The Universe Is on Our Side by Bruce Ledewitz;

Author:Bruce Ledewitz;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why Do We Evade?

The columnist Joe Nocera wrote an op-ed in June 2020 criticizing the firing of Estée Lauder board member, Ronald Lauder, after employees in the company demanded that he be removed because he had poured money—$1.6 million at the time—into pro-Trump organizations.23 The company agreed to remove him.

Nocera understood that the president was really beyond the pale for some younger workers. He even sympathized with this feeling.

But Nocera had a broader view on the matter, having to do with the “culture of millennials.” His theory, premised on a suggestion from Charlotte Alter’s book, The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, is that because the parents of millennials were overprotective, they were overly strict, imposing draconian punishments for even minor rule infractions. So, according to Alter, millennials developed a merciless morality. They have no tolerance for people who think in the slightest differently from them.

In this chapter, I have agreed that we don’t debate anything—that we just move from one condemnation to another depending on which side we’re on.

But I don’t agree with Nocera about the reason we are like this. I don’t see that this tendency has anything to do with age or parenting style. The reasons we are like this lie in our beliefs about the nature of reality.

First, we cannot act reasonably because there is nothing to be reasonable about. You debate matters when there is the possibility of learning something. But under the reign of the Death of God, there is nothing to learn. There is no knowledge about important matters to be gained.

If you want to know why millennials are like this, you can ask whether their parents engaged in thoughtful exchange and debate. Mostly, they did not.

We also do not engage large questions, because we feel that resolving them will prove impossible. We don’t expect progress. Again, we feel that way because we are living under the Death of God.

Finally, we are afraid of what genuine discussion would unearth. If you suspect that the universe is an abyss of unreasoning forces, that the self is an illusion and that the sense of significance that you feel in life is a spandrel—that is, a byproduct of evolutionary advance that somehow appeared along with a bigger, better problem-solving brain—you do not want to probe into any important matters.

It is hard to live with these feelings. But at least if you evade anything important, you will be like the fool in the saying “Better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” We are afraid of what the truth would show.

We have now come to the end of the coming home to roost of the Death of God. I repeat, as I have said previously, there is no going back. The God who died will not return, at least not in any time frame that makes a difference to us.

So, if our condition is to improve, we will have to pursue a new and different path. We don’t any longer have the old story.

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