A theory of modernity

I HAVE A GRAND THEORY OF MODERNITY AND HOW I CAN MAKE IT RIGHT!

– yells a person from his open, third-floor window, inexpertly shaved and wearing his most sleep-deprived eyes.

Our time is created by stories. We let ourselves be guided by stories, powered by stories, sated with stories, lulled by stories, confused by stories, divided by stories, enraged by stories, permeated by them, he yells.

They are what they call augmented reality. An overlay. You see a rock – it’s real; you see the meaning of that rock. That’s story. You see a moving mass of flesh, reality; a human with an inner life, that’s story.

A playwright from my own land spoke of onions, myself I prefer to talk of sediments: The layers. At one layer, you have tragedy and triumph. At another, humans doing each other justice. At yet another, humans teeming with human rights – and breaking them …

augmented reality! But you need no equipment other than your tongue. Your fingers. Your feather dipped in ink or stylus on softened clay: Stories.

They are growing beyond us now. Today’s aesthetics are the set designs of yesterday. You must have noticed. Today’s news events have showrunners, today’s journalists perform fanfiction more than anything. Our collective imaginings funneled through intellectual properties, bought, sold, maneuvered, consolidated … into monstrous, autonomous entities in charge of who’s allowed to imagine what.

We had a mythworld, once, and tamed it into fiction, now all fictions grow together into a single cinematic universe, where every reference can be true – provided you know the rules. Can amass the funds. Can convince the money. (Money are stories too.)

All this he yells.

BUT I CAN MAKE IT RIGHT.

For the sake of form, he makes for himself a story where the building across the street is really a representation of Mount Olympos.

Then steps back from the window (but keeps it open). He speaks more normally to his secretary (of course he has one, a person like this would never go without):

I must tell stories of my own. Not just any story. A great one. Then I must convince everybody. The stories will come true.

It will make me the villain, the well-intentioned demigod, the totalitarian impulse given a human face; it will make me

not a modern Prometheus, but his comic sidekick, his foolish brother, Epimetheus. Where Prometheus looks forward, Epimetheus sees only regret.

The one who must be defeated. But it’s okay. Because I will be your warning: Awake from the bad dream I bring you, avoid all the things I stand for, and …

Whoa! Whooooaaaa! Are you saying you will use your actual powers, be not just someone shouting at the wind, which would really just be adding to the wind, seeing how the voice is simply movement of air …

that’s just disgusting!

No. It’s self-sacrifice. I learned that from a superhero movie once.

It’s an everybody else-sacrifice. Would be even if you only harmed yourself. For even then, you take from those who love you things they wouldn’t have given willingly. Your vision of good and evil is just the second of those two, and theft besides.

Yeah, didn’t you get it? Didn’t you hear me? I’m the villain!

Pah. You don’t have a part to play in this at all.

But that’s the problem! Don’t you see? No one gets a part to play (the inexpertly shaved one is now weeping) or even a play to part with. We don’t even get a script anymore.

There there. It’s okay. The stories are there, only in different forms.

As sediments, that’s all. Layered like rock, brittle like glass, which is mostly made of rock anyway, transparent too. Stories aren’t mirrors anymore, but they break just as hard when you throw them.

Geology metaphors again?

Well, I’m not crying anymore, so there’s that. I might even go and get a shave.

From talking about rocks?

Rocks are nice. Heroic. Whereas villains? They’re more like particles of gas. Zig-zagging about, bumping into stuff, and if we stay too long they burn our hide.

With unbound movement goes the semblance, at least, of agency.

Didn’t you say the heroes were the ones with agency?

They used to be. Then they crystallized. That is exactly what I’m trying to get at. Today, their freedom of movement has been reigned in, brought under control, by …

Yeah, I get it. Heroes aren’t free to break the rules anymore, make the hard choices, toe the grey areas. Brought under control by common morality.

No. Brought under control by brand awareness.

Common morality. That’s what I said.

They aren’t remotely the same!

Grey areas? That’s just one of the trends. A trope, even. Probably copyrighted to Hades and back by now. Inextricably linked, if I remember it right, to foreign wars and domestic surveillance – though surveillance, in those stories, are usually where the hero draws the line, says this is a step too far!

Then I don’t get it. What’s this talk about “becoming the villain”?

Come on. Anyone who acts to “set modernity right” is a villain.

Well, sure, but that’s nothing new? Nothing to shout out of windows about?

We need to reinvent the scope of villainy. Every obvious transgression by now has been committed by villains, opposed by heroes, committed by heroes, gloated over by villains, condemned in letters to the editor, not to mention major advertisers, reined in by brand awareness, drained of moral significance good or bad, repeated into trends, into tropes, got whole franchises of their own, and that’s where we’re standing, with modernity.

It takes a villain to invent new, less obvious transgression for people to stand against.

Like, I don’t know, kicking puppies? Public opinion against kicking puppies must surely need a boost.

Please don’t kick any puppies.

You think I would? What do you take me for?

I didn’t say I’d be effective as a villain. But I must become one.

I’ll probably just stick to soliloquizing.

Did I forget to close the window? I’m freezing!

Choices used to be difficult, you know. That’s what gave you agency when you made them. The power to choose between good and evil matters less when it’s an easy choice, when the right thing and the obvious thing and the pleasant thing are all the same. When you only do what everybody would have done. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of good things are easy, but when they are you only have to let circumstance take you over, carry you down the slope and out to sea like a grain of sand.

Pack you in with the other grains, until you become hard like a rock, because rock is now what you are …

Hard like a rock. Layered and brittle like glass.