This week, the World Economic Forum takes place in Davos. One of those closed gatherings of the global elite which so fascinates and infuriates conspiracy theorists. Davos, the Bildeburg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations: who are they? What are they talking about? Are they in control?

My own personal conspiracy theory is perhaps even more frightening: no one is in control. There is no global elite. The so-called ‘global elite’ is just as stupid, confused, blinkered and short-term as the rest of us. I know, I’ve met them.

Members of the ‘global elite’– politicians, academics, think-tank fellows, media big-wigs – like to think they are deeply concerned with the future of the world. But what they are really concerned with, 90% of the time, is their own standing in the global elite, whether they are ‘relevant’, whether their latest pronouncement got picked up by CNN or the blogosphere, whether another member of the global elite replied to their last email.

You meet some big global player, some politician or academic, and you think, finally, I’m near the centre of power, let’s find out what’s going on, what’s the big plan, and then these people invariably mouth platitudes, sound-bites and buzz-words. ‘There’s a danger of Russia wielding the energy weapon’, they say, or ‘it’s important to push for democratic renewal in the Middle East’, then they smile blankly, shake your hand and say ‘Great talking to you’.

There is no global elite, and here’s something even weirder – no one knows where we’re going. Western society is an aimless society.

I find this discomforting. It’s a relatively new phenomenon, the aimless society. Western society has had an aim at least since the triumph of Christianity. For hundreds of years, that aim was to prepare for Christ’s second coming. OK, it wasn’t much of an aim, but hey, it was something to look forward to. And that aim lay at the heart of Western society, in the prominent position of monasteries, in the power of the Church.

Then, slowly, the Christian telos became replaced by a scientific one. We must explore the world, explore our minds, explore the universe, we must discover the immutable scientific laws which will make human society perfect.

Or, related to the scientific telos, a political telos: we must free ourselves from the tyranny of kings and priests, we must fight for freedom, die for freedom, until the last worker, the last woman, the last homosexual or ethnic minority, is free and unrepressed.

But now, in Western societies, we are free. What do we do now? Where do we go? How do we spend all our time?

This is the crucial question for people living in Western societies. How to kill time. Thank God, in this respect, for work. If Westerners weren’t anxious workaholics afraid of getting the sack, they might look around and realize they have absolutely no idea what they are living for. Or they say they are living for the occasional holidays. I remember how people in my office in London were always talking about their holidays. ‘Oh, I’m off to Thailand for 2 weeks in March, I can’t wait’, or ‘Just three more months to go before I go skiing’. As if this was somehow a meaningful existence, sitting around in an office for a year waiting for two weeks a year when you can sit around on a beach.

Francis Fukuyama called this period ‘the End of History and the Last Man’, and I think he’s half-right. It’s the end of history in so far as it’s the end of teleology. History, of course, won’t stand still, but western society is now no longer defined by what it’s striving for, than by what it fears and reacts to – Islamic terrorism, global warming. And he’s right that we’re witnessing the triumph of the ‘Last Man’.

The Last Man is a phrase of Nietzsche’s from Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“Alas! there comes the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man -- and the string of his bow will have unlearned to fly!

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

Alas! There comes the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There comes the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.

Lo! I show you the Last Man.

"What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?" -- so asks the Last Man, and blinks.

The earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His species is ineradicable as the flea; the Last Man lives longest.

"We have discovered happiness" -- say the Last Men, and they blink.

They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth.

Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men!

A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death.

One still works, for work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one.

One no longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule? Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome.

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: he who feels differently goes voluntarily into the madhouse.

"Formerly all the world was insane," -- say the subtlest of them, and they blink.

They are clever and know all that has happened: so there is no end to their derision. People still quarrel, but are soon reconciled -- otherwise it upsets their stomachs.

They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health.

"We have discovered happiness," - say the Last Men, and they blink.”

Nietzsche was a little over-optimistic. We haven’t quite discovered happiness, though certainly anti-depressants are doing a roaring trade. But we have comfort. And leisure. Ours is a comfortable society. It has many amusing side-shows and distracting spectacles, though none you remember for longer than a week, but that doesn’t matter, because each distraction is soon succeeded by the next.

This week’s distracting spectacle, in Britain, is Celebrity Big Brother. An enormous furore has blown up because one inmate of the Big Brother house was supposedly racist to another inmate, an Indian. It became a massive deal in the UK, to the extent that both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown waded in to condemn the racism. The media was full of discussion of the incident – what did it say about Britain? Were we racist? Were we tolerant?

I’ll tell you what it says about Britain. We’ve become a completely trivial culture. I remember the newspapers in the week before Celebrity Big Brother started, about two weeks ago, and their headlines were ‘Just a week to go before BB kicks off’. Medieval society was defined by the seasons. Ours is defined by reality TV. First there’s ‘Celebrity Big Brother’ in January, then ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’ in March, then ‘Big Brother’ in April, then ‘Wife-Swap’ in July, then ‘The Apprentice’ in August, then ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ in December. We have nothing better to do than sit around watching people as ordinary and mediocre as ourselves sitting around doing nothing. It is the triumph of the small man. The triumph of democracy – to take the trivial, and make it enormous, make it so big, that even the leader of the country has to discuss it.

Nietzsche was in some ways the first Modernist. The Modernists were a group of intellectuals who worked from the 1890s to the 1920s. They were, with a handful of exceptions, colossally elitist, and warned that high culture was going to be destroyed by the unwashed masses, on whom they looked with fear and loathing.

If you read the great artistic products of Modernism – TS Eliot’s The Wasteland for example, or DH Lawrence’s Women In Love– what is obvious is their over-riding contempt for the masses, with their petty concerns and banal entertainments (the great exception is James Joyce’s Ulysses, which celebrated the average man, albeit in an avant-garde style that the average man was unlikely to enjoy). And in some Modernist texts, particularly those of the Nietzschean DH Lawrence, this contempt for the masses gives way to an overwhelming nihilism, a desire for civilization to be destroyed, rather than allowed to limp on its present, trivial state.

In many other Modernist works, the desire is expressed for some form of authoritarian or even fascist state, which will protect high culture, and if necessary protect the genetic purity of the upper classes through eugenics.

Later Modernists of the 1930s, meanwhile, went to the other extreme and wholeheartedly supported the USSR, because they believed that Marxism was the perfect intellectual solution to the confused mess that was bourgeois capitalism. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, leading intellectuals in the UK, France, Germany and Italy were telling us all how the diktats of the Communist Party represented the last hope for Western civilization.

The failures of both Nazism and Communism, and the (to our eyes) obvious evil of both regimes, did an enormous amount to discredit and weaken the intellectual in the West. And rightly so. Far too many intellectuals showed themselves enraptured to the point of blindness by grand intellectual schemes which they lovingly served, deafening themselves to the cries of ordinary people’s suffering. Only a few of the great minds of the period – George Orwell above all - managed to come out in favour of the ordinary person’s ability to live their own life how they want, free of the intrusion of intellectuals’ theories.

Still, the Modernists were right about one thing. Theirs was the last flowering of Western culture. We have some decent cinema now, we have some good pop music. But we no longer have great literature, or great philosophy, or great music. But we are a comfortable society. A society where ordinary people won’t get carted off to the gas chamber or the gulag. That’s a wonderful thing. And if they do nothing else with their time than watch reality TV, well, that’s their choice. The intellectual has lost his ability to tell people how to live their life. Maybe not his ability. Simply his audience.

Still, we try to hide our aimlessness from ourselves. Yes, we are free…but what about the rest of the world? We must export our freedom, export our prosperity. So we export liberalism to the Middle East, and it again gives us that delicious sense of having an aim, something to work towards. But the Arabs don’t seem so into liberalism, and we’re confronted by Islamic fundamentalism. Brilliant! Something to define ourselves against, something to fight, something to spend our time worrying about and discussing. Thank God for Islamic fundamentalism.

But underneath the war on terror and anxiety about the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, there is the overwhelming nihilism of our era. We are a tiny piece of dust in an enormous, uninterested universe. We no longer have any great claims to spiritual or cultural greatness, we use up the world’s natural resources so we can drive to the shopping mall or eat popcorn and watch action movies. We tell ourselves the goal of our lives is to get married and have children. What’s the point? Or to get promotion. What’s the point? Or to go travelling. What’s the point? Or to learn another language. What’s the point? Or to become famous. What’s the point? Or to practice yoga. What’s the point?

As Samuel Beckett, the last great British writer, wrote in Waiting for Godot:

Estragon: Nothing to be done.

Vladimir: I'm beginning to come round to that opinion.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

January 23, 2007