“The Party was their world.” Yes. The World – and as Schopenhauer pointed out and Kierkegaard reiterated and re-explained, the World is much more likely to be a merely *aesthetic* organizing meme, rather than an ethical one, among a certain kind of very common person. A person suffering from the institutionalized and nurtured emotional arrested development of his town and era, but who has been the prodigal recipient of the great summits of thought, which such a person can nevertheless only appreciate on the level of a collection of slogans. These slogans vaguely organize the loose network of interests which provide the coherence and experience-translating machine of his friend groups, myriad friend groups their culture, and their culture their politics. Nevertheless, in all this multitude, nothing but aesthetic attachment, ephemeral feeling, a large shining bouyant stupidity.

I agree that the influence of the authors of the Enlightenment and the subsequent ascendance of “the Aufklarung” as a cultural-phase polestar were very influential and provide the architecture of which the phenomenon I badly describe is a misunderstanding, but having observed a similar development in my friends on a small scale – for that’s what we’ve witnessed in my generation over the previous 8 years, a choice – I think the answer may be just this: it is merely aesthetic appreciation. The week after 9/11, I was sitting in a bar in NYC’s lower east side, a 20something, and was talking with a friend about how we were going to go into Afghanistan and destroy the Taliban, and how glorious the vengeance would be, since it was such a shiningly moral thing to do. “That’s YOUR morality” said a voice behind me, some hipster; “no that IS morality,” I said; “NO man that’s YOUR MORALITY” he yelled back. And so it went on. I felt like breaking his face, and delivering to him the ethical epiphany that all his experience and mind and acquaintances had totally rebelled against all their lives – while living off the fruits of those moral people who had preceded them and cared for them and let them debauch themselves. So I like Kierkegaard’s “aesthetic, not ethical.” I know for a fact these supreme well-credentialed people I know do not actually understand the authors of the Enlightenment; I’m pretty sure most of them haven’t even read more than 100 pages on the subject.