While it should hardly come as a shock to anyone that we live in a narcissistic era, it’s refreshing to see some actual discussion of the trend. On Slate, Christopher Hitchens states the painfully obvious when he argues that the self-absorption of the ‘me decade’ hasn’t gone anywhere, and has instead transposed itself to the democratically-correct pronoun ‘You’ – i.e. you the voter, you the creator, you the decider. While it’s a little self-evident, it’s nice to see some mainstream discussion of some of the more insidious aspects of liberal-humanism.
Then, Tony Long from Wired suggests that the recent hubbub around the Blogger Code of Conduct is in fact a futile effort in a piece rather cleverly titled “The Blogosphere, Where a Tawdry Culture Goes to Die“. He suggests that civility is based on self-restraint, the sort that actually involves placing others’ needs in front of one’s own – something that is at odds with the dominant entertainment and cultural trends of the last thirty or forty years.
But most interesting is the yawning gap in both writers’ arguments. Hitchens gestures towards it, but only dismissively:
Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual. What you can do to stop planetary warming. How the maximum leader is on your side. The ways in which the corporation has your needs in mind as it makes its dispositions. The candidate who wants to hear your views. Or, a little farther down the scale of flattery and hucksterism, come to our completely uniform and standardized food outlet and create your own salad and dessert, from our own pre-selected range of freshly prepared and tasteless ingredients!
But both Hitchens and Long miss the utter alienation that mass-society populism creates – that narcissism is much a defence-mechanism as it is a symptom of democratic-capitalist excess. In doing so, they again place blame at the feet of those who have neither the time, resources or scope to appreciate how we historically arrived at the contemporary moment. To riff on Hitchens, it’s your fault you were born into the modern western ethos.
And that’s why they’re both jackasses.
