lately it seems like they're drowning...

On the subway today, on my way to the movie theatre, I was reading Kierkegaard's The Present Age. I encountered this passage that made me laugh out loud:

Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose...Nowadays not even a suicide kills himself in desperation. Before taking the step he deliberates so long and so carefully that he literally chokes with thought. It is even questionable whether he ought to be called a suicide, since it is really thought which takes his life. He does not die with deliberation but from deliberation.

Kierkegaard was above all a master of irony, and this passage attests to that quite well. I thought his point was an interesting one, for after all, today's leaders retain such a description not for their exuberance of passion or strength of spirit as shown by their actions, but for their thoughts. Unlike our pagan ancestors, whose notions of virtue revolved around physical actions (hunting, sacrificing, conquering), our notions of virtue revolve around ideas, abstractions, and the intellect. We are a much more boring lot on account of this. We don't conquer to assert our will; we merely scheme. We don't hunt for sustenance; we microwave. We don't sacrifice to the gods in order to get in touch with our spirituality; we read philosophy books.

Nothing ever happens. What does "happen" is all-too often an abstraction. We go to school, and earn a degree. Ultimately, it's just a piece of paper with symbolic meaning at best. We go to work and collect a paycheck. The numbers in our bank account change. That's all.

A revolutionary age this is not. Even today's "rebels" and "revolutionaries" (if such people even exist) get to go home to their big-screen tv's and dishwashers at the end of the day. The revolutionary spirit has become laughable in today's world of comfortable abstraction. Nothing enrages in the full meaning of the term. All conflict is addressed through mere argumentation. People bicker, and then go away happily thinking they have won the argument. Nothing actually transpires. Everything is reduced to mere symbolism, and for good reason: Things are simpler to deal with when they're not real--when they're mere representations of reality, but not reality itself. Indeed, today's age is one of indolence, and even cowardice. Thus spoke Kierkegaard!