"The post-modern attitude of hyper-self-awareness, unrelenting irony, and overbearing cynicism seems to mirror Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian self-consciousness" -anonymous
The Fall in Genesis can be read as a story about growing up and becoming an adult. Adolescence is a time when we lose our childhood innocence and start to realize what the world is really like. Just as adolescence is (hopefully) a stage on the way toward adulthood, perhaps self-aware, irony-laden postmodernism is a stage of our culture on its way toward... well, something.
Once everyone in a society achieves a postmodern level of self-awareness, maybe the next stage is to become immune to it somehow. Think about your own perspective and how it changes as you get older: when you're 15 and your parents embarrass you in front of your friends, you feel like it's the end of the world. But then you grow up and maybe you realize things like that aren't such a big deal. As an adult you have more important stuff to worry about than how cool you look.
The media/advertising machine, operating under some form of quasi-free-market economic principles, seems to want to trap people in a kind of perpetual state of adult adolescence (more grown-up virtues being presumably rather less easily marketable). Personally, I do feel like the older I get the less I care about that stuff (and the less "stuff" I want to buy), so if my own experience is anything to go by, the advertisers/marketeers are being smart in trying to keep us from growing up.
Is it possible that maturity has something to do with not caring so much about whether people are judging you (though I doubt anyone can 100% not care, it's only human), but rather simply caring about other people?
I think artists in particular find it hard to lose that sense of feeling judged, not only because they're usually very sensitive, but also they really
do get criticized (sometimes rudely) by all kinds of people. That's something that most people probably don't have to deal with - we get criticism from our bosses, yes, and from our families & friends, sure, but generally not from strangers who don't give a damn about us. Creative types have to put their work out there, which is often very personal, so they have to risk being deeply hurt by strangers every time they release one of their works into the world.
Maybe artists were the original adolescents (in the sense of being allowed, socially, to be the way teenagers are today). Celebrities (who are often artists and/or adolescents) are also like this. It might be impossible to really grow up if everyone acts as if the world actually does revolve you (and then punishes you for believing it's true).
I realize this all sounds kind of vague and also rather teleological (i.e. as if I'm suggesting our culture is living out a pre-planned destiny) but I think there's a way of thinking about this without proposing Intelligent Cultural Design.
In evolution, the results of natural selection, viewed with hindsight, can appear so mind-bogglingly complex as to require a creator (see Paley's
watchmaker analogy). If you take the time to study evolutionary theory, however, you'll come to realize that in fact this is an unfounded assumption: natural selection (which is really just a function of the laws of physics) does the job perfectly.
If we allow that natural selection is the mechanism behind sociocultural as well as biological evolution, then there is no need for a grand design or master plan; but as conscious agents we are responsible for our culture and what it produces, just as we are responsible for our own bodies and what they produce. Maybe we should start thinking about meme therapy for our culture (Note: I Googled "meme therapy" and all I got was
this boring blog).
