I would argue that stories are instruments of instruction and social cohesion... What we see in pre enlightenment stories is that outcomes are driven by the ethic's and morality of the participants... Go against the natural order of things and you end in ruin... If your actions are in line with reality (right ethics and morality) you will be honored and society preserved... modern stories are relativistic. There are no absolutes and everything is defined by the individual...self naming... this is the modern problem ... individualistic materialism...
I definitely feel that. But something I have been turning over lately is that perhaps it’s better not to be confident at this moment. Maybe something that is worth our commitment will reveal itself. Until then, powerfully pursuing the wrong thing might be worse.
Ethics and morality are evolutionary. They are subject to evolutionary pressures and society selects for them because of their fitness in helping them survive. The post-enlightenment postmodernist move was to deconstruct millennia of evolutionary pressures and throw us into an uncertain milieu of relativistic thought. A lack of confidence is the product of this postmodern deconstruction. All we have is our history and traditions. All we have is what has been given to us by those that came before. All we can do is trust that what they gave us was functional until we gain enough maturity and wisdom to determine it for ourselves. To dismiss it out of hand is arrogant and the tragedy of the modern world.
I would argue that stories are instruments of instruction and social cohesion... What we see in pre enlightenment stories is that outcomes are driven by the ethic's and morality of the participants... Go against the natural order of things and you end in ruin... If your actions are in line with reality (right ethics and morality) you will be honored and society preserved... modern stories are relativistic. There are no absolutes and everything is defined by the individual...self naming... this is the modern problem ... individualistic materialism...
I definitely feel that. But something I have been turning over lately is that perhaps it’s better not to be confident at this moment. Maybe something that is worth our commitment will reveal itself. Until then, powerfully pursuing the wrong thing might be worse.
Ethics and morality are evolutionary. They are subject to evolutionary pressures and society selects for them because of their fitness in helping them survive. The post-enlightenment postmodernist move was to deconstruct millennia of evolutionary pressures and throw us into an uncertain milieu of relativistic thought. A lack of confidence is the product of this postmodern deconstruction. All we have is our history and traditions. All we have is what has been given to us by those that came before. All we can do is trust that what they gave us was functional until we gain enough maturity and wisdom to determine it for ourselves. To dismiss it out of hand is arrogant and the tragedy of the modern world.
Do you think modernism was the right way to go? What if that certainty which is at its zenith in 1945 leads to nuclear war?
And nobody is reading Tolkien without postmodernism.
I'm not a big fan of counterfactuals. We can only analyze what "is" ...not what might have happened "if"...