Michael Foley's book The Age of Absurdity is a sharp, ironic but very perceptive analysis of what is wrong with our distracted and overstimulated culture, obsessed with novelty and transience. What Harry Emerson Fosdick called 'rich in things and poor in soul'. Never have so many wanted so much so badly – I love the front cover of this book – it could be a study on ecology, sociology, anthropology, technology, theology – in fact it's a study of absurdity.
Foley eyes the whims and obsessions of a consumer culture with what can only be called expert irony. Many of his comments are simply unanswerably self evident except they weren't so evident till he pointed them out. Even some of his chapter headings are fun, in an ironic way. The Ad and the Id; The Old Self and the New Science; The Righteousness of Entitlement and the Glamour of Potential. Early on he lists with an envious glance at Buddhist wisdom, so absent in Western consumerism, the Four Ignoble Truths
- We can't sit still
- We can't shut up
- We can't escape self obsession
- We can't stop wanting things
Four telling sermons could be preached on each of these as symptoms of a culture which far from being godless is god-ridden. If everyone is free to choose their own Gods, and want their own version of salvation, and to construct and be whoever they want to be at any particular time in their lives, and ignore any inner sense of obligation to that which is higher, more durable, more significant than the self, if 'whatever' is the mantra that underpins the weight of life's longings and those deep potential's of each human spirit, then we are in trouble. And Foley traces that trouble to its sources, and exposes the strategies that persuade us to buy into (important wee metaphor that) – to buy into someone else's vision of who I am, what my life is about, to let someone else subliminally shape my choices, influence my preferences and turn me into a money-spender and things getter.
I'll do a couple of other posts on this book – he has important things to say to the Church (which isn't even on his horizon) if we are prepared to overhear someone whose analysis of the culture within which we are placed to follow Jesus and share the Gospel is way ahead of some of our own efforts within the Christian Church.
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