A modern itinerary : keynotes in the search for meaning

Chris Fleming, John O’Carroll

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    This is an essay about meaning—especially what its felt absence itself means in the contemporary world. Key sociologists of the modern era have long asserted that many people, even entire groups of people, struggle to make sense of the world and the place they occupy in it. In this essay we trace how the rise of the modern world brought with it ways of describing that world that—paradoxically—have made it harder for individuals to actually answer the questions they ask and learn not to ask as modern subjects. That is, within a widely thriving secular society, many people relegate inquiry into ‘what it all means’ to fields like evolutionary psychology and ‘memetics’ (the attempt to apply neo-Darwinian models to study cultural ‘evolution’), believing that the weight of evidence has revealed that there is no inherent meaning to human existence. But, as this essay seeks to show, such a view has blindspots, and is far from being a simple, self-evident explanation.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)19-24
    Number of pages6
    JournalCompass
    Volume42
    Issue number2
    Publication statusPublished - 2008

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