:rolleyes: By what method? Genocide? You aren’t going to destroy all the rival religions and secularism and still have a democracy with anything less drastic. Some golden age.
Not to mention that a strengthening of Christianity would be associated with the collapse of Western (or any other) civilization. Both because Christianity is evil and stupid in its own right, and because strong religion and an impoverished, ignorant or just plain collapsing society go together. Prosperity and education are a bad environment for religion.
:dubious: I suppose it’s purely coincidence, and not at all significant to your assessment, that the Belle Epoque you speak of was also the high point of European colonial imperialism and global political hegemony?
My vote is that we need to hurry up and make a time machine and send all the people that yearn for a “simpler, better time” wherever, so they can have it.
Curtis gets to go back and live without modern medicine, and with a relatively poor level of general education for the average citizen. I am sure things look great from the castle or manor, write us letters as to how things look from the general population. FriarTed can go to the future where he and his buddies have gotten rid everyone but the good Christians.
Leave the rest of us for today, we apparently appreciate it more. (though I will admit that currently things aren’t too rosy, but we’ve got nothing to bitch about in comparison.)
Depends a great deal on what exactly you want the question to mean. Does a Golden Age have to be golden in all parts of western civilization or just some? I’d say that the late 1700’s and early 1800’s were a pretty good time in England and the northern United States, where most people owned their own property and there was a high degree of individual rights and autonomy. On the other hand, the Southern United States and Central and South America were still slave societies and large parts of Europe were still backwards.
On the other other hand, now is pretty good time across large portions of the globe, with the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, parts of East Asia, and Israel all enjoying democratic government, human rights, and prosperity unrivaled in history. However, that must be balanced against the fact that the prosperity of the first world is earned partially at the expense of the third world. Millions of factory workers in China and other places labor in subhuman conditions to produce the goods that we take for granted, and we have to support oppressive regimes in the Middle East in order to keep the oil spigots open. And, of course, there’s the issue of environmental destruction.
So in any age there’s good stuff and bad stuff happening. While I agree that the art world has become a joke in the last century, I don’t measure golden ages by that criteria. Fine art is generally a concern to only a small slice of the population, namely the upper class, and hence it shouldn’t be used to measure the human experience generally.
It would be nice to think so. I’ve read about how many hundreds of millions of people have converted to Christianity over the past generation in China, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Since the shift of a population to Christianity is always concurrent with increases in human rights and standard of living, I believe that those places will see a great deal of improvement over the next few generations. The progress is already visible in many countries. However, if history teaches anything it’s that we can’t extrapolate far into the future based only on trends that are visible now.
I think the best is yet to come, and we probably won’t live to see it. I always thought the promise of western civilization was in the principles that drove change in early western civilization.
Eh - I won’t say you’re wrong, but I do think there’s a stronger case to be made for the present. Gay folks in the US have made big strides over the past twenty years - and the US is big enough that it pretty much has to count heavily in any assessment of “Western Civilization.”
If that doesn’t do it for you by itself - the Internet. Niche item for most of the nineties, ubiquitous and transformative today. In particular, the emergence of broadband has done a lot to “shrink” the world.
We’ve got problems, many quite serious. But I’d still argue that things are getting better.
Did “modern” art *cause *WWI? (Blame it on the Symbolists!) And all the other bloody events that followed? What did cause the end of your so-called “Golden Age”?
You need to learn a lot more about history, art & literature. (I keep telling myself, 'He’s only thirteen.")
“Christian” is unlikely, given that it comprises a minority of the world and that the influence of religion generally has been on the wane. The war with the main current enemy of civilization (Islamic fundamentalism) will reinforce this trend, by discrediting theocratic political notions in general (in much the same way that the experience of Naziism discredited “genteel” anti-Semitism).
In reverse order:
“Considering people personally disposable” is far too common a phenomenon to consider it particular to the current generation.
Conflating “ingratitude” and “irreverance” is either careless or cynical to a degree that it makes it impossible to take any of your arguments very seriously. Ingratitude is a form of dickish behavior; irreverence is a perfectly rational and justified refusal to be led around by the nose.
Complaints about “pandering to the lowest common denominator” and “consumerism” are, at root, elitist resentment that the penny stinkards nowadays get catered to in a way that used to be reserved for their “betters”.
“Vulgarity” is a meaningless catch-all-term for “stuff I don’t like”.
I’m still getting my head around the idea that the OP rates London (very good, not great) and Doyle, (amusing, good, but hardly “very” good), as the epitome of quality while ignoring the fact that during that period, their contemporaries were not really regarding Van Gogh and Monet as the epitome of good art, so even if they had it they did not recognize it.