural pool (music, movies, and fashion from the eighties and nineties). Worst, most of the do-overs, especially big studio films, treat the “past” they are repeating as merely quaint artefacts of nostalgia. They rarely interrogate their subjects, and they frequently smooth over historical aspects to modify them into products that fit seamlessly into our own time.
There is, however, a third objection, and this one has real power. It cannot be dismissed so easily, nor should it be. There is, so goes the objection, a third view of what our epochal questions are. We aren’t reduced to a binary between cultural complacency and conservative concern for the past. Another section of society has been asking its own cultural questions.
PART FIVE
New Identities Emerge
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, humans are unable to bear mythless, clear-eyed rejections of narrative, metaphor, and meaning. After close to a century of attempting to topple all that Western cultures have built, a twenty-first century response to the boredom and meaninglessness of postmodernity emerged. Starting around 2010, the identity politics that had been fomenting for several decades in the West found new purchase.
If the old stories could not hold up, and the myths of religion were now useless, and the political battles of previous generations were predicated on first principles that came last in modern lists of priorities, then perhaps meaning could be found within the individual self. Purpose might be discovered in the processes of forging and establishing an identity. This is not even close to the full story of the rise of identity politics – which travels back through the solipsism of consumerism, through the gay and civil rights movements, through the existentialism of Sartre et al, and further back still – but the disappearance of group meaning and community solidarity is a vital component of it.
The identitarians have raised their own cultural questions, the issues they believe are of vital importance in our time. These are “big questions” of who we are as individuals relative to the groups to which we happen to belong, and how we define ourselves relative to our race, sexuality, sex and/or gender, and other accidents of birth, as well as asking who has power and what they should do with it – or what those without said power should do in order to even the balance. They reject traditional gender norms, oppose inequality, tear down structures that oppress minorities – in short, they deconstruct everything. They adopt labels that express these oppositional poses (non-binary, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, atheist). But they lack a clear picture of what they hope to build.
There is a discomfiting number of those from this worldview who espouse socialism – and even outright communism – as an expression of what they stand for, and yet even this is most clear on what it opposes (capitalism). On asking for what they hope to put in place of capitalist societies or Enlightenment rationality, one often receives mumbled platitudes about inclusive societies where everyone is equal. Pressing for details usually acts as a strong wave that washes over their ideological sandcastles. A typical follow-up tactic against this onslaught of reason is for the progressive to list the evils of the past and ask, accusatorily, “You want to go back to that? To slavery, and women as property, and child labour?”
It is not only the sins of the past that these revolutionary types want to cleanse from our collective consciousness, it’s also the questions we once asked of ourselves. These questions took many forms and touched on myriad topics, but they all fed data into the cultural calculator seeking the sum of human experience: What does it mean, we once asked, to be human? This question is seen by identitarians to be cynically universalist and distracting from the “real questions” of individual identity. What does it mean, the identitarian, hyper-individualistic Left ask, to be me? It’s this dismissal of the humanist project, coupled with the pseudo-religious effort to purge the world of sin and remove idolatrous imagery, that means this third way, like the Last Men, reinforces the notion that ours is an Age of Amnesia. In this case, the forgetfulness is by design.
PART SIX
The Festivals of Insignificance
In the quest for cultural dominance, each faction of the so-called “culture wars” insists on undermining their opponents by labelling them one of two things: dangerous or irrelevant. Warning the world of how threatening the other side is, we hear that the conservative Right are wealthy fascists committed to crushing the weak, while the progressive Left are aspiring despots dedicated to the overthrow of Western culture. No doubt some on the extremes are described accurately in such terms; what is inexcusably false, and serves nothing other than partisan propaganda, is the idea that everything outside the narrow limits of one’s own position should be considered the extreme fringe.
Instead of castigating the other side as evil, they are sometimes derided as self-centred, ignorant, and plain silly. The conservative Right are worried about some dead white males losing their prestige; meanwhile, the progressive Left think that words are like sticks and stones in their capacity to cause actual, physical violence. In this mode of dismissing the cultural questions of other mindsets, each views the other as indulging in a Festival of Insignificance. If we can only shake off the tendency to move indiscriminately from specific critique to wholesale rejection, we might see that there are concerns from the “other side” that can act dialectically to strengthen our own positions. We might – naively ecumenical as it sounds – learn from each other.
What I am espousing here is frequently referred to, in derisive tones, as “centrism”. The extreme poles of our political divides see any kind of centre as synonymous with the enemy, for not being conservative or progressive enough. The centre is seen as yet another Festival of Insignificance, a set of big cultural questions to be dismissed as irrelevant. But this centrism (if you insist on the term) or liberalism (my preferred term) need not be a final position, nor should it fallaciously claim that the truth on any topic is always found in the middle. It can be an acknowledgment of the missing syllogistic element that gives value to disputation between a progressive thesis and conservative antithesis (or vice versa). It can offer a temporary synthesis, from which we can derive a new starting point for future debates.
Regarding the question of what today’s important cultural questions are, the way forward might just be to take seriously the concerns of those from different camps. It might be that in looking for validity in the ideas of other worldviews, seeking the seed of truth in forests of dissent, we might find new answers and new questions worth asking. Because, in the end, the greatest Festival of Insignificance might be comprised of two sides screaming and no one hearing a thing.
Further Reading:
• The Festival of Insignificance, Milan Kundera (2015)
• Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively (1987)
• The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)