Sunday, June 17, 2012

широкая натура

Culturally we surely live in a twilight era: both Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are fading, and they have not been replaced by anything more than spiritually dead consumerism. That's a hoary complaint I'm sure many would feel and object that there never was an era that wouldn't have been, at heart, crassly, graspingly materialistic - but that's not really an actual rebuttal. Ideals differ and change by era, and as ideals go Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are not too bad at all. We now have, increasingly freely expressed, a certain frozen narrowness of mind dominating, a certain totally bogus righteoussness that would have felt at home in the early Victorian era though devoid of the fundamentalist Christian cum primitive capitalistic justification for it. A cynical, narrow era. I don't think that it's the Net that creates this impression though it surely has removed many constraints - it mostly just reflects our current reality. Not a good time, this.