In the Culture of the Counterfeit 249
military presence: soldiers hold fl ags, march, stand on guard, and
play the national anthem. Navy jets fl are overhead. So strange has
the world become that the soldiers believe they are being exalted
by their presence near the game. They are being raised up through
their contact with au then tic professional athletes.
Real exercise of courage is dangerous. We want to hop and blink
and live a long time— live forever if possi ble. When Nietz sche says
that bourgeois man is good at inventing happiness, he might well
be prophesying the pre sent (and probably the future): middle- class
happiness is living the life of a Self that can possess the persuasive
illusion of Soul. We have become stunningly good at doing this.
Instead of going to war we (and our children) go to the TV screen
and watch the Sunday pseudo- carnage. Or we repair to the com-
puter screen to act the part of world- class warriors, pocket- Achilles
and Hectors. Video games make heroes of us all. (What renders
someone an adept slayer of his virtual enemies on the screen is dex-
terity with a stick and some buttons— something akin to typing
skills.) We catch an action movie; we watch another installment of
this cop show or that; we read a mass- marketed corporate thriller
and put ourselves in the place of the daring hero. But the book is an
old technology of pseudo- transcendence, now nearly eclipsed by the
electronic juice and jolt that comes off the screens.
In current culture, where is wisdom to be found? If wisdom is a
hunger in the Soul, as Plato said, and if we are transfi xed with true
fi gures of wisdom— the man who has had time to think enough, the
woman who has the chance truly to refl ect— how do we now slake
the need? It turns out that the prob lem of wisdom is an easy prob lem
to solve. For acquiring wisdom, as we saw, is dangerous. The indi-
vidual who pursues true insight is, to use Nietz sche’s phrase (though
the perception goes back at least as far as Plato), un- timely. That is,
he strives to be ahead of his own time in his perceptions, albeit
sometimes basing his thoughts in the intellectual achievement of the