David B. Calhoun’s Blog

So I guess we’re right now in the middle of the age of art. I just was browsing through the internet and I found a book called “The Substance of Style”, a recently published book which argues this point. Fashion is becoming the obsession of the entire world.

I know that we’ve always been fashionable people, but are we more fashionable today than ever before? Maybe. What else is there, after all? The postmodernist has made Truth something not to be desired, so let’s instead feast on entertainment, aesthetics, and ourselves!

My greatest fear is that there will be no waking up from this deep slumber that the world is in. We are all too content publishing millions of meaningless books. This includes Romance novels. If I am ever put in charge of running the world, Romance novels by and large will be sent to remote third world countries who cannot read, and they will be used to fuel their fires. The remaining books left over (for even then there will be a surplus) will have their pages stripped out to be used as cheap barely-marketable one-ply toilet paper. Ok, enough about romance novels!

The world, at least the majority of it, is in this deep slumber. I, as well as they, are all too happy with a comfortable lifestyle of luxury and entertainment and fashion and art and music. But why don’t they realize their predicament? Don’t they see that on its own, it is meaningless and purposeless?

Why are people all to content to work at office jobs and to simultaneously realize they are a replaceable gear in the greater machine of their company? Why is everyone all too eager to get a job working as a gear, only to work after hours and to come home to see their wife and children for a good half hour before they are asleep, and then rise the next day to do it all again? What are they working toward? Lots of money? Perhaps it is only that people expect that if they just made a little bit more money that they’d be truly happy that keeps them going. It is a vicious cycle - they assume that they haven’t made it to that point of comfort yet, because they are not yet happy, so they keep attempting to make more money.

So the point of life is to acquire money? Let’s hope there is more to it than that.

This reminds me of the state of science today - proponents of science view their discipline as God himself, with the power to heal and extend lives! No doubt it is very good at doing that, but they must answer the same question: to what end? Extending lives will automatically make better and richer lives? So science isn’t omnipotent as we once thought! It has much power in the physical realm, but in nonphysical things such as ethics or politics, or simply how to live a better life, it says nothing at all. It only extends lives. At this point I’m seeing science as neither necessary nor sufficient - it just seems to be a toy of the physical world.

So all these things leave something to be desired, and hopefully the world in its current aesthetic state will finally wake up and realize the meaninglessness of the world they’ve created for themselves and fashioned for themselves. Or perhaps it will go on and continue to self-medicate and remain blissfully ignorant, even knowingly ignorant, if there is such a thing.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 12:41 am and is filed under Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.