Vaguely Related Paragraphs

Our T.A. brought up an interesting point in class today: American culture is focused on youth. He told us that nowhere else in the world is there such an obsession on young people. In fact, most of the world reveres older people instead, respecting their wisdom. Think about the rash of teeny-bopper stars (Lolitas like Spears and Aguilera to mere boys like Hanson) less than a decade ago. That in itself isn't so unusual, as their has been plenty of young musical acts in past decades. But moving past that, a lot of advertising is now aimed at teenagers and children because companies know that its these young people, not their working parents, who control the money. Perhaps people here look towards youth as a celebration of potential and care-free worry? Idealized youth represents freedom from the crap this nation is wading through.

I picked up a book to kill before class today, Salman Rushdie's Fury. Early in the first chapter the author makes a note about the difference between the Christian and Muslim moral universes. He writes that Christians have sin and redemption, while Muslims have shame and honor as their moral poles. This simple insight reveals a lot about a world I know a little about, and explains why Western philosophy is so far removed from the streets and cities of the Arab world. The two moral compasses have almost no overlap, especially since each has developed independently for hundreds of years. A situation: your daughter is raped. In Western philosophy, the one at fault is the rapist, he is evil, he is wrong, he is a sinner, he is punished. In many Islamic countries, the daughter is the one at fault. She has brought shame on her family and is punished, usually with death or mutilation. The rapist often receives punishment, but nowhere near as severe as the punishment the daughter receives, and it is not unheard of for the rapist to go free.

I just finished The Brothers Karamazov, a Russian novel about four brothers and the murder of their father, but primarily serves as a vehicle for Dosotoevsky's philosophies concerning good and evil in man through the influence of Christian religion. One of the brothers is an intellectual who renounces and mocks those who fall in line behind the church, and actually Dostoevsky provides through him some very compelling arguments against the existence of God. The next book I started reading is Nietzscshe's Thus Spoke Zarthustra, his most famous work. On page 3 of the novel the protagonist speaks one of the most well-known sentences associated with Nietzsche: "God is dead". Karamazov was published in 1880, and Zarathustra in 1883-1885.
It is doubtful that these two authors had any connection with each other, but it's even more important to realize that while the current generation always thinks it is on the cutting edge, every generation previous has thought the same. Just these two works provide enough philosophical weight to give that 140-year-old generation a lotta clout.

I don't really know what that last sentence means, but the takeaway here is that it may be a bit premature to put faith in the upcoming generation (we're Generation Y, apparently includes those born 1978 to 1998. Some call us Millennials). Instead we should focus on the problems we're facing right now, not hoping that a group of young up-and-coming people will bring solutions to light. Are these paragraphs related? Barely.