it could only have been a return to what preceded it.
Instead, the postmodern attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment was formulated as a leap toward some vague transhumanism—which is really an attempt to reinvent religion as antireligion, alongside the attempt to reinvent art as antiart, the old impulse to worship the more-than-human turned into a desire to idolize the less-than-human.
from both the spiritual faculty of apprehending the sacred and the ascetic techniques that enabled union or identification with it, they take pleasure instead in blasphemy. What is in vogue today, in lieu of worship, is the inversion of worship: vapid rebellion, deconstruction, demystification, demythification, critique.
Unbeknownst to themselves, the blasphemers are the last remnant of the faithful.
becomes particularly evident from the '60s onward.
Drug use is not the cause. Drug use is a symptom of a receding world and of a facile (chemical) attempt to reestablish connection with something beyond fugitive appearance.
The paradox: loss of metaphysical orientation does not increase contact with reality (as science promises) but the opposite. When physics supplants metaphysics, the world is emptied of meaning, becomes insubstantial. Science zombifies world.
Consumerism turns the world into a garbage dump of disposable things and images. Disposability contributes to the sense that "nothing is real."
Like science, photography promises greater intimacy with reality but transforms reality into images. It virtualizes the world.
The demythification/demystification of the world undertaken by modern sociology turns the world into an ideological mirage. The demythified world shatters into fragments experienced in bewildering isolation from each other. (Christopher Nolan's Memento.)
This may account for why "identity" becomes a postmodern fetish.
Unable to participate in a shared, consecrated reality, the postmodern subject compensates by sacralizing the self. However, flimsy postmodern identities resting on nothing more than narcissistic conceits do not yield sufficient existential assurance. Instead, they tend to induce "imposter syndrome."
The derealization of the world and the self go hand in hand. They are the two sides of modern mass psychosis.