You Do Not Talk About the Spirit of the Age: Revisiting Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated

Twenty years ago, Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated: How Media Shapes the World and the Way You Live in it described a society reeling from explosive technological advances. Humanity’s escalating conquest of nature clashed head-on with deep-seated beliefs about natural order, creating a disconcerting sense of alienation amidst an overabundance of media, control and information. The release of the iPhone two years after the publication of Mediated provided a solution by neatly categorizing information and options and making individuals the masters of their digital domains. In this new age, an excess of convenience no longer felt like an embarrassment of riches. Rather, it felt like a birthright.

Contrast this with life ten thousand years ago and humanity utterly at the mercy of nature in a world clearly designed by some great power or powers.¹ Gods were not just a credible explanation; they were the only viable ones. As Richard Dawkins remarks in The Blind Watchmaker, “I could not imagine being an atheist at any time before 1859 when Darwin’s Origin of Species was published.”² Even today, with advanced evolutionary science, the argument from design remains formidable. In premodernity, the vast fearsome universe was out of the individual’s control and clearly governed by unpredictable deities.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault argued that the legitimacy of dominant entities becomes reinforced through societal institutions, and that is precisely what happened with respect to gods during premodernity. Observations of divine control prompted religions to advocate for divine rule. In accordance with the reasonable observation that gods ran the world, religions concluded that gods ought to rule the world. Under Foucault’s theory, the status quo works to justify itself through the establishment of assumptions about the world: “Power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power.”³ In practice this means that whatever is, becomes what should be. Gods were in charge and thus over time humans came to believe that gods should be in charge and, ultimately, they had the power to establish moral law.

With the onset of modernity, the fundamental description of the world was poised for revision.  The mid 1500’s heralded a major shift with the discovery of the scientific method.⁴ A new explanatory framework emerged for the existence of the world and its complexities. Science enabled humanity to exert greater control over its environment, allowing an observer to conclude that humans were matched evenly with nature, if not superior to it. The Enlightenment occurred a century later, reflecting mankind’s elevated status, and the Foucauldian paradigm seemed to hold true. The world was being explored and tamed by humans working together using reason and science. It came to seem that the world should be a balance between humans collectively working together and nature. (It was this sense of balance that was disrupted during the period referenced in Mediated.)

Under Enlightenment humanism, people are obligated to each other because they are all part of one interconnected thing, the human race. This assumption cast humanity as the new moral source and spun a narrative consistent with this notion. To a humanist “No man is an island” resonated as a fixed truth, just as God’s word had felt like a given, immutable moral fact to Judeo-Christian thinkers. In reality, both perspectives were the culmination of a process where the collective unconscious described the world, concluded that it ought to be that way, designated the dominant force as a moral touchstone, and then selected particular narratives that could credibly be presented as logical results of these assumptions.

Successful moral narratives would need to appear to flow out of the spirit of the age, while aligning with innate moral instincts.building on instincts, moral philosophies extend hardwired feelings of obligation beyond small groups. Judeo-Christianity and Enlightenment humanism, for example, rely on analogies to familial and tribal paradigms. The former establishes God as the father figure, and mankind as his children.⁵ To the extent that we owe people outside of our immediate circles a moral duty in that tradition, it is partly because we are all part of the family of man. Similarly, Enlightenment humanism’s concept of universal interconnectedness likens the entire human race to a gigantic tribe or family. We owe each other moral duty, just as the members of a tribe or family are obligated to protect the welfare of other group members. Most popular moral systems also mirror our instinctual adherence to rules, regardless of personal self-interest.

The technological progress that brought humans out of premodernity kept accelerating and “it crossed a qualitative threshold in the past couple of decades, with the rise of the new media.”⁶ Somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century the world had changed so much that a revised description was necessary and with the advent of the iPhone urgently so. Industrialization had already given humans access to a lot of good things; our phones now offered the ability to arrange those things at unprecedented speeds, access and organize information and communicate with people in new ways at an entirely new pace. Smartphones even allowed us to escape the present moment into our own minds by simply looking down, making participation in the physical world feel to some degree optional. All this was quite convenient.

Applying Foucault’s logic, one would anticipate that a world of utmost convenience would eventually become a world in which people believe convenience is an inherent right. And that is what happened. The mental state described in Mediated wasn’t a static outcome but rather a transitional state, the byproduct of a confrontation with new and unfamiliar circumstances. For a while, it felt weird. But the mind adjusted, forming a new set of expectations.  People now living in technologically advanced nations expect things to be convenient, to such an extent that when things don’t work out that way it feels like betrayal. In extreme instances, such as natural disasters, it can even feel unreal, a violation of our expectations about how things should be.

In a world that prioritizes the individual and his needs, the Foucauldian model further predicts the rise of an epistemological system where the individual is the source of his own moral legitimacy. That too has occurred with the spread of a popularized form of relativism, which attempts to accommodate contradictory but self-affirming principles: there is no fixed truth that can be imposed on an individual; but liberal values are considered true; individuals can select their own truths; but not when they conflict with others’ choices; and so on. This type of relativism’s focus on self aligns with the overall direction of the day but is unable to effectively draw on the power of instinct to amplify itself the way that, say, Judeo-Christianity draws on familial metaphor. For good evolutionary reasons, moral instincts focus on the family and tribe, not on the individual. There is no fundamental moral instinct analogous to the idea that people should be their own moral guide. Without being able to make such a parallel, and riddled with inherent contradictions, relativism can be a difficult conception to swallow.

When the world changes so significantly as to deserve a new fundamental description, stories that were generated under previous conditions do not just disappear. The Enlightenment, for example, obviously did not lead to an eradication of religion. Nonetheless, the spirit of each age is potent, exerting an overall pressure that leads some to adopt a whole new schema (think the rise of humanism), and others to simply move in the spirit’s general direction (think reduced overall religiosity and increased secularism in the wake of the Enlightenment).⁷

Accordingly, the spirit of the present age has its own gravitational influence, which happens to include a prohibition against becoming aware of it. That makes it an elusive phenomenon to study. Like Fight Club, whose first rule is, “You do not talk about Fight Club,” the spirit of our age prohibits its own examination: in most instances, recognizing that one’s beliefs are being influenced by convenience is inconvenient.

Besides, making broad generalizations about an age is so 19th century, a transparent attempt to control through classification.⁸ It’s arrogant. Anyone who would dare to coin the phrase “age of convenience” would clearly be doing so because it made him feel good somehow. And yet, our present distaste for grand generalizations aside, what if there really is an increased preconscious tendency to rearrange beliefs to maximize convenience? Of course, personal convenience has always influenced belief, but in the past that influence was something to at least attempt to resist. In the present day, according to the theory, we would actually be supposed to yield to our own convenience. That would be something new.

In such a world you would expect to see a magnification effect operating on people’s views whereby those inclined in a certain direction would go deeper in that direction, while those inclined not to care about the larger world might retreat completely into a purely tribal mindset. This would be a world of both greater ideological extremism in patches and of greater selfishness or apathy in others. As de Zengotita observed in Mediated, “Fanaticisms flourish in an atmosphere of unlimited choice” as people “cling more desperately” to their fading narratives.⁹ You might also see a faster and looser relationship with truth, where people either disbelieved in fixed facts on principle or bent the truth for their own convenience, or both. There might be a nagging sense that in practice any moral attitude that reached beyond instinct was somehow suspect. Conservatism would thereby gain in popularity, since conservatism is better aligned with tribal instinct than liberalism which demands that people care more about those outside their circles. Does this not all sound familiar?

It is easy to forget when focused on the larger public sphere that for most people the larger public sphere only occupies a small fraction of experience. Instinct, familial and tribal, cover almost all situations that we encounter on a daily basis. You don’t need a moral philosophy to feel the urge to offer someone a seat on the subway, or to want to help a friend in need. Moreover, as we touched on, of course convenience has always influenced—and to a significant extent—which moral systems people adopt. The problem is subtle, and it applies in only a small portion of our lives. So, it’s easy to miss. You don’t talk about the spirit of the age because it doesn’t want you to, but you also don’t talk about it because it’s really not that important, at least not in comparison to the really important stuff: love, family, career, all the things that continue to work just fine thank you under the guidance of our still-intact innate instincts.

Yet something is demonstrably different. Have you ever noticed how quickly goodies in a company break room are consumed? People who wouldn’t normally eat multiple chocolate chip cookies at 10:00 AM slip in like hyenas over a kill. The fact that it’s free, that it’s given, is enough of an excuse to nudge people over the edge who were naturally teetering. Something like that is at play with our choices of moral systems—the spirit of our age is only a tiny tailwind, just a nudge. A little voice that says, you do you. Even without that factor, coming to an authentic and sincere attitude about the larger world wasn’t easy. But with it in play we’re just a little more susceptible to our own convenience. Though we don’t talk about this phenomenon very much, a piece of us has an inkling, and that part of us is responsible for permeating our culture with a pervasive sense of irony.¹⁰  On some level we intuit there’s a dynamic at play that undermines peoples’ sincerity. Without understanding why, we can’t fully trust others’ motives or, when we look carefully, our own.

Even adopting an attitude about the general situation is problematic. Attitude is important since, as de Zengotita pointed out, “values adhere first of all in postures, in rhythms of speech and gesture, prior to semantics.”¹¹  But when the issue at hand is a universal tendency in the way people form attitudes, any attitude about the tendency will be shaped by the tendency itself. We literally can’t step outside of the tendency to evaluate the tendency.

A lightly mocking tone is a possibility, but the problem with that tone is that it subtly—and falsely—implies that the speaker is somehow exempt from the dynamic in question. The key is that the phenomenon is happening universally, not that some people’s sense of virtue has slipped.¹²  A mocking tone lets the reader off the hook. The wink alludes to some other path, some unarticulated exception, and allows writers to explicitly address the problem while implying that it doesn’t really apply to those in the know, without ever putting forth any real alternative.

The other posture one could take is that the whole situation is plain inconvenient. It is inconvenient to have one’s moral systems determined on the basis of convenience, because any system based on convenience is tainted, and it is inconveniently uncomfortable to have tainted views. There is some merit to this perspective, but it somehow feels inadequate. True, the state of things is inconvenient, but there can also be big real-world consequences of the problem that exceed the scope of the word, “inconvenient.” The larger world has a way of reaching occasionally into our own little circles. “The likes of Trump and Orban and Putin and Bolsonaro and Poland’s Law and Justice Party (the list goes on and on) will continue to thrive as long as facts and values remain nothing more than ‘social constructions.”¹³ Moreover, being unable to form a satisfying relationship with the larger world just feels wrong. Again, though, the word “wrong” does work in that sentence. Wrong from what perspective?

There is a reasonable argument that we ought to simply ignore the problem of authenticity, since focusing on the issue is a recipe for political paralysis. Fake it till you make it might be the best we can do. But before we load our ships and sail off to the undying lands shouldn’t we at least consider the possibility that careful description of our circumstances could somehow yield a shred of hope? De Zengotita maintained a sense of optimism.¹⁴ Admittedly, the headwinds are strong. Increased technological advances will likely only reaffirm the expectation of convenience. It might be that the only thing that can significantly alter the spirit of our age would be a major change in the organization of the world. Nuclear apocalypse, environmental disasters on a much, much greater scale than we’ve already experienced, or a drastic reordering of things via extreme and strange advances in artificial intelligence or a defeat of democracy and return to despotism. Not exactly rays of sunshine.

For better or worse, the result of our long mediation process is likely to stay with us for quite some time. Mediation, as in, “the intervention in a process or a relationship,” was really the process of adjudication between old and new assumptions, not just a reference to the actual literal screens that surrounded us.¹⁵ That adjudication led in most instances to the displacement of old assumptions. Sometimes actual digital media was an actor in the conflict, and sometimes the conflict just played itself out in the background of everyday non-screen-related consciousness. For several decades, the old and new needed to be constantly reconciled. That process was a sort of consumption, hence de Zengotita’s “Blob,” his way of referring to the whole messy experience whereby new assumptions were replacing the old. It is fair to say that, for the most part, our perceptions no longer require this mediation, no longer require reconciliation. We have adjusted our expectations to reflect the new conditions. As I scurry through the city, staring at my phone, the pursuit of my own convenience is the real world. What was became what should be. The Blob finished its meal.

Except for one small morsel. The Blob can’t digest the contradiction between our sense that things should be convenient and the fact that there is something inconvenient about not being able to form an authentic moral attitude about the larger world. In that little bit of indigestion lies hope that de Zengotita was right and there is a positive path forward. It is inevitable that our attitude about the situation is influenced by convenience. But we can still choose to think further about the problem. As de Zengotita observed: “At each moment, it is up to us to act. The arrow points at each of us. What should we do with this gift?”¹⁶

 Notes

¹ Thomas de Zengotita, “A Phenomenological Foundation for Human Ethics: An Essay in Philosophical Anthropology,” Logos 22, no. 1 (2023).

² Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986), p. 6.

³ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977; originally published 1975).

⁴ Thomas de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory and Progressive Politics: Toward a New Humanism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 10.

⁵ Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961; originally published 1927), p. 24.

⁶ Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2005), p. 18.

⁷ Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018).

⁸ de Zengotita, Postmodern Theory, 2018, p. 95.

⁹ de Zengotita, Mediated, p. 15.

¹⁰ Thomas de Zengotita, “World World; or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blob,” Harper’s Magazine 301, no. 1805 (July 2000): 17–25.

¹¹ de Zengotita, Mediated, p. 97.

¹² Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

¹³ de Zengotita, “A Phenomenological Foundation for Human Ethics,” 2023.

¹⁴ ibid.

¹⁵ “Mediation,” in Oxford English Dictionary (online), accessed January 17, 2025, https://www.oed.com.

¹⁶ de Zengotita, “A Phenomenological Foundation for Human Ethics,” 2023.