A few weeks ago I filmed some interviews for a couple of my friends, Jon and Olga, for a lecture on Danish consciousness and culture that they were planning. Jon and Olga are undertaking an ongoing exploration of the postmodern cultural predicament and values—pluralism, individualism, and anti-modernism—finding all kinds of means to get more conscious of who we are. This time they wanted to document that the postmodern “flatland” thinking (overly egalitarian) and the psychological orientation towards life, isn’t just their own random accusation, but has become a part of mainstream culture.

So, we grabbed a camera and walked the streets of Copenhagen for the interviews, since you can´t get more postmodern than Danish! We were curious to hear the answers of perhaps the biggest questions possible, such as:

• What is the meaning of life?
• When you lie on your deathbed what would you like to be remembered for?
• What is a good person?

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In there were ever such a thing as the Billboard Top 10 Spiritual Terms, one word that I would be surprised to see make the charts is morality.  Apart from young Christians wearing pro-abstinence purity rings, public affirmations of morality (i.e., not just saying “war is bad” but saying “________ is great!”) do not seem particularly hip these days. And largely for good reason. But I want morality to be hip again.

As Jeremy and Tineke’s blogs wonderfully described, traditional understandings of what is ethical have become seriously out of date. Most contemporary expectations of what family, nation and life should look like come from worldviews and life circumstances those of us in the developed, educated world no longer inhabit; for example, most progressively educated people no longer believe in a mythic God up in the sky and most people in developed nations have contraception, which calls for a new understanding of the moral implications of having sex. Read the rest of this entry »

     “Wow, I love this place!” I thought as an eighteen-year-old newcomer to New York City, having spent the majority of my youth in the quiet nooks and crannies of the Pacific Northwest of the USA, “It’s almost like people come here… and then just never grow up!!”
      It really was an epiphany of some sort. To find grown-ups who had long ago finished school and who were now living colorful, kooky, childish urban lives was something new altogether to me. I had often equated life after college with the end of fun and the beginning of something long, gray, and mechanical, and was relieved to find that this wasn’t always the case. The idea of seriousness seemed silly to me back then, and it was a relief to meet adult after adult in New York City who didn’t seem to take anything very seriously at all: a job could be something that you just did between parties and, come on, family? Relationships? Long-term goals? Bo-ring. Old news. The prospect of a life of complete freedom from such constraints was thrilling.
            During college, I had deep yearnings to do something of meaning and to explore and experience all that I could, but it seemed to me the easiest way to start doing that was to simply let go, be crazy and to have fun while getting to know people who were out really living in the world in ways that I used to only read about in novels. New York seemed like a melting pot full of personality types colored with that vibration and it literally felt like entering an oasis — and it was for a little while — but at a very deep level it often left me feeling uneasy, confused and restless. Read the rest of this entry »