Murray writes:
The term, which has a certain currency among European intellectuals, aims to convey the sense of fluidity and flux that has characterized life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a period often described with the umbrella term “postmodern.”Eco opines that Twitter is a symptom of this liquidity. Twitter is like a bar room where everyone is talking over everyone else and no one really pays much serious attention to anything anyone else is saying.
Postmodernism, Eco notes, “signaled the crisis of ‘grand narratives,’ each of which had claimed that one model of order could be superimposed on the world; it devoted itself to a playful or ironic reconsideration of the past, and was woven in various ways with nihilistic tendencies.” But it “represented a sort of ferry from modernity to a present that still has no name.”
Bauman, though, thought the word “liquidity” captured the nature of our current state, one of lost moorings and lost meanings, where the only constant is change. In the liquid society people often find themselves afloat, aware of the collapse of once-powerful institutions and ideologies, and without the consolation of the beliefs or traditions that provided ballast for centuries.
What is notable, Eco observes, is an “unbridled individualism” prompting people in the liquid society to “move from one act of consumption to another in a sort of purposeless bulimia: the new cell phone is no better than the old one, but the old has to be discarded in order to indulge in this orgy of desire.”
In the liquid society many millions bid for attention, apparently driven by the sheer pleasure and excitement of being noticed. In the past, says Eco, people assumed recognition or praise was somehow earned, attached to the display of some skill or virtue widely prized. Now, however, it generally doesn’t take much to merit a legion of “followers,” a profusion of “likes.”Though he himself was not a believer he lamented the loss of religious belief in Europe. Murray writes:
It often just means laying claim to a parcel of media space.
In a 2002 piece Eco already spotted this trend, pointing to the endless procession of untalented people rushing to appear on television reality shows to air their scandals and sins; or who, when a camera appears in public, jostle to position themselves before its lens, eager to “wave ciao ciao” to those watching at home.
This exhibitionism, Eco suggests, stems from anomie and fear of anonymity. In a 2010 piece he cites his friend, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, who posited that such desperate public displays must owe, at least partly, to a widespread loss of religious faith.
“At one time,” Eco writes, people “were persuaded they did have at least one Spectator,” the “all-seeing eye, whose gaze” brought meaning to all human lives, however lowly or great. The disappointed mother, thus, could tell her ungrateful child: “God know what I’ve done for you.” The abandoned lover could proclaim: “God knows how much I love you.”
When this “all-seeing Witness” is gone, being seen on a video screen is for many “the only substitute for transcendence,” one’s best shot at pseudo-immortality.
With the ear of God no longer there, one “seeks the eye of society, the eye of the Other, before whom you must reveal yourself so as not to disappear into the black hole of anonymity, into the vortex of oblivion, even at the cost of choosing the role of village idiot who strips down to his underpants and dances on the pub table.”
Eco was a traditionalist, of a sort — a left-leaning, sometimes cranky agnostic who nonetheless understood Western culture and loved its marvelous and often religiously inspired accomplishments, its literature and art.It is indeed grievous to see the cultural roots of our civilization withering away. How long one wonders, can the tree of culture continue to be fruitful and verdant after the roots have died?
As an Italian he registers with displeasure a growing disrespect for Christian symbols like the Crucifix, which is now commonly used as a piece of jewelry, seen “nestling in the chest hairs of Italian Lotharios” or dangling from the necks of young women “who go about with their bare navels and skirts around their groins.”
He points to the religious illiteracy of many schoolchildren in his country who, faced with a painting by Fra Angelico or some other Renaissance master, can’t begin to understand why a young woman is depicted “in conversation with a winged youth,” or why an “unkempt old man” is pictured “leaping down a mountain carrying two heavy tablets of stone and emitting rays of light from two horns.”
“It’s virtually impossible,” Eco writes, “for people to understand, let us say, three quarters of Western art unless they are familiar with the Old and New Testaments and the lives of the saints.”
He mentions Benedetto Croce’s well-known remark that “we cannot not call ourselves Christians” - referencing all Europeans, practicing or not, whose civilization retains such deep Judeo-Christian roots.
At the very least, for children, a more rigorous schooling in the history of religion would seem to be in order, particularly since the media environment that envelopes them “is now transmitting less and less useful information, and more and more that is entirely useless.”
Murray concludes his review with this:
It’s not hard to detect the melancholia in this final Eco collection—a kind of nostalgia for the past mixed with worry about what’s ahead for a world “with no points of reference, where everything dissolves into a sort of liquidity.” .... where, as Eco himself puts it, too many people “are inclined to talk without pausing to think.”