Rebuilding

                When I used to argue with people about what postmodernism meant, the most common complaint was that pomo undermined the ‘truth.’  My response was that ‘truth’ was already undermined and that a weak sense of truth was better than an absolute sense of truth anyway.  In other words, the critique of postmodernism has always been more descriptive than prescriptive – it merely showed what was already going on.  Now we’re in the midst of a presidency where truth has taken a sabbatical.  Trump makes up new stuff everyday that is demonstrably untrue, but he uses it to build support among his followers, who mimic everything he and Fox News put out there.  It gives Trump too much credit to say he is cleverly manipulating the system.  The real problem is that the system has been broken for a long time, and Trump is just the logical conclusion.

                The ‘norms’ that Trump is accused of breaking on a daily basis have been crumbling for a long time.  Advertising has more to do with the way most Americans construct the world than reason.  We have made a world that we want to live in and have abdicated responsibility to obtuse institutions.  It is both comical and pathetic to see reporters point out another transgression and then wait for someone to spell out what the consequences for it should be.  There no consequences.  The capitalist fantasy that we’ve constructed has no controls.  We have taken the ‘right’s’ that people in the 18^th century only dreamed of having and turned them into libertarian privileges that prevent us from ever assuming responsibility for our actions and intentions.  The right to speak freely has become the right to be freely stupid and the privilege to revel in our stupidity.

                Maturana says that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  Everything we do and say has consequences and we are responsible for them.  When people talk about ‘rebuilding the institutions of democracy,’ they are forgetting that without rebuilding the people in the democracy the institutions are useless.  We have gutted our educational system and turned what is left of it into a vocational wasteland.  Not even science, that supposed champion of modernity, stands a chance against a population of entitled morons.  If we want a better government, we have to be better people.  We can talk about STEM education all we want, but without an education that produces adults and not just technicians, education is not just futile, it is dangerous.  We are training people to do things without giving them the capacity or even the inclination to ask if they should do them. 

                Just as no one can eat fast food all the time and be healthy, no one can consume the constant diet of media we produce and be responsible.  We market everything to everybody, but we don’t sell a reality that is sustainable and healthy.  Even our most personal and intimate relationships are fragmented and sold off as fetishized illusions of sex and power.  This isn’t a sermon, but if we want to be a great country, we have to be better people.  We have to care about things that define our humanity and our purpose.  I’m not here to sell a version of what those should be.  We have to build them together, or the best thing that could happen to the planet is that we descend quickly and quietly into insignificance. 

                What we’re watching is not just a spectacularly bad presidency.  What we’re watching is the end of what cultural theorists have called modernity, the age of reason and science.  What fuels Trump and the 40% or so of the people who support him is the pleasure that comes from living in your own little fantasy without the guilt of thinking about what it does to others or the planet.  Trump is high on power, and the people around him are getting a contact high off that.  He might be impeached.  He might walk away.  He might not be reelected, although I wouldn’t bet on any of those.  It doesn’t matter.  He has brought us to the end of grand political and social experiment that began in the Enlightenment. 

                When religion failed to be the basis of a world after the end of Kings, we propped up reason and it’s fair haired offspring science as the new bedrock of society.  It had a nice run.  It did some good things.  Of course, it also destroyed the planet and brought us horrific wars, but let’s not quibble.  It’s over.  Who knows what’s next.  What we do know is what the end of modernity looks like:  an orange clown with a ferret for headpiece.