Saturday, September 16, 2006

9. The Cutting Edge

It’s easy to believe that we are much too scientific to consider faith. We know too much, and we’re too sophisticated to slip back into such archaic ways of viewing life, or so we think! No matter what era we live in, we always presume that we are at our most knowledgeable point. We talk about living in a technologically advanced society. We speak of knowing and understanding more about the universe than people who lived in other periods of history. We allude to a sense of loftiness in our social, intellectual, and perceptual development; and to the notion that the people of today (ourselves included, of course) are more evolved than, and therefore, somehow, implicitly superior to those in other eras. And we bolster that path of logic by tracking lines of knowledge back through time to show that the past is a primitive form of the present, and that we are indeed living in yesterday's future.

Yet, that does not mean that development in a particular direction is inevitable. It merely spotlights the parts of reality that are traceable in that way, or, points to the parts that have little or no trail to the past, and so are considered new. There is a temptation to believe that our religion and politics have improved over time as well, and that today we are wiser and more knowledgeable and progressive than at other times in human history. But societal systems and cultures travel a meandering and multi-dimensional path through time, not a linear one. We do not build today squarely and solidly upon yesterday. Maintaining some beliefs and behaviours that have reverberated throughout human existence, hanging on to some simply out of habit, we develop new combinations of actions and ideas to address the present, leaving in the past, those that no longer seem relevant. We are all, therefore, living in a reality formed by the best and worst actions of our ancestors; and are creating through our current “modern” actions, a future culture different from the one that we imagine we’re developing or maintaining.

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