Thoughts on Hypermodernity in the Afterglow of Pentecost

Nothing ever happens

Have we moved beyond postmodernity? I believe we have. Whether or not one identifies the year 2020 as the definitive inflection point, it seems clear that the post-Covid world is a fundamentally different world in certain major respects. Yet in many ways this difference lies in a ramping-up of the same patterns to previously unknown levels. Hypermodernity, an emerging and now somewhat common term for the period we find ourselves in, seems a fitting label.

If postmodernism is deconstruction, the dissolution of metanarratives, and a snowballing condition of self-referentiality, hypermodernism is in a sense the goal toward which postmodernism was leading: permanent self-reference as global metanarrative — the ubiquitous presence of past epochs as the mono-texture from which world culture is woven. This is of course made possible and facilitated by ratcheting advancements in all-pervasive technology which increasingly serves to record (or duplicate) the human experience in both its external and internal dimensions. Put another way, hypermodernism is the tendency for the structures of human artifice to house more and more of mankind’s collective memory, such that the recorded past is increasingly accessible to consciousness at any moment.

The mini epochs that we grew accustomed to in the 20th century, stratified neatly into decades bearing their own unique stamp, have been replaced by what might be termed “flash renaissances,” or brief collective recollections of past trends. Moreover, these flash renaissances increasingly overlap with each other, rising and falling in a constant churn. The meme “nothing ever happens” points to this, to the perception that the changes which occur now in culture are either nonexistent, increasingly subtle, too large to comprehend, or so fast that they disappear into a uniform static. In a way all of these things are really true simultaneously.

A sense of ever-moving fixity (and not, Lord knows, in the glorious sense of St. Maximus the Confessor’s vision of the eschaton) hovers over hypermodernity. Whether we view this as a kind of stabilized attractor state like Fukuyama’s “end of history” or, perhaps more pessimistically, as an impasse in the sense of Žižek’s vision of capitalism happily subsuming all attempts to break free from it, hypermodernity is the terminal pole and apotheosis of modernity. Its very name points to self-capture, toward being trapped within a feedback loop. I have elsewhere referred to this state, borrowing from Hegel by way of Bulgakov, as “bad infinity”. Regardless of whether we view it positively or negatively, one wonders how long this “infinity” could last. I won’t venture a prediction on that. I will however sketch out some initial observations on what I sense might be lurking in the nascent conditions of the emerging era.

Exteriorized memory and elemental beings

Just as postmodernity and now hypermodernity are part of the overall current of modernity, if we zoom out and consider modernity within the even larger current of history itself, we can see the grooves for what is now steady-flowing already beginning to be carved out in the farthest recesses of the human past. Modernity is really just an intensification of certain eddies in the continuous stream of world process. How might we define this “world process”? We can frame it, following Valentin Tomberg, as an interplay between the vertical (heavenly) and horizontal (earthly) planes of reality as mediated through human activity.¹ Put slightly differently, it is the story of man’s relationship to the Divine, to what comes to him as given, and what he makes of this given. Through the Fall, the first couple’s flawed use of what they were divinely given stamped the error of their deed onto the horizontal plane, where it then echoed across the generations as sin and death, or disconnection from the vertical plane; until on Golgotha the vertical descended into the horizontal like a flash of lightning, setting the earth aglow in the image of heaven and vanquishing death forever. But that’s perhaps taking us farther than we need to go for now. Let me return a moment to a sentence from above, this time with added emphasis on a few words:

[History] is the story of man’s relationship to the Divine, to what comes to him as given, and what he makes of this given.

The word story indicates that history is not just a sequence of events, but the record or memory of those events held in human consciousness. The words what he makes indicate that human creative activity is an integral part of the picture. And what do humans make via their creative activity? Tools, of course — technology. Looking into history as told both by modern archaeology and religious tradition, we see that technology has been a major component of human life since the earliest times (think, for instance, of the line of Cain). What has happened over the entire trajectory of human existence, and what the emergence of hypermodernity allows us to see with newfound clarity, is an offloading of the story into the technology, such that collective human memory is increasingly supplemented and even replaced by sense-based prosthesis. What was once held in the mind and transmitted orally via the natural faculties of the human being, proceeded first into the written word and artistic representation, then into print media, then into digital media, and finally into universal digital media instantly accessible to any and every individual via personal electronic device. Where in ages past one had the physical world-as-given “outside,” the life of experience “inside,” and the interpersonally transmitted Tradition as the primary tool to connect and calibrate these two poles, one now finds the “tradition” impressed and infused into the artifacts of human creation where it has solidified into the environment and become part of the outer world itself. This is of course not entirely new; human beings have always molded their ideas into their surroundings. What is new is the limit that has been reached. Our creative activity — carrying our story — comes at us now with the givenness, force, and omnipresence of the physical environment. And just as it requires minimal effort to interact in a basic way with the objects in one’s physical environment, it now requires minimal effort to interact with “worldified” global human culture, with the collective human memory exteriorized.

Souls born into most parts of the world today enter a life in which effortful participation is largely not required in interacting with the human story. Also not required is direct person to person contact. Got a nervous system and a screen? You’re good to go. The technology will do the work (the thinking, feeling, and willing) for you.

What this all amounts to is a merging of human soul-spiritual activity back into the environment. Is this a bad thing? And why am I saying “back” into the environment? It is at least a dangerous thing, because the environment is precisely what humanity fell into from out of the Garden. Let me explain what I mean by this. It’s not quite as Gnostic as it might sound. Animals live in seamless continuity with their environment. The environment, the macrocosm, is expressed through them via the instinctive drives and impulses of the species. This being the case, animals are moved by the primal forces that weave and work in outer nature. These forces which connect the animals to compulsory rhythms and processes — things like seasons, phases of the moon, reproduction and mating cycles, etc. — are baked into and automatically reflected in their behavior. They cannot do otherwise than follow the dictates of the species in response to outer conditions. Human beings on the other hand have recourse to reason, or the conceptual life of thought, and the freedom of will that consulting this conceptual life affords. However, after the Fall humanity as a whole took on the tendency to jump from the tower of reason and into the murky depths of animality. This is reflected, for instance, in pagan religion, where various gods and goddesses lorded over human activities, seeking propitiation and coercing them into yielding to the same natural or “elemental” forces of earth, water, air, and fire that fuel the drive-based activity of the animals and that work in the mineral and plant kingdoms.

St. Paul speaks of Christ having liberated humanity from the “elemental spirits of the cosmos” (for example, Col 2:8, 20). Though it’s often argued otherwise, it is my opinion that these very same forces I’ve just been describing are what Paul is referring to. When carried over into the human domain, the “elementals” butt up against the moral world order — the spiritual hierarchies of the right and left who stand between man and God. Those “gods” which kept men under the compulsory influence of the elements, steering men toward spiritual slavery, were disarmed and humbled by Christ. “He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Col 2:19). A doorway was thus opened back to reason, and not merely the natural reason of the pagan sages nor the discarnate wisdom of the Orient, but truly spiritual reason allied with faith, illumined and substantiated by the self-emptying love of the incarnate Word made Flesh.

As the hypermodern human being merges back into his environment, he approaches a new paganism and the risk of a new spiritual slavery. A different sort of elementals reach out to greet him. For his exterior world, what was once the natural environment, is now shot through with the externalized contents of both his personal inner life and the collective memory of all mankind. As the human saga becomes less and less something he actively participates in and increasingly something he passively imbibes, his soul faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing become weakened. Gradually he loses his reasoned self control, and the environment begins impressing itself upon him, automating his actions. He is lulled into a trance-like techno-animality. The “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12) slouch back toward their thrones again.

Are those spirits actually new, or had they just temporarily disappeared from view? One thing is for sure: the internet and particularly social media make it easier to recognize them. Their activity presses into the elemental fabric of the virtually expanded world, where it gives shape to the subtle currents we immerse ourselves in through our electronic devices. The gods of old, once the stuff of commonly accepted lore, disappeared at the dawn of rationalism and have now been made visible again through the newly universalized technological extension of our environment.

LARPing, sheep and wolves, and the Comforter

So what to do? One looks in vain for an escape route in the stable forms and institutions of the past. Simply plugging oneself into a pre-existing “traditional community” is vastly less sure and simple than it sounds, because the global world process has seeped into every nook and cranny of human life. If you look around you, you will find almost no one who isn’t using the exact same technology as you. The undulating texture of flash renaissances that I described earlier is permeating the experiences of everyone in every community. Participation in a community’s traditional forms is no longer granted de facto by the spirit of the folk but comes about through the free choice of every individual, whose options — knowingly on the part of the individual — span the entire gamut of recorded human history.

Simply put, there is no such thing as a fully traditional community which is also hooked up to the internet. Any remnant of folk or corporate bonds which impart organic consistency of form on such a community is weakened in proportion to the extent that its members participate in hypermodernity, aka have smart phones (nowadays just called “phones”). Those who think they or their community is immune to hypermodernity should take another moment to examine the situation. One does well to remember that “In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire (Roman) world. And everyone went to their own town to register” (Luke 2:1).

Let’s take a common example. A young couple enters the Roman Catholic Church, hoping to find in it a safe haven for their traditional sensibilities. They look back to a time before things went south and see Catholics attending Mass with gentlemen in suits and ladies in lace head coverings. They opt to continue this tradition, finding it more in line with the kind of piety they’re committed (admirably) to living out. But every Sunday in church, they find their ilk drastically outnumbered by more contemporarily dressed people — some modest, others not, a few guys in shorts, and perhaps a baseball cap or two. They kneel for Communion and receive the Host on the tongue, amidst hundreds of people doing otherwise. They don’t raise their hands with everyone else when responding “and with your spirit.” So on and so forth. Has this couple escaped hypermodernity? Not at all. They have simply loaded the Trad™ profile from the same dizzyingly expansive menu that every other person in the pews consulted (though perhaps less consciously and to a less intense degree) in shaping their preferred manner of showing up to church. This conscious adoption of traditional forms held against the background of the hypermodern paradigm often earns such examples a “LARP” badge from those who see the irony. LARPing is in fact a quintessential issue facing all traditional institutions, not just the Church. Unlike actual LARPers, who have their finger on the pulse, unwitting LARPers have yet to awaken to the radical and unprecedented freedom underlying their decision to embody a persona that was once issued by default.

And herein lies the paradox of hypermodernity. At the same time as the human being with atrophied soul faculties sinks into the environment of his externalized memory, becoming increasingly a passive bystander to life and thus disempowered and less free, a near-infinite vista has opened up before him in the domain of what he is able to make of himself. On one hand he is the freest he has ever been. On the other he slides into elemental bondage. The dissonance of this situation is truly staggering. Perhaps never before in the Common Era has the nature of the “I” been thrust so glaringly into the foreground. We find this essential element of man’s makeup, the unique personal center and locus of free activity for which modernity has been the fertile but rocky garden, stripped bare and caught vulnerably in a tug of war between two teleological attractors. “And out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword…” (Rev 1:16).

Whereas the earthly descent of He who said “I AM” to Moses on Sinai was heralded by the “voice of one crying out in the wilderness,” the creaturely “I am” now wades out into another kind of wilderness. “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves,” said the Master to the Twelve. “Therefore be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16).

The human “I,” the image of God which realizes itself fully — is given access to true being — only in attaining to the likeness of God, must in doing this learn to navigate the dangerous new terrain. It has been sent out into this wolf-ridden terrain and is now surrounded on all sides by it. Though exposed and vulnerable, it is not alone. “I will pray the Father, and he shall send you another Comforter, that he may abide with you forever” (John 14:16). The Comforter, the Holy Spirit, is the only force capable of preventing the “I”s of the global human community from splintering into every-man-for-himself. He vouchsafes the spiritual continuity of Christ’s sacrificial deed, actualizing the utterly unique “I”hood of every human being in Christ, not through division but through unity. For the way to personhood is the pouring-out of oneself for the other. Serpent-like wisdom and dove-like innocence are founded in this pouring-out of self, which must now be lived out in an inexorably hypermodern context.

As the contents of increasingly expanded, intensified, and objectified history remix endlessly behind our beloved screens, and we each become our own unique reflection of the one world process, the Tower of Babel continues both to rise and to fall, crumbling now into ever smaller pieces of rubble. The confusion of languages spreads to the level of the individual, as every person now speaks his own bespoke “language” molded from the world content he freely (at first) takes in. We still speak our native tongues, but in a quite palpable sense we talk past each other and can’t connect. As I reflect on these things in the immediate afterglow of Pentecost, my heart and mind draw warmth from the image of the tongues of fire that descended upon the original Christian community. “Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. And when this sound rang out, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language” (Acts 2:5-6). In our new age where “nothing ever happens,” poised on the fulcrum between radical freedom and techno-slavery, it is the Holy Spirit in whom we are offered the chance to understand each other again — each in our own language — and to discover the true universal reality, where something truly awesome is always happening.

Come Holy Spirit,

Fill the hearts of your faithful

And kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created.

And You shall renew the face of the earth.

O, God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit,

Did instruct the hearts of the faithful,

Grant that by the same Holy Spirit

We may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations,

Through Christ Our Lord,

Amen.

1. The “vertical” and “horizontal” terminology is used throughout Tomberg’s famous, anonymously published work Mediations on the Tarot.