--Irving Kristol
It seems that the key idea here is what Kristol meant by a meaningless life or a meaningless universe. As Xinlin said, one could look at this from a literal standpoint and say that he meant a purpose in life or a point in life but I think he means more than just that. Humans love to believe that the world isn't so random and that their lives aren't so chaotic. We spend our time finding excuses as to what our meanings are or what our purposes are. We spend years trying to find out who we are (metaphorically speaking of course) and we forget much of the big picture. This dissolution leads us to believe and see strange things and we may think that our society is working. We can see this in all forms of government as well. Before every government fails (as they are all destined to do) it's people fall in love with it, become concerned about it, hate it, and then BOOM revolution and everyone's waving their flags for a "new order" or some other ideal that will be just as easily washed away as its predecessor. This proves Kristol's point because as history shows, people like to see their society working in some way and once it becomes impossible to further lie to themselves about it they burn it down and create a new one.
The one thing that I do not agree with in Kristol's point that even a suspicion will lead to a community's destruction for people will lie to themselves for years in order to rekindle that feeling of fake hope that they once had. Our suspicions exist but we repress them in order to not cause a commotion in our community. We are instilled with fear and the powers that surround us keep us from speaking up so we quell our suspicions and allow these communities that seem to be leading meaningless lives to continue to spiral downward until there is nothing more of it but a distant memory of what people thought they had.
Ken I would like to disagree to some extent with what you wrote in your second paragraph. Yes, I agree with what you said about fear, and how fear keep us from saying what we think is possible. But I think that what Kristol is talking about in her quote is about the entire society, not just the individual. To me, I think that we suppress our fears as individuals. But if the society does not believe in something, it is much more likely to be discussed about. If our society believed we were leading "meaningless lives" or... to put in a more understandable example, not advancing in the medical field, I believe our society would have a problem with the meaningless-ness of the medical fiend. I believe we would have such a problem, the "fear" would be temporarily supressed. However, if I myself had a problem with the medical field, I would be less likely to suppress my fear.
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ReplyDeleteI agree about a suspicion not affecting a community. I should have talked about that in my post but here works too. People have their suspicions and we usually down-play them because it is not common belief. But if enough people go with this suspicion then the community may spiral into nothingness.
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ReplyDeleteI don't agree with you when you suggest that Kristol is saying a community with suspicion will be destroyed. Infact Kristol is saying the opposite, a community where people stop questioning, where people stop being suspicious is a community whose demise is inevitable.
ReplyDeleteI agree with a lot of what you've said here, and rather than disagreeing like the others I think it was pretty interesting how you talked about the suspicion not affecting society. That doesn't seem to be a common idea here, it was nice to see it and remember that people do in fact repress the suspicions that they fear may hurt them, at times. You did a good job bringing that to light here.
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