Afterworld

If you have some free time than may I suggest checking out the online drama series afterworld:

www.afterworld.tv



It is a fantastic story about the rebirth of humanity after a cataclysmic event that wipes out 99% of it. It is the first of a new genre that is exclusively online and combines video game like animae with graphic novel style narration. But what I personally like about it is the excellent depiction of "fragmented reality" that is the focus of most postmodernist and existentialist derelicts of our time that saturate the halls of academia. I do not disagree with their premise--that the world appears fractured, as in one of Picasso's pictures, after the end of the premodern hegemony of the Church (which includes both the supermacy of sharia in Islam and the varna-ashrama dharma in Hinduism), or the 'death of God' as Nietzsche would put it--where I depart from them is in their conclusion that modernity or rationality does not supply a solid footing to rest ones criteria on, whether epistemic, ontologic, political, ethical, or even esthetical. If one is looking for an absolute objectifying truth/reality, then it is true that neither reason nor modernity (in their individualist and naturalist nuance) are ever going to provide a substitute for the "good ol' days," where every community had a common vision of reality, things were simpler and more clear, and where people felt a genuine sense of selfworth rather than the contemporary (post modern) simulacrum of an ego that thrives upon the simulacra of conspicuous consumption as an end in itself for its own sake.



To me, the personality of Russell Schoemacher (shoemaker), the protagonist of this series, is appealing precisely because he is a modern man--a skeptic, a humanist, and an enthusiast--that is constantly trying to make rational sense out of the various belief systems that've emerged around him, after "the Fall," and his persistent determination to ground the truth upon empirical reality. The greatness of our hero comes from that fact that his demeanor, while it may feel apathetic to some, does not void ambition or compassion from his quest for truth. He is still determined to get back to his family and find happiness in that most natural of human institutions, and at the same time, he portrays an enourmous amount of empathy for those whom he encounters on the way.



I would say that we do not need extinction to produce men like him. In many ways, we are living in the "Fall" of man from Eden that came with the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein that progressively disloged us from the center of the universe, that even our sun was not the center and that other heavenly bodies had their satellites too, deciphered the mysteries of the heavens by binding them to strict determinist laws, showing a common link between all life and human life as a mere byproduct of natural and cold-hearted selection, and baffling us completely when we came to realize that the universe at its bedrock behaves in the most counter intuitive way. And 20th century is a testament to the horrors of that schizophrenic mentality that can neither integrate reality nor does it want to, for then the fancy that abounds a child's life would dissipate; and if the acts of human governance can be summarized over the last century (if not throughout the entire human history) they could be summed up as a perpetual attempt to treat adults as children.

Averroes

Sounds interesting, I'll check it out.