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Nihilism and Modernity
The Sisyphean task of combatting boredom
Introduction: Art, Medicine, Technology
Modernity — and postmodernity — is duly characterized, on the one hand, by the acceleration of the development of art, medicine, and technology, and, on the other hand, by the prevalence of the threat of society succumbing to nihilism. The development of the arts and sciences has led to an increase of quality of life and an increase of the experience of the quality of life, and yet its prominence in human history has led overwhelmingly to a prodigious crisis of value. With the advent of modern medicine, the discovery of numerous scientific advances, and the invention of myriad useful tools and devices — mass transit, automobiles, airplanes, radio, television, cellular phones, the internet, microchips, etc. — in short, with the overturning of systematic ignorance and the replacement with systematic overconnectivity and reliance on technology, there arose also the threat of succumbing to a new ignorance: that of the sedentary, privileged, overstimulated, undereducated, and in short ignorant technocrat. And along with the advent of modern science and technology, there came also the bourgeois overthrow of “religious ignorance” — along with the overthrow of cultivation and civility.
