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."
"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."
DeleteI think that's the essence of the problem, and well-expressed.
Those are some interesting dreams you've had!
Roger Scruton said somewhere, in defence of Western societies against communist societies, that society shouldn't need a telos. I might be misquoting him but it was something like that. Even as I read it, many many years ago, I thought: "No, actually they should. Not one rigidly enforced by secret police, but a telos itself is a good thing." Every telos the liberal-left has is corrective. Anti-racism, sexual equality, open borders...but then what? What's it all for?
The great trouble with modern banality is that there is no excuse for it!
ReplyDeleteWe are (or have been, for many decades) the most leisured and prosperous people in the history of the world, with greater access to good things than could have been imagined.
And yet, what do people choose to do with this time and energy? The answer is what is so deeply dismaying at a cultural level!
And the answer has to do with NLR's point about a lack of purpose or meaning - such that life becomes, even in theory and ideally, just a matter of passing time as pleasantly as possible - and nothing more.
I think you've put your finger on it! Almost any ideal seems superior to mere hedonism-- and by hedonism I really mean epicureanism, since it nearly always comes with a pair of running shoes and careful nutrition these days.
DeleteI suspect it's Convenience + Banality V War + Drama. I've never (yet) experienced the latter. I think there is a danger amongst those who haven't to romanticise it. I say this as someone also crushed by the banality of everything.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm definitely grateful I've never had to experience war. If only we could wage heroic war on convenience and banality. I guess I could start in my own life.
DeleteI don't know if it's often commented on, but the great pillars of the Western Literary Canon are wartime products: Homer - Trojan War. Dante - Italian Wars. Shakespeare - Spanish war, Irish war. Joyce - Ulysses written during WW1. Massive overgeneralisation, no doubt, but there's something to it.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely something to it-- I had never connected Shakespeare with the background of war. I don't know about this Joyce fellah though, I think he's a bit of a fad!
DeleteIt’s Monday. I just can’t go there.
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