What if the world ended and nobody knew about it . . . or cared? It’s a strange question, and one that I never would have considered had it not been for Rick Roderick, a philosophy professor from Duke University, who sadly is no longer with us, having passed away over ten years ago. I discovered Rick Roderick through his recorded lectures with the Teaching Company. One of Professor Roderick’s areas of special interest was “postmodernism”, and if that sounds like a stodgy subject, then one is in for a real shock (and not an unpleasant one) when hearing Professor Roderick discuss it. Listening to a lecture by this self-described son of a “con man”, with his west Texas drawl and sarcastic wit, is a little like having a conversation with a close friend about the meaning of life after you’ve just finished your first twelve-pack of beer. Nothing is sacred, or taken too seriously; all beliefs – no matter how seemingly sound – are challenged; and no person is above suspicion . . . or ridicule. Professor Roderick is particularly partial to those German and French philosophers who have cut through dogmatic and sterile presumptions about truth and meaning with a blunt axe, and proposed radical new conceptions of how to make sense of who we are and how we got that way: thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Habermas, Foucalt, Derrida. For him, they are kindred spirits, “hell-raisers” I suppose he might call them. You may not agree with them, may not want to join their ranks, but you’re grateful that they came by and bashed the party, because the host and the guests were phony snobs, and things were getting very dull before these guys showed up. (I highly recommend Rick Roderick’s lectures by the way: there are three sets of eight of them, all available for free for viewing and MP3 download at rickroderick.org.)
One of these Continental philosophers that Professor Roderick discussed was a man named Jean Baudrillard, and it is he that inspired the question I raised at the beginning of this entry about the end of the world. Because Baudrillard believed that the apocalypse already has happened, some time late in the twentieth century. It was not the result of a nuclear war, or a massive plague, or a worldwide geographical catastrophe like an asteroid strike. No, the end came silently one day, when there were no longer any real people left in the world. Our civilization had subtly transformed all of us in such a way that we had collectively become products conditioned by mass media, where the fictional dramas and other entertainments of television and the movies became more real and important to us than anything happening in our personal lives, and our own tastes, beliefs, desires, and goals were manufactured for us by the market-driven media apparatus that has dominated our conscious existence almost from birth. In a sense, Baudrillard is suggesting that we have become a race of beings who only appear to be alive, awake, and volitional: a type of zombie. And after reading Baudrillard, one can’t help but wonder if this is why zombie movies and television programs have become so popular these days. It brings to mind a funny scene in one of those movies, Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies are milling about in a mall, pushing shopping carts and standing in front of shelves. It is explained that these creatures, though dead, continue to engage in many of the activities that occupied their time when they were alive, because, after all, these activities didn’t really require any higher brain function.
But Baudrillard might have actually protested against such a comparison. Zombies, after all, are still capable of a primal sort of violence, a “lust for life” as it were, as they pursue, capture, and tear apart living victims to eat their flesh. We, on the other hand, have managed to completely divorce ourselves from any tangible evidence of the violence that underlies much of the basis of our existence. Animals raised in factory farms, in conditions so inhumane that any pet lover would cringe if they allowed themselves to see it, are safely hidden away, and we need only encounter their remains as unrecognizable precision-cut pieces, neatly packaged in plastic, cardboard, and Styrofoam boxes. And, for that matter, we’ve managed to insulate ourselves from our fellow human beings who have failed to succeed, and to conform, lest we feel an unsettling rush of compassion . . . or fear. They are efficiently tucked away in prisons (America
Baudrillard’s dystopian vision of our world was one where we had been subtly stripped of everything that made us authentic selves, and we didn’t care. Reality has become a manufactured thing – a sort of high tech “bread and circuses” that was perhaps at one time deliberately crafted by big business and big government, but now is being orchestrated by the impersonal machine of civilization itself, because there aren’t even any authentic selves left in the upper echelons of society to direct the levers and curtains. If this sounds strangely similar to some Hollywood movies that you might remember, it is no coincidence. Baudrillard’s views inspired the movie The Matrix, where machines literally have taken over and created a synthetic, virtual world for entrapped human beings to live in. And Baudrillard’s skepticism is actually just a modern incarnation of a grand tradition among French philosophers who have tackled the question of what it means to have an authentic existence, beginning with Descartes, who wondered how we would ever be able to tell if our lives were just illusions, projected into our minds by some sort of demon who could make us believe that we were living active lives, when we really were not. It was the nightmare of The Matrix, imagined nearly four hundred years ago. Other popular movies seem to have been inspired by this same vision: if not by direct exposure to Baudrillard and other postmodernists (because I doubt that many Hollywood writers and producers read philosophy), then maybe by exposure to Rick Roderick’s lectures. The Truman Show comes to mind, in which a man is living in a television situation comedy and doesn’t even know it, and Wag the Dog, where government agents team up with a Hollywood filmmaker to create a fictitious war, in order to divert national attention away from a Presidential sex scandal.
But Professor Roderick, who was generally sympathetic to the views of the postmodernists, was not prepared to go to Baudrillard’s extreme conclusions. In Roderick’s view, while our trajectory seemed to be in the direction of Baudrillard’s dystopia, we had not arrived there, yet. The self is “under siege”, he contended, but it has not been extinguished. He relates in one of his lectures how he read Baudrillard’s description of the war between the U.S. and Iraq (the first one, with the elder President Bush in charge) as merely a staged spectacle, and felt that here, for certain, Baudrillard had gone too far. But then Roderick admitted that, when he spoke with persons who had participated in the war, as soldiers, they confessed that they had not seen much in the way of actual battle, but had witnessed it pretty much the same way that Americans back home had, via television monitors. Roderick wondered if Baudrillard might not be so far off the mark after all.
In retrospect, it is easy to see how Professor Roderick, who made his Teaching Company lectures in the early 1990s, could imagine that we were imminently approaching a sort of apocalypse where the self would be overwhelmed by the synthetic reality of a post-modern age. This was the era of the “Pax Americana”: just a few short years after the fall of the Soviet Union , when it seemed that there really were no genuine adversaries left in the world, and that all we had left to fear was ourselves (and our overseers). In this era of American hegemony, coming on the heels of the victory of consumerism in the yuppie, “shop till you drop”, 1980s, one could imagine a “brave new world” where the citizenry was kept in check by a steady stream of entertaining diversions, along with vague, nondescript terrors that required constant government vigilance and intervention, like the “war on drugs”. It seemed that, by the 1990s, the revolt against mediocrity, conformity, and social coercion which began with the beatniks in the 1950s and flowered with the hippies and civil rights activists of the 1960s had finally been beaten back into a permanent submission. Yes, everyone was free to express himself or herself in any way that they chose (a token act of obeisance to those cultural revolutionaries and nonconformists of decades past), as long as these modes of expression were not truly threatening to the established order. Wear a striped tie on a checkered shirt. But don’t do anything genuinely subversive.
Still, even in the 1990s, I wonder if we were any less authentic as selves than, say, the typical serf living in Europe six hundred years ago, a factory worker during the first decades of the industrial revolution, or a contemporary Tupi tribesman of the Amazon rainforest. Were their lives more rich, more autonomous, more engaged than our own? Was the quality of their experiences more interesting, or more authentic? And what of those persons who somehow managed to look away during the 20th century calamites of Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia
Rick Roderick passed away in 2002. Had he lived to see the second Iraq War, he might have had even more cause for cynicism about Baudrillard’s theories. There was nothing comfortable, or pleasantly distracting, about this war, even for its witnesses back home, and its legacy still haunts us. Still, there is something uncomfortably Orwellian about the “war on terror”, which has now joined the “war on drugs” as one with no end in sight, no tangible enemy, and an ongoing justification for the government to compromise both our property rights and our civil liberties.
Professor Roderick, like many of the French intellectuals that he admired, was a fan of the cinema, and used examples from movies to exemplify many of his points. One of his favorites was Blade Runner. At the end of one of his lectures, he described the climactic scene of that movie, where the leader of the rebel androids impales his hand with a nail - an act which echoes that of a character in Jean Paul Sartre’s Roads to Freedom. It is an irrational, painful, self-destructive act, and for that very reason is the highest expression of freedom, because it defies the innate, fundamental drive for self-preservation, for seeking self-gratification and avoiding pain, as well as all conditioning, all logic, and all social conventions that motivate one to behave in a manner that is not . . . counter-productive.
I don’t know if there is a silent apocalypse looming in our future like the one that Baudrillard envisioned, or, indeed, if it has actually already happened. How does one remedy the death of the self? Many years ago, I told a friend of mine of a nightmare that I had, in which I was in a world dominated by zombies, and I myself was a zombie, but harbored a secret desire to find a cure. My friend said that he suspected that we all have had the same nightmare. For Baudrillard, the cure was to out-absurd the absurdity of non-existence, to push this synthetic reality to the limits of endurance, and in doing so perhaps create the conditions for the re-emergence of an authentic self. That sounds suspiciously like the counter-culture of the 1960s. I suppose that it almost worked once. Maybe it’s time to give it another try.
