This Modern Life

My current teaching assignment at Florida State is a junior-level course called Christian Tradition (for some reason, my department doesn't add an "s", as if there was only one). The class is a general survey course about the history of Christianity. I tend to do rather traditional lectures on Monday and Wednesday, but on Friday I like to try and connect things to more contemporary issues and events. This Friday's lecture is entitled "This Modern Life", and a good chunk of it revolves around the song "Some Nights" by Fun. Here's the music video. If you click the "Show More" button, you can read the lyrics.

Briefly, this is how I read the song. It's about the artist's inability to create meaning through his music. He once believed that his songs would affect some change in those who listened, that he could get people to really hear instead of simply tapping their feet or bobbing their heads. But things didn't turn out that way. Now he doesn't know what he stands for or who he is: artist, commercialized hack, something in between? In the end, the song echoes the film Contact. When Eleanor meets the alien, and it speaks to her in the guise of her father, it says, "See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other." Especially when you add the nighttime battlefield from the music video, the song sounds like a modern rendition of Matthew Arnold's 1867 poem "Dover Beach," where all we can do amid the long, melancholy withdrawing roar of the sea of faith and between those ignorant armies that clash by night is "be true to one another." In "Some Nights", the solution of his life's meaninglessness is found in his nephew's eyes. At the end, he tells us listeners that, perhaps, it's best we didn't really hear him after all. "Tap your feet," he says with the strong down beats in the song; "Sing along," he says with the simple chords and simple melody. Just live your life and love the ones you're with. Why? Isn't life more than that? Did he give up hope? At the beginning he says that he wishes his lips could build a castle: are we to leave behind the dreams of our youth and just start biding our time, waiting hand in hand with our beloveds until death do us part?

I use "Some Nights" in my class to articulate a certain feeling most of us in the West have grown up with. Thinkers for hundreds of years have condemned modernity by either looking back to a mythic golden age or forward to a utopian, eschatological future, whether it's in this life or the next. Somewhere in history, they say, we went wrong. Whether it began in the Garden of Eden or with the advent of industrial capitalism, we aren't living the way we are supposed to. Thus, we have many prescriptions coming down through the years about how to make our lives ones worth living: be right with God, return to the land, find true happiness within yourself, lose weight, drop your desires, read certain texts, eat certain foods, marry certain people, vote.

I don't really offer my students any solutions of my own. After all, as someone who teaches the history of religions, that's not my place. We do science in my classroom, and as we all know, science just isn't supposed to ask certain questions. I do, however, give them some answers that other people have provided. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the parable of the "Eternal Return." If a demon came one day and told you that you were doomed to relive your life forever, exactly as you have—the same successes, the same failures, the same joy, and the same pain—what would you say? Would you cry out with resentment and gnash your teeth, or would you say to the demon, "You are a god, and never have heard anything so divine!"? Nietzsche is asking if you have the courage to accept the necessity of the present. Stare into the abyss until it stares back at you. Accept your life because it has brought you to this moment, and this moment is all you have.

I also read them Wendell Berry's "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front." Berry tells us to make our minds unpredictable. After all, what can't be predicted can't be controlled. He tells us to plant sequoias. Work for nothing. Practice resurrection.

So is there something rotten in the West? Are we fallen creatures? If so, what can we do about it? Personally, I am a bit skeptical anymore of spiritual renewal, eternal salvation, or personal enlightenment. To borrow a phrase from Marx, you can't think away real chains, and I've come to believe that life needs to be more than simply finding inner peace and contentment or loving your family while ignoring the rest of the planet. Some parts of the very structure of this world we've built need some major adjustments, others might need a good smashing. I don't have any real answers, but it seems the conversation is finally headed in the right direction. I used to be able to sympathize with John Calvin, who thought that there is nothing we can do about our state: all of our works are simply moot. But I've decided I don't want to be a cynic anymore: no more hiding beneath the magnitude of the problems we face, no more wallowing in the small, pragmatic impact any single person can have.

Perhaps it's time to take up Wendell Berry's charge and plant some things which will only come to fruition long after my days on this earth are through.