The Colbert Report's interview with the Harvard head of Philosophy actually struck a chord with me. I generally speaking dont like the interviews on the Report because they are just as satirical as the rest of the show, whereas on the Daily Show the comedy isn't in a lightheartedness that I feel robs the interviewee of the message they want to make.
The discussion was about his book, which examined the idea that people today find it harder to find things to find meaningful.
I havent read the book, but taking that idea and getting an idea of his position through the interview, it made me wonder. Generally speaking I think I agree...but not in that people find it harder to hold things as meaningful, but that nowadays it's a lot easier to phone it in. Facebook protest loops, for example. Facebook in general. You can format who you are, choose the way you come across to the world, decide what information you give and therefore affect the way people perceive your mood and life without having to do anything but tap your fingers. It is potentially words without actions.
I think I agree with him because I myself feel like I dont care about the things I should. At the same time, I feel like I am sometimes flummoxed at how little people around me seem to cherish the things I DO cherish. So in light of that I have to wonder if my perception is just based on not having the same values as those around me and feeling that disconnect. I wonder if that's what the people who wrote that book were experiencing.
I've always felt that if you go back in time, rather than be shocked by the difference a lot of people would be surprised at how similar people five hundred, or even a thousand, years ago are to people today. The illusion that we were different comes from being able to see the obvious difference in available and known information about the world, culture and custom. It's tempting to project a whole slew of different individual and existential differences as well based on that, but I dont think those individual differences really exist between your average man of 1405 and your average man of 2011. It's easy to forget that when we look back in history, the ways we analyze and create a picture of how things were are inanimate objects, and written history/evidence of outstanding events and people. We dont get an account of the general latency of the general population of a general city. We get explosions, lulls, outstanding figures who pushed things forward and made things interesting, artists whose work we can still appreciate. It's hard to remember that the time itself wasnt necessarily that interesting to someone not in that loop of inertia. It was just a few artists, political figures, wars, mathematicians and philosophers who managed to stand out, or even just write down what they knew.
I think that perhaps rather than not finding anything sacred, it's simply a definition of what sacred is. And it's certainly easy for people to become complacent nowadays perhaps moreso than 1000 years ago. And, going off on my own little tangent, it seems to be such a shame to waste the lavishness of our culture on complacency, but perhaps that's just how it goes.
So anyway. The idea that I'm weighing right now is: Is the issue really that people nowadays are finding it more difficult to find things meaningful, moreso than at other points in time? Or is it that we can see the ways in which our modern culture makes it easy for people to disregard the sacred, and we assume that it's unique to this culture to do so?
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that adults from 1405 and 2011 would find each other instantly recognizable. The development of the middle class and the spread of literacy were huge, if in some ways 'quiet' social developments. You could compare, say, the upper class of that era to the upper class of this, or the lower to the lower, but there's a huge swath of modern people with little clear analogue in the past.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think that's part of what this struggle for meaning is getting at. Existentialism is a middle-class phenomenon. Specifically it's thing that develops when a number of people have sufficient leisure time to themselves, but no clear guiding axioms or lines of community. They aren't clergy, they aren't guilded tradesmen or a handful of idle second sons; they're really the bulk of society. And the search for meaning has traditionally been an ascetic practice, one really of enforced asceticism, because in order to have that kind of time to devote to self-discovery people had to strictly limit their needs. The modern middle class really has no reason for this, and so they lack even that struggle to define themselves against.
I would be interested to read the book. Sorry it took so long to respond...
ReplyDeleteI agree that people with an excess of time on their hands and a limited at least acknowledgment of the extraordinary or even duty in their lives are the primary subjects of loss of meaning. I talked to someone on facebook after I made this post who said that he didnt ever notice how beautiful everything was until the army when he had to deal with excessive temperatures, study an outlandish amount of hours, and generally suffer. I countered that I dont think suffering alone leads to people noticing these things. For example it becomes HARDER for me to feel awe in myself and the world the more I suffer. I experience this through learning and understanding and a sense of productivity. Which might have been what he was talking about, but he was also talking about a sense of place and beauty rather than meaning...which are equatable but I dont think that's what the author of the book was talking about. But then again, not everyone speaks from the same reference points with which we use to create our language, so who knows.
I was upper middle class and didnt find a desire to find real meaning in my life until I suffered. I think what the guy on the program was referring to was value and prioritizing the meaning in one's life. It seems like a subtle distinction from the rant you and I went on, but relevant nonetheless. I'd have to read the book to be able to vocalize that difference.
I'm going to re format my response to this. I think that yes, epople (I left the typeo there because it's hilarious) were different in all those sociological ways. Literacy today is more widespread, but that a) doesnt mean that everyone is literate...I'm pretty sure you'd be surprised how common illiteracy is. b) doesnt mean that people use it to gain or use information. Like I said, the tools and culture at our disposal is obviously different. But in the context of the discussion of some unwashed masses finding it difficult to find things meaningful? I dont think the experiences of this is different now as opposed to "then". And I dont agree that not finding things meaningful is primarily middle class. People who have been less educated are less aware of things that they COULD find meaningful, and additionally they more likely come from more stressed out, less emotionally nurturing families. Tons of people in lower classes are just floating around, doing whatever works. Again, I find myself not sure of what I'm saying because his definition of "meaningful" isnt yet clear to me. Of course I could find something that someone finds meaningful, at least abstractly.
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