Asking for Meaning and Answering with Justice Anonymous College

Asking questions about meaning and of belief is a fundamental part of being human. Arguing as to any specific worldview is a fundamentally futile process because of the ways in which the search for this meaning is almost as important as the ultimate meaning itself. A set of recent works help illuminate a world view in which the process of inquiry is almost as important, if not more important than, the results of this inquiry itself; these works also show that one of the most important projects for ethical humanity in the early twenty-first century involves fighting and struggle for some form of justice, whether it is saving the world from ecological or sociological unfairness or whether it is fighting to honor one’s sense of self. This essay considers Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, Charles Blow’s Fire Shut Up in my Bones, and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains as both powerful works from which to derive a larger sense of self and of identity, as well as instances of a genre that reveals important insight into how meaning and ethics are constructed and communicated.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction deals with the man-made...