The Age of Absurdity

 

There's a lot happening. So far in 2020 we've lived through a devastating bushfire season unlike any other, we've been entertained by a "gay, gun-toting cowboy with a mullet" on the unbelievable insane world of Tiger King, woken to an anomalous downpour of brown dirty rain in Melbourne, read news of Grimes' and Elon Musk's bizarrely named newborn, X Æ A-12, we've seen cardboard hospital beds in Colombia which fold easily into coffins, and been repeatedly astonished by the President of the United States who recently suggested we defeat this virus by soaking up disinfectant or sunlight in vivo. All this and it's not yet June.

It feels like we're hurtling into an era characterised by an intersection of disaster with the disorientatingly absurd. Everything is unprecedented and nothing really surprises us anymore. At least we're not surprised when we're surprised. Everything is weird and nothing is normal. That's the new normal and it just is what it is. Who are you to judge? And according to who's facts? The plurality of views and voices which surround us can be dislocating and mind-numbing.

Conspiracy theories which turn everything upside down have propagated in this fertile soil, especially - but not exclusively - in America. Bill Gates, who's foundation has campaigned for pandemic awareness and preparedness for years is behind it all! Donald Trump, who has served as a gift to the rich and cut services to the rest, is hailed as a Machiavellian saviour who's just biding his time before he exposes the huge paedophile ring of the elite "deep state". Or how about the economic-prosperity-obsessed state of China crashing its own economy with a global bio-weapon? Why not!? A majority of Americans believe it according to one poll. That's not fringe. Locally, Australia's alt-right got traction online in baselessly blaming our bushfire season on Muslim extremism. Everyone's got a truth to tell you and you can rest assured everyone else is telling lies.

Where does this leave us? It's hard to sense-make when nothing makes sense. Especially when an inflated sense of purity and an (often legitimate) fear of backlash deters many from openly debating proponents of nonsense and calling them out. We need to have hard conversations that confront difference. Instead, ideas are often left to fester in the margins, but then to grow beyond them, where they can seep into the mainstream and start corroding common sense. Not that common sense resides in the "mainstream" anymore, as what was mainstream no longer dominates, and has become warped in itself, we see this in the distorted universe of the Murdoch press, for example.

The sense of disorientation  is palpable. It feels like someone has cut the collective cord to the mothership and left us spinning in zero-gravity. We've lost our frames of reference and with nothing available for scale but the infinite blackness of space, that station which once secured, reassured, and orientated us, could now appear as incidental and insignificant as any other piece of cosmic litter. The modern narratives which attempted to cohere the bits together could never have sustained, but we're yet to craft something in their place. Nietzsche foreshadowed this radical disorientation and relativisation:

"Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?"

Both the death of God, which Nietzsche lamented, and the destabilisation (again, understandably) of modern faith in our institutions, in information and facts, and even in our own human nature, have left us spinning. I won't hasten for a false fix, for a regression back to paradigmatic absolutism, or for solutions only pregnant with more problems. Although we're in a lucky spot of relative reasonableness in Australia, ours is still the age of the absurd, and only through its long dark passage can we emerge somewhere new and into a new orientation.