Kierkergaard's Present Age the Age Essay

Indolence is the record of the century. Introductory pages to Yahoo, for instance, minutely discuss an individual's fashion as groundbreaking news (the individual, incidentally, can be one 'star' amongst many), various ways to loose weight, or the latest toys on the market. Instruments devised to further communication from reality become increasingly more complex. Whilst supposedly linking us to people, Facebook, Twitter and ilk create a 'virtual space' reality, and virtual space has become the order of the day. TV, itself, is an undistinguished conglomeration of surreal images, which, although allegedly based on reality, are, with the inclusion of news documentaries, quite distinct. It is for this reason that this age has been called the post modernistic era with the term 'modernism' being insufficient. Ours is a collage of impressions, with concepts such as Truth, Fulfillment, and Meaning, being, as Foucault, Derrida, and Habermas amongst a host of other deconstructionists, post modernist and nihilist thinkers have styled it, relativistic, dated, anachronistic, and actually non-existent.

The representative monument of our times -- in the same way as man's step on the moon signaled the '60s -- is Michael Graves' Disney building in Burbank, California the atlantes who support the mausoleum depict Snow White's Seven dwarfs with pride of place being given to Dopey.Even the American king, little by little, is reduced to nothing more than a fiction, and we see that with the decline from the strong hero figure of the Kennedy of the '60s to the minimized wimps of Nixon, Bush, and Clinton, each of whom was successively embroiled in financial, religious, and sexual scandals. People may wish the established order to continue, but they know it does not, and in our age, fundamentalisms notwithstanding and even inclusive, idealism has gone the way of Hades, heaven or hell, and Leveling Rationalism -- where all are equally right and moral with nothing left to fight for or acclaim -- is the order of the day. Ayn Rand's universe is a nightmare and so, too, is George Orwell's 1984. Yet, some of that has been accomplished in modern day 21st century America.

Reference

Kierkegaard, S. The Present Age and of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962)

Then.....