New Age Crusaders [Long]

One of the core motifs in White Noise is that many of the people within the book array their lives around consumerism and the consumption of goods and services. This focus on life begins to change for main character jack after his brush with death, and he begins to realize that the consumption and academia he’s based his life around is truly quite shallow and meaningless. I think the book’s emphasis on consumerism is a critique of how life in the 80’s, when this book was published, was moving away from more traditional religious values and towards more free, consumerist ideas. I think this shift in what gives one’s life meaning has been occurring and is occurring in the modern age, but instead of consumerism, humanity’s focus has shifted to politics. Part of being human is the human experience, and the human experience is inherently tribal in nature. Humans evolved to need to be a part of an in group, as this was critical to survival for much of human history, and part of being within an in group is having an out group you’re arrayed against. Throughout human history these needs were filled through living within towns, communities, and nations, and waging warfare against other, outside groups. One of the last bastions of these instincts to be a part of something bigger than oneself was religion, and as society has become increasingly secular, so too has participation in and dedication to religion decreased. In its place humans, by their very nature, required a new in group to ally themselves with and a new out group to work against. The answer, for many, has been politics, and I think that is why our society in the modern day has become so incredibly polarized. Political thought has ceased being just that, thought, and has instead morphed into a kind of religion in its own right, with its own forms of heresy, devotion, and even worship of central political figures. Political ideas have morphed from someone’s beliefs into a dogma, that isn’t to be questioned and enforced on those who attempt to subvert or change its tenets. Political debate has morphed from the discourse it once was into a battleground quite similar to the centuries long conflict between Christians and Muslims over control of Europe. Because of this, changing someone’s political beliefs has become akin to attempting to convert them to your religion, to change their underlying way of thinking to more closely match yours. This attempted conversion is not met well by most, and one’s natural response is to block of the person trying to change you by dehumanizing them, so instead of having to fight and against and prove wrong their attempts, you can dismiss them out of hand. This is also part of why political debate has become so fraught with stereotypes, you’re not arguing against another person and trying to disprove their ideas, you’re ‘punching nazis’ or ‘owning the libs’. Instead of debating the person in front of you, your fighting a strawman of what you think they are, as they do the same to you. This is why I think American political discourse has withered, and I don’t think it’ll get any better until American’s find something else to base their lives around, an idea that is akin, to telling a devout religious person to change.