Nov 24 2009
Dying for Stimulating Content
What will this decade be remembered for?
50s … that was fun, full of post-War burst of energy. Dow finally recovered from the Great Depression.
60s? Crazy but not short of sparks: feminism, civil rights, anti-poverty … a succession of promises of a fairer, more just future.
70s? That is probably comparable to the doldrums we live in now. But the post-structuralist ideas boomed and man reached deeper beyond Positivism.
80s, pretty bleak too. Yet there was Said’s Orientalism. In China, that was my Enlightenment Age, epitomized by the 读书 magazine.
90s? That was the high time, tech innovations, the promise of a new economy and new paradigm. If anything, you know your material life will be quite different and exciting in the future.
2000s, Terror plus GWB. The Preemptive War doctrine, the Patriot Act, the renditions, unauthorized domestic surveillance, the great cave-in to the Executive Power by the other two branches. And now the financial crisis that put the entire legacy of Economic Man on trial. In the tech field, it is full of echoes of popping false promises (social networking), dark prediction of new breakthroughs (brain scan, bio-engineering, gene altercation, etc.) or incessant chatter from a narcissistic crowd.
If Evolution is as what Jay Gould suspected–a cyclical pattern of bursts and slumps, I suspect human thoughts goes the same. And I feel like living in the Dark Age nowadays.