The New Dark Age

I admit that the world in which we live today is a puzzle to me. What was black is now white. The speculative is turned into accepted truth. Tradition is ridiculed and modernity worshipped, no matter the value of each.  This must be the new Dark Age. Maybe the older humans like me are supposed to feel displaced as we reach our final years.  That way we don't mind leaving life behind. But then, I think of past generations and they did not have so much change, often mindless negative change, occur so suddenly and often. What's different today is that the social order, the folkways and mores don't seem to matter anymore. What matters now is "me".

My observation is that the social media craze has killed culture and replaced it with a mind set of relativism, "if I like it it's right". Thus, we get social trendiness as the driver of behavior. What is trendy today is popular, morality and ethics be dammed. Celebrities and Face book have replaced educational institutions and time tested core values as the source of truth.  Instead of Shakespeare we now have rappers spouting ignorant vulgarity.  Religious worship is gone now, replaced by the faith of "global warming". That's why when most Americans are asked what is the greatest challenge facing mankind the reply is "climate change". Huh? They must be kidding. But even the American president agrees.

Today I read in my newspaper about some of the major "news" stories. The front page included stories about a pastor who is suing a grocery store because it hurt his feelings when allegedly adding a "gay slur' to the cake decoration he placed. Do we really need to read of that? Is there not something that affects our lives better suited for page one? Well, it started on social media and in our degraded society that makes it important. Other front page stories included a report on a football player whose agent fired him, something with the headline "Rainbow colored nooses on campuses disturbing" (I didn't read that one), a story that says our genes tell us when to first have sex, and why someone named Emila Clarke "rules the red carpet." It's garbage for the brain, pabulum.

Social media and technology has degraded the man capacity to understand what is real and what is important. It has discouraged thinking and damaged our ability to reason.  Society has been bought off by its technological addiction. No need for a nuclear bomb to kill us, those cell phones and i pods are already dumbing us down so much that brain deadness is more the norm than the exception. The future looks worse than the past. No wonder I won't be regret my own end when it comes, for the darkness we face at death is merely a mirror of the darkness of our modern Dark Age.