Hypocricy of modern, western alienation (or the Ignorant Sophisticate)

Jim Cheney, in Tricksters (in the Shadow of Civilization) writes

In his New Science (published in 1744), Giambattista Vico offers a theory of the development and decline of human institutions “governed by the law of entropy” (as Robert Pogue Harrison puts it in his remarkable study, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, the title of which informed the title of my paper and upon which I draw freely in this section):

[O]nce the mind fully develops its powers of abstraction, critical reason becomes ironic. Reflecting on the pieties and customs of the past, irony discovers that they were based on errors and arbitrary beliefs. Thus a consciousness that has reached the stage of irony tends to repudiate the authority of tradition as lacking in either necessity or justification. An ever greater ironic distance from the past leads to skepticism about the institutions that had hitherto “preserved humanity”. . . . If such irony follows its course toward unrestrained cynicism, it can create the conditions for a new barbarism at the heart of the enlightened city of man. Vico calls it the “barbarism of reflection.” (Harrison 11)

Such peoples, Vico says, “have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride. . . . Thus . . . they live . . . in a deep solitude of spirit” (Vico §1106).[1] It is the development of this ironic sensibility and its attendant mood of alienation from both tradition and the earth that we now trace.

As an English teacher, unfortunate terms like metacognition and metalinguistic awareness come up. :-

In classes at some point I like to discuss the purpose of education, and especially liberal education at the college level. Most of my students are headed toward this liberal education. I want them to be explicitly aware about what it is they are supposedly pursuing. Meta-awareness: to think about the process itself.

I suggest the liberal education seeks to create a well-rounded individual capable of discerning, critical thinking. (Camille Paglia would suggest our schools are dried up job factories, and have abandoned this goal-maybe she's right.)

I have thought that the particular ignorance of the modern man is his failure to achieve this goal: that modern Americans, for example, have no real grasp of the past, either explicitly of history, and the humanities more generally. YET, at the same time, we experience that sensation of exhausted possibilities. That is, we feel like we know so much more than the people of any past era. We feel like we are at the end of history. We've got most of it figured out. We are the smug post-modern sophisticates. It's what as a society as a whole, we tell ourselves, even though at an individual level we are actually probably quite ignorant of our vast cultural past. Being told about Kant, or Nietzche, isn't the same as reading them. Being soaked by the various media with generalized allusions and cultural and historical references isn't the same as actually aquiring knowledge, much less wisdom.

The point of this post: Ignorance breeds folly, and the particular folly of hubris. The general disregard for the er, wisdom, of the past (I'm not being ironic here), allows for "the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests," and doing so confidently, I might add. The biggest irony is:

The pursuit of reason and learning have led to this ironic alienation, this "barbarism of reflection", gutting belief and tradition.

YET education is actually not producing these deeply informed critical thinkers.

So what are we? Superficial self-deceivers who experience the sensation of ironic skepticism of tradition, belief, institution, without actually having arrived there through the heavy lifting of real, informed, abstract and critical thought.

Have a nice day.