Am back. After almost a week of absence. I had been doing an article for both the Saudi Gazette in Saudi Arabia and the Philippine Daily Inquirer in Manila. I work as an editor at the Gazette and write on the side for the Gazette's Expat Life weekly supplement and the Inquirer's Global Pinoy weekly page
Anyway, for this blog, I got the appetite to write about Lady Gaga and her ilk after my wife and I fetched our 14-year-old daughter from school this afternoon. On our way home, our child suddenly asked me if I knew the meaning of illuminati. "Do you mean illuminate?" I asked. "No, it's illuminati," she said. "Well, I don't know. It's the first time I heard the word," I said, then quipped. "Why did you ask?"
She said it's because her classmates told her that Lady Gaga, Rhiana and other singers whose names I failed to track down are illuminati. "And what does it mean?" I asked. It means, she said, that they don't believe in God. "They might have meant atheist," I said. But she insisted, "No, it's illuminati."
At home, I looked up the word illuminati in the dictionary and found it. It means "the enlightened, a name given to various religious sects, and especially to a society of German free-thinkers at the end of the 18th century." The other meaning is "people who claim to have special enlightenment."
I could think of Lady Gaga and Rhiana as free-thinkers if we take the word with reference to people who don't believe in God or give a room for doubts about His existence. If they have made any claim of being spiritually enlightened, I have no quarrel about it, either. Even nuts can make such a claim.
As I sat down to write this blog, I started to think how the meaning of words have kept on changing. In my younger days, I always associate the word enlightened with the intellectuals. Nowadays, the word seems to have been associated also with people who do not believe in God as if those who believe in religion have become morons.
I surmise that this all started from the time Copernicus disproved the Church's belief that the sun revolves around the earth. That was followed by the eras of Galileo and other great thinkers that pushed the Church against the wall and ushered the age of enlightenment, known also as the age of reason because it was an era in which reason was advocated as the primary source of legitimacy and authority.
Let us fast-track forward the tape of time and we come to the age of Lady Gaga and her ilk. Their age, which is also ours, is a byproduct of the inventions of science that have made this world so complicated. Ours is an era of compartamentalized, hurried and harried life. If I may borrow an analogy, we have left the pan of simple living for the hell of an exhausting life.
Entertainment, which I used to think as a preoccupation of people who had nothing to do in life, has become a mainstream industry that gives people like Lady Gaga an income way beyond what most of our intellectuals get. Like religion, reason is losing ground to a new fad. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has complained that the new generation of Americans are reading less and partying more. We know the drift is not confined to the US.
I often hear the songs of Lady Gaga from the stereo of my car when I go to the office, drive home or take my family elsewhere after work. Although I could not make head and tails of her songs "Ra-ra-a-a-a ... Roma-roma-ma-ma ... Ola-la-Ola-la-la" or "Paparazzi, do you love me?" the young generation across the world loves her music.
There must be more to life than reason but must our life's journey lead us farther into the abyss of a sliding mundane drift?
Anyway, for this blog, I got the appetite to write about Lady Gaga and her ilk after my wife and I fetched our 14-year-old daughter from school this afternoon. On our way home, our child suddenly asked me if I knew the meaning of illuminati. "Do you mean illuminate?" I asked. "No, it's illuminati," she said. "Well, I don't know. It's the first time I heard the word," I said, then quipped. "Why did you ask?"
She said it's because her classmates told her that Lady Gaga, Rhiana and other singers whose names I failed to track down are illuminati. "And what does it mean?" I asked. It means, she said, that they don't believe in God. "They might have meant atheist," I said. But she insisted, "No, it's illuminati."
At home, I looked up the word illuminati in the dictionary and found it. It means "the enlightened, a name given to various religious sects, and especially to a society of German free-thinkers at the end of the 18th century." The other meaning is "people who claim to have special enlightenment."
I could think of Lady Gaga and Rhiana as free-thinkers if we take the word with reference to people who don't believe in God or give a room for doubts about His existence. If they have made any claim of being spiritually enlightened, I have no quarrel about it, either. Even nuts can make such a claim.
As I sat down to write this blog, I started to think how the meaning of words have kept on changing. In my younger days, I always associate the word enlightened with the intellectuals. Nowadays, the word seems to have been associated also with people who do not believe in God as if those who believe in religion have become morons.
I surmise that this all started from the time Copernicus disproved the Church's belief that the sun revolves around the earth. That was followed by the eras of Galileo and other great thinkers that pushed the Church against the wall and ushered the age of enlightenment, known also as the age of reason because it was an era in which reason was advocated as the primary source of legitimacy and authority.
Let us fast-track forward the tape of time and we come to the age of Lady Gaga and her ilk. Their age, which is also ours, is a byproduct of the inventions of science that have made this world so complicated. Ours is an era of compartamentalized, hurried and harried life. If I may borrow an analogy, we have left the pan of simple living for the hell of an exhausting life.
Entertainment, which I used to think as a preoccupation of people who had nothing to do in life, has become a mainstream industry that gives people like Lady Gaga an income way beyond what most of our intellectuals get. Like religion, reason is losing ground to a new fad. Bob Herbert, a New York Times columnist, has complained that the new generation of Americans are reading less and partying more. We know the drift is not confined to the US.
I often hear the songs of Lady Gaga from the stereo of my car when I go to the office, drive home or take my family elsewhere after work. Although I could not make head and tails of her songs "Ra-ra-a-a-a ... Roma-roma-ma-ma ... Ola-la-Ola-la-la" or "Paparazzi, do you love me?" the young generation across the world loves her music.
There must be more to life than reason but must our life's journey lead us farther into the abyss of a sliding mundane drift?
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