re: Charlie Kirk Assassinated at Utah Valley University

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Your the second person who has brought up MacIntyre in as many weeks. I need to read him. That sounds like a really astute observation on his part.

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He sadly passed recently, but he is a champion of virtue ethics and has brought it back into mainstream ethical discourse. After Virtue is in many ways a criticism of moral projects post-Enlightenment which seek to describe morality without any grounding in a human purpose, a telos. He brings up Rawls at one point, but he brings up many great thinkers throughout history and offers his commentary. He ultimately walks away rejecting Kantian and post-Kantian strands of moral discourse and says that if you want a coherent framework that is properly grounded you are left with two viable options: Aristotelianism or Nietzsche. Even if you don't walk away embracing Aristotelian metaphysics or ethics or if you simply find his conclusions wrong, I think he gives people a lot to chew on about just how much is lost when we abandon the idea of a shared human purpose.

As far as what we are to do? That's the golden question. Historically you may have a church or a community center that offered community and one could implicitly derive a sense of purpose without philosophical inspection from family duties or religious obligations. As these historical institutions have lost relevance, it's an open question on what we can replace them with that yield the same benefits. Some would argue replacing them is the mistake, and we should retreat back to them. I won't wade into those waters here, I'll just say I think it is true that we haven't replaced them adequately.

You mention small groups, and maybe that's where it starts. Slowly introduce people to a better way of living life and a more healthy framework for what their life ought to look like and why it ought to look that way. Then, maybe if these people yield good fruits in their lives others can be convinced that there's something to it.

As far as climate change and the general doomed attitudes and feeling "futureless", I'd just do my best in these small groups to say that fatalism is a poison that will guarantee that you are deprived your ability to live a fulfilling life. Even if some challenges are unavoidable, nihilism ensures you don’t even attempt to live well within them. Small communities that model resilience and virtue might not fix the whole cultural fracture, but they can provide a compelling counterexample to despair.

I don't really have a better answer than that at the moment. Hopefully by passing what I think is a healthy framework on to my children, I can spare them this nihilism, but time will tell.