Navigating a Meaningless World

...on the way to a new reality.

A great change has come over the world in the last twenty or thirty years. Its outward expressions - the digital revolution, globalisation, the internet, social media and so on - are familiar to all of us. But just beneath these surface changes, and working mainly in synchrony with them, there have also been shifts in our dominant values and systems of meaning. Old and seemingly stable points of reference such as provided hitherto by nation, religious affiliation, sense of social class or the heterosexual family unit have wilted, partly out of a decline in inner conviction, partly due to attacks from without. Meanwhile new significations have arisen, what seem superficially to be new meanings replacing the old. Multiculturalism, a preoccupation with race and gender, climate change, and PC evolving into Wokeism have provided some of the salient features of the novel outlook.

The old meanings were rather like the typical material goods of the past - functional and durable, if also somewhat predictable. By comparison the dominant ideology of today functions rather like our digital devices, requiring that we adapt to it continuously. Also like our devices it is forever promising more and better, while all too often delivering complication, incompatibility and dysfunction. And yet going backwards is not an option for it, no matter how deplorable the consequences of its own rule. Instead the answer is always to blame the previous dispensation, or whatever remains of it, for the obstacles encountered and the absurdities generated by the new.

There have been numerous times in history when one set of institutions or state structures, and the meanings and values attached to them, have been replaced by others, gradually or suddenly, peaceably or otherwise. Whether such replacements have represented an improvement or not will have been debatable at the time, and may continue so with historical hindsight. What we can generally affirm, however, is that the replacement has been imbued, initially at least, with a greater degree of vital energy and conviction than the old order it has replaced. And so one set of meanings and values has given way to another, not necessarily better - certainly not better in every respect - but embodying undoubtedly a fresh lease of life, and a novel way of envisioning the world.

Our current transition, however, is not following this well-established pattern. Contrary to how things might appear superficially, we are not really seeing the replacement of one set of meanings and values by another. The old has indeed decayed, but the new represents no additional lease of vitality. Instead it takes over the demoralisation already evident before, and aggravates it; it feeds on the corruption that wormed the dark corners of the old, and generalises it. To that extent there has been continuity as well as rupture; but even continuity can become rupture when a tipping point is reached: when a level of corruption that the old could still just about cope with metastasises and becomes irreversible.

One reason why we are slow to appreciate the scope of this change is that our concept of corruption is too narrow. We still think of it, first and foremost, as a personal proclivity, a deplorable one no doubt, and pin it on the usual and rather limited repertoire of suspects - unscrupulous corporations, politicians on the take, bought media and journalists and so on. The Covid enormity ought to have opened our eyes in this regard; certainly it has lengthened the above list to include large parts of the medical profession, the pharmaceutical industry of course, great chunks of the scientific establishment, and the police and judiciary in their role as enforcers of the New Normal. Currently also corruption in academia is becoming a major issue, and promises a long chain reaction of revelations. And the whole trend is summed up, finally, in the concerted attempt to corrupt children. This is being done first by ideologising them when they are still far too young for critical discernment, and then as a consequence of the ideology in question, by sexualising them also.

The pretence that a new set of meanings and values has emerged to replace the old is no more than a sleight of hand. There are no new values or meanings worthy of the name; what is being offered us - forced down our throats rather - is in reality utterly counterfeit.

Clearly then corruption is no longer a matter only of individual deviance, but has grown to systemic proportions. But grown out of what? Out of demoralisation, out of the exhaustion of the previously operative values. Once again there is a tipping point in this process. It is reached when, in response to the question why corruption, the easy and seemingly plausible answer is why not? And it is confirmed when that why not meets with no principled resistance, no corrective turn of the rudder. From there it is but a small step for why not to become a generalised default setting. The line of least resistance takes over, and the process assumes a life - or better said, a mechanised lifelessness - of its own.

The loss of values proceeds in turn from something larger and more elusive, which is the loss of an overarching meaning to human existence. One after the other the large directions provided by religious belief, progressive rationality, revolutionary politics, or the confidence that science and technology could better our lot, have crested and declined. But even then the quest for meaning has continued, only in more fragmented and personalised forms. What to do when the big ships have sunk but cling to the flotsam? When there’s nothing else on offer but consumerism you may go along with it, or entertainment, or celebrity worship, or the construction of one’s very own narcissistic identity - whatever it is, it’s got to be better than drowning in the ocean of the meaningless that extends around us in every direction. It may only be a rotten plank that we’re clinging to, but once invested with significance it is jealously defended.

The paradox is that this desperate attachment to small, residual meanings serves only to accelerate the process of fragmentation, producing still more of the meaninglessness against which they had promised refuge. What is an addiction to social media, for example, but a desperate search for meaning and significance in a place where we are unlikely to find it? Yet while the search yields no wished-for results, it does deliver just the opposite of what was intended: an aggravated sense of insignificance, more isolation, less nurturance, more futility.

As is the case at the individual level, so also at the collective: the pretence that a new set of meanings and values has emerged to replace the old is no more than a sleight of hand. There are no new values or meanings worthy of the name; what is being offered us - forced down our throats rather - is in reality utterly counterfeit. There are slogans and catchphrases, but they mean nothing. Or if they represent anything at all, it is exactly the opposite of what they purport to mean. Take for example the inescapable DEI acronym. Here Diversity signals a demand for uniform compliance, Equity stands for policies of unabashed discrimination, and Inclusion means the systematic exclusion of disfavored sections of the population.

In and of itself the meaningless is insubstantial; as such it can garner substance for itself, or a semblance of it, only through the parody of previous meanings. DEI is a striking case in point. It latches onto values once expressive of noble aspiration, and distorts them in its own image and likeness. It can do no other. The diversity clones, the equity enforcers, the inclusion excluders are the abject tools of the corporate and state interests they serve, yet in the same spirit of parody which informs everything else about them, they preen themselves on their anti-establishment credentials. Where radical commitment in the past was all too often measured in terms of the jail time incurred by those who answered its demands, today’s pseudo-radical posers are the ones who jangle the keys to the lock-up, or as the case may be, the lockdown.

Today the impetus for change arises out of no new lease of vitality welling up from the turbulent depths, as was the case with past historical transformations. Instead it is following out a kind of logic analogous to that imposed on the software developer on the update treadmill. The key difference is that now it is we who are being updated, so that we can be rendered compatible with the digitalised world - or better said, the digitalised prison - that is being built around us, and penalised to the extent that we fail to comply with it.

All the great social transformations of the past were propelled by two essential ingredients: cogency of critique wedded to selfless passion for a cause. This at any rate in the best of cases - we know also what the great waves of history have churned up from the murky depths of the human psyche. What we are seeing now, likewise, are two twin factors at work, only each represents an exact parody of the two noble qualities just mentioned. For cogency of critique we have the clichéd convolutions of the time-servers and jobsworth ideologues, while for selfless passion we have the narcissistic emotivity of the Woke activist. Put them together and you get a coagulate which may seem like it is engaged in the business of producing meaning, but which in reality is only dissolving whatever residual meaning it can still lay its hands on, while failing to produce anything minimally coherent to take its place.

In and of itself the meaningless is insubstantial; as such it can garner substance for itself, or a semblance of it, only through the parody of previous meanings. DEI is a striking case in point. It latches onto values once expressive of noble aspiration, and distorts them in its own image and likeness.

And so again we are not currently experiencing the replacement of one set of meanings and values by another, but instead are witnessing the displacement of all meaning by the meaningless, of all values by what is lacking any kind of value, of all sense by what is patently absurd if not altogether demented. It is an inescapable spectacle, and yet there is commonly a reluctance to face it in its full implications. This is understandable, first because it is not a gratifying sight to behold, but also because there is no obvious precedent for such a state of affairs. Whole societies have crumbled and collapsed in the past, of course, but they have done so out of obvious exhaustion and disintegration, whereas our globalised society seems to be possessed of a frenetic energy that is driving it headlong into the future.

That show of energy, however, is just as illusory as the plausible meanings to which we are required to bend the knee. Indeed paradoxical as it may seem, the apparent vitality of our present times is due in large measure to our own fatalistic inertia. Think of passengers being jolted in a train, or experiencing airborne turbulence, and it will be obvious that their very physical inertia ensures that they are tossed about this way and that. Likewise with us: we may be stressed by the demands of work or domesticity, fearful in the face of a strangely mutating world, or intense in the animosities which such a world generates; yet none of this demonstrates that we are truly active from within rather than being jolted and prodded from without.

Such inertia is fed by fatalism, guilt and a contracting fear which the mass media, politicians and experts of various stripes are ever keen to magnify. Yet even if we have learnt to distrust their repetitious pronouncements, or even if we are dead set against their narratives, it may still seem that we have every reason to be fearful if not fatalistic in the face of the current and likely future state of world affairs.

This is where a broader perspective can be of great value. Let us admit for the sake of argument that we are in the midst of a vast cyclical unfolding, only a small segment of which is apparent from our current standpoint in time. What we are experiencing then within that small segment is something which in its own terms is undoubtedly major, not to say profoundly unsettling, yet which is revealed in a larger view to be part of a predictable pattern that is working itself out as it must.

Viewed in such a perspective our present conjuncture is fulfilling its function within the broader scheme of things. That function is unavoidably a destructive one, and painful to experience, at least if we are identified with the old and hold it dear, as which of us does not, in one way or another. Not only is it destructive but it is perilous also, for the old is being pulled down before a genuine new life has taken shape. Into the resulting gap or interregnum forces hostile to humanity have entered, attempting to bring about the miscarriage of what is due to be born in us.

Not easy times to live in. Yet just as it can happen in personal life, so also in the life of the collective: we only dig deep into our inner resources when we find ourselves with no other alternative, and in response go into do or die mode. The resources are there: they have to be, for they are just as much a product of the great cycle’s unfoldment as the obstacles which keep them concealed. Major upheavals will be required if those obstacles are to be displaced, yet in this regard at least we can rest assured, for upheavals are one thing we can safely count on in the coming years.

Here at the conclusion of this post I find myself opening onto a vast subject, one which can only be tentatively sketched, which is why anything I say at this point is likely to sound rather cryptic. My intention, however, is to focus consistently in future articles on this theme of cyclical unfoldment, shedding light on its many facets so that hopefully a much larger picture will gradually emerge. Our current phantasmagoria exercises a perverse fascination over us, but it is only when we draw well back from it that a proper perspective can be gained. First, inner repose: then courage and hope can arise out of it for the struggles ahead.