Quote:
Originally Posted by Textcritic
You know this with certainty? What a preposterous statement. For you to assert that "progress" is a fabrication or illusion is actually the opposite side of the same coin for those who assert that "progress" is real. How does one quantify "misery", anyways?
I understand what you are getting at: socially and culturally the modern world might appear largely bankrupt as a result of consumerism and materialism. I have seen apologists and romanticists make the same claims before: that "rates of depression and anxiety are soaring", and that this is somehow indicative of the generally poor state of our society. I quite frankly don't buy it. How can we even know about such things in a world in which such things did not exist, at least not on the same or even similar clinical level that it does today? I think that it is highly debatable whether or not "anxiety" and "depression" are on the rise, or whether this is an illusory product of our emerging definitions of such things, our increasingly clinical interpretation of them, and our developing understanding of the chemistry and mechanisms of the human brain (of course, I suspect that with this final comment you will predictably accuse me of being a scientific or materialistic ideologue who is committed to the idea of "absolute progress").
I think the question raised deserves a much more specific response: In what ways was the medieval world better than the modern world, and how do you know this?
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Have you read the Canterbury Tales?
That's a completely fair question, by the way. We can read the literature of the past and we can know that the lives that produced such wonderful poetry and stories was just as vibrant and happy as our own.
As for progress, you don't really believe that insisting progress is a fabrication is actually the other side of the coin, do you? That's preposterous. What a silly, linear understanding of history and human development.