Packaging
If you take literature and art courses in college, you’ll encounter not only different genres, but also different styles, moods, or themes, such as “classicism,” “romanticism,” “realism,” “naturalism,” and “symbolism,” all associated with different “ages” and groups of like-minded writers either the product of their times or revolutionaries in their times. The realists, for example, rejected the moods and themes of their predecessor romanticists, making the former “revolutionaries” in a period leading to the revolutions of 1848. This type of literary classification and historical perspective is useful for understanding western writers, but might be useless for eastern culture writers and artists. For the sake of argument here, I’ll use the classification of Western trends as a context for understanding the United States in the twenty-first century, but I’ll admit that such classification schemes occur only in retrospect. Culture, and that includes intellectual culture, is generally organic because the appeal of any philosophy art or music or literature movement often relies not on rational contemplation but rather on emotional urges.
Our brains have a tendency to package thoughts and political and social movements. Packaging makes the world easier to understand. We’re all a bit Linnaean. Or, maybe a bit obsessive-compulsive. Thus, we speak of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century even though there were many who were far less than enlightened than the writers and diplomats who ferried thoughts around Europe and the Colonies. As the old saying goes, every system or ideology, every movement, and every motivation contains the seeds of its antithesis—especially when carried out to its fullest extent.
The Progression within a Stasis
I think most of us realize that everything happens all at once. Peace here is countered by war there. You might live in a peaceful community at this time, but in January, 2024, more than thirty conflicts are displacing people and taking lives. Love and unity are offset by hate and disunity. Thus, the opening paragraph of this essay should be read in the context of historical and ongoing complexity. And whenever one human perspective seems to dominate—as the movement of symbolism did from 1890 to the beginning of WWI—one can be assured that a counter movement, if not exactly the opposite, then at least “different,” underlies the dominant perspective, much like the early mammals underlay the dinosaurs until the latter’s extinction.
Like the mammals replacing the extinct dinosaurs, some forms of the earlier themes remain, though altered, just as the avian dinosaurs continue to this day (See that bird?). Some writers today could easily fall into the category of symbolists as they mimic the fin de siècle literary movement practiced by Oscar Wilde and explained by the pessimistic Arthur Schopenhauer. (In fact, if as some say, the pessimism of the fin de siècle foreshadowed the rise of Fascism, then today’s Antifa movement and government overreach and attempts at censorship, actually parallel much of what was going on during the Symbolist movement)
But given our penchant to place things in packages or categories, we have reason to see a progression of perspectives and movements within the past half millennium. The Renaissance and Classicism gave way in the early nineteenth century first to Romanticism, and then in sequence to Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism. Characterizing today’s literature and art is more difficult, partly because we’re in the midst of it and partly because literature and art have borrowed from all the previous moods and styles, and finally, partly from the number of writers spread throughout the Web seeking to establish an identity.
Just as there are only about six or seven fundamental plots for stories, so there are only limited numbers of moods and styles. Mixing is inevitable, so there’s a blurry demarcation among the various approaches in all the arts and cultural perspectives. Think of classical music recitatives reborn in Hip Hop rap, or talk-singing as I call both. In short, all moods and styles, from politics to the arts, borrow from previous moods and styles and the milieu in which they are created—even when their stated purpose is to overturn the contemporary milieu.
So, Where Are We Today?
When I began thinking about this topic this morning, I assumed I could write a quick summary. That approach immediately proved to be just plain foolish because the United States now looks both west and east and past and future (consider AI) in its motivations. These motives have produced a simplistic dichotomy in the minds of many: Conservatives supposedly looking to the past and Progressives supposedly looking to the future. But in practice, these stereotypes of moods, themes, and styles are reductions to absurdity.
Those in tune with social media, the Web, and mass media fall into identifiable categories, don’t they? And I’ve been as guilty of reductionism as anyone on social media, the mainstream media, and the gajillion bloggers. I’ve labeled our times variously through these essays, and I might add Age of Whiners, Age of Doomsayers, Age of Snowflakes, Age of Indifference, Age of False Narratives, Age of Ideology, Age of Immigration, Age of Terrorism, Age of Petty Concerns, Age of Bitterness, Age of Gossip, Age of Overt Narcissists, Age of Artificiality (think AI; think gender fluidity), the Age of … (your turn)
Yet, not one of those suggested names is anything other than a reductio ad absurdum because of our fundamental contradictory nature. Nothing new here as Mary Shelley encapsulated in her famous novel; there’s a Hyde in both individuals and movements.
So, what would be the best way to characterize our times? No doubt you have your favorite goto characterization, but do you have it for all the age or for just select aspects of the age?
Pick a Topic, Any Topic
Today, I’ve convinced myself that only in the context of specific topics can we frame a characterization. Abortion is an example. The ethical conflict of our times centers on a definition and a value: What is human life? Then, given the assumption that we can define human life, we ask, “Does human life have an intrinsic value?”
Then we get into the nitty-gritty. Both sides have their contradictions. Those favoring abortion often oppose capital punishment. Those selectively favoring capital punishment oppose abortion. When the Obama Administration killed Osama bin Laden, many pro-lifers applauded. Seems that the value of an adult human is something to be earned, and bin Laden didn’t earn longevity. But the same Administration also seems to have been either pro-abortion or indifferent to it (on the basis of Democratic platforms, I’d guess the former). So, the official stance of Obama’s Administration seems to have been that those among the unborn who had no opportunity to work for merit and value were, in fact, valueless. But adults who had either earned value or not earned it were deemed either valuable or valueless, and bin Laden was the latter. I know that seems like a simplification, but remember that we’re trying to define an age by the perspectives, actions, and “moods” of its denizens. For abortionists, human value depends…
On what? Well, that depends on whom. For pro-lifers with ambivalent stances toward capital punishment, then the same can be said, except that for the youngest, those still in the womb, the value comes by fiat, not by deed, and the pro-abortion god doesn’t impart value. And then at the other end of life’s spectrum lies the similar problems of suicide, euthanasia, and war. Can one voluntarily give up human value, or have it taken away in as in the case of bin Laden? Can one voluntarily take away human value? Certainly, those who initiate wars, such as Putin in Ukraine, have little compunction about sending the innocent to their deaths, as tens of thousands of Russians have discovered their valuelessness.
Or, take the current problem with immigration. Before the crush of what is currently the population equivalent to a Cincinnati (300,000) entering the country every month, those who said, “Let’s open the border” maintained a symbolic value system, essentially saying, “All are welcome here.” The permission to enter the country en masse was a symbol of the tolerance and value that Democrats wanted the world to see while simultaneously being a rub-dirt-in-the-face of proponents of border security. And now? Well, overwhelmed with immigrants taking advantage of handouts like free transportation, phones, time to wander about the country uninhibited, food, clothing, and shelter, Democrat mayors and councils are beginning to rethink their policies—and they will continue to do so unless the Feds provide them with lucrative handouts. So, one has to ask, “Is this an age of Statue of Liberty Charity?” Is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” the defining ethical characterization of our age?
Could we characterize the age at the beginning of the immigration crush as one deriving from a Romantic View, one that praised the “noble savage,” the downtrodden, the destitute, and the persecuted? Could we characterize the age as one of unavoidable Realism framed in the questions, “Who’s going to pay for all this?” And “Where are we going to put all these people?” In the midst of the problem of immigration a new wave of crime has risen in neighborhoods housing tent-city immigrants, forcing a revitalization of a dark Realism. As Roland N. Stromberg writes in his introduction to Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism, “…the ‘realists’ put aside a varieties of ‘unrealities’ such as …the cult of the exotic (medieval, oriental, the remote, and the fairylandish), or seemingly impossible political ideals, or idealism in philosophy” (xii). * The proponents of “sanctuary cities” seem to be turning away from a burdensome ideology and toward a realistic perspective. Are the Left's idealists becoming realists?
Take at least one more topic on this journey to defining our age: Modern Capitalism. Socialists will label it the bane of modern civilization and human dignity. It’s a system that makes the rich richer and that divides them almost continuously from the poor. Of course, we recognize that, as the saying goes, “I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” (The origin of the saying is debatable, but seems to go on a trail from Beatrice Kaufman through Joe E. Lewis, Sophie Tucker, and a number of others) Thus, we find a new definition: The Age of Hypocrisy. I frame that term in light of the millionaire wealth of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders and a number of other Democrats who speak of distributing wealth while hoarding their own.
Is this an Age of Failed Ideologies? Is this an Age of Confused People?
See the Problem Here?
As I wrote above, it’s difficult to see the whole when one is part of a part. We can surmise the shape of our galaxy, for example, but we can only do so by some observations that reveal a similarity to spiral galaxies seen through telescopes. We’re in the midst of an “AGE,” but as in all previous “ages,” we can’t see ourselves from an outside perspective. We live in a galaxy not just of stars but also of moods, styles, and movements.
I would like to think that right now there’s some primordial never-before-seen and therefore wholly original movement taking place in a mind-pond like those one-celled organisms of 3.8 billion years ago that eventually evolved to become multicellular. But I’m inclined to think with Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
And one of the reasons I am so inclined is that analogously, those early life-forms took their existence from a “primordial soup” that, if it were today’s Earth environment, it would decimate the life that has evolved. I’m sure you don’t want to live in an environment of sulfuric acid, acetylene, and formaldehyde, all compounds suspected to lie on the pathway from an abiotic to a biotic world. Once life formed and began its journey toward consciousness and us in particular, the fundamental stuff of life couldn’t be reused to restart the whole process again, producing an entirely different life regime on the planet. And the same seems to apply to the rise of any age. The stuff of culture that makes up ages—movements, ideologies, actions, moods—already kick-started the current culture and the possible forms it can take. Ages are like phyla, they are the possible forms that human endeavors can adopt. The phyla can be linked, as Fascism, Socialism, and Communism can be linked, but they do retain their forms and are recognizable as separate “entities.” We humans still retain that “reptilian” part of the brain. This “age” is still linked to past “ages” in many ways, physically, intellectually, and emotionally.
Admitting Failure
So, I guess I have done here what I would never have advised college students and colleagues to do in an essay: Write from beginning to an indefinite end. My advice was always to write an essay from end to beginning, that is, to know where one was going and to end there with the reader. **
But as usual, I’ll suggest that something good can come out of my failure to define our current age: At least I’ve given you some food for thought.
So, I leave you with the question: How would you define your times?
*Sromberg, Roland N. 1968. Subtitled Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914. New York. Harper Torchbooks.
**A bit of advice: As you write, ask yourself if the reader knows how he’s gotten to where he is in the piece, that is, if he knows why you are saying what you’re saying in a given sentence or paragraph. Advice I ignored in the above essay.
If you take literature and art courses in college, you’ll encounter not only different genres, but also different styles, moods, or themes, such as “classicism,” “romanticism,” “realism,” “naturalism,” and “symbolism,” all associated with different “ages” and groups of like-minded writers either the product of their times or revolutionaries in their times. The realists, for example, rejected the moods and themes of their predecessor romanticists, making the former “revolutionaries” in a period leading to the revolutions of 1848. This type of literary classification and historical perspective is useful for understanding western writers, but might be useless for eastern culture writers and artists. For the sake of argument here, I’ll use the classification of Western trends as a context for understanding the United States in the twenty-first century, but I’ll admit that such classification schemes occur only in retrospect. Culture, and that includes intellectual culture, is generally organic because the appeal of any philosophy art or music or literature movement often relies not on rational contemplation but rather on emotional urges.
Our brains have a tendency to package thoughts and political and social movements. Packaging makes the world easier to understand. We’re all a bit Linnaean. Or, maybe a bit obsessive-compulsive. Thus, we speak of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century even though there were many who were far less than enlightened than the writers and diplomats who ferried thoughts around Europe and the Colonies. As the old saying goes, every system or ideology, every movement, and every motivation contains the seeds of its antithesis—especially when carried out to its fullest extent.
The Progression within a Stasis
I think most of us realize that everything happens all at once. Peace here is countered by war there. You might live in a peaceful community at this time, but in January, 2024, more than thirty conflicts are displacing people and taking lives. Love and unity are offset by hate and disunity. Thus, the opening paragraph of this essay should be read in the context of historical and ongoing complexity. And whenever one human perspective seems to dominate—as the movement of symbolism did from 1890 to the beginning of WWI—one can be assured that a counter movement, if not exactly the opposite, then at least “different,” underlies the dominant perspective, much like the early mammals underlay the dinosaurs until the latter’s extinction.
Like the mammals replacing the extinct dinosaurs, some forms of the earlier themes remain, though altered, just as the avian dinosaurs continue to this day (See that bird?). Some writers today could easily fall into the category of symbolists as they mimic the fin de siècle literary movement practiced by Oscar Wilde and explained by the pessimistic Arthur Schopenhauer. (In fact, if as some say, the pessimism of the fin de siècle foreshadowed the rise of Fascism, then today’s Antifa movement and government overreach and attempts at censorship, actually parallel much of what was going on during the Symbolist movement)
But given our penchant to place things in packages or categories, we have reason to see a progression of perspectives and movements within the past half millennium. The Renaissance and Classicism gave way in the early nineteenth century first to Romanticism, and then in sequence to Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism. Characterizing today’s literature and art is more difficult, partly because we’re in the midst of it and partly because literature and art have borrowed from all the previous moods and styles, and finally, partly from the number of writers spread throughout the Web seeking to establish an identity.
Just as there are only about six or seven fundamental plots for stories, so there are only limited numbers of moods and styles. Mixing is inevitable, so there’s a blurry demarcation among the various approaches in all the arts and cultural perspectives. Think of classical music recitatives reborn in Hip Hop rap, or talk-singing as I call both. In short, all moods and styles, from politics to the arts, borrow from previous moods and styles and the milieu in which they are created—even when their stated purpose is to overturn the contemporary milieu.
So, Where Are We Today?
When I began thinking about this topic this morning, I assumed I could write a quick summary. That approach immediately proved to be just plain foolish because the United States now looks both west and east and past and future (consider AI) in its motivations. These motives have produced a simplistic dichotomy in the minds of many: Conservatives supposedly looking to the past and Progressives supposedly looking to the future. But in practice, these stereotypes of moods, themes, and styles are reductions to absurdity.
Those in tune with social media, the Web, and mass media fall into identifiable categories, don’t they? And I’ve been as guilty of reductionism as anyone on social media, the mainstream media, and the gajillion bloggers. I’ve labeled our times variously through these essays, and I might add Age of Whiners, Age of Doomsayers, Age of Snowflakes, Age of Indifference, Age of False Narratives, Age of Ideology, Age of Immigration, Age of Terrorism, Age of Petty Concerns, Age of Bitterness, Age of Gossip, Age of Overt Narcissists, Age of Artificiality (think AI; think gender fluidity), the Age of … (your turn)
Yet, not one of those suggested names is anything other than a reductio ad absurdum because of our fundamental contradictory nature. Nothing new here as Mary Shelley encapsulated in her famous novel; there’s a Hyde in both individuals and movements.
So, what would be the best way to characterize our times? No doubt you have your favorite goto characterization, but do you have it for all the age or for just select aspects of the age?
Pick a Topic, Any Topic
Today, I’ve convinced myself that only in the context of specific topics can we frame a characterization. Abortion is an example. The ethical conflict of our times centers on a definition and a value: What is human life? Then, given the assumption that we can define human life, we ask, “Does human life have an intrinsic value?”
Then we get into the nitty-gritty. Both sides have their contradictions. Those favoring abortion often oppose capital punishment. Those selectively favoring capital punishment oppose abortion. When the Obama Administration killed Osama bin Laden, many pro-lifers applauded. Seems that the value of an adult human is something to be earned, and bin Laden didn’t earn longevity. But the same Administration also seems to have been either pro-abortion or indifferent to it (on the basis of Democratic platforms, I’d guess the former). So, the official stance of Obama’s Administration seems to have been that those among the unborn who had no opportunity to work for merit and value were, in fact, valueless. But adults who had either earned value or not earned it were deemed either valuable or valueless, and bin Laden was the latter. I know that seems like a simplification, but remember that we’re trying to define an age by the perspectives, actions, and “moods” of its denizens. For abortionists, human value depends…
On what? Well, that depends on whom. For pro-lifers with ambivalent stances toward capital punishment, then the same can be said, except that for the youngest, those still in the womb, the value comes by fiat, not by deed, and the pro-abortion god doesn’t impart value. And then at the other end of life’s spectrum lies the similar problems of suicide, euthanasia, and war. Can one voluntarily give up human value, or have it taken away in as in the case of bin Laden? Can one voluntarily take away human value? Certainly, those who initiate wars, such as Putin in Ukraine, have little compunction about sending the innocent to their deaths, as tens of thousands of Russians have discovered their valuelessness.
Or, take the current problem with immigration. Before the crush of what is currently the population equivalent to a Cincinnati (300,000) entering the country every month, those who said, “Let’s open the border” maintained a symbolic value system, essentially saying, “All are welcome here.” The permission to enter the country en masse was a symbol of the tolerance and value that Democrats wanted the world to see while simultaneously being a rub-dirt-in-the-face of proponents of border security. And now? Well, overwhelmed with immigrants taking advantage of handouts like free transportation, phones, time to wander about the country uninhibited, food, clothing, and shelter, Democrat mayors and councils are beginning to rethink their policies—and they will continue to do so unless the Feds provide them with lucrative handouts. So, one has to ask, “Is this an age of Statue of Liberty Charity?” Is “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” the defining ethical characterization of our age?
Could we characterize the age at the beginning of the immigration crush as one deriving from a Romantic View, one that praised the “noble savage,” the downtrodden, the destitute, and the persecuted? Could we characterize the age as one of unavoidable Realism framed in the questions, “Who’s going to pay for all this?” And “Where are we going to put all these people?” In the midst of the problem of immigration a new wave of crime has risen in neighborhoods housing tent-city immigrants, forcing a revitalization of a dark Realism. As Roland N. Stromberg writes in his introduction to Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism, “…the ‘realists’ put aside a varieties of ‘unrealities’ such as …the cult of the exotic (medieval, oriental, the remote, and the fairylandish), or seemingly impossible political ideals, or idealism in philosophy” (xii). * The proponents of “sanctuary cities” seem to be turning away from a burdensome ideology and toward a realistic perspective. Are the Left's idealists becoming realists?
Take at least one more topic on this journey to defining our age: Modern Capitalism. Socialists will label it the bane of modern civilization and human dignity. It’s a system that makes the rich richer and that divides them almost continuously from the poor. Of course, we recognize that, as the saying goes, “I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.” (The origin of the saying is debatable, but seems to go on a trail from Beatrice Kaufman through Joe E. Lewis, Sophie Tucker, and a number of others) Thus, we find a new definition: The Age of Hypocrisy. I frame that term in light of the millionaire wealth of self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders and a number of other Democrats who speak of distributing wealth while hoarding their own.
Is this an Age of Failed Ideologies? Is this an Age of Confused People?
See the Problem Here?
As I wrote above, it’s difficult to see the whole when one is part of a part. We can surmise the shape of our galaxy, for example, but we can only do so by some observations that reveal a similarity to spiral galaxies seen through telescopes. We’re in the midst of an “AGE,” but as in all previous “ages,” we can’t see ourselves from an outside perspective. We live in a galaxy not just of stars but also of moods, styles, and movements.
I would like to think that right now there’s some primordial never-before-seen and therefore wholly original movement taking place in a mind-pond like those one-celled organisms of 3.8 billion years ago that eventually evolved to become multicellular. But I’m inclined to think with Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes 1:9 that
What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
And one of the reasons I am so inclined is that analogously, those early life-forms took their existence from a “primordial soup” that, if it were today’s Earth environment, it would decimate the life that has evolved. I’m sure you don’t want to live in an environment of sulfuric acid, acetylene, and formaldehyde, all compounds suspected to lie on the pathway from an abiotic to a biotic world. Once life formed and began its journey toward consciousness and us in particular, the fundamental stuff of life couldn’t be reused to restart the whole process again, producing an entirely different life regime on the planet. And the same seems to apply to the rise of any age. The stuff of culture that makes up ages—movements, ideologies, actions, moods—already kick-started the current culture and the possible forms it can take. Ages are like phyla, they are the possible forms that human endeavors can adopt. The phyla can be linked, as Fascism, Socialism, and Communism can be linked, but they do retain their forms and are recognizable as separate “entities.” We humans still retain that “reptilian” part of the brain. This “age” is still linked to past “ages” in many ways, physically, intellectually, and emotionally.
Admitting Failure
So, I guess I have done here what I would never have advised college students and colleagues to do in an essay: Write from beginning to an indefinite end. My advice was always to write an essay from end to beginning, that is, to know where one was going and to end there with the reader. **
But as usual, I’ll suggest that something good can come out of my failure to define our current age: At least I’ve given you some food for thought.
So, I leave you with the question: How would you define your times?
*Sromberg, Roland N. 1968. Subtitled Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914. New York. Harper Torchbooks.
**A bit of advice: As you write, ask yourself if the reader knows how he’s gotten to where he is in the piece, that is, if he knows why you are saying what you’re saying in a given sentence or paragraph. Advice I ignored in the above essay.
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