{I don’t know much about Ross Barkan, but he apparently hasn’t read (or doesn’t remember) Pascal. “For thousands of years,” Barkan informs us, as he blithely explains today’s Zeitgeist, “mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom.” Compare this smug observation with Pascal (17th century): “All humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It also seems that Barkan, who was born in 1989, is unaware that New Age spirituality is not new: e.g., New Age - Wikipedia or, for an even longer historical view, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. Those caveats aside, Barkan’s recent essay is indicative of—well, of something.}
Ross Barkan (from “The Zeitgeist Is Changing” 1):
Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.
Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?
What explains the dominance of digital charlatans who promise all of life’s riches are at hand if only you visualize hard enough or utter the correct incantations. 2 Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun – until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise.
Irrationality, on its own, is no virtue, and some of the romantics of the 19th and 21st centuries succumb to the same ancient dross, magic alone as the supposed channel to transcendence. That spiritualism has spread with tech is an irony fitting of the age.
Against the hype of progress, the new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”. Science brought about these revolutions; science compressed once unimaginable computing power into a single handheld device. Science now promises a great leap forward with artificial intelligence, which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves – machines will now make mediocre art, music, literature, and even fact-challenged journalism.
For now, rapacious tech still has a mass buy-in. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are hegemonic. Mark Zuckerberg sculpts his pharaonic Hawaii compound. He and his ilk own the present. Whether they own the future, forevermore, is no longer clear. Generational change is hard on the incumbents. And romanticism won’t hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame. What it burns is still anyone’s guess. 3
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1 Experts say that, for best results, your zeitgeist should be changed every generation or so, perhaps at the same time you refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure." Thomas Jefferson) I would also recommend that you take your zeitgeist in for a tune-up every five years or every 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.
2 Belief in incantations and ritual formulae is shocking to Christians? That seems odd.
3 As is, for that matter, whatever Ross Barkan is going on about.
You may not be interested in the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is interested in you.
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