Immediacy

There are two important aspects of what I call the 'immediacy' that we see in the emerging culture. One is what’s known as the ‘fast-food syndrome’: people are impatient with any delay. Thanks to technology, we can have most of what we want when we want it. A meal can be bought frozen and ready to eat in three minutes with the help of a microwave. To contact someone on the other side of the world, we only have to click ‘send’ and they can receive the message instantaneously. The downside of this ability to do everything quickly is that we expect everything to be done quickly! Anything that takes time (such as, in this case, studying religious texts) is generally not considered to be worthwhile.

The second and more subtle aspect has to do with a connection to the immediate experience. Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, committed suicide in part because of this. In his early days, he felt an amazing feeling of exhilaration and adrenaline when performing, especially in front of large crowds. Later in his life however, he found this feeling harder and harder to get, despite being a superstar and performing in front of huge crowds. In his suicide note, he wrote, “…I don’t have the passion anymore…”

For the post-modern person, the past and the future have no importance compared with the present. Delayed gratification has no meaning compared to the thrill of the now. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the neurologist and anthropologistau Oliver Sacks writes about a man who has no short term memory. He can’t remember anything that happened even a few minutes earlier. Sacks wrote of him, “He is, as it were, isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all around him…He is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.”[1] In many ways, this describes post-modern culture.

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[1] Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. p. 34