That's the question I keep asking myself, especially recently.
Don't people who consider themselves "sensitive", "soulful", "deep", "poetic", etc. etc. say this about every era?
Wasn't Wordsworth lambasting England in 1802 because "plain living and high thinking are no more"?
Didn't G.K. Chesterton deride his era of "frock-coats" and "stovepipe hats" (both of which now seem impossibly elegant to us), though he also complained about a "dwarfish contempt for the present?"
Didn't William Morris thunder against the utilitarianism and ugliness of his era?
And Thomas Carlyle?
And John Ruskin?
And W.B. Yeats?
And everybody?
And yet...I can't help it. I feel crushed under the banality of the twenty-first century all the time-- the supermarkets, the office blocks, the identikit suburbs, the moronic patter on the radio, the omnipresent political correctness, the all-pervasive irony and "self-awareness", the general lack of seriousness and solemnity and sublimity.
Well, maybe I don't feel like this all the time. But a lot of the time. I have a positive craving for "re-enchantment", whatever that means, and feel an urgent duty to be an agent of this however I can.
And yet, I can't help feeling that someone who wandered into the twenty-first century from the Middle Ages, or perhaps even any other time, might consider it a paradise beyond imagining, and want to kick me for my ingratitude.
I once had a dream that there was going to be some sort of show called "an evening with Benjamin Disraeli" and he was going to speak in a theater and give a monologue reminiscing about things that happened back in the Victorian era. In the dream he was somehow still alive. I once read an encyclopedia article about him years ago, but why him in the dream, I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteI had another dream earlier that Eugene Debs was going to be giving a speech and in the dream I was surprised he was still alive, he looked pretty decrepit when I got to the venue he was speaking at.
Anyway, no one alive now is 200 or 150 years old (which would certainly give a perspective on things), but I would say that it is nonetheless possible for people in the past to have accurately critiqued their time while at the same time people in the present can critique it accurately from a similar perspective.
If anything, multiple people make the same general criticism in a variety of ways would suggest that there is at least some degree of accuracy.
I think one of the biggest issues with our civilization is that it isn't about anything. The Middle Ages was far from paradise, but at least they had a genuine basis for their civilization, that human society was a reflection of a cosmic order. But what is our current society about? Is it entertainment or economics? Neither of those is a motivation for a civilization?
What about "advancement"? That seems to be one of the most common ones, but advancing to what? C.S. Lewis said in "Dogma and the Universe":
"Indeed, the very possibility of progress demands that there should be an unchanging element. New bottles for new wine, by all means: but not new palates, throats, and stomachs, or it would not be for us 'wine' at all."