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The Age of Absurdity

NWRatCon

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When I thought of this thread title, I was unaware of the book by Michael Foley of the same name (or the album by Phil Campbell). This thread is not about that... exactly. The theme of that book, however, fits into this narrative. I was thinking of the 1920 novel by Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence and the 1977 book by Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty. I liked the play of words, and the interplay between those titles. And, I was thinking of absurdism philosophy and literature, and how apt it is in our current age.

Voltaire said (in translation), "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." ("Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste"). We are certainly in the throes of that condition. Putin's excuses for invading Ukraine certainly fall within that paradigm, and I would argue that the whole MAGA movement, and the events of January 6 are proof of its validity. But, again, this thread is about more than that.

The subtitle of Foley's book is "Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy", and that does fit into my précis - which is that we are now living through a period when absurdity is rampant. People are willing to believe almost anything and have abandoned any semblance of relating to common sense or how things actually work. People who believe in such absurdities are not only unhappy - angry, even - but are making our political and moral systems unworkable.

That's where I would like to address this discussion - on both the literary/philosophical tradition of absurdism, and how it has come to fruition in our modern age.
 
NWRatCon said:
we are now living through a period when absurdity is rampant. People are willing to believe almost anything and have abandoned any semblance of relating to common sense or how things actually work.
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It is the great irony that the internet has given us an unprecedented ability to fact check and is also the most effective tool of mass deception ever created.

NWRatCon said:
People who believe in such absurdities are not only unhappy - angry, even - but are making our political and moral systems unworkable.
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What I have come to realize is it really leads people towards isolation. As they get deeper and deeper into these niche communities, the only people who can understand what they are talking about are other people in the community.

Take Qanon for example, they have an ever evolving set of "in group" lingo that makes reading their posts nearly impossible for someone not in the community. Far right fascist groups have this as well. Normal people don't want to hear you explain how you traced the ethnic ancestry of the Romani and that really they don't count as Caucasian European. They don't know what "based and Westoid pilled mean" or why you are spamming HONK HONK under progressive posts on Twitter.

Before you know it your family and friends have cut ties with you and your only support group left is the cult. Now your social life is dependent on you maintaining your political beliefs. At that point it is very difficult to reach someone.
 
Basically, it sounds like the world is going gaga. And that's the problem with emotionally biased information, it's not tempered with reason, dispassion, or for the greater good. This kind of widespread belief in deception to achieve a goal is ultimately destructive to a functioning society.
 

Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros.

One by one everybody starts to turn into Rhinoceros. And as any large mindless heard animal will do, they destroy everything in their path as they run around the streets.

It fits Trumpism today perfect.
It was made into a film but the film is very hard to find. Easy to read the play if you prefer.

I also recommend people watch Being There. Another film that seems to have predicted Trump. (Staring Peter Sellers and Shirley McClain)
 
Absurdism is essentially true in a scientific sense. The universe around us has no purpose or meaning that we can discern that is separate from the meaning we ourselves give it. By observing the universe and trying to explain it to ourselves we create the fictions of meaning and order which we rely upon to create theories that offer us a measure of predictability in science. But that predictability is not by any means either certain or constant and thus we create new fictions and new theories to explain the inexplicable universe around us. In a sense we cross our eyes to blur out the details which contradict our desire for pattern recognition and cry, "Eureka" when we have discovered our new fiction.

Meaning is a human bias, born out of our ability to see and impose patterns on chaotic systems where no patterns may actually exist. Meaning and order are the chauvinism of our biocentric minds which we ourselves have created in order to organise ourselves and our understanding in order to better survive in an essentially chaotic universe (essentially an act of behavioural/social evolution). From these two fictions (meaning and order) arise new fictions like time, change, rules and laws which we have also created to structure an unstructured universe.

This ancient scientific body of prejudice based on pattern recognition has spilled over into other facets of our lives, until now it controls our lives at almost every level. Just like we slightly crossed our eyes to blur out the inconsistencies we saw in the universe, we do the same with our interactions and relationships from familial to societal levels to create meaning and order where there is none. We impose fictions on ourselves in order to organise ourselves and thus to better serve our collective chances for survival and success. We create rituals and traditions, laws and taboos, rights and responsibilities, obligations and dispensations, loyalties and enmities, conflicts and alliances, all to laminate meaning and order on ourselves and those around us. This creates the need for power and coercion to enforce those fictions of meaning and order upon the greater part of the populace who may not share such biases. Be it the Rule of Man where relationships determine the nature of human interactions or the Rule of Law where "universal" principles determine our interactions, it is all just fiction. Meaning and order are functions of human will and unfortunately tend to be functions of the will of powerful minorities over the lesser wills of majorities.

When enough people begin to realise the Oz-like nature of meaning and order as functions of humans' will then they question both meaning and order. Then we create new fictions like spirits, ancestors, gods, demons, religions, laws ideologies, isms, etc. to shore up the bulwarks of power and coercion which maintain meaning and order among us. These new fictions attempt to maintain "received and orthodox" versions of meaning and order by controlling the thought and language of public discourse and debate through creed, authority, indoctrination and more recently outright propaganda. But as the size of the imposing minority decreases and the power of that minority increases the cracks in homogeneous meaning and order begin to crack and crumble. If tools like the stylus and tablet, the pen and paper, the printing press, the radio or the television and the Internet with peer-to-peer social media emerge in a society, then the norms of meaning and order are questioned and shown to be the fictions which they really are. Such periods of public, intellectual non-conformity threaten the elite-imposed norms of meaning and order and can threaten the coherence and the cohesiveness of societies built on such fictions. The elites then struggle to control the new avenues of dissenting discourse in order to reimpose meaning and order to the society they have created and maintained. If they succeed, then a new orthodoxy is imposed and the old fictions in new flavours persist. If they fail, then revolutions and counter revolutions occur and all hell breaks loose until a new elite and their new version of the fictions are imposed from above by a new powerful minority.

Order and meaning are functions of will, nothing more, even when we dress them up with a tyrant's arms and armour, stately senatorial robes, sacred vestments, religious banners, powdered wigs, lab coats or business suits.

It really is absurd in the other meaning of the word but it also a life or death matter.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.
 
I’m way out of my comfort zone here, how about Albert Camus?
 
Loulit01 said:
I class Camus more with existentialism, but I'm sure opinions differ.
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Lol, I said I was a fish outta water, I just like to read @Evilroddy ‘s posts, not a dig at anyone else in the thread!


Camus defined the absurd as the futility of a search for meaning in an incomprehensible universe, devoid of God, or meaning. Absurdism arises out of the tension between our desire for order, meaning and happiness and, on the other hand, the indifferent natural universe's refusal to provide that.


Didn’t Monty Python do a whole series of films that were absurd?
 
Evilroddy said:
Absurdism is essentially true in a scientific sense. ...
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I laughed out loud when I read this. It's both true and absurd at the same time...
I'm not dismissing any of the intervening text, as I agree with all of it. But this passage gets closest to the theme I was going for when I started this.
Evilroddy said:
It really is absurd in the other meaning of the word but it also a life or death matter.
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I really applaud the entire disquisition, but I, personally, do not go quite as far. Which brings me to the last, and how I approach the world.

I'll start here: Much of human endeavor, as you note, is to impose order on an inherently chaotic universe. I do believe, however, (being a human trapped in the paradigm) that there are scientific answers to questions posed by... scientists, and that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our ability to perceive it.

With that in mind, I do believe in science, generally, and certainly the "scientific process". At the same time, I recognize that the meaning we assign to it is arbitrary, and that our observations of it impact the objective reality - a la Heisenberg.

As far as human social constructs - I'm all for them in principle (being human), but I object to many of them in practice. Religion, for example. While there are many laudable outcomes that are attributed to religious proscriptions - charity, for example, and fellow-feeling - those are, as I take you observe, artificial attributions for the benefit of the religious authorities. I can be just as generous for my own reasons and never ascribe that to being a "good Christian" (I am, in practice, a spiritual humanist and recognize the absurdity of that condition).

And, also being human, I think my artificial constructs are better than the next fellow's.

Which brings me, at last, to the thread itself. The more I think about the book which shares the title (I previously forgot to include the link), the more I realize how "on theme" it is. ("The common challenges of earning a living, maintaining a relationship and ageing are becoming battlegrounds of existential angst and self-loathing in a culture that demands conspicuous consumption, high-octane partnerships and perpetual youth.")

The problem which prompted this thread is that the current environment gives up on any "rational" paradigm for behavior, something that I think our human condition requires. I also accept that my position is absurd - but less absurd than this behavior/belief system. What I cannot fathom is operating without any internal consistency (notwithstanding the existence of unreasoned consistency). I believe in rationality.
 
@NWRatCon

The universe may be much odder than we could rationally expect. The great physicist John Wheeler came up with the most disturbing and fascinating theory of existence - the Participatory Universe. While studying how information flows rather than particles or waves may be more useful for studying the micro and macro cosmos, Wheeler came up with his "It and Bit" theory or reality. Essentially what he argued is that the universe reveals itself based on the questions we ask and the experiments we conduct or the phenomena we observe. Ask different questions or make different observations or conduct different experiments and the universe interacts with our interrogation to produce a different universe. Not a different understanding of the universe but a whole new universe. In essence he argued that universal reality was the result of a conversation between us (sentient parts of the universe) and the rest of the universe itself. The universe is not a passive reality to be discovered but is an active and participatory universe which morphs itself when it allows information to flow within it. This was not solipsistic navel gazing but rather the result of a years long analysis of how information flows seem to affect Ur-reality in our cosmos. Heisenberg only argued that observation affects certain observable events. Wheeler said that the very act of studying the universe actually creates it! Absurd and yet beautiful at the same instant.

Do Our Questions Create the World?

Quantum theorist John Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis anticipated ongoing speculation that consciousness is fundamental to reality
blogs.scientificamerican.com

In a sense we also live in a participatory world. History is a vast cloud of data which we cannot fully record. We do our best. But then through human analysis, intentional and unintentional bias, and pattern recognition we ignore even more recorded fact until we have distilled history into a synthetic story based on what we think it should be. Thus history is really the aggregate of the myths we all agree to believe and is essentially a discrimination-derived faux reality which we ourselves have created by the questions we ask and the answer we settle on. We live in a participatory historical bubble too. What do I mean by this. Perhaps an example will make the point clearer. For years we have been arguing who discovered America first? Columbus? Spanish and Portuguese fisherman like the Corte-Real brothers (João and Gaspar)? Vikings? Irish? Romans? Celts? Phoenicians? Egyptians? All of this enquiry was underpinned by the assumption that Old World explorers discovered the New World. But discoveries about burial practices of Maritime Archaic First Nations peoples in Newfoundland-Labrador show that Native Americans were sailing to Europe in the Neolithic period and transferring their Red Ochre burial practices to Neolithic Europeans. We didn't discover America, America discovered us! The questions we ask determine the answers we get. Which is why scientists are being blocked from asking certain questions when it comes to Maritime Archaic research today. History and prehistory are participatory disciplines but some powerful networks of people don't want certain questions asked to preserve myths, folklore and heritage.

The Campaign to Thwart Paleogenetic Research Into North America's Indigenous Peoples

In the north, the Maritime Archaic gave way to Pre-Dorset Palaeoeskimos (as they are known in the literature) that had recently arrived from Siberia.
quillette.com

I am glad in your response to my earlier post you used the word "believe" so often because like science and history, Ur-reality may be an act of faith and a participatory one at that!

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.
 
A very interesting discussion. If I may interject -- if the argument of Absurdity is true wouldn't that mean this discussion is also absurd?
 
And the emotions they stimulate are addictive. Like gamblers and thrill seekers and sex addicts. Addiction to neurochemicals.

And like all addictions, tolerance develops. So it takes bigger and bigger outrages to keep those juices flowing.

It cannot end well.
 
Like smartphones and social media, people are getting a dopamine jolt everytime they respond. It's similar to a nicotine habit.
 
@NWRatCon

A timely discovery and perhaps some small measure of evidence that I am not barking mad when I describe science the way I do. Brace yourself for the rationally absurd!


Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.
 

Off the top of my head...first thing comes to mind is, we're not yet equipped to deal with the force amplification factor of "the internet" at least as far as the social aspects are concerned. I think I conclude that human beings are okay with processing what comes with two or three people gossiping over the back fence or a handful of folks chewing the fat at a party. But social media is the equivalent of not only speaking before a large crowd of thousands, but also having to deal with the responses of thousands, which are routinely drowned out by a well polished media machine that manufactures narrative and consent the way we toss back six packs of beer.

And we're currently quite drunk, and the hangover is a brutal mutha-****er.
 
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