Toughts on the new dark age

Everywhere I read about how we are evolving as a species, how our culture evolves, our language evolves, how everything we do evolves...it has become the synonym for change, for adjustment for the ever upward and onward movement of the species towards a better and brighter future.

However, when one sees the actual evidence that is ‘fleshed out’ in this world we see our cultures, our art, our manners, our civilisation heading in a different direction. We see what an astute blogger notes as: “The only notable developments I’ve seen over the last couple of decades are an increasing tendency in the Western democracies towards bureaucracy as the operative form of government and a greater tendency to follow charismatic chiefs, the societal modality that John W. Campbell characterized as “barbarism”.”

Many insightful observers hold the view that we are headed into a new ‘dark ages’, I concur. During the first dark ages the flame of civilization was kept alive in monasteries and Christian communities, will it be so with the new dark ages? I would like to believe that this will in fact be the case but I have some profound doubts that it will.

I have been encouraged by some developments that have occurred recently within the churches regarding the arts, philosophy and culture in general, but I wonder if we have the will and ability to maintain the impetus, if recent history is any example I think we will find that our attention span is very secular. A brief overview of the church reveals how we are in truth a collective of the most foolish of human beings and our tendency is to build our little fiefdoms rather than the Kingdom.  

We are as influenced (perhaps more than we like to admit) by the worldviews of this fallen world as are the unbelievers (think: tolerance, PC, multiculturalism etc), and our conversations are liberally sprinkled with the detritus of the zeitgeist as are many of our educational environments. We embrace the newly ‘converted’ (particularly the skilled and talented) without understanding that many need time to unlearn what the ‘world’ has indoctrinated them with, thus we set ourselves up for syncretisation.

We feel the need to keep pace with new technologies without examining the unintended consequences of such actions. We live as if the ‘new’ is always preferable to the old…thus this essay returns to its  beginning.  Thinking out loud!