Laudator Temporis Acti

Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 133-134 (notes omitted):

What is wrong with the mythless 'motleyness' of modernity? In pointing to the specific symptoms of this, Nietzsche develops a 'cultural criticism' which is deeply indebted to Wagner's and which persists with remarkable consistency throughout his career.

The first symptom is loss of unity. Since the unity of a community, of a 'people', can only exist when individuals are gathered into the 'maternal womb' of a unified myth, there is, in modernity, no community, no homeland. Instead, all we have is a 'wilderness of thought, morals, and action', a 'homeless wandering about'. Modern society has become the atomized world of, in Wagner's phrase, 'absolute egoism', with the only unity being the artificial and oppressive one of the state. As a consequence, communally and so individually, life becomes meaningless.

The second symptom is a 'greedy scramble to grab a place at the table of others', the search for meaning in the supermarket of 'foreign religions and cultures'. One might think here not only of the thriving 'Eastern-guru' business but also of so-called postmodern architecture, the raiding of past and alien styles as an expression of the hollowed-out emptiness of our own culture, which, Nietzsche points out, is not really 'post' modernity at all.

The final symptom is modernity's 'feverish agitation'. The loss of the eternal, mythical perspective on things, the loss of a meaning of life, leads to an 'enormous growth in worldliness', a 'frivolous deification of the present ...of the "here and now"'. This is what modern German sociologists call the Erlebnisgesellschaft — the society driven by the frenzied quest for 'experiences', cheap thrills; for sex, drugs, rock and roll and 'extreme' sports. It is the society described by Wagner as 'bored to death by pleasure'. Without a communal ethos to give aspiration and meaning to one's life, the only way of keeping boredom at bay is the frenzied search for cheap thrills.

Most of the quotations come from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, § 23.