I don't agree with everything Eric Jager says in his LA Times op-ed piece, but I will second his strike at "presentism" or our predisposition to view contemporary times as the summit of knowledge and enlightenment looming above the ignorance and intolerance of past ages. I find this particularly irritating when public figures in past ages are judged by contemporary standards, but that's not really where Jager is going.
Jager believes that we have no right to refer to the emerging 21st century as the "Information Age" as he sees major elements in our behavior as a species that haven't changed since Medieval times: "...legalized torture, rampant religious fanaticism, widespread poverty and illiteracy, the threat of mysterious plagues, fascination with magic and the occult and suspicion of science, what else would you call it?" but the New Middle Ages. I have a feeling he picks the Middle Ages as he is a professor of Medieval Literature. But why stop there, you could go back as far as you want in human history and find all of these things. It's evident to me that will all the advances we've made, there are still many things about us that have not changed since the Pleistocene, and we should never forget it.
But I do concur with him that we should keep a rein on our self-esteem as "modern" people. As an exercise, imagine yourself in Europe or North America in AD 1800, just knowing that you are at the summit of modern science just as we do today, then consider the knowledge and technology gap between then and AD 2000. Now turn around and imagine what ignorant, benighted clucks the people of AD 2200 will consider us to be.
And they will!
1 comment:
The LA Times article you referenced would have seemed at first glance a promising rumination on the subject of presentism but, alas, it turns out to be simply an over-compensation for such sentiment. The author is so wide of the mark he sets; not only have the ills he lists abated, albeit with painful stubbornness, in our times his comparison of our age to the stall in human enlightenment that was the Middle Ages doesn't rise even to the level of speciousness.
Ours is a time of dizzying advancement in knowledge that shows no signs of slowing down. Our curse is not reactionary fundamentalism, even though that exists in militant Islam (and I'm sure in the author's mind in conservative Christianity-another conflation), but widespread spiritual disillusionment.
Nice post.
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