Book Talk: The Postmodern Predicament

Please join the Lillian Goldman Law Library for a talk with Professor Bruce Ackerman ’67 about his new book, The Postmodern Predicament.

This event will take place on Wednesday, September 11th at 12:10 PM in SLB128.
**Online Registration is Required by September 9th**
Boxed lunch will be available for those who register at: https://bit.ly/3XpMHgs  

Bruce Ackerman, The Postmodern Predicament (Yale University Press, 2024):

For the first time in history, all of us are living two lives at once – engaging in distant relationships on the internet while dealing with one another in face-to-face fashion in the real world. Our double-lives are the source of a distinctively postmodern predicament.

Its source is a fundamental feature of the human condition:  We all need at least five or six hours of sleep, leaving us eighteen or nineteen hours a day to confront the competing demands of friends and families, schoolmates and workmates and co-religionists and many other associates. Yet it is utterly impossible to fulfill all their demands. Even before the rise of the internet, it was tough to satisfy the expectations of our most important partners-in-life – and failure could readily lead to shattered lives. Our most intimate companions may abandon us in despair if we don’t spend enough time attending to their concerns; and our bosses may fire us if we don’t keep up with our workplace demands. Yet, during the internet age, we are spending four or five hours in virtual reality— leaving only fourteen or fifteen hours left for constructive engagement with real-world partners – presenting a clear and present danger of enormous increases in bitter marital break-ups and failed careers.

To be sure, the internet can vastly enrich our lives as well as destroy them. The challenge is to define the real-world contexts in which our double-lives threaten us with profound disappointment — and come up with realistic reforms that can decisively reduce the tragic dynamics unleashed by the high-tech revolution of the twenty-first century.