Why You Hate The Modern World | Kierkegaard's The Present Age

The present age is the age of advertisement. Nothing happens. But what does happen is instant notification.

Have you ever felt that the modern world is sort of empty in a way that is difficult to define? You trudge along in your day-to-day existence, but it all has an underlying pointlessness to it. It is like you are watching yourself just get through life without ever truly engaging with it.

Philosophers have given this problem a whole host of analyses over the past two centuries. From political thinkers criticizing our economic organization to spiritual leaders encouraging us to take back a sense of wonder in the world. No doubt they each have their own insights and ideas to add.

But today I want to examine how the Danish philosopher Saurin Kagard criticized the direction in which his society was turning and how his words may be even more relevant now than they were in 19th century Copenhagen. In his brilliant essay on the present age, Kkagard predicts with startling precience the general malaise many today report feeling about their lives. And I cannot wait to look at this with you.

Get ready to learn the dangers of public life. How too much information may be a bad thing and so much more. As always, be aware that this is just my flawed and incomplete interpretation of Kicker Godard's words and to use these ideas to aid in your own thinking rather than just absorbing them uncritically.

But with that out of the way, let's get started. One, a passionless present. An awful lot of philosophy over the years has been written in criticism of the passions.

That unstable part of us that can gift incredible energy, animism, and will, but at the same time is prone to illogicality, unpredictability, and flights of fancy. The Stoics often viewed passion as outright dangerous and said that it prevented us from living in accordance with perfect and universal reason. Plato said that a perfect society would fight against the passions, while the rule of St.

Benedict encouraged us to trade in our own unstable wills for obedience if we wanted to become true monastic Christians. And it is perfectly understandable why so many have feared the passionate nature of humankind. At its worst, passion can lead to atrocious crimes, societal collapse, and personal misery.

If we simply gave in to wherever our passions led us, we would likely destroy ourselves and those around us in the process. However, Kagard argued that the flip side of this situation would be just as bad. That having no passion at all would not only be damaging socially, but would also leave us without the special ingredients that make life worth embracing rather than simply enduring.

Think about it this way. A passionate person could commit a murder. But they could also devote their entire life to study or become a phenomenal artist.

Isaac Newton experienced such passion for his field that he reportedly devoted over 10 hours a day to natural philosophy. Leonardo da Vinci was said to be so in love with his work that he could always be found writing, painting, or at his workshop. And passion is not just useful in the hands of a genius.

The person devoted to train spotting or Dungeons and Drgons or dinner parties is still reaping the rewards of passion. For Kagard, passion seems to be a cluster concept around which a myriad of other properties are associated. Passion is decisive.

It stems from a strong individual outlook and can coalesce around an idea or set of ideas. He characterizes the revolutionary age as one filled to the brim with passion almost overflowing with it. So Kagard might say the French Revolution was passionate because it was decisive energetic action around an idea.

Of course this is not to say that passion is always a good thing. Kagard says if we have passion without inward-looking then we can fall into disastrous results. As he puts it, when individuals relate to an idea merely on mass, that is without the individual inward directedness singling out, we get violence, unruliness, and unbridledness.

This touches upon a key theme in much of Kkagard's philosophy, a deep skepticism around crowd actions. Put a pin in that as we're going to come back to it later. If we have a group of considered passionate individuals who each independently subscribe to an idea, then we're on to something really quite special.

That is the recipe for some serious action in service of a carefully constructed philosophy. But this passion is the very thing Kagard sees dying from modern pressures. He describes our era as an age of reflection.

We are used to considering reflection as a good thing. But Kagard thinks it can be taken much too far. Specifically, he is worried about the effect this lack of passion and abundance of reflection will have on our existential development.

An idea underlying a lot of Kkagard's work is commitment. This is a complicated notion, but to simplify it is the ability to shut out the vast majority of possibilities in our lives and focus instead on a few key things that really matter. So, a priest might be able to put aside any wish for fame and fortune and hone in on their relationship with their god.

Or a revolutionary might devote their entire life to a key idea, exalting this above all else. A parent might decide that their family means the world to them while a lover might show absolute unwavering commitment to their partner. Understood in this way, commitment can come in all shapes and sizes, even if Kikagard favors a theological one.

If someone cannot do this, then they risk floundering in a despair of possibility. This is a theme Kagard touches upon both in the sickness unto death and in either or. Someone desparing from possibility is caught in existential indecision.

They see the long road of life stretching ahead of them, and they don't know what to do with that. They flit from one shallow activity to the next, never being bold enough to plunge into a single path. As a result, their life slowly ticks away, and an emptiness takes hold of their heart.

They know they are wasting time, but they don't even know what it would look like not to waste time. They lack the ability to give their utmost commitment and faith to a single route. This, according to Kagard, is what happens when passion leaves us.

We become embroiled in the existential equivalent of situationships, unable to settle down with an idea long enough to find it meaningful and motivating. This is the rather terrifying effect of a lack of passion. And Kagod says that our rage is dooming us to these empty lives.

But what is the cause of this passionlessness? And how can we stop it from robbing us of a meaningful existence? Well, Kagard's answers are both surprising and terrifyingly relevant.

If you want to help me make more videos like this, then please consider subscribing to my channel, my email list, or my Patreon. The links are in the description. Two, information overload.

Do you ever feel like there is an overwhelming amount of information to take in on a daily basis? We might in a single hour check the news, see what our friends are up to on social media, read an opinion piece, crack open a magazine, and become angry at a tweet. This in turn has spawned thousands of blog posts and think pieces on how we are just too overloaded with inputs to sift through it all and decide what really matters to us.

In his own time, Kagard faced a very similar issue but on a much smaller scale. He was concerned with how the newspapers and magazines of Denmark would affect our ability to take committed singular action in our lives. In an incredibly prophetic 1997 paper entitled Kkagard on the internet, Hubert Strafer splits Kkagard's critique of information overload into two distinct characters.

We will call them the passive observer and the commitment addict. The passive observer is the person who surveys all the information available to them and yet cannot commit to any of it, even a little bit. They see too many issues of importance, too many sets of actions they could take, and can't decide on anything in particular to focus on.

Paralyzed by this, they limit themselves to simply commenting on events. Rather than take committed action in the world, they pass their self-evidently important judgments on every major issue of the day, and even many of the minor ones. They may even trick themselves into thinking they are doing something worthwhile, but afterwards, they will look back at all their comments and realize that they amounted to n.

Even worse, they become more concerned with the aesthetics of ideas than their contents. So, they are not even devoted to a search for truth, but simply seeking to be the cleverest person in their local coffee shop. They may not know anymore whether their statements are ironic or sincere because their actions are completely uncorrelated with what they say.

This is the person with a total absence of commitment. and Drfus cleverly links them to the aesthetic stage of life Kagard talks about in other works where people pursue pleasure and distraction rather than finding stable meaning in their lives. The passive observer is just distracting themselves with information rather than with partying or drinking.

Next, Drfus talks about the commitment addicts. This is a very different reaction to information overload, but it ends with the same inaction that the passive observer had. The commitment addict is someone that cannot tear themselves away from an important issue.

So they attempt to commit to them all. And they truly do care about each and every cause that comes their way. One moment they might be absorbed with the water crisis, the next with malaria and then with some aspect of electoral politics.

However, all of this commitment means that they eventually just burn out or they cannot devote a meaningful amount of time and energy to any of the causes that they feel so strongly about. And this does not just apply to the social or political spheres. This commitment addiction can hold just as much for the person who wants to learn everything, committing to subject after subject until eventually they realize that they never discovered that much about anything.

In any case, the commitment addict becomes just as paralyzed as the passive observer, either just from sheer exhaustion or despair when they realize that they will forever fall short of their own commitments no matter how hard they try. In both cases, we again see the issues found from an excess of possibility. There are just too many options, too much information out there.

And as a result, we become totally indecisive. Both the passive observer and the commitment addict are robbed of the privilege of devoting themselves to a stable meaning. And Kagard thinks this is an important component of a fulfilling life.

This is partly why he thinks a belief in God is a good route out of existential despair. He holds that a true Christian must take a leap of faith to trust in God wholeheartedly, knowing that that is to a large extent irrational. He must give God his unconditional devotion, commitment without caveat.

Of course, I am not a Christian, so I don't apply this framework to God in particular, but I do think that Kagard is on to something with this notion of faith and the importance of some of our commitments having very few conditions. Existential despair often consists of a feeling that there is little points to our actions, thoughts, emotions, or decisions. We could get out of bed today, or we could lie there and rot.

Who cares? It won't change anything. And I think that Kicker's idea of faith provides a really nice inverse of this state.

For him, the truly religious person would always have something to appeal to to make their life meaningful because they have a total and unreserved commitment to an idea or a god. And this makes every moment of their lives have value. It's also worth noting here that Kagod thought most Christians did not truly have faith in this sense and that it was a rare quality to find even amongst the devout.

But whether you think this sort of radical commitment is your route out of existential problems, Kagard highlights something incredibly worthwhile here. When we are bombarded with so much information, it is very easy to lose ourselves in indecision. And this would be a crying shame because committed action is what makes a lot of people's lives worth living.

And total paralysis often leaves misery in its wake. We now face levels of information overload Kicker Guard could only dream of. So how are we going to deal with it?

But the worst is yet to come. Now we will examine the effects Kagard thinks this passionless excess of information will have at the societal level. And some of it will look disturbingly familiar.

Three, the pitiles public. A lot of ink has been spilled in recent years over stochastic encouragements to violence. These are situations where no one directly calls for someone to attack another person or organizes a mob or forms a militia, but instead whole masses of people mutually create the conditions where such events are very likely to occur.

Sometimes without even knowing it, then responsibility is spread so thin amongst thousands and thousands of people that who knows who to blame. Every individual can wash their hands of it and say that they didn't call for anything like this to happen. even as each one contributed in small ways to its inevitability.

It's a bit like how in some executions by firing squad, one of the rifles would be loaded with a blank so that each executioner could tell themselves that they had the blank cartridge and so didn't kill the prisoner. And Kagard anticipated this stochastic phenomenon over 150 years ago. He spends much of his essay criticizing what he calls the public.

This is similar to an ordinary collection of people, but is much more abstract. It's a bit like when someone talks about what the people are saying or how everyone thinks this for Kagard. One problem with the public is that it provides people the ability to disown their actions, remaining detached from them and claiming they are just speaking for the public.

He specifically singles out the press as doing this quite a lot. This is a cover almost anyone can use regardless of what they are arguing for. and it allows them to avoid the risk of actually having a judgment on an issue or even of holding up their hands and saying that they don't want to comment.

This all exacerbates that lack of commitments that Kagard is so worried about. Our opinions are no longer spoken by us, but instead placed in the mouth of some imaginary third party. Additionally, Kagard is worried about the violence and vitriol that can be enacted by the public without any one individual having to risk their neck.

He imagines the public as a Roman emperor who has a pack of trusty dogs at his beck and call. If someone displeases him or he grows angry or just requires momentary amusement, he can release the hounds and watch them tear someone to pieces. Then afterwards, he can say, "Well, the dogs did it, not me.

" Retiring to his throne with an unblenmished conscience. If a large enough group commits a horrific act as one body, then each individual person can say that they did not really hurt anyone. or if they did, it was only because everyone else was doing it.

And it could truly be that each individual only committed a tiny wrong. But when added together, these amounted to someone's death or ruin. Kagard is referring to smear campaigns in the magazines and newspapers of his time.

But this is arguably even more of a risk in the internet age. If you have thousands of people all saying an insult once, then no individual person has done anything particularly major. But put all of these tiny actions together and you might have a full-blown harassment campaign on your hands.

And this sort of thing has driven people to suicide on a number of occasions. Each person can honestly say that nothing they did constituted harassment. They may have left just a single cruel comment, but together they brought about someone's intense suffering or even their death.

This is just the sort of situation Kickergard feared would arise from the public. That real wrongs could be committed without anyone bearing responsibility for them. When we combine this power of the crowd with the lack of individual passion found in the present age, we have a situation where few or no individuals will take drastic action.

But there are these lumbering crowd actions which lash out at anyone differentiating themselves from the amorphous mass that forms an abstracted general opinion. Without passionate individual investment in key ideas, the crowd will not even bring about great change as in revolutionary ages. It will simply be an indecisive and changeable guardian contenting itself with trivialities.

As Kagard put it, gossip and rumor and specious importance and apathetic envy become a surrogate for both this and that. So Kagard paints a dark vision of the future where the public rules from on high with no one in particular reaping the rewards because the public is no one in particular. Real existent individuals will suffer for the continued health of a crowd that is unpredictable, unthinking, and yet perversely aggressive.

Because the public is not simply a collection of individuals. It is something that each of those individuals are attempting to serve. And these are not simply Kagard's elitist worries about what the unwashed masses will do if they are given the chance to have an opinion.

The danger of the public stretches to the very way we relate to the world and to ourselves. Fundamentally, Kagod is concerned about the death of individuality. And that is just our last point.

Four, leveling and the individual. Over the course of the 20th century, the anthropologist Renee Gerard formed and refined his theory of mometic desire. This held that many of our wants are essentially borrowed from the people around us.

Without a proper examination of whether achieving these wants will make us fulfilled. So if all our friends suddenly want fancy watches, then we are much more likely to desire a fancy watch. And if everyone we know is going through breakups, we might feel a yearning to be single ourselves.

In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing. It may even help us become more socially cohesive. But Kagard was worried about a much more sinister form of mimisis, where our individuality is gradually scrubbed away and we lose everything wonderfully idiosyncratic about our own particular existence.

In all of his religious and philosophical thinking, Kagard remained a staunch individualist. Not necessarily in the political sense, but rather in the existential one. He thought it was in our individual relationship to God that we could bring out everything that was unique and precious about ourselves and escape existential dread.

This is partly why he associates religiosity with inwardness and self-standing. So perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the public for this Danish was the effect it would have on people's self-conception. namely that it would level us.

Leveling is a concept Kaggard uses a lot in the present age and it's indicative of some of his wider concerns about the individual's ability to thrive within modern society. Kagard says that with our age of reflection comes a certain objective way of looking at life. But by objectivity, he does not just mean the ability to see things logically, taking all the relevant information into account.

He also meant a detachment from our own subjectivity. that is a refusal to value our own perspectives and what they might tell us principally about ourselves. Kagard thought that the social pressures of the modern age would lead us to seek assimilation rather than individuality and cause us immense distress as a result.

As he put it, just as a surf belongs to an estate, so the individual realizes he belongs to an abstraction under which reflection subsumes him. In other words, he thought we are discouraged from being exceptional or even just individual and instead encouraged to try and resemble whatever the abstract public thinks in every respect. This leveling force is only egalitarian in the sense that it wants to make everyone exactly the same.

Rather than give everyone the equal chance to thrive as individuals, it wants to sand down each person's inconvenient edges and bumps until we are all perfectly alike and perfectly predictable. Importantly, Kagard is not being conspiratorial here. He does not think that leveling is being orchestrated by some cabal of anti-existentialists in long capes and evil-looking masks.

He thinks that no individual can be the leader of leveling, but that it stems from a general sense of passionless envy amongst people in the present age and that this passionless envy in turn stemmed from the inability to commit ourselves to anything in our lives. It all links together into a single picture. This is not dissimilar to nature's famous idea of resentment where he says that those with less power attempt to repress and constrain those with more power by crafting a morality which makes greatness itself evil.

However, whereas nature thought this was baked into Christian ethics as early as St. Paul, Kagard thinks this leveling is characteristic of modernity in particular and that our present age either originated leveling or made it significantly worse. It is symptomatic of the deep suspicion of passionate action in general, which we are encouraged to abandon in favor of endless reflection and discourse.

The disastrous effects of leveling only become clear when we compare it to what Kagard thought made an overall fulfilling life. In the sickness unto death, Kagard analyzes all sorts of ways that we can become as miserable as possible. But most of them involve some corruption in our relationship to ourselves.

While this sounds quite abstract, in its simplest form, it's rather straightforward. If we don't know ourselves, then we could spend our entire life chasing mirages, never knowing what we truly want. Or to use Kagard's terminology, what we are willing to have faith in.

Kagard cares deeply about individuality, both for its own sake, but also because he thinks that if we all become subsumed within this public crowd, then we will inevitably end up deeply unhappy. We will fall into a kind of nihilism because we will have ceased to view the world through our own eyes and thus the ability to affirm what matters to us. Instead, we will attempt to view it through everyone's eyes and unsurprisingly find that no part really matters more than any other.

Bear in mind this is a simplification of what Kagard thinks because he also holds that true individuality is found through a relationship with God. This emphasis on the individual also links back to the theme of commitments that runs through Kagard's essay. If we refuse to be individuals, then we cannot give our commitment to something as individuals.

If our only wish is to be a perfect member of a bland public, then we will never feel brave enough to take any sort of leap of faith where we descend from our comfortable reflection to engage with the world as it is. We will remain endlessly chatting, as Kickergard puts it, distracting ourselves with our public, putting forth half-considered musings on everything from the price of milk to the latest show at the opera house. Then when we look back on our lives, all we will truly be able to say is that we were unfailingly anonymous and unremarkable.

This is the existential horror Kagard says leveling has in store for us. And it is a truly terrifying thought for anyone who values their individuality. It would be somewhat irresponsible for me to speculate on how relevant this final observation is for the present day.

But I will leave it to you to decide how much of this chimes with your experience of the world. Do you feel the everpresent public pressing down on you, attempting to stifle your individuality? If so, do you think this is a new phenomenon?

Has it got worse in recent times? Or is this just how things have always been, the inevitable result of the human tendency towards conformity that allows societies to actually function? Do you think we are encouraged simply to be a face in the crowd, to not put our head above the parapets or think for ourselves?

Or do you think that this fear is overblown? After all, in the same essay where Kaggard talks about this extreme conformity, he also speaks of the newfound ability people have to form opinions on almost everything, even if they are uncommitted opinions. And surely this has the potential to support rather than oppress individual differences.

My point is I'm not saying that Kagard's observations should be pared uncritically. There are aspects that are plausible and aspects that are far less plausible. He is writing in the mid-9th century and we live in the 21st.

But I do think that Kicker is analyzing many of the same issues we face in our internet age. And moreover, he is doing so on a much smaller scale. Information overload, being a passive spectator, and a lack of clear direction are all problems we face now today as a result of our own social, political, and philosophical pressures.

And I think that Kagard's essay is a wonderful starting point from which we can develop our own ideas. Who knows, we might find out that this old Danish thinker has spotted something about our own time that we have missed in all the chaos. It's certainly worth a glance if you ask me.

And if you want to look into some of these existential issues in more detail, then check out this video where I attempt to make the notion of nihilism a little bit clearer.