LDOC is Wednesday. Remember last year when Common (who had the, ahem, sense to recognize his own, er, mediocrity) told us that he believes fervently in "justice"?
That's sort of like the late Arthur Schlesinger saying he believed in John F. Kennedy's nuptial fidelity. Or for you college students out there, that's sort of like Tupac Shakur announcing he's alive, fo' sho and fo' real.
But at least Duke students know how to decorate the quad for LDOC. I mean, who hasn't felt at one time or other that our Gothic Wonderland needs a thorough coating of alcohol-smelling garbage?
We also realize why clothing manufacturers decided to desecrate normal appearances by introducing cargo pants. These contraptions look like sewn-on saddlebags. It's like having a donkey without having to rake up manure-soaked hay.
Indeed, the cargo pocket is ideally fitted to carry alcohol. Undergraduates strut around dispensing the good news like Johnny Appleseed. Except the fruit of our Johnny's labors is a vomit-covered bathroom floor in the basement of Few Quad.
Let's just say that LDOC is not really about growing up but is more like a celebration of adolescence. Sadly, much of life in an American's twenties is a celebration of prolonged irresponsibility rather than an attempt to grow up.
Heather MacDonald of the City Journal discusses how single young males watch "SportsCenter" and compare Kevin Garnett to Baron Davis. They play video games for hours and then get drunk. They eschew serious relationships; instead, life for the single young male is about trivial entertainment.
Tucker Max embodies this attitude. He has tons of sex with loose women. He gets unbelievably drunk. Then he writes down his stories on his cell phone in order to sell a book to schmucks who could only dream of partying so hard. He is hilarious but empty: he has no deeper meaning than the confines of his own mundane sensualist mentality.
David Brooks, writing last year in The New York Times, calls the time between adolescence and adulthood the "odyssey." Basically, once young people exit their highly structured childhoods and enter an ambiguous period of uncertain responsibility, the normal bonds of society begin to drift apart.
As Brooks points out, in this "spirit of fluidity... dating gives way to Facebook and hooking up. Marriage gives way to cohabitation. Church attendance gives way to spiritual longing. Newspaper reading gives way to blogging. (In 1970, 49 percent of adults in their 20s read a daily paper; now it's at 21 percent)."
Brooks says that young people want to get married and have children. But the world is getting "scrambled." Careers are getting quite complicated. Empty and silly diversions are increasing. As a result, people are having trouble connecting on deeper levels.
So what to do? How is the young person growing out of his drunken, adolescent stupor supposed to make his or her way in the world? How are you supposed to find a deeper meaning in life when our tumultuous society is defined more by the television show "Friends" than by the elegant and refined provincial stories of Jane Austen?
The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte offers a clue.
His philosophy goes something like this. We are all "selves." We are all "subjects" who look out on the world and see other objects. Yet in order to actually know our selves we must "posit" ourselves as objects of thought. In other words, to achieve self-knowledge we must see ourselves as a part of an external and objective order.
OK, whatever, right? But basically he's saying, according to one interpretation, that only through a long process of examination of our selves in a society of other people can we achieve self-knowledge. Deeper meaning in life can only be achieved through an understanding of the place of our selves in the world around us.
So we should not follow our whims. Desire-driven hedonism is no route to self-knowledge. Following the passing fads of ideology will not lead to self-knowledge. We cannot just do whatever we want if we want to find a deep meaning in our existence.
Something else is needed. We must attempt to figure out the world. We need to find what our existence means by thinking deeply about our relations to the world around us. It is a difficult task; it requires prolonged reflection on art, history and philosophy.
I leave you with the words of Arthur Hugh Clough in his poem "Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth." This is the last stanza: "And not by eastern windows only, when daylight comes, comes in the light, in front the sun climbs low, how slowly, but westward, look! the land is bright."
Wheeler Frost is a Trinity sophomore. This is his final column.
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