Critical Thinking

2004-07-21 - 8:59 a.m.

Oh, right, let's just invade Iran now, shall we? Because it makes complete and utter sense to topple a government each year. Isn't that what global society is all about? Yeesh.

Anyway, I just finished reading Dark Age Ahead which was a lighter book (in the sense of being lightweight as opposed to being funny) than I was expecting, but was still a good read. The book, if I haven't described it before, details Jane Jacobs' "5 pillars of society" and how she feels that western society is on the verge of collapse and being forgotten, like the Romans, various Chinese dynasties, and countless other cultures that we only have remnants of today*.

I recently asked a friend whether he thought that we were at a critical or crucial or somehow "special" time, and he said he doesn't. I kept rephrasing the question, because I can't shake the feeling that there is some sort of crucible that we're going through in this culture, and maybe in the world. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a unique time, because cultures have faced struggles for time immemorial (arg, spelling!), but I think that the last hundred years or so have been a part of an age. I think that historians will be able to look back at this time and will be able to set it apart from other times, the way we do for the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the High and Low Egyptian Kingdoms, and so on.

Of course, it's natural for people to think of their times as special: we see all of the minutiae, the coincidences and the patterns that may or may not be significant. Humans are adept at creating stories and connections out of whole cloth, and there's a lot more whole cloth in your average day than there is in the entire collection of written world history. The further back you go in history, the more tempting it is to asign entire blocks of hundreds of years as having "nothing much of interest", which is quite likely complete fabrication: people were born, people were killed or died of disease, towns flourished or withered, dynasties were founded or lost...we just don't have the records of those times any more.

Whether or not these times are special or not isn't really important to me, though. I believe that even small choices can have large effects down the road, regardless of whether you're at a "critical" time or not, and that whether these days are special or not can't change the fact that all of us are responsible for the way we live our lives, and that it's important that we make good choices and try to learn how to make better ones. No matter what it ends up being, there will be a future, and we have no one to blame for it but ourselves.

Cheers,

The Magus

*This didn't really fit in that paragraph, but by "forgotten" I obviously don't mean to say that we've forgotten the Romans, but when the Roman empire collapsed much of Europe was plunged into our most famous dark age where if you were to ask the average person of that time, they would have much less knowledge of the Romans than we have today, even though they were much closer, time-wise.

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