History Running Absurd
Photo by Joseph Corl
In a recent essay for The Atlantic, “History is Running Backwards,” David Brooks argues that ever-more people are disillusioned by the moral chaos and uncertainty that characterizes our society. They believe there is no hope for the future if progress no longer provides rational answers to the issues that matter. So they’re turning toward tradition and history for meaning, especially conservative religion, frustrated as they are with the corrosive secularism they believe has contributed to this problem.
On this journey the disillusioned beings’ search for the correct history will likely be filtered through the lens of nostalgia, driven to capture the comfort of immersing themselves in imaginary moments when images and symbols and the vibrations of belief held sway, helping them assuage their guilt for missed opportunities and crippling bloopers.
There have always been urges to abandon moments of chaotic social change for greener pastures, whether imaginary or real. They stoke the desire to believe that some doctrine or screed attached to an earlier congruence of truthfulness will deliver them from anxiety. As Paul Tillich contends in The Courage to Be, this turn is common during moments of disruptive social change and as the end of an era approaches. Threatened by disruptions to expectations and comfortable lifestyles, beings find ways to alleviate this anxiety.
Our moment can easily be seen and felt as the end of an era. The arrival of AI and especially AGI (artificial general intelligence), the machine that portends to control human intelligence, and the resulting job losses already occurring on a big scale; the threat of nuclear annihilation that appears increasingly possible; the random acts of violence that saturate our daily lives; the epidemic of elite malfeasance and scandals; the sieve of moral relativism and the insufficiency of traditional religious denominations; the ever increasing difficulty of economic survival, etc.
The palpable presence of these changes is surely enough to presage the complete loss of control over everyday lives, even transit some into a feeling of nothingness, what Tillich refers to as non-being, the voiding of human existence. This can lead to suicide for those who are ill-equipped to manage the void, especially the uneducated who can be easily seduced by apocalypse-speak. Ignace Lepp calls them the “psychically immature.” They’re captured by a closed morality “which has its origins in the superego, taboos, social conventions, the hope of rewards, and the fear of punishment in the next life” (The Authentic Morality). They’re obedient, Bible-reading subjects.
Those with this mindset won’t easily grasp what the perplexities at the end of an era mean. They’ll select what they want to see. And it is likely they won’t grasp the full significance of what it is they’re turning to either. Instead, they’ll identify with symbols and images to compensate for a misread of this absurd existence, but their limited awareness will likely entrench their dilemma, reproduce their confusion in another form until they become unwitting victims of the absurd.
There’s a mindset at work at this moment that’s reacting to the absurdity of how our internet culture has evolved and especially what it has done to our everyday lives. According to an April 2026 NBC News Decision Desk Poll, 47 percent of adults aged 18–29 (Gen Z) would choose to live in the past, with many expressing discomfort with modern technology and constant, 24/7 networking. A significant number in this group identify with the 1980s, 1990s, or early 2000s, often describing them as the “pre-social media” era.
These numbers are far higher for older generations. According to a report in Consumer Affairs (“The Effects of the Digital Age by Generation,” June 12, 2024), 91 percent of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers feel overwhelmed by these same pressures, identifying with the 1950s, 1960s, and the 1970s. But interestingly, they feel a different kind of discomfort compared to the Gen Z generation, which assimilated, to a degree, the Digital Age’s advances until the negatives became nearly impossible to face.
Neither one of these older generations grew up with the internet (many boomers have never plugged in, refusing to even use email), though this does not automatically translate to oblivion. The attraction to new toys inspires many in our consumer-driven culture. And facing off with PCs and then smartphones was nearly a religious experience for many who were not inclined to be sci-fi aficionados. But as the absurdity of this evolution has become threateningly clear, they’ve imagined living inside certain enclaves of history. In this sense, the generations overlap.
The threat is greater among the older victims since they witnessed such a striking contrast between worlds, crashing through the end-of-the-era gates. The boomers grew up in an age of promise and optimism when progress was ascendant. They’re retiring into a culture of regression. The Gen Xers got a belated piece of this aura before the millennium and the post-9/11 years of endless wars and societal stasis.
What do these frustrated folks imagine will replace the strictures of the Digital Age? Its tentacles extend far, wide, and deep. They could develop their aesthetic intelligence and imagine other worlds, teleport themselves to places where they can find solace and simplicity. They could physically transport themselves to places where people simulate primitive lifestyles, an island off the west coast of Ireland, for example, or exile themselves to unplugged pockets of rural America. Some boomers might literally reconstruct the good old days and resort to communal living or, even move back to their home towns, possibly live in their parents’ digs. It’s debatable whether they’ll find the kind of certainty and simplicity there that preserves the lifestyle options they had when living among the moral chaos. The less gutsy might start immersing themselves in all facets of throwback culture.
The impulse that shapes the search for certainty and simplicity is utopian. Nostalgic reflections and utopian thinking are forms of longing. Nostalgia looks backward to an idealized past while utopia imagines an ideal future. They link in the sense that nostalgia is a utopia with orientation to the past, and utopia is a nostalgia that’s oriented toward the future. “Good nostalgia” involves more than merely remembering a certain time. It turns the past into a vision of wholeness, authenticity, or lost perfection. The nostalgia impulse in this sense is utopian since it imagines a better place or time that feels complete, even if it never truly existed. They differ, however, in significant ways. Utopia is change oriented while nostalgia resists it by idealizing the non-existent past.
The utopian impulse, therefore, is vital for forging an authentic existence and positive change. An actual utopia, on the other hand, is unattainable. The semblance of one will be static. However strong the impulse behind the attempt to create a utopia, the end result will be less than perfection. It’s very definition is “no place.” The structure of advanced industrial societies as we know them—organized with degrees of capitalist exploitation—simply can’t accommodate everyone. Some anthropologists contend that primitive societies, those before the agricultural revolution spiked the populations and solidified hierarchies, could approximate utopian experiments. These can surface too in small-scale communities—subcultures especially—where ta unifying cultural and egalitarian bond prevails. The Amish communities, effectively mini-states, serve as a good example. They’re bonded by a strict religious, communistic ethic resistant to external influences. But they’re mostly the exception.
Utopian experiments in recent times have been fated to fail. The Llano del Rio socialist cooperative was founded in 1914 by Job Harriman. It was located fifty miles north of Los Angeles, just east of Palmdale. Housing just over 1000 residents, it succeeded for a few years until water shortages, internal conflicts, and sabotage from conservative activists forced its demise in 1918. The infamous communes of the 1960s are another example. Alienated by urban civilization, educated middle-and-upper class dropouts scattered to rural America, embodying composite identities of cowboy and Indian, in search of a lifestyle modeled on that of the Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But they found a less-then-romantic challenge in having to work the land like tenacious farmers. Plus, the tensions between those steeped in the ethic of individualism and collectivism were difficult to resolve.
Literary representations reveal a similar fate, the striving for a more perfect society that falls short. So far short, in fact, that for the most part they can be characterized as dystopian, especially in the 20th century. H. G. Wells’ A Modern Utopia (1905), Zamyatin’s We (1924), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ape and Essence (1948), and Island (1962), George Orwell’s 1984 (1948), Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), and Anthony Burgess’s 1985 (1978), among others, demonstrate how increasingly difficult it is to fashion large-scale utopian experiments given the complexity of industrialization and the limits of liberalism.
Ursula Le Guin’s notable story from 1974, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” captures this dilemma. She offers a comparison in the subjunctive mode between the state of American society and a sketch of what a utopian society might look like, her language erupting throughout with reservations. She presents an inventory of negatives about American capitalist society and its institutions, its exploitative stock market and technology, repressive mores, military culture, etc., and provides a humane substitute for each. Omelas is painted as a city infused with aesthetic and natural beauty where complex and intelligent people live caring and tension-free lives. Its excellence is undercut, though, by the presence of an immiserated child, allegorically the underclasses, mostly hidden from view. Enough of the citizens know, however, so that this knowledge spreads. Even though most become aware of this impoverishment, they suppress it, conform to the existing social contract and accept their limited freedom. Though some walk away, and Le Guin questions their motives, she posits the argument that given our existing knowledge about how societies work, there must be those who are excluded.
Whether a mental capture of the past, an experimental possession of a space that conjures it, or one that paints a future of perfection from it, chasing utopia can compound disillusionment and create new uncertainty. Facing up to this limitation, breaking free from a dependency on the idea of utopia, can provide paths to satisfy the need to simplify lifestyles and manage the chaos of our moment. This means coming to a realization that there are ways to survive in the present free of a fixation on nostalgia or the future. This means accepting the chaos and uncertainty of the present as limits we confront from day to day.
Albert Camus provided insight into this dilemma in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus. It was written at a moment of crisis, during the early years of World War II. He felt—feelings were paramount for Camus, rejecting the role of absolute reason—that the world we live in is absurd, that it is always absurd with respect to the meaning of life. His notion of the absurd is defined as a clash between our constant need for clarity, purpose, and order, and a world that offers no clear answer, no final meaning, since it remains unreasonable and silent. It arises in the tension between a mind that wants meaning and a universe that gives none back. Now he was an atheist, a thinker associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and historical Existentialism, so he nixed the dependence on external and higher meanings—essences—that many who are captured by the chaos are tempted to embrace, along with a belief in rational progress, hope for the future, and nostalgic throwbacks. Any escape from or leap to a space away from the absurd present, even suicide itself, constitutes intellectual dishonesty. According to Camus, “The present and the succession of presents before a constantly conscious soul is the ideal of the absurd man.”
The absurd man practices absurd reasoning, which is a way of thinking that means refusing to escape. He keeps facing the struggle, acting consciously to manage the chaos and uncertainty, accepting that meaning is not forthcoming. Like Sisyphus fated to roll a rock up a hill repeatedly, in perpetuity, he comes to realize that nothing will ever change this equation. It is in this realization that this limit is transcended, enabling life to be lived freely and passionately.
The big question here is how one comes to this realization. How does one develop the consciousness to grasp this situation? Not everyone possesses the psychic maturity. Many are lost in the routines of everyday life and can’t gain perspective until the “stage sets”—the heretofore unseen scaffolding that sustains one’s existence—collapse. Then the victim becomes the absurd man, ready to revolt against all imposed meanings. This state is Camus’ absurdly-rational “utopia” where the absurd man lives day to day, moment to moment, responsibly and with integrity, in an ethical realm beyond the ordinary markers of good and evil.
This alternative to escapism, however, which clearly broaches the philosophy of Existentialism, is confined to the ethic of individualism. Can true freedom and stability be secured through this ethic? Is this sufficient to navigate through the clutter and chaos, tune out the noise and confusion and achieve stability and certainty? Camus’ absurd hero acts aggressively to keep up the struggle to live lucidly in the present, but he’s an isolated individual who performs strictly through his own efficacy, fearing that the wills of others might impose essences—divine or pre-determined meanings from outside one’s subjectivity, etc.—on his capacity to act. However important it is for the absurd man to power his struggle, the experience of being part of a group that meshes the willful can serve as a replacement for “tradition” and repel the urge to escape. ///
Subcultures could be created where members probe options to survive within the chaos, something an isolated individual is unable to do. These could be housed in creative communities—within or outside of cities and conurbations—where members experiment with how to develop alternatives to the mainstream, the mega-connected global machine that lords over the whims of the willing like Big Brother. With cooperation—outside the corporate profit system—they could develop an enlightened version of AGI through a dark web that gives control to the willing, refusing to submit to neo-Luddite fantasies. This cooperation could extend to the structure of the social mechanism, producing the equivalent of the egalitarianism practiced in pre-agricultural societies, tempering the cost-of-living extremes. Communal living would perhaps flow naturally from this, helping to break down the isolation of the individual. Then add a pinch or more of soul-bonding religiosity to infuse the grouping that’s shaped by an honest and diversity-directed morality laced with integrity and faith. And if qualms remain about security and safety, add a bomb shelter.
The end result could surely deliver at least a smidgen of possible perfection, certainly a new conception of progress that the disillusioned can identify with, but no utopia as such since the concept itself negates flawlessness. The best experimental configuration is one that exists within the limits of the possible.
