Satori

Francis Fukuyama dealt a blow to Hegelian dialectics when he wrote The End of History and the Last Man and before that the sociologist Daniel Bell had written The End of Ideology. Both of these tomes offered a form of historical revisionism that proposed its own millenarian view, to the extent that they forecasted the prospect of a society that wasn’t riven by conflict. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was a countervailing jeremiad that warned of the prospect of cultural conflicts that would replace the paradigm of the cold war conflict with something far more pernicious, a prophecy that, in fact, has come true (interestingly Fuyuyama was Huntington’s student.) The concept of the “paradigm shift” outlined in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has in fact made us wary of the perceptual apparatus that we employ to make decisions. But what about a tome entitled The End of Knowledge or The End of Wisdom, since the illusion of knowledge itself with the concomitant specter of ego raising its ugly head may be the villain? “The best lack all conviction” are Yeats over-used words, but there are some who would argue that one of the few redeeming aspects of age is the kind of satori or enlightenment that seems to derive as knowledge drains out of you. Unless you’re someone who’s living in the delusory universe of a tyrant, then you’re ready to admit that much of what you've held dear is merely a way of encapsulating reality and pretending that you understand what often confounds understanding. Einstein died without ever creating a unification theory (between gravity and electromagnetism) and perhaps the conclusion that will someday be reached is that there isn’t one—though to prove that the universe doesn’t make sense may turn out to be as exacting a task as showing that it does.

The Age of Acquirius

This could very well be the beginning of a new age! If China revalues the renminbi, the two-state solution finally gains traction in the Middle East, Google acquires the rights to most of human thought, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il finally acknowledges his polymorphic perversity and stops trying to silence critics of his dictatorship, then we can only assume that the problem of cold fusion will soon be cracked. Imagine a world in which energy is no longer something that major powers fight over. As Freud once said about analysis, once it’s over, the real problems begin. If we accept Marx’s analysis, the drive for economic hegemony infuses international politics. Without the struggle for resources, life will lose its meaning and many world leaders will walk around with sunken eyes, like Max Von Sydow losing his game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. 

   

What will this new age be called? The Age of Acquirius. When Wall Street is battered as it was in the past year, analysts say that the market is making an adjustment. Wasn’t Period of Adjustment the name of a Tennessee Williams play, later made into a movie starring Jane Fonda? But what is this new age? Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is still an apt description of the overarching materialism that has spread exponentially in our time. Our economies have grown from the horse drawn chariot of supply and demand to the nuclear powered rockets of computer-generated algorithms. Profits of some hedge funds exceed the GNP of modest countries, while England is referred to as Iceland on the Thames and the entire country of Greece faces the equivalent of a massive foreclosure proceeding. An explosion of information has awakened whole continents of knowledge, yet newspapers are defunct and the democratization of truth via outlets like Wikipedia has crushed the notion of a moral center. Is this the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn was alluding to in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  Yeats’s oft-quoted lines ring true once again: “The best lack all conviction and the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.”