The conservatism of David Foster Wallace

All the way back in the '90s, David Foster Wallace was pointing out the consequences of the postmodern attitude, specifically as it pertains to culture and entertainment. In the essay"E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1990)" he says the following:

I want to convince you that irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture (of which cutting-edge fiction is a part) that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird, pretty hand has my generation by the throat. I'm going to argue that irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that, at the same time, they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that, for aspiring fictionists, they pose terrifically vexing problems.

What he is describing here is very relevant to our age. The shallow rebelliousness that characterized television in Wallace's time has made a new home of the internet and, by virtue of its innumerable participants, has significantly magnified its destructive potential.

Postmodern irony is disastrously versatile and easy to employ. It's like acid that can burn through everything indiscriminately. Every possible worldview, lifestyle and philosophy can be reduced to its excesses and get endlessly mocked from that point on. This is what characterizes most online arguments: Religious people being reduced to psychaotic zealots, Atheists being reduced to narcissistic neckbeards, Feminists being reduced to screeching banshees and Anti-feminists being reduced to incel troglodytes. All meaningful interaction is lost under a sea of pointing and laughing. And worst of all: It can be genuinely entertaining. I myself can enjoy a George Carlin comedy routine or a South Park episode. Watching people rant and absolutely demolish things can be hilarious if done right. Furthermore, taking an idea to its excesses is actually a good argumentative practice for spotting problems in its more moderate manifestations. The thing is: Once you start employing irony there is no reason to stop. Individual comedians will spare some things and uphold them as genuine and worthwhile but it's only a matter of time until another comedian comes along and applies the same scathing irony on those things. The values and positions spared by George Carlin, John Oliver, BreadTubers and Bill Maher will inevitably be attacked by Penn Jillette, Matt Walsh, Joe Rogan and the Babylon Bee, and vice-versa. All the viewer can conclude from this ironic back-and-forth quarrel is that both sides are wrong and blind to their excesses. Literally, every side can be painted in this reductive, embarrassing light. So at the end of the day, maybe humanity as a whole is dumb and all values we can possibly uphold are dumb. In this sense, postmodernism is early stage nihilism.

This gets to the bottom of what is wrong with postmodernism: You cannot doubt forever. The ball has to settle somewhere eventually. Both individuals and societies need values to orient themselves. Values that they can confidently follow and don't doubt at every step. To conclude with another quote from Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. ... The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. ... The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness.