Cultural Trivialisation
In the wake of the Internet and its associated technologies we have relatively recently begun to recognise that social media and mobile devices, and instant connectivity, isn't all roses. It has a downside. One that is so strong that some countries have even taken steps to restrict access to the technology, for young people.
The modern Western world is now just full of
• habits of perception
• cultural scripts
• institutional routines
• media patterns
• cognitive shortcuts
All this gives us a robust sense of the objectivity of the world in which we are living — but at the cost of inner depth and presence. The more we are drawn into this and become attached to it, the more everyday life becomes superficially lived through only outward-focused attention and media dependent satisfaction, rather than being deeply and meaningfully experienced. Real human meaning fragments into surface stimulus.
Our power of attention is weakened by being pulled always outwards into the world in a never-ending search for more stimulus and experience and feedback.
The malady of "modern learning difficulties" - the very fact that we recognise and name only the learning difficulty aspect of what we call "learning difficulties" - is a symptom of misunderstanding and lack of consciousness of what is really important in being a human being. Short attention span, stimulus addiction, MLD-like fragmentation — these are not something that Western culture truly understands, just because it gives them technical sounding names, and nor are they “moral failings”. Rather, they are symptoms of an entire culture that has become stable but is now under high-frequency decoherence pressure.
The modern Westernised world is a place in which outward-focused attention is very easily and quickly saturated. All these symptoms are what an attention-saturated environment looks like when:
• noise is cheap
• time is money and reflection is costly
• novelty is rewarded
• interiority has weak reinforcement by a culture that encourages outward-focused attention all the time.
In a world like this,
• depth gives way to remit, commentary and parody
• attention fragments
• shared stories lose weight
• people oscillate between distraction and anxiety
What all this is, is the trivialised aspect of the world in which we live. It appears as the cultural shallowness on the surface of the deeper culture. Many people can be immersed in this for years, without complaint. The mechanisms of all the various forms of media are only too happy to keep feeding the momentum, in fact, their very business model is built around the monopolisation of attention regardless of other considerations. In other words, "ratings". Eventually, some people feel:
• spiritual dryness
• boredom with their own habits
• hunger for depth
• a sense that “something essential is missing”
Something essential is indeed missing. In spiritual language this is often referred to as the moment of consciousness of poverty of spirit - the point at which the world in its currently perceived and understood form can no longer satisfy.
Although we have ongoing religion and contemporary spirituality, Western civilisation is now in a late phase of its evolution. Across traditions, late-phase worlds are described as:
• spiritually flat
• noisy
• restless
• full of images but empty of presence
Buddhism calls this restless craving, Christian mysticism calls it acedia, Sufi writers call it veil upon veil, Hindu traditions frame it as tamas-bound prakášiti without inward orientation, full of raja and lacking in sattva. In modern terms it is the exhaustion of depth-meaning and its replacement with only fast-access entertainment, in an environment in which intelligence spins faster than previous generations, but with multiple, ephemeral, thinner layers, while deeper coherence remains inaccessible.
We literally live in an age of information. Today, the world is practically drowning in information, information processing, and the craving for data. Hence data or information is the new gold or oil. Wisdom is just a thing looked for in poetry. The mark of intelligence in an individual is taken to be the personal possession of information and the ability to process it. These are all symptoms of human, evolutionary intelligence having become more and more fine-grained and complex through its recent evolution, not least in partnership with science, and consequently more and more stabilised in a domain of "knowing about the world" and even "knowing about the world of knowledge" - but without self-knowledge or even an understanding of what self-knowledge is.
The deep nature of intelligence is not understood at all by modern Western culture. The truth is that science does not actually understand the nature of the intelligence that science relies on, and does not even understand the nature of artificial intelligence which is not even conscious. We built it through a very little knowledge and much trial and error over decades, but no one in the industry at the current time really understands how or why it works (current estimates are that we understand about 3% of it). And yet, there is not a little faith in the idea that science is going to understand consciousness, even though it doesn't understand the nature of intelligence without consciousness, or the human intelligence that is doing the understanding.
Fortunately, by the way of things, the same environmental conditions that trivialise modern life also can intensify the longing for authenticity and interiority. And that induces the countermovement.
The Good and the Beautiful
The ancient Greek philosophers used to talk about the good and the beautiful. When something is genuinely beautiful — a landscape, music, architecture, a gesture, a face, a line of poetry — attention:
• stills instead of scattering,
• gathers into an undivided field,
• becomes unified rather than fragmented,
• and experience deepens rather than skims.
There is a moment of “this is enough" and no craving for the next stimulus. That is anti-trivialisation in real time. Triviality in contrast wants speed, novelty, distraction, entertainment, excitement.
Real beauty consciously experienced - and not just what trivialisation often calls "beautiful" - immediately invites presence, patience, and inward resonance. In contrast, in the trivialised world, in trivialised culture, there are endless choices, opinion-loops, entertainments, shallow self-reference, and shallow substitutes for the good and the beautiful.
A substantial part of modern culture is about "identity". So much so that it has even given rise to "identity politics". But the relationship between "identity"and the good and the beautiful is not really understood.
Modern, Western culture eulogises the personal idea of "who I am" in a world that is focused on habitually outward-flowing attention. In general, the attention is only ever drawn inwards through pain. And so relationships in contemporary, popular, Westernised culture are approached in the same way. And that both trivialises relationships, and injects pain into them.
The conscious awareness of what is beyond the trivial is the doorway into the next level up in our intelligence. That's not emotional intelligence. Like technological connectivity, emotional intelligence has a downside as well. Why? Because people frequently try to use their emotional intelligence negatively against others. It's very, very common. Not just in the "real world" but also online. And to such a degree online that governments are having to pass laws to try to control it. Emotional intelligence isn't everything it is cracked up to be. It is completely overrated. It isn't the basis of our spirituality. It is actually just part and parcel of our highly evolved but nonetheless evolutionary, animal intelligence, as it appears in the human species. Only what is beyond it opens the way to a deeper understanding. And the door to that is in general closed by the potent mixture of trivialisation and emotional intelligence, which creates the modern, Western cultural illusion of "having arrived".
The modern Western world is now just full of
• habits of perception
• cultural scripts
• institutional routines
• media patterns
• cognitive shortcuts
All this gives us a robust sense of the objectivity of the world in which we are living — but at the cost of inner depth and presence. The more we are drawn into this and become attached to it, the more everyday life becomes superficially lived through only outward-focused attention and media dependent satisfaction, rather than being deeply and meaningfully experienced. Real human meaning fragments into surface stimulus.
Our power of attention is weakened by being pulled always outwards into the world in a never-ending search for more stimulus and experience and feedback.
The malady of "modern learning difficulties" - the very fact that we recognise and name only the learning difficulty aspect of what we call "learning difficulties" - is a symptom of misunderstanding and lack of consciousness of what is really important in being a human being. Short attention span, stimulus addiction, MLD-like fragmentation — these are not something that Western culture truly understands, just because it gives them technical sounding names, and nor are they “moral failings”. Rather, they are symptoms of an entire culture that has become stable but is now under high-frequency decoherence pressure.
The modern Westernised world is a place in which outward-focused attention is very easily and quickly saturated. All these symptoms are what an attention-saturated environment looks like when:
• noise is cheap
• time is money and reflection is costly
• novelty is rewarded
• interiority has weak reinforcement by a culture that encourages outward-focused attention all the time.
In a world like this,
• depth gives way to remit, commentary and parody
• attention fragments
• shared stories lose weight
• people oscillate between distraction and anxiety
What all this is, is the trivialised aspect of the world in which we live. It appears as the cultural shallowness on the surface of the deeper culture. Many people can be immersed in this for years, without complaint. The mechanisms of all the various forms of media are only too happy to keep feeding the momentum, in fact, their very business model is built around the monopolisation of attention regardless of other considerations. In other words, "ratings". Eventually, some people feel:
• spiritual dryness
• boredom with their own habits
• hunger for depth
• a sense that “something essential is missing”
Something essential is indeed missing. In spiritual language this is often referred to as the moment of consciousness of poverty of spirit - the point at which the world in its currently perceived and understood form can no longer satisfy.
Although we have ongoing religion and contemporary spirituality, Western civilisation is now in a late phase of its evolution. Across traditions, late-phase worlds are described as:
• spiritually flat
• noisy
• restless
• full of images but empty of presence
Buddhism calls this restless craving, Christian mysticism calls it acedia, Sufi writers call it veil upon veil, Hindu traditions frame it as tamas-bound prakášiti without inward orientation, full of raja and lacking in sattva. In modern terms it is the exhaustion of depth-meaning and its replacement with only fast-access entertainment, in an environment in which intelligence spins faster than previous generations, but with multiple, ephemeral, thinner layers, while deeper coherence remains inaccessible.
We literally live in an age of information. Today, the world is practically drowning in information, information processing, and the craving for data. Hence data or information is the new gold or oil. Wisdom is just a thing looked for in poetry. The mark of intelligence in an individual is taken to be the personal possession of information and the ability to process it. These are all symptoms of human, evolutionary intelligence having become more and more fine-grained and complex through its recent evolution, not least in partnership with science, and consequently more and more stabilised in a domain of "knowing about the world" and even "knowing about the world of knowledge" - but without self-knowledge or even an understanding of what self-knowledge is.
The deep nature of intelligence is not understood at all by modern Western culture. The truth is that science does not actually understand the nature of the intelligence that science relies on, and does not even understand the nature of artificial intelligence which is not even conscious. We built it through a very little knowledge and much trial and error over decades, but no one in the industry at the current time really understands how or why it works (current estimates are that we understand about 3% of it). And yet, there is not a little faith in the idea that science is going to understand consciousness, even though it doesn't understand the nature of intelligence without consciousness, or the human intelligence that is doing the understanding.
Fortunately, by the way of things, the same environmental conditions that trivialise modern life also can intensify the longing for authenticity and interiority. And that induces the countermovement.
The Good and the Beautiful
The ancient Greek philosophers used to talk about the good and the beautiful. When something is genuinely beautiful — a landscape, music, architecture, a gesture, a face, a line of poetry — attention:
• stills instead of scattering,
• gathers into an undivided field,
• becomes unified rather than fragmented,
• and experience deepens rather than skims.
There is a moment of “this is enough" and no craving for the next stimulus. That is anti-trivialisation in real time. Triviality in contrast wants speed, novelty, distraction, entertainment, excitement.
Real beauty consciously experienced - and not just what trivialisation often calls "beautiful" - immediately invites presence, patience, and inward resonance. In contrast, in the trivialised world, in trivialised culture, there are endless choices, opinion-loops, entertainments, shallow self-reference, and shallow substitutes for the good and the beautiful.
A substantial part of modern culture is about "identity". So much so that it has even given rise to "identity politics". But the relationship between "identity"and the good and the beautiful is not really understood.
Modern, Western culture eulogises the personal idea of "who I am" in a world that is focused on habitually outward-flowing attention. In general, the attention is only ever drawn inwards through pain. And so relationships in contemporary, popular, Westernised culture are approached in the same way. And that both trivialises relationships, and injects pain into them.
The conscious awareness of what is beyond the trivial is the doorway into the next level up in our intelligence. That's not emotional intelligence. Like technological connectivity, emotional intelligence has a downside as well. Why? Because people frequently try to use their emotional intelligence negatively against others. It's very, very common. Not just in the "real world" but also online. And to such a degree online that governments are having to pass laws to try to control it. Emotional intelligence isn't everything it is cracked up to be. It is completely overrated. It isn't the basis of our spirituality. It is actually just part and parcel of our highly evolved but nonetheless evolutionary, animal intelligence, as it appears in the human species. Only what is beyond it opens the way to a deeper understanding. And the door to that is in general closed by the potent mixture of trivialisation and emotional intelligence, which creates the modern, Western cultural illusion of "having arrived".