The Epidemic of the Century

What I am about to tell you is very frightening, very frightening indeed. It is so frightening that if you succumb to the very thing I might be warning you against, then it is frightening to think that you think this might not be as frightening as it is. It is a disease of pandemic proportions that even the most sophisticated infections are not as dangerous, not as subtle, not as endemic as the one I am about to expose from you.

The disease is called apathy.

Apathy has infected more people than any other disease and longer than any other large scale epidemic. The disregard for truth has become more evident in our times, more than any other time, in our entire existence. The fact that many, many people just don’t care about some of the more important issues like value, justice, truth, love, and beauty is just a glaring example of the times we live in. Whether we live or die, whether there is truth or dare, whether there are moral absolutes, whether macro evolution is true, and even whether God himself exists doesn’t seem to phase the common person out there.

Even though this attitude of heart has existed in one way or another throughout the centuries, it has become more apparent in this day in age. Whenever we stopped asking questions about the above values and started denying the very essence of the things we treasure there started a slow erosion towards apathy. Even ten years ago while modernism gasped for air before it gave away to postmodernism, people still cared about whether reality is real. I personally think that all postmodernism really is is modernism’s hangover. We debated, reasoned, deconstructed, empiricized, essences out of existence. Hence, all we were left with is the leftover carcass of meaninglessness, indifference, and hatred towards all things precise and true in favor for ambiguity, non-judgementalism, and all things perspectival.

“So what if its true?” is said by the common person. This is so telling of the culture we live in that even if we were to find all truth, there will never be enough of it to bring a person against his apathy towards it. “You can bring a horse to water but you can make him drink.”

Nevertheless, Its funny to see people who don’t care - care about the fact that they don’t care. It’s like saying “I don’t have a position on this particular issue.” Then the question could be asked whether that IS a particular position about the issue. However, even if we demonstrate to the culture at large that we have weighed their argument in the logical scale and have found it wanting, the end result is no different than the musings of child in his terrible two’s: “so!”

I was recently reading Peter Kreeft’s book on apologetics where he mentions that there are twenty-four or so arguments for the existence of God. However, if people do not care whether there are twenty four or twenty four thousand then what is to become of our commandment to present proofs for the faith we have been endowed with. It is troubling and disheartening to even think about whether it is even worth throwing the pearls of wisdom to the swine of indifference.

Then we are left with a penetrating question, “How then shall we live?” I’ll explore this issue more in the next post or so. That is, if I care to even do it.

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