There are some who believe that “in a large diverse society such as the USA, there is no single zeitgeist shared by everyone.” I disagree. I see Americans sharing a zeitgeist hovering somewhere between self-annihilation and apocalypse.
It brings to mind a Woody Allen quote I often repeat: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
This is where we seem to be today in America. It’s hard to be optimistic, a traditional American trait, when one reads, on the one hand, Donald Trump is facing a veritable kaleidoscope of indictments and, very plausibly, convictions (knock on wood), while on the other, legal scholars opining he’ll never see the inside of a prison. Add to that runaway mass delusion in the form of QAnon superstitions and Ron DeSantis wanting to slit my throat.
Evidence of America’s gloomy zeitgeist:
Only 18 percent of Americans are satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. — half of the 35 percent historical average, according to a recent Gallup poll; 20 percent say the economy is getting better compared to 76 percent who believe it is getting worse (in contrast to the latest stats).
Another recent Gallup poll shows that two-thirds of U.S. citizens hold strong pride in being American. Only 18 percent of adults aged 18-34, however, feel that way. The poll further reveals that “extreme” pride began to plummet in 2017 when it was at 75 percent. It now averages a mere 42 percent.
The average U.S. household with student debt owes $58,238, according to NerdWallet’s 2022 household debt study. Polling by American Opportunity Survey last fall reveals almost a quarter of Gen Z respondents do not expect to retire, and only 41 percent expect to own a home one day. Fifty-five percent of 18-to-24-year-olds report having received a diagnosis and/or treatment for a mental illness.
As of this writing, there have been 424 mass shootings (about two a day) in the U.S., resulting in 28 fatalities, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Zeitgeist, of course, is a German word, mostly associated with the philosopher Georg Hegel. A popular definition is, “an invisible agent, force, or demon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.”
“Demon.” Hold that thought.
I’m currently brushing up on my German in preparation for a month-long stay in Berlin. In doing so, I return to everything German: ponderous food, mood, history, grammar and philosophy. The Germans have many attributes. Levity usually isn’t one of them.
So, as I crack open my old college German texts, I confront again the schwerfällige Friedrich Nietzsche. As I slog through terms like Götzendämmerung, Daseinsberechtigung, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, Friedrich hits me square in the face with: “the death of God must be followed by a long twilight of piety and nihilism.” Also Sprach Zarathustra. Thus Spake Zarathustra. See what I mean about Germans and levity? BTW, Nietzsche lost his mind while at the top of his game.
I’ve written previously that I believe we’re in a Weimar moment in our history. We are witnessing today in the U.S., as well as in other countries, a similar “revolt against modernity” as Weimar Germany experienced with the ascendancy of the Nazis. Scholars point to societal changes centering on globalization, immigration, a yawning wealth and income gap and atomized information media as catalysts behind current political troubles. Add to that a toxic political agent like Donald Trump and you have a witch’s brew for popular discontent and social strife. Quick-witted political pundit Rick Wilson talks about the “chthonic gloom of the GOP’s moral midnight.” While we’re on clever esoteric turns of literary phrase, I warn about “the Stygian outer reaches of our troubled souls.”
In reflecting on today’s zeitgeist, I harken back to two Weimar-era movies by the brilliant Fritz Lang.
In his 1922 production, Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler), the protagonist, Dr. Mabuse, is a supervillain who exploits social decay, paranoia and populism of the Weimar era for criminal self-aggrandizement and power. He cunningly plays on the period’s social disorder to get people to believe in nonexistent behind-the-scenes villains fomenting the turmoil. He scapegoats his own failings. His actions mirror proto-fascist movements of the time, including a putsch against the government. Individual and social pathology permeate the film. Mabuse exerts a hypnotic, zombielike grip (kadavergehorsam) over his minions. Sound familiar?
And, of course, there’s Lang’s best-known masterpiece, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens). The skin-crawling vampire Nosferatu reflects Germans’ post-war anxiety. Too often, as in Weimar Germany, people seek scapegoats when they feel fear. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror plays on the pervasive underlying theme of fear in German society during the Weimar period when Germans were polarized between insiders and outsiders, or traditional power elites vs rising new forces comprising those frozen out of political and economic power. Nosferatu reflects on how Germans projected their fears in uncertain times. Republicans today peddle fear to acquire power.
BTW, note the uncanny resemblance between Nosferatu and Rudy Giuliani. (And no hair dye running down the vampire’s sallow cheeks.)
How do we exit the zeitgeist of malaise we now find ourselves in? Let’s start by saving our democracy.
If I’d been able to write cables that invoked Nietzsche, modernity, and nihilism, I might still be in the Foreign Service! (I never repeated the mistake of explaining to a DCM that the country we served in was a patrimonial state.)
Something has indeed knocked the word off its axis (one would hope only metaphorically) since the 1980s, if not the 1960s. The easy answer is that it is a long-in-coming reaction to neoliberalism and the decline in the quality of life for everyone outside a shrinking elite, and there’s a lot of truth in that. But there is also a reaction to the fact that the world has become more complex and more complicated to deal with on a day to day basis. Cities are larger, the planet is boiling, housing, medical care, and education are not just expensive but also bureaucratic to obtain, retirement requires more than staying alive until one’s 65th birthday. Living in the 2020s is exhausting in a way that I suspect living in the 1960s was not. And from this we get the revolt against modernity based in themes oddly reminiscent of the 19th century German philosophers. And on the other side, we have the post-modernists, who reject the idea of objective truth, claiming that all claims to truth are ultimately rooted in opinion and self-interest, which is ultimately about protecting power. And from there we get identity politics, which set out to undo power rooted in “patriarchy” and “white privilege.”
But there is a a lot more gloom than proposals for workable solutions to these problems.