The End of the End of the World

According to one way of telling this story, the world began in 1641 with the following words, as translated from the Latin:

Some years ago now I observed the multitude of errors that I had accepted as true in my earliest years, and the dubiousness of the whole superstructure I had since then reared on them; and the consequent need of making a clean sweep for once in my life, and beginning again from the very foundations, if I would establish some secure and lasting result in science.

— Rene Descartes, 1641

The world ended — again, on one way of telling this story — as follows:

On or about December 1910, human nature changed.

— Virginia Woolf, 1924

In this essay I want to explore the meaning of those two passages, and to think about where we stand now in relation to them.  Let’s ask what we should do after the end of it all, here at the end of the end of the world.

(Pictures, too!  Below the fold.)

The beginning, here, as quoted above, was the beginning of Rene Descartes’ Meditations On First Philosophy.  The end was marked by Virginia Woolf, upon the occasion of visiting an exhibition of post-impressionist art in 1910.

The world began like this:

Descrates, after famously musing upon the question of what he could be certain, decided that his foundation, his rock, was Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am.  That Descrates was anticipated in this by St. Augustine and 1300 years is beside the point.  Nobody needed the cogito in 380 a.d.  In 1641, they did.  By 1641, religion had rather demonstrably and violently failed to ground the world in certainty.  So . . . Descartes started again, closer to home.  With me.  With you.  I think, I am.  You think, you are.  The rest had better follow from there.

And follow the rest did, in spades.  From this foundation, this certainty in the stability and sufficency of the individual human, we get among other things the novel, the industrial revolution, capitalism, and the scientific method of verification.  If I can see the carbon atom, and you can see the carbon atom, then it doesn’t matter if God can see the carbon atom.  (And given the rate at which we see that atomic sucker decaying, it might be just as well if God doesn’t see it — the planet’s a bit too old for His liking.)

But then, if the world is based upon the stability of the subject — the human subject, the arbiter of all things, the standard measure, what are we to make of Nude Descending a Staircase #2 by Marcel Duchamp, at the beginning of the 20th century?

Where is the stability there?  The center upon which to build Descartes’ lasting superstructure?  What kind of life form sees itself like that?  Who does that person think he, she or it is?

“On or about December 1910, human nature changed.”

There are other ways of telling this story.  We can begin, if we want — if we prefer the concrete to the literary — with the English Civil war in 1642, and end with the Germans crossing into Belgium in August 1914.  We can note, too, the eerie prescience of the poets, as if they saw the end of the world coming.  As if they knew of the fragility of certainty and of the vacutiy of the solitude upon which it had rested. 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

— from Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, circa 1851

A point about the historical tide noticed, as usual, by the poet before the general.

Our soldiers are individual.  They embark on individual little enterprises.  The German . . . is not so clever at these devices . . . He has not played individual games.  Football, which develops individuality, has only been introduced into Germany in comparatively recent times.

— Lord Northcliff’s War Book, 1917

It is a symbol, I suppose, of the ignorance with which armies crashed into the oncoming darkness, that the Brits of WWI kicked footballs towards the enemy lines as they advanced.  At least at first.  But, to vary Woolf’s phrase: on or about August 1st, 1914, human nature changed.

We can wonder about the very notion of progress built upon that sand.  We can marvel at the fact that the British kicked soccer balls — soccer balls! — into the nightmare no-man’s land, the barbed wire between the trenches of WWI, as a sign of “good sportsmanship”. 

What we cannot do is doubt that something happened.  However you want to begin this story, with Rene Descartes or Oliver Cromwell, with Hamlet or Adam Smith; however you want to end it, with Archduke Ferdinand or with Virgina Woolf.  Something happened.

So what do you do at the end of the world?  What do you do when you find, in end, only empty space, only nothing?  What do you do when there is nothing left to say?  Well, one answer, and it’s certainly not a bad answer, is: make a joke.

That was Andy Warhol’s answer, and, on one way of telling the story, we call this answer, “post-modernism”.  Post-modernism is like the well-timed joke, the beat of the drum, the holding action until we figure out: what next?

What comes next?

This brings me to the phenomenon of George W. Bush.  Or, rather, the phenomenon of his followers.  George Bush, famously, does not get the joke, or that there is a reason to tell one.  He is not post-modern.  He is, if anything, pre-modern.  He never got as far as Descartes did, in 1641.  He never: “observed the multitude of errors that I had accepted as true in my earliest years, and the dubiousness of the whole superstructure I had since then reared on them”.  Or if he did, if he did “sweep it all away,” he did it in the decidely humorless way, the retro-fit of the paleolithic, that we call being “born-again”.

“Born again”: a way of not getting the joke; a way of missing the point.  A way of coping with the failure of the Modern that fails to grasp exactly why anyone was making a joke to begin with. 

Or perhaps, “born again” is post-modern at one remove.  For example, here’s an attempt at post-modernism that somewhat fails to convince:

This is the celebrated “Jesus Horse” at the recently opened Creation Museum in Kentuky.  And it is not a joke (even though it’s hilarious).  It is, however, and however oddly, post-modern. 

The Jesus Horse is part of the pause, the caught-breath before diving, the beat in the joke, that we call post-modernism.  The joke about progress.  The questioning, not of science but of scientism.  The weeping over that football kicked into no-man’s land.  That the proprietor of the creation museum doesn’t know this, is, again, beside the point.

George W. Bush is, in this way, the ultimate post-modern president.  His fans are the apotheosis of accidental kitsch.  Kitsch-value is what made the 60’s love the 50’s, the 90’s love the 70’s, and no one at all love the 80’s, except the idiots who don’t know that they really ought to be kidding when they say Reagan was a great President.  George Bush is what you get when you don’t know what to do; he is the world-historical hiccup before the Next Big Thing.  This is what I believe.  If Virgina Woolf told us about the end of the world, then George W. Bush is telling us about the end of the end of the world.  The last gasp of the modern era.

What do we do now?  What do we do at the end of the end of the world?  It’s not enough, anymore, to make jokes about the past.  We have to actually try and make a future — a much scarier proposition.

Although I certainly hope the future has jokes in it, too.

Sitting alone in his house, with his table and his quill pen and his thoughts, the best Descartes could do was “I think, therefore I am.”  Of course it was the best he could do — and good on him for trying.  Descartes was, after all, thinking to himself.  But in the blogosphere, we think to each other; just I, now, am thinking to you.  The “We think, therefore we are” of the blogosphere is not the death of individuality.  We are individuals, but our presense to each other has an immediacy and a meaning not present in other forms of writing.  We are here.  We are here, together.  As individuals.  Together.  And we are not afraid to say so. 

We feel, as did Descartes, “the consequent need of making a clean sweep for once in my life, and beginning again from the very foundations”, but we do it together, because we feel no worry, no need to re-assert, yet again, that we are ultimately alone.  Maybe in the end we are: death will have its dominion.  But for right now we are here, and we are doing our best.

The banner for Docudharma reads, “Blogging the Future”.  This is what I take that to mean.  Blogs are where we try, through rough draft and re-draft and re-re-draft; through comments and essays and snark, to think of the Next Big Thing.  To try our best to see what it is we are supposed to do, here at the end of the end of the world.