Une Autre Epoque

Sometimes people say that they feel they were born in the wrong time. You hear this from girls sighing at the end of a Jane Austen movie, just wishing that people still spoke so elegantly or dressed so well or knew how to court a lady. Those were the good old days. People had dignity then. Class.

It’s not so much the courting rituals that I covet. Certainly not. I consider myself fully appreciative of my modern freedoms: of dress, of speech, of study. Whisk me to a world with any kind of caste system, and I would flounder. John Locke runs through my veins. Put me in constrictive clothing and I get jittery and exhausted. I like people to say what they mean. Don’t give me the poetic runaround.

But there is something about a former age that I long for. There is a big part of me that mourns the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment. I feel at times that I am drowning in information and argument. Authority used to be in scripture, in hierarchy, in what one was told and what everybody just knew. Truth was looking up at the night sky and seeing pieces of heaven leaking through the blackness of earth’s blanket. God was physically up there, just far enough away, and all one had to do was to complete the work his or her role required and look up at night and know they were doing God’s work, and that they’d be with him someday.

Of course, there were myriad problems with this. When all people know is what they are told, they can be conned, they can be kept down. There is immense value into seeking one’s own solution to something, to equal opportunity. The monopoly on knowledge faded. Now everyone was responsible for figuring out the truth. It was a human responsibility, and the answer was found through experimentation, reason: human faculties.

And then the world exploded into more and more denominations, schools of thought, political parties. Separate groups, all claiming authority. This is what I mourn. The bright, affirmative concepts of “freedom” and “individuality” and “reason” lead to more and more divisions, people barking at each other. This is not the world as it is meant to be. Don’t tell me that it’s a positive, natural thing for me to be separated from my brothers and sisters by a sea of differing authorities and interpretations. My heart longs for unity. Not mindless conformity. But harmony. A sense of peace with one’s place in the world, with the piece of truth that everyone could grasp, a sense of community.

And now I am told we live in a postmodern age, where we can no longer bark at each other. We have been so divided for so long that we have given up. We can’t figure out who is right, so, everyone is. It’s not unity, it’s not harmony. It’s endless dissonance. Is it childish of me to want a resolution? I’m not hoping for utopia. I’m not proposing we join hands and sing “Imagine.” But there is something in me that aches for an authority. I feel that there must be real answers to the questions that everyone is trying to hack answers for. I admit that people are free, and that they should have the right to seek those answers. But I hate the divisions that those freedoms have created. And I don’t buy the dissonance.

Gosh, I must be religious.