There is no doubt civilization has evolved markedly over the past century, in many ways besides the obvious technology. We have come a long, long way. There's a black man in the White House, a reality unthinkable as little as forty years ago: what's even more amazing, in the light of history, is that people are disappointed with him and it has nothing to do with his skin colour.
Gay people are increasingly free to be who they are and love who they will; "bastardy" is a concept out of time that would need to be explained to many people, and then further explained why it was once considered such a stain on one's life. Information, which always longed to be free, is freer than it has been at any time in human history. Superstition is slowly being supplanted by science, in a process that started centuries ago.
And yet, you can turn every one of those undeniable accomplishments on its head. That black man in the White House presides over a country with Ferguson, Missouri in it; a country with the city of New York in it. New York, you'll recall, is the place where more young black men were detained and frisked in 2011 than there are young black men in New York City. Racism is very much alive and thriving in the U.S; it hasn't even lessened much, in places, just been driven underground, where it bubbles up like a sulphurous spring every now and again.
There is still a long, long road for gays to travel before they are considered equal, both in the United States and certainly in many benighted areas of the world. The "family' is a quaint old thing hardly applicable to certain communities: children grow up without the presence and sometimes the knowledge of their fathers, to their profound detriment. A concerted effort is being made to lessen the flow of information, and in any event most of that information is noise and not signal. Governments in both Canada and the U.S. are infected with a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism, while abroad ISIS carries out barbaric and terrible acts in the name of superstition.
It's a complicated place, the world.
It's not that I long for a simpler time. The past was not simple, it was a different kind of complex. I don't mean to romanticize the past...actually, for all the horrors of our present, I think I'd rather stay here than find myself in a world where a toilet, or two people in a bed, can't be shown on TV. I'd last fifteen minutes in the fifties before I'd be locked up on obscenity charges. But there is a quality of the past that appeals mightily, and that I don't think I'm romanticizing at all: seriousness.
For all the serious issues facing us in 2014, and there are a multitude, society today seems frivolous.
The decline of education is particularly worrisome. Every now and again you see eighth grade tests from 1912 or 1895 going around Reddit or Facebook, and you look at them and know you'd fail them. Snopes argues that this does not imply educational standards have slipped. I beg to differ.
I hate math--advanced math, at any rate. Its utility was never explained to me and thus it lacks relevance to my life. But "kitchen-table arithmetic" is relevant to everyone's life and it's the sort of thing few high school students can do without mechanical help.
("But why is that important, Grandpa? I've always got my phone on me and it has a calculator function!") Yes, and how do you know your output matches your input, sonny-boy?
It just seems so...silly. Hollywood keeps making the same movies over and over again. There's lots of decent television on, to be sure, but there's still so much reality tripe, and the latter has completely overcome channels like TLC (which used to be called "The Learning Channel", let's not forget). Popular music is full of AutoTune: actually singing songs yourself is passé. From Instagram to Vine to Twitter, the overwhelming imperative in our society is to communicate your thought in as little time as possible. This does not lend itself well to serious thinking. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it's the enemy of analysis.
What troubles me is the proliferation of celebrity culture. Now, celebrities are not new. They date back into prehistory. But never have they been so scrutinized by so many for so little. The obsession with celebrities has overtaken us to the point where we actually look to them for guidance on issues well outside their purview.
I just cited one (among many) who use their fame towards a higher end, and there are celebrities who are extremely intelligent, deep thinkers. But that is not what they are known nor revered for, and that troubles me. There was a time when intelligence had popular value. That time has all but passed.
Most ominously in Canada of late, we find ourselves with a government that distrusts, perverts, and outright ridicules science--in fact, our Prime Minister refers to science in the terms one usually reserves for some sort of crime. (I trust this attitude will be thoroughly repudiated at the polls next year--but believe me, the coming Canadian election will be the dirtiest in our history). It's all I can do sometimes not to retreat into a past when political antagonists still respect for each other (usually), and who debated the issues of the day more rationally than we see today.
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And yet...there are many times I find myself musing I was born too soon...perhaps far too soon.
I do believe that in some respects, I'm ahead of my time. On a personal level, the polyamory I so deeply identify with is roughly where homosexuality found itself in the early 1970s: just starting to take its first tentative steps into wider recognition, but beset on all sides with misunderstandings and condemnations. I suspect--I hope-- that forty or fifty years hence, polyamory will be seen, both legally and socially, as something utterly unremarkable. I'm going to do my part to bring that about.
Globalization has made the world smaller, but it needs to be smaller still--very much so. There is but one human race, and we are all part of it; perhaps in the (probably very distant) future we will truly recognize this and act accordingly. Sadly, I'm not at all sure the world isn't about to get a whole lot larger. I believe the cheap oil is running out, and oil is the lifeblood of our world as we know it. Even renewables need oil to get off the ground--you can't as yet make a solar cell without input from oil, for instance (people tend to forget that the manufacture of anything is a complex system that depends on oil for its transport, among other things).
Still, I'd welcome this development. If we can't have a one-world government, we can--and I suspect will, by and by--have a multiplicity of local governments that are more likely to have our interests in mind than the remote and insanely convoluted governments we're stuck with at present. I think we're in for some very rocky times before things settle down--the storm before the calm, if you will--and I'm torn between hoping I'm dead long before things get too interesting and hoping I'm somehow alive to see how interesting they get.
In the end, of course, I was born exactly when and where I was supposed to be--or it wouldn't have happened. It's my charge in life to couple the best of what I know of the past to the best I can imagine for the future, and thus continually re-create myself in the next greatest version of the greatest vision I ever had about who I am.
Join me, won't you?
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