HOLLA! 9/20/09

Last week I did my pre-class-post on Habermas and what I took away from his reading. After going over Habermas in class on Tuesday something really stuck out that I could truly understand. In class we discussed Habermas’ quotation of “The twentieth century has shattered this optimism” (103). I can truly say this quotation is one that makes complete sense. It is almost like in the Bible how Eve eating the fruit on the tree shattered the optimism of a perfect life and unity. Everyone is so obsessed with ‘progress’ making life better; the future will bring more positive enlightenment to the present etc. Habermas is explaining that this progress almost doesn’t exist. We said in class that tension between progresses make life better for us and progress takes up time, worst for humanity, for example, cell phones. I think in our society today we are so set on improving life that it is almost like our goals are unrealistic. I also feel once we meet certain goals they take away from the original intension, for example, how cell phones have almost complicated life with all of their new technologies and applications. Our society is so obsessed with the next new amazing gadget, but they are just getting more complicating and almost less helpful. Also in our society there is no longer metanarratives. This was an interesting point because through out my life I have seen this diminish. When we were in kindergarten we all knew the national anthem and pledge of allegiance, but now you can ask a 6 year old if they know it and the chances are they do not. Basically the way I see it is that the more we ‘progress’ the more we lose these metanarratives completely. We have all these forms of technology to do our basic daily needs; we are losing the classical and traditional aspects of life.