Darkness and despair

Paul Greenberg’s primal “soul screams” come from somewhere deep in the outer darkness in his Kafkaesque “Confession” on Sept. 24. Who knows how much medical weed and alcohol it takes to induce a catatonic state of numbness to deal with this angst and despair?

Adding to Greenberg’s darkness in that Sunday’s Perspective section, Russ Roberts writes “The world is turning upside down.” No happy sunbeams there. One could argue that Roberts’ article is even more despairing because he highlights the frightening magnitude of societal disintegration while offering woefully inadequate solutions.

Oxford Dictionaries captured a powerful culture-destroying dynamic with its 2016 Word of the Year: Posttruth. One has to wonder if the core of our culture can hold together in a post-truth world.

Once a culture is gutted of truth, what remains is an exposed quivering mass of irrationality and throbbing emotionalism. Rational civil dialogue seems impossible. Tribalism becomes passionately entrenched. In politics, the red tribe screams, “Crooked Hillary” and “lock her up.” The blue tribe dehumanizes the reds as “deplorables.”

To save ourselves, Roberts suggests learning from history. What? Whose history? The history those white guys wrote? In a post-modern, post-truth world, all history is suspect. Plus, appealing to history is sadly comical and ironic. History reveals that we don’t learn from history—like we didn’t learn from Vietnam’s experience the lesson of becoming bogged down in senseless wars.

Is sinking deeper into this abyss inevitable? Many may join Paul Greenberg in the outer darkness of despair. JOHN LITTLEJOHN

Siloam Springs