Why My Life Makes Little Sense

My life makes little sense because mine is a liminal generation. The point when I should have launched into flourishing was a point when the world changed. Like all great changes, it has been recognised only backwards and too late. We came unprepared. More precisely, we came prepared for the wrong worlds.

Ideas

As soon as I entered young adulthood, the Soviet Union was gone. What had been a third of the map was no more. It was as though the pink maps of the British Empire had been bleached still more quickly than those were. We had accepted that atheism and Stalinism were a fact, dominant and permanent, and now they were not.

Now we were told it was the end of ideology. The world was unipolar because American values had prevailed. Then the world was multipolar because competing power centres, like Beijing and Tehran, proved more important than had been thought. What the world never was again was a choice between two sets of values.

Two years later than the USSR’s collapse, in 1994, an essayist called Sven Birketts published The Gutenberg Elegies. ‘Instead of carrying on the ancient project of philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘attempting to discover the truth of things — we direct our energies to managing information’: he wrote this in 1994! [1] Why no longer mattered. What and how, were the order of the day.

Words

In that essay Sven Birketts refers to ‘desert island’ reading. Had you only one printed book, you would read it again and again. He explains that ‘intensive reading’ like that had given way to the ‘extensive reading’ in this new dataverse. Thirty years ago, in other words, we were warned. But the schools fell over themselves to install computers. They said they were training young people for the future, by allowing them old software.

Schools I attended myself had tried to prepare us. We were told that computers (and languages) would be important. But we could see with our own eyes that computer nerds and geeks were not the norm. So the reading we were taught (whatever the languages) remained intensive. It was what schools today, trying to salvage the wreckage of their actions and inaction, call ‘deep’ and ‘close’.

Words can be jammed together today any which way, as ideas can. The tech makes it possible. Tech is not nerdy now. It is ‘user-friendly’. Even before it was generated for you, text was cut and pasted for a generation. The punctuation of the previous context remained in the new. Noun phrases were compounded like Lego bricks. There is no grammar of ideas, or words, that anyone can enforce, anymore.

Posthistoire

This idea of a final meaninglessness is not so new. It was also 1994 when Lutz Niethammer wrote Posthistoire. I read it in a college library. It was already a history — of an idea. The idea that history was over was common to the Left and the Right. People have been reacting to the loss of meaning all this time since. Populism is the fruit. It is the sound of a receding wave.

My generation was taught that religious faith was at an end, and that religion was the echo of the wave receding from the shore — as for Matthew Arnold on Dover beach. In fact, the age of the loss of faith, coming after ‘the age of faith’, was the past in which our teachers were brought up, and which they educated us for, believing it still to be present. The present time is the loss of even existential meaning.

For Sven Birketts, reading an actual and material book, silently turning its pages, and forced to its pace, had been the ritual through which ‘existential meaning’ was created; and this, not any skill with tools, was what distinguished the human being.[2] It has been said that this is how the self, however illusory, came about. First there was an oral culture in which one’s self was communal; then there had been the private self. Reading meant something. It made meanings something.

Pretty pictures

‘There is no monastic work more appropriate, more useful, and closer to our vows than the office of copying.’ These words came from Johannes Trithemius, in 1492, and are quoted by Jeff Jarvis.[3] He meant: copying by hand. ‘Monks should not stop copying because of the invention of printing.’ Today even monasteries are plugged into the world. It would take a Don Quixote, a person formed by books, to make a braver choice.

In the nineteenth century, public schools multiplied. Grammar schools were rebooted in imitation of those the Clarendon Commission had noticed. Arnold’s followers tried and failed to make these schools a medium of Christianity as well as of swanking and sport. The cult of the chivalric gentleman took off — what Mark Girouard called The Return To Camelot. When Don Quixote believed himself, he was a laughing stock, but the public schools did not really believe in chivalry — except as a tool for keeping one’s position and getting one’s way.

Sincerity was so last year. In the period I have sketched, the outline of my own life, irony was king. Observational comedy emerged. When ideas, words and narratives could not be trusted, a shared distrust became the basis for comedy clubs, a new centre in which trust between performer and audience, there today but gone tomorrow, could be forged. It made for Dadaism in all arenas, in the ‘real world’ too: random juxtaposition of pictured situations that could only make you laugh.

Austerity

But now, there will need to be a new austerity. Those whose employment survives will work amplified by AI. The public schoolboys of my generation have made off with their loot. The few own the lion’s share and the scraps are fewer for the many, and soon there will be no point in the mental world, which no longer has clear boundaries between public and private, subjective and objective, at which you can be sure you are speaking to a person. What will principles matter then?

The self will disappear, in other words; the private self. This does not mean that the communal self will return. We enclosed and privatised the communal self, and the new networks are fissiparous as slow-growth communities were not. It may be that people disappear into the mutual objectivity of computing. Their only chance of returning to themselves may lie in that desert island reading, and first they will need their desert.

As in the past, we have clung to the past. We are trying to hold on to our gains. Faced with the climate, for example, which is changing now as was predicted at the start of my period here, we prefer to argue whether there should be a government solution or an individual solution when of course, in democracies, it is the same thing. We are occupying an abstract space in which we need do nothing. We vote Green and go to the Maldives.

I think we need to remember what first made us human. I was a close reader, practising a religion, examining ideologies, trying to do good and shun evil, who has now become a managed unit of labour, a data-point, ‘converted’ to sales, and pressed to skim-read. The internet, bubbling with bots, is not a community. To live in spite of it, sacrifice has to be done, rather than spoken. Persons cannot grow as an appendage to the machine. Things must be gone without. The flights must not be taken. The pages must be turned.

[1] The Gutenberg Elegies, Faber and Faber, 1994, p.75

[2] The Gutenberg Elegies, Faber and Faber, 1994, p.31

[3] The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 18–19.