The Mood of the '90s, Again

When I have written about the 1990s I have tended to focus on the post-Cold War triumphalism, the tech boom, and altogether the vision of exploding technological progress and economic growth in a globalizing unipolar order about which the "mainstream" view we get from the media tended to wax "optimistic" (really, "complacent" is a far better descriptor for it) in the manner exemplified by Thomas Friedman--while still others looked beyond even that to something more spectacular in the manner of a Raymond Kurzweil--in a way starkly contrasting with the declinism and self-criticism of which one saw so much just a few years earlier.

However, I vividly remember the other side of the matter, which, jealously gatekept as the mainstream discourse may be, was by no means hard to detect--a sense of exhaustion and breakdown on the part of a culture that, even as it fantasized about transcendence, may well have been descending into madness. One saw it in "shock TV" and the tabloid scandals it treated as world-historical events that had their logical conclusion in the fusion of the tabloid mentality with high politics in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. There was a certain amount of self-awareness regarding that exhaustion and breakdown, which I suspect had a lot to do with the notorious '90s "irony"--an alertness to society's losing what remained of its sanity that it coped with by trying not to take things too seriously, by laughing at itself as it obsessed over the little things in life in that "What is the deal with that?" way because the big things seemed so much a given.

But the self-awareness slipped away as the insanity got worse (was allowed to slip away, perhaps?), and again I find myself thinking of the reality TV obsession as a minor and comparatively trivial but still telling example. In 1999 EdTV was a joke. Not long after it was a default mode for the culture--defended by cultural commentators with as much ardor as stupidity, the critical faculty gone as those who should have fought the trend not only surrendered to it but embraced it.

And so now, even while remembering how profoundly annoying that '90s irony could be I now find myself wondering if it did not then and again at least provide us with some protection against what the world was turning into--in contrast with the world of today, where irony abounds, but seems to be of a far more nihilistic kind, a product of the circumstances rather than a reaction against them at least testifying to the memory of something else, and its different hopes, adding mightily to the toxicity of the culture we now inhabit.