This may sound like an obvious point, but when you can't prove your argument resort to ridicule. In effect you're going beyond the question, You can't be serious?, because that still presupposes some level of engagement. Instead what is aimed for is an absolute form of dismissal.
Leo Strauss writes of how that was the Enlightenment's chief mode of attack when it came to religion. Either that or create the conditions whereby people would be so absorbed in worldly matters that they would become self-sustaining realities- and the only ones worth considering to boot.
Except the problem now arises: if surface realities are everything then why chase a chimera? If the tension between Reality and Appearance has been the source of all our creativity then what happens when only appearance remains? And the more difficult question (Nietzsche): given that appearances can never be more than they seem, will they even be appearances?
So: the piss-take, irony, cynicism, radical doubt and indifference are the hallmarks of our age. There is no "our age". "Go with the flow". There is no telos of Man, no cosmos, no stable or abiding order. Get over it, dude. Lighten up. Hannah was surely correct to point out that the word-if there is one word-that encapsulates all of this is 'process'. The situation is fluid. From now on: sovereign becoming, liquid modernity. The journey, the self-styled nomads will tell us, is everything.
We are noting but a part of nature-except nature now is not so much a model of unchanging standards or a hierarchy of being as it is mere contingency, ebb and flow, sheer randomness. A world of luck and power. Consider the lilies. And, of course, all of that would take a sinister turn. Since life is nasty, brutish and short we must submit to an external order. To think that we are but brute animals, straw tossed in the wind, nothing but the Gnostics' blind will, results in us acting like brute animals. Later, not even that. Man is a machine, a number (Primo Levi).
To break the stranglehold of a shallow utilitarianism: art for arts' sake or an emphasis on the esoteric, on expert opinion. Only the difficult and obscure is true (which is another form of fakery, as Roger Scruton informs us). Or, alternatively, if you can't manage the light-heartedness: all truth is on the boundaries, in the extreme.
A line from Macintyre that really gets to the heart of it: In a world where there are no objective standards (no "customary expectations," E.P. would say), then effectiveness and success are nothing but what passes for effectiveness and success. What passes.
Which is why we now think in slogans, paint by numbers. ISIS and the nihilists are the extreme example of this: there is no cause or end-point, it is pure mindlessness. At a totally different level, but similar in form, is the endless desire for accumulation of wealth. It is not just the economic system that could be criticized here. Economic theory itself (at least since the 1930s) has not been concerned about any substantive theory of the good. Instead what we have is an abstract 'desire for more'. To what end, no-one can say. What counts as rationality is not so much the pursuit of 'given' ends but consistency, a purely formal notion that exhibits no external correspondence to reality ("internal consistency"). Rationality, then, is reduced to a set of axioms, devoid of any relation to social context or ultimate purposes.
Leo Strauss writes of how that was the Enlightenment's chief mode of attack when it came to religion. Either that or create the conditions whereby people would be so absorbed in worldly matters that they would become self-sustaining realities- and the only ones worth considering to boot.
Except the problem now arises: if surface realities are everything then why chase a chimera? If the tension between Reality and Appearance has been the source of all our creativity then what happens when only appearance remains? And the more difficult question (Nietzsche): given that appearances can never be more than they seem, will they even be appearances?
So: the piss-take, irony, cynicism, radical doubt and indifference are the hallmarks of our age. There is no "our age". "Go with the flow". There is no telos of Man, no cosmos, no stable or abiding order. Get over it, dude. Lighten up. Hannah was surely correct to point out that the word-if there is one word-that encapsulates all of this is 'process'. The situation is fluid. From now on: sovereign becoming, liquid modernity. The journey, the self-styled nomads will tell us, is everything.
We are noting but a part of nature-except nature now is not so much a model of unchanging standards or a hierarchy of being as it is mere contingency, ebb and flow, sheer randomness. A world of luck and power. Consider the lilies. And, of course, all of that would take a sinister turn. Since life is nasty, brutish and short we must submit to an external order. To think that we are but brute animals, straw tossed in the wind, nothing but the Gnostics' blind will, results in us acting like brute animals. Later, not even that. Man is a machine, a number (Primo Levi).
To break the stranglehold of a shallow utilitarianism: art for arts' sake or an emphasis on the esoteric, on expert opinion. Only the difficult and obscure is true (which is another form of fakery, as Roger Scruton informs us). Or, alternatively, if you can't manage the light-heartedness: all truth is on the boundaries, in the extreme.
A line from Macintyre that really gets to the heart of it: In a world where there are no objective standards (no "customary expectations," E.P. would say), then effectiveness and success are nothing but what passes for effectiveness and success. What passes.
Which is why we now think in slogans, paint by numbers. ISIS and the nihilists are the extreme example of this: there is no cause or end-point, it is pure mindlessness. At a totally different level, but similar in form, is the endless desire for accumulation of wealth. It is not just the economic system that could be criticized here. Economic theory itself (at least since the 1930s) has not been concerned about any substantive theory of the good. Instead what we have is an abstract 'desire for more'. To what end, no-one can say. What counts as rationality is not so much the pursuit of 'given' ends but consistency, a purely formal notion that exhibits no external correspondence to reality ("internal consistency"). Rationality, then, is reduced to a set of axioms, devoid of any relation to social context or ultimate purposes.
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