The Poison We Pick
I've been talking with my brother a lot about this recently, especially as a function of the overall decrease of 'meaning' in the world. I think it goes back even further, to the advent of postmodernism in the throes of World War I. They were the first lost generation, but I don't think they were the last. The death of modernism and the accompanying assault on the bastions of objective meaning (as discussed in the article, Religion, Jingoism, and Community by way of Tribalism) is in some sense a healthy thing, as 'objective' meaning is too often used as false justification to do battle with other, contradicting 'objective' meaning. But it hasn't been replaced with anything. And the intervening years have only weakened it further. Maybe we had a brief sputter of national identity again with World War II, but the atomic bomb saw to that, and Vietnam finished the job (in America, at any rate). And now we're drifting in a world without objectivity. And what do you work for when the only objective truth is death, and the end of your accomplishments? Some people seem to be able to answer this question for themselves, some cannot.We thought as well that this may be why there are so many people engaged rabidly in the consumption of fiction these days; it seems to me just as much a symptom of a broader crisis of meaning as opiods may be. A fictional world is readily graspable; you can wrap your whole head around the whole thing. And meaning is easily found in the simplified moral space that these simulations are often constructed under. It seems to me just as much a salve for the meta-crisis of meaninglessness as a drug, in some sense.I don't mean to ascribe any moral right or wrong to any of this; in fact, that's the whole thrust of it. It's harder and harder to know what moral right and wrong are.---EDIT: it's been pointed out that I should probably be less careless throwing a word like "objective" around: I mean it only in the sense of mass perceived objectivity. If a society agrees on it, it's as close to objectivity as we seem to be able to get. Substitute it for "Societal Consensus", if it pleases you, but I think the brain treats them as one and the same.