The Present Age

If someone were to overhear what people said ought to be done, and then in the spirit of irony, and for no other reason, proceeded to act accordingly everyone would be amazed. They would find it rash, yet as soon as they had talked it over they would find that it was just what should be done.
- Soren Kierkegaard The Present Age

The age in which we live is the age beyond invention, the age in which everything has a reference, and nothing stands uniquely alone. It is an age in which institutions from political parties to religions have become cowardly simpering caricatures of what they might have been in some deeper more sincere age. The towering American edifice lay in smoldering, belching, stinking ruin. From baseball to automobiles to agriculture to motherhood the age is replete with tawdry, hollow imitation. It is of course not a condition limited to America, we are very much a global society in a stupor. I think of China’s hollow communist party and still more hollow capitalism, Russia’s gilded iron fist and India’s hidden castes. There is not the courage among them to embrace fully their own ideologies, everything must be tempered so as not to upset the markets. The great armies of the earth built on noble principle are ranked with corruption. We fail to even respectfully elevate war to its demigod station.

It seems as though we sometimes achieve great things in spirit, but in practice we fail to manage the really exceptional outcomes. Not long after the stimulus package began to gel around a particular monetary value, the critics including those voices on the economy I most respect, began to warn that it simply was not big enough. The moment had come to pass legislation that could remake the American economy, retool our energy infrastructure and modernize our public facilities and institutions, and we had not (yet) seized it. The calm rational voices reassured us that we could not likely have gotten more, considering the slim victory in the US Senate and the opposition in the House. The remnants of the Republican party in Washington were going to reinforce their positions and obstruct to the last congressperson. The media was going to play the advocate of the diabolical, and after all, no one was sure it would work. It is here that I will introduce the idea that there is nothing necessary for the legislation to do beyond all of the particulars. I mean the tangible projects directly undertaken. I think it is clear to most by now that we should not be attempting to restore the economy as we knew it. On the contrary, the intention should be to initiate the creation of something new. If instead the efforts are judged by their ability to reinvigorate the broken system of exploitation and greed we are now emerging from, then I do sorely hope that they fail. Here we are, at this point of opportunity, not unlike the one we stood upon on September twelfth in 2001. May we not see this moment in the same light from some future vantage point.

I wonder about this present age, and about what is possible for us. So much of what we dared not imagine emerges momentarily. It is in these times when it seems there is something in fact to seize, that contemplation may become the subtle obstructor. It will not be a sound excuse to claim that we faced opposition, or that there were doubts, or that the media misled us in a most naive and innocent way. In fact we are now compelled to reach for the exceptional. The exception of which I speak is not a further perfection of something that already exists, it is the invention of some thing entirely novel. Nietzsche refers to “great” individuals or ideas, and how one either exists before or after them. An element of the exceptional is an exceptional impact. Before there can be that impact, we must act. This exceptional action cannot be left to the governments or the institutions that loom above us, but it must be how we all proceed from here.