The end of history

I received some hate mail recently that told me to unplug my excretory orifice. I did, but apart from a copy of "A Pocket Style Manual" no hidden treasures were discovered. In the well-meaning letters I received, I was also admonished for not dealing with more important issues like politics or grade inflation. "Write about Bush!" they urged. "Or politics! Stop your meaningless, unimportant rants! Get laid!"

There is an obsession with action in certain circles, an obsession with big, important things. This kind of thinking reminds me of children playing doctor. It's a lot of fun, but it isn't going to stop your grandaunt Mary from dying in a bilious mess on the kitchen floor when her hemorrhoid explodes. Few people seem to possess the kind of reflexivity necessary to distance oneself from such self-gratifying play. Take the Oxfam donate-a-meal drive. I remember being informed that we could donate our meals to Oxfam to feed the hungry, but it would be generously compensated for because Frist would give you a free late meal in return. What a benign way of feeding the hungry! A brief rescheduling of dinner can save lives! There's a mini Mother Theresa inside every one of us!

This is a classic symptom of the flatness of the postmodern universe that designates all action as simulation. Meaningful action has lost its value, having been exiled into a diaspora of virtue. Who was responsible for the money being donated to Oxfam? Where was this virtuous activity located? If not the students, perhaps the kind folks at Frist? Perhaps the University itself? Perhaps the investment bankers who manage our $11 billion endowment? Capitalism? Adam Smith? Petitions are no better. A piece of paper with ink marks inscribed upon it, petitions are meant to signify a sort of collective discontent that carries with it the burden of representing an action. Genocide in Darfur? Scribble your name on a piece of paper, click your red shoes together and circulate it around in the world! Someday millions of online petitions will zip around fiber optic cables and eventually be relegated to the electronic dustbin of history. Until then, we'd better continue recycling paper.

The heart of this hive of activity is a myth of social participation, in which all that is possible is simulation and random play. This is political theater, but the key word is theater, and in a bizarre Brechtian move the audience members are the actors themselves, staring at a mirror in which they recognize their own egos. The good citizen stands outside Frist, reciting pi and reading "I-Have-Feelings" poetry, and then it's off to lunch to discuss world poverty with equally "socially aware" citizens. Oh, social awareness, that marvelous action-at-a-distance, that beautiful oscillating wave that propagates itself through ether and darkness! As if, like God, one could simply speak and there would be light. Beyond the grin of good spirits and the occasional media frenzy, action is nothing more than white noise.

Apathy is growing with each generation. A recognition that action is increasingly inconsequential has led to the subsequent retreat from participating in this kind of simulation. The nightclub — a microcosm of society and metaphor for the state of social relations today — is where you put on cool clothes, play loud music to drown out the conversation, dance, get drunk, maybe do some drugs and get laid just for a night. In this context, actions are meaningless, pleasurable and ephemeral. Actions have no consequences and memory is erased the very next day when a nurse from McCosh gives you an enema. The students stumble back from drunken revelries early on Friday morning and sign petitions the very same afternoon. Like a little black dress, apathy takes you from the nightclub to the charity gala. The end of history is not socialist but anti-socialist.

Of the recent failed protest against torture that attracted a whopping crowd of 25, organizer Asheesh Siddique '07 claimed that "a lot of this stuff is very removed from students' lives." That's true, and there is no way of circumventing this fact. To use a Platonic catachresis, the social activist and good citizen is urging the cave dwellers out into the sunlight to do things in the world, but they just won't budge. After all, they're only going to walk out of the cave into an even bigger cave, and moreover, there's TiVo on the big screen and a couple of beers in the fridge. Johann Loh is a freshman from Singapore. He can be reached at loh@princeton.edu.