Post-Modern Teenagers
From Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950:
Gloomy prognoses also sell short the way in which thoughtful human beings are drawn to fundamental questions of existence. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question that none of us can avoid completely, even in times when such questions are least fashionable. "What does it mean to live a good life?" is another. It is difficult to think about these things outside spiritual frameworks. The successive blows to traditional religion thought to have been struck by Darwin, Freud, and Einstein made some intellectuals give up the option of thinking about such questions within such frameworks, but there are good reasons for thinking that this too will prove to be ephemeral. It may well be that the period from the Enlightenment through 20C will eventually be seen as a kind of adolescence of the species--a time when human beings were deprived of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. In the manner of adolescents, humans reacted injudiciously, thinking that they possessed wisdom that invalidated all the things that had gone before--if Darwin was right, then Aquinas was no longer worth reading; if Freud was right, the "Nicomachean Ethics" must be wrong. But adolescence is temporary, and when it passes young adults discover that their parents had gotten smarter. That may be happening with the advent of the new century, as glib answers to solemn questions start to wear thin.
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