Bones of Tomorrow

As we approach the year’s end, I am steered hopelessly into a reflective reverie. Though it may not be the end of the decade, when things truly take on a backward-looking tint, these times of upheaval make years seem to pass like decades indeed.

I’ve always held that a decade actually only changes not at its nominal cusp, as it overflows into the waiting wellspring of the next one after it, but rather at the middle mark—the true heart and epicenter. It may have been Andy Warhol, or someone of his ilk, that likewise summed up decades as having their true stylistic chrysalis-breaking moments during their exact centers; it’s almost as if the first half is a sort of coming of age, the groping search for identity as the years accumulate in self-seeking struggle, only to emerge in its truest form at the midway mark, followed by the slow declining burnout phase—the natural process of decay and renewal.

And so as we approach the midway of the 2020s—a decade many of us never thought we’d live to see—I’m wont to rhapsodize on the future unknowns, and those blind stabs of the birthing period we’re now subject to.

There are decades of change, and then there are entire eras. As I ponder these things, I happen to be making my way through Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a romantic ode to Europe—particularly the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its last spill of the setting Habsburg dynasty light, written on the eve of momentous change during the height of World War 2. The book even carries a certain mystique because the author killed himself merely a day after delivering the manuscript to his publisher. He was undone by the crushing weight of an uncertain future, as the idyllic past of his memories was washed away by the sulfur and cannonade of incomprehensible war.

The book itself revolves around that rarefied passing of the guard, one world fading into the next unrecognizable one. It is a wistful elegy to childhood ideals clouded by the confounding darkness of modernity, the frightening pull toward the uncertain pathways radiating into a future stripped of logic. The book dazzles with sumptuous descriptions of antebellum Paris and Vienna as halcyon centers of expression, love, order, and freedom—certainly overly idealized by the somewhat credulously child-like author, but nevertheless representative of the sense of something lost and never to be found again, which we all increasingly endure these days.

An excerpt from the chapter Brightness and Shadows Over Europe:

Today’s generation has grown up amidst disasters, crises, and the failure of systems. The young see war as a constant possibility to be expected almost daily, and it may be difficult to describe to them the optimism and confidence in the world that we felt when we ourselves were young at the turn of the century. Forty years of peace had strengthened national economies, technology had speeded up the pace of life, scientific discoveries had been a source of pride to the spirit of our own generation. The upswing now beginning could be felt to almost the same extent in all European countries. Cities were more attractive and densely populated year by year; the Berlin of 1905 was not like the city I had known in 1901. From being the capital of a princely state it had become an international metropolis, which in turn paled beside the Berlin of 1910. Vienna, Milan, Paris, London, Amsterdam—whenever you came back to them you were surprised and delighted. The streets were broader and finer, the public buildings more imposing, the shops more elegant. Everything conveyed a sense of the growth and wider distribution of wealth. Even we writers noticed it from the editions of our books printed; in the space of ten years the number of copies printed per edition tripled, then multiplied by fivefold and by tenfold. There were new theatres, libraries and museums everywhere. Domestic facilities such as bathrooms and telephones that used to be the prerogative of a few select circles became available to the lower middle class, and now that hours of work were shorter than before, the proletariat had its own share in at least the minor pleasures and comforts of life. There was progress everywhere. Who dared, won. If you bought a house, a rare book, a picture you saw its value rise; the bolder and more ambitious the ideas behind an enterprise, the more certain it was to succeed. There was a wonderfully carefree atmosphere abroad in the world—for what was going to interrupt this growth, what could stand in the way of the vigour constantly drawing new strength from its own momentum? Europe had never been stronger, richer or more beautiful, had never believed more fervently in an even better future, and no one except a few shrivelled old folk still bewailed the passing of the ‘good old days.’

And not only were the cities more beautiful, their inhabitants too were more attractive and healthier, thanks to sporting activities, better nutrition, shorter working hours and a closer link with nature. People had discovered that up in the mountains winter, once a dismal season to be spent gloomily playing cards in taverns or feeling bored as you sat around in overheated rooms, was a source of filtered sunlight, nectar for the lungs that sent blood coursing deliciously just beneath the skin. The mountains, the lakes and the sea no longer seemed far away. Bicycles, motor cars, electric railways had shrunk distance and given the world a new sense of space. On Sundays thousands and tens of thousands, clad in brightly coloured sportswear, raced down the snowy slopes on skis and toboggans; sports centres and swimming baths were built everywhere. You could see the change clearly in those swimming baths—while in my own youth a really fine figure of a man stood out among all the bull-necked, paunchy or pigeon-chested specimens, nowadays athletically agile young men, tanned by the sun and fit from all their sporting activities, competed cheerfully with each other as they did in classical antiquity. Only the most poverty-stricken stayed at home now on a Sunday; all the young people went walking, climbing or competing in all kinds of sports.

For the world was moving to a different rhythm. A year—so much could happen in a year now! Inventions and discoveries followed hard on each other’s heels, and each in turn swiftly became a general good.

I feel sorry for all who did not live through these last years of European confidence while they were still young themselves. For the air around us is not a dead and empty void, it has in it the rhythm and vibration of the time. We absorb them unconsciously into our bloodstream as the air carries them deep into our hearts and minds. Perhaps, ungrateful as human beings are, we did not realize at the time how strongly and securely the wave bore us up. But only those who knew that time of confidence in the world know that everything since has been regression and gloom.

Did that passage happen to stir something deep in your viscera? Some remembrance of a time long past, perhaps resonating within those cloistered confines of your being? When did our current society last offer any real growth—in any shape or flavor, or anything of value at all? When have inventions and scientific progress last been made to benefit the common man rather than, conversely, take away his livelihood—like all the latest AI developments? When did you last find yourself walking outdoors to look upon a scene like this colorized one from 1945, and felt yourself involuntarily falling headlong toward some indeterminate-yet-exciting fate—born of a future that was worth living?

It is the quintessential joi de vivre, that almost indescribable lightness or buoyancy of being, which is gravely lacking from today’s lived experience. Maybe I’m just being morose, and many of you are wonderfully fulfilled with a vitalizing sense of promise for the future. Maybe this existential nostalgia strikes you a discordant note. But I venture that an increasing lot of you have felt yourselves stumbling through the dusky woods of late, a temporal-blindness squeezing out your vision of the dimming light beyond the trees ahead.

Coincidentally, I happened to be reading fellow Substacker David Bentley Hart’s latest offering, which resonated with the selfsame synchronic sense of lost remembrance. He beautifully describes the magical evocations of liminality contained in the classic French novel Le Grande Meaulnes:

For me, this is where the peculiar genius of both men lay: in their ability to evoke a sense of something always just at one’s back, which one cannot turn around quite quickly enough to glimpse—the sense of a lost country at whose border one can only drift, or of a lost memory whose tremulous edge one cannot quite grasp. Theirs is an art pervaded by the ache of exile, the feeling of something now gone that was always both perilously fragile and deeply loved: a vanished childhood or early youth; departed innocence; the loveliness of rural France and England, with their woodlands and copses soon to be cleared away for development, and their fields and country lanes soon to be covered over by metaled motorways; an older social consensus, sustained by a rosier set of illusions; a fairyland fading in the light of dawn; a squandered and immemorial paradise; or whatever else. Above all, in long retrospect, it summons up images of a generation of children who grew up in the long, serene Edwardian spring, but who would not grow old enough to have children of their own.

Most cultures have some concept vaguely related to this. Whether it be the je ne sais quoi of the French, or the mono no aware of the Japanese, or the portmanteau of vesperance, coined by another internet writer with the help of ChatGPT, which I mooted before:

Vesperance (n.): The solitary emotion of wistful recognition of the present as a fading era, tinged with anticipation for an unrecognizable, transformative future.

It strikes to the heart of the precipice on which we stand today. America as the more visceral example: the last few decades have been marked by a decadent exuberance which saw American culture, even for all its many excesses, bear the torch through the trailing darkness of postmodernity, toward some tangible future we could anticipate with the bite of briny air presaging a sea. Despite lacking the ability to give it name or form, a kind of hopeful determination still filled one with at least a cautious sense of optimism for things to come.

But a growing disorder began to grip the world in the 60s and 70s. Various shocks and crises related to oil, monetary policy, and geopolitics sprouted like locusts. The hyper-liberal culture war knocked through barriers one after the other, touting superficial highs which belied the ills below the stricken soil at society’s roots. The sickness was sublimated through the expanding counterculture movements and indie scenes, which embraced the nihilism and dissolution, to no happy end. Ian Curtis—Joy Division’s lead singer—comes to mind: he killed himself on the eve of their first North American tour—a sadly prevailing theme.

Through it all, a fervor for the promises of tomorrow still smoldered dimly, uniting people with some unspoken kindred touch. Western society retained its moral license to preside over the rubric of good and evil; the Soviet Union offering a facile mythological antipode, harnessed to effect by the power-brokers-that-be. Though the future foreboded uncertainty, some distinct tangibles at least remained: people planned their lives because the material necessities were still within reach—one could afford a home, a car, vacations, etc. The country wore its own mythologized leadership like a crown, and the world bowed libidinally to its perceived ‘First Right’.

A strange morass envelops America today. The culture has lost its luster, its weight to move the world—the lures once used to trap us in a common myth of salvation lie withered as false idols. The dimming fire has squandered any sense of ‘magic’ in the guttering West, replacing it with the remnants of some incomprehensible unease—an existential acedia. Cultural touchstones crumble around us like rotting edifices one after another, ivory towers redeeming years of spiritual neglect. Brands like Disney, once representing inviolably deep strands of the American psyche, have been transfigured into engines of perversion—or more aptly conversion—hemorrhaging billions in losses: blood fountaining from the gargoyle’s mouth. America now resembles a high-security prison, each state its own separate cell-block, the restive residents of which chafe and fret with suspicion—or outright hostility—at one another. The sun has set on the bon vivants of yesteryear, and the pony show has gone to seed.

China, Russia, and Africa now boldly chart their own paths forward, ignoring America’s vermiculate cultural recursions. Their own social imperatives are designed to protect not only the family, but society’s majority; just look at Putin’s recent decree that 2024 will be deemed ‘The Year of the Family’, with all attendant social and governmental investments; for instance, Putin has already just headlined a conference days ago tasked with outlining new social benefits for children-bearing families, maternity bonuses for women, etc. Similarly, the LGBT movement’s status has once more been downgraded to harsher regulation in order to protect the vast majority of the citizenry from harmful and destabilizing propaganda. Contrarily, in the West the majority suffers through the slings and arrows of a veritable new Spanish Inquisition for the sake of some imaginary victimized minority. In reality, this minority has been induced and weaponized as a mere institutional guignol against those who pose the greatest threat to the social-engineers of authority. Western society increasingly bears the odor of some unrestrained ritual lustration.

What has this all led to?

The West has hit a cultural wall; its vision for the world rejected by wider society—the mandate to dictate the direction forward along with it. We find ourselves in the throes of some hazy bardo, a liminal morass, trapped between eras with no clear way forward, no satisfying vision of the future to guide or salve us with its reassurance. As a result, culture has become a stagnant whirlpool: a broken temporal loop of haunting isolation, loneliness, and indescribable alienation. These, our new idols, have become the social fabrics of our displaced continuum, to be occasionally broken up by the shrill contortions of some shortlived “techno-marvel”—AI and ChatGPT as the newfound ushers to our dispossession.

Several thinkers have made careers of analyzing the phenomenon in recent years. Chief among them the brilliant Mark Fisher, who popularized the Derrida-coined term Hauntology to describe the way our ‘lost futures’ seep through the pores of our collective present, synthesizing into an ever-visceral sense of not only loss for something once promised, but an inescapable feeling of gutting emptiness about tomorrow. In essence, lacking a real future, figments of the one promised us continue their seductive hold on our psyche like a hypnotic rhythm; blinking specters of what once was, and will have been.

Fisher speaks of ‘the slow cancellation of time’ itself, a concept faintly echoed in Zizek’s ‘post-ideology desert’—the idea that modernity has displaced all previous development with a barren landscape of non-ideas, akin to Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, which Fisher likewise hearkens to. In short: post- and metamodernity as a vacant lot haunted by the ghosts of a would-be future.

Can you, by now, guess Fisher’s predictable fate?

A direct lineage can be traced not only through Derrida but to his one-time pupil Fukuyama, who famously declared the end of history, with neoliberal capitalism having culminated in an apex of human progress—a mountain peak which looks upon the lilliputian world with a cold sneer. The mountain’s conqueror—in this case the anointed West—furls both past and future into one pennant to be staked proudly in the now eternal twilight, declaring Pax Liberalis.

Fukuyama may well have been right—but not in the way he imagined. Instead the present has curled in on itself: that tonic promise of modernity—built on the dredged up dreams of a future gouged and made barren to douse the sins of the past—has come to naught.

The West’s cultural supremacy has waned under the dimming sparkle of its ingenuity. Beneath the entrancing facade of innovation!, expression!, progression!, and all the other empty agitprop bribes bedecking the gleaming wall panels, we found the well-hidden traces of an elaborate ruse: a concealed webwork of ropes and pulleys, the crafty subversion of globalist commodifying forces. A rat race, a religiose mythography of the exploitative engines of runaway capital excess—the ahistorical ‘myth of progress’. Without the underwriting of global predatory capital, the cultural locomotive found itself chuffing to a halt. Beneath the gimcrack and baubled veneer lay nothing more than the faded tinselry of empty sublation: a denial of nature’s moderating impulse. Where we stand now is where we’ve always stood; the quicksands of time.

When Edward Bernays began designing his scripts to the modern reality show, he was at least conscientious enough to keep the behavioral nudges only slightly offset to our natural urges. Society’s mores were preserved, with only careful and periodic retouching to suit the needs of the Big Business showrunners.

Now the techno-pharisee-elect have increased the stakes. Owing to the urgency of their financial hegemony’s imminent demise they’re forced to fistulize our throats with megadoses of garbled programming to ensure the brood is complacent and disunited enough to not entertain any inconvenient modes of redress during the pharisee-elect’s historic waning period. The poisoned covenant must endure at all costs!, lest the fabric of imposed reality be undone.

The incoherent noise traps us in a state of limbo: ever distant, ever alienated, ever distrustful of one another. This unbearable distance leaves us displaced minstrels kicking at the loose gravel of the past, rummaging for scraps of those estranged, once-gleaming futures like wayward archaeologists. What treasures could lie in these wasted, bygone fields? Might we unearth some meaning for these fractured times?

Having found an imperfect fragment, we station our soapboxes in some under-trafficked corner of this ol’ bundle-o’-fibers, and carry on our spoken word and songs of remembrance, hoping to kindle a memory or two in a fellow traveler. Maybe something will jog loose, to uncover more of what was lost.

Care for a tune?

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