How come we are so taken in by the absurdities of our age? Are we too gullible to notice when we are being had by the adverts? Are we so self obsessed we are deaf to the voices from elsewhere saying we are not the whirring centre of the universe? How has the human gift of longing, journeying and exploring, in short the essential forward pull of the quest, become a seeking after that which is illusion and delusion, leaving us searching frantically for some kind of grail if only we knew what, and where, and when, and with no sense that what we seek is something that transcends our oh so limited horizons.
Ecclesiastes observed, with some irony after looking at the vanities and futilities of human pretentiousness, "You have put eternity in human hearts". Yes, God, you have. But that sense of eternity has been so eroded by mass produced experiential trivia, so corroded by the appetite to possess everything and experience whatever and dominate whoever, that what is left is a distorted vision, and instead of an upward longing for God, there is a downward longing for a dream reality. So we are gobsmacked by banality disguised as significance, tempted into ethical illiteracy trying to persuade us that cash value is confused with worthiness, and mistakenly believing street credibility is more important, more personally defining, than authentic human experience – joy and suffering, achioevement and failure, acceptance and rejection and self-awareness and self-questioning. By the way the important word in these pairings is the conjunction 'and', because we reach our richest potential as human beings, when we recognise and acknowledge and learn from the whole spectrum of experience, the positive and negastive. Ours is an age of denial, which avoids, minimises, talks down, intentionally overlooks and understates, those experiences and realities which interfere with the dream reality we have created.
All of this non-sense, absurdity, Foley cleverly and I think persuasively exposes. Such attitudes are the sources of our capacity to live absurdly. The second major section of the book explores a number of cultural strategies that help pull the wool over our eyes; or perhaps more accurately cultural obfuscators which grow like cataracts over those ways of seeing which we might want to call, a conscience ethically informed, knowledge distilled to wisdom, critical discernment, and honest, brave, open-eyed knowledghe of ourselves. The first of these rang so many alarm bells it deserves a post on its own – the next post. For now here is how the chapter starts, and you;ll see why as a recently retired academic teacher, it made me smile, wince and sigh all at once.
"A student fails to submit a project on time and then misses an appointment with his supervisor to discuss the problem. The university sends the student a letter informing him that he has been given a mark of zero for the project. Now the student not only comes to the supervisor but barges into his office without an appointment.
This project must be accepted late, he demands
Why is that?
Because I'm suffering from TCD
Which is?
Time Constraint Disorder – a chemical imbalance in the brain that means i can't meet deadlines or turn up on time for appointments.
Foley goes on, "I invented TCD as a joke….and the discovered that a Professor Joseph Ferrani of DePaul University genuinely wants procrastination recognised as a clinical disorder and included in the standard reference work for mewntal health professionals, the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)."
The chapter is called 'The Undermining of Responsibility" in which Foley examines the refusal of responsibility, the sense of entitlement and deserving, and the various slippages of social and personal accountability that lead to non-responsibility for the way we act, speak and live our lives.
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