If, when you get up in the morning, you watch the news and peruse the headlines of newspapers and think you are feeling the effects of ‘the night before’ and that the sun is going the wrong way… you could be on the right track.

And it would take more than a Galileo or a Copernicus to convince you otherwise. One thing you can be sure of: the sun knows where it is heading; on the other hand, we living in the 21st century do not.

Call it the age of absurdity, of anxiety, of populism, Islamism, feminism, skepticism… whatever. Every label fits. The world belongs not to those who love it most but to those who shout and fight and twist and hide facts. The absurd part is that they are believed.

A recent report in a Canadian Church newspaper noted the plight of a minister in the United Church of Canada who is an avowed atheist but who is “fighting to keep her credentials”.

A Deakin University professor says the falling numbers of participants in Protestant churches in the US is due mainly to these churches becoming “more liberal and progressive”. He concludes that these churches are facing continuing decline if not actual extinction.

This sounds absurd in an age of so-called liberalism, no borders, no frontiers and no rules.

However, there is always a silver lining in this modern cloud of unknowing.

Modern absurdity goes beyond belief or/and religion. It has virtually become an accepted axiom

As a strong contrast to these ‘liberal’ Protestant churches, the same professor cites the case of the Charedis, a strictly Jewish orthodox community who, after virtually being wiped out in the Holocaust and by forced secularisation in the Soviet Union, have regained strength and “increased enormously”. From an estimated 100,000 or so in 1945, there are now 1.5 to two million Charedi Jews in Israel, the US and other parts of the world.

However, modern absurdity goes beyond belief or/and religion.

It has virtually become an accepted axiom that we, in the West, live in this ‘modern deplorable state’ as a direct result of our leaders, inventions, beliefs of the last 200 or more years.

Whether it was inventions, or enlightenments, or ideologies, or religions, all these contributed to the modern conflicts, cruelties, suicides, drugs and abuses. The past is as black as the metaphorical black arm bands which they wear.

Even some monuments of old heroes are tumbling down and these are not those of Lenin or Stalin. The more knowledge we accumulate the more sinister, according to these leftist iconoclasts, becomes our view of history. They turned our achievements to tragedies and our virtues to mortal sins.

So they reason that the conflict in the Middle East is the result of colonialism and so is the turmoil in Africa. Isis is another direct result of that and of the US siding with Saudi Arabia because of oil.

The present trend of shooting and murders by Islamists is, according to leftist reasoning, the fault of Western European nations that have not welcomed enough the Muslims in general and helped them to find jobs and be accepted in their societies.

In, a recent talk on ABC radio Anooshe Mushtaq, a research fellow @Info Ops hq., blames the far right western groups or anti-immigration activists and states that “divisive rhetoric can transform young Muslims into Islamic extremists”. At least, the speaker did remind us that these atrocities are committed in the name of Islam, “the religion of peace”.

We are asked by some religions and psychiatrists to be still, to enjoy silence, to get away from the self and to be able to say ‘enough’. But can this ‘enlightenment’ be attained by anyone in a western country when our life is permeated by these four habits: we can’t sit still; we can’t shut up; we can’t escape self-obsession; we can’t stop wanting things?

We tend to complain about, and, at times, condemn, the ‘now’, especially its absurdity. We tend to think that the heroes of the past we admire had seeds or did acts which could have been considered absurd or, rather, in conflict with their preaching.

Buddha, who preached honesty, not only abandoned his wife and child but sneaked away during the night. Socrates, who is considered another ideal man and philosopher in the western world, was notoriously dismissive of his family.

And Simone de Beauvoir, the lover of Sartre, father of existentialism, seduced young, attractive and impressionable female students and then passed them on to Sartre, who dumped them when he had his fun. And several of these girls were blighted for life by the experience.

Perhaps Sartre considered his activities as part of ‘existing’. That could be the reason he is one of our modern philosophers.

They say distance lends enchantment to the view. From a distance, you can see the wholeness of reality. It also makes you see some of the absurdities of the reality of life.

As astronaut Neil Armstrong realised when he was on the moon and discovered that he could cover the earth by raising his thumb.

Did it make you feel really big, he was asked. “No, it made me feel really small.”

Pity that, at the turn of the century, we concentrated only on computer collapse… and did not go into the more complicated project of changing the whole rhythm of society. And sort out some of its absurdities…. Perhaps!

Victor Vella is a former high school teacher, a broadcaster and an active member of the Maltese community in New South Wales.