anomieandme

This blog is meant to become a textual archive of my dynamic and often contradictory intellectual development over the past and coming years. I hope it will accomplish two functions, as a kind of cognitive genealogy, and as a textual extension of my thoughts exposing them to outside criticisms. Please keep in mind that some of these posts are only trains of thought and not necessarily my actual opinions. I am a thirdish year undergraduate student majoring in both philosophy and sociology.

8.10.06

a terrible post to crack off a new season


What with the sorry state of today’s geo-political affairs, it’s common for a lot of liberal tree-hugger types to talk. Sometimes when I study a little history I realize that this trend to doom-say runs deep. In fact, it would seem that everyone in every generation before me also thought the world was coming to some kind of catastrophic end point. But let’s think about this for a moment – sometimes it did: WWI, WWII, the Great Depression, and if you lived in Russia this happened only about 15 or so years ago. If you live in places like Sudan or Iraq, it’s happening right now, and has been for sometime now. The truth is that the world falls apart sometimes, and maybe we’re not so nuts to be worried. Furthermore, what if we didn’t worry? Maybe it’s all this worrying that’s kept things rolling for as long as it has – because if there hadn’t already been half a green movement maybe the global warming would already be upon us. It is this doom-saying that keeps us alert, it keeps us critical, and it keeps us prepared to initiate change. At any given point our current way of life is stretching out into future histories, some of which forecast our immanent destruction and others that secure our prosperity. If we aren’t engaged now, there’s no telling where we’ll end up.

The above post is not meant to only pertain to me and people like me. Throughout this whole post I’ve been talking of some kind of “We.” As the world globalizes this We is ever expanding. Whereas in the past we might have talked of We as a nation, now its becoming ever more apparent that a new We, that’s more inclusive, needs to be formulated.