Modernity is not primarily a historical era. It is an
assortment of intellectual assumptions, biases, and tendencies to which humans
have been susceptible from time immemorial. As a disorder, modernity has
profoundly debilitating effects on the person, psychological as well as
physiological effects. In extraordinary cases it may spread to social and
political institutions, breeding decadence on a vast scale. There were isolated
outbreaks of modernity even among the ancients, but it never attained to a
level of an epidemic. As a designation of roughly the last five hundred years
of Western history, the term modernity denotes an era during which every sector
of society has been more or less infected. Today, modernity threatens to become
a pandemic.
The typically modern individual suffers from a variety of
ailments: melancholy; lethargy; malaise accompanied by a hauntingly vague
disorientation; a sense of meaninglessness. In short, nihilism. Many try to
escape their dis-ease by diverting attention away from their troubled minds
through various bodily indulgences. The most popular of these diversions are of
course alcohol and drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, obsessive attachment to
popular culture, extreme athletic exertions. Anything that inhibits thought.
The typical modern society condones and even promotes these activities, in part
because the markets upon which such societies depend profit from the products
and services associated with them; also because these societies lack the
spiritual resources to recognize them as pernicious. (from PURE by Mark Anderson)
I'm a fan of the Scottish novelist John Buchan (1875-1940), though I had never read his novel Huntingtower. It sounded like a good read-a-loud for the family. We are just two chapters into the book, but my 12 year old and I are amazed at the way our reading experience has been enriched by having done the Ambleside Online curriculum for the last four years or so. The story takes place near the end of World War I and the book's hero is a retired Scottish grocer looking forward to a bit of adventure walking through the Scottish countryside. He is a bit of a literary man with a love of poetry; he even carries Isaac Walton's The Complete Angler with him on his journey which also refers to poems that we have recently read. We feel like we've met a kindred spirit; like we are insiders. We are getting the many references to history, great novels, and poetry that are part of the story. It makes me wonder if he had a Charlotte Mason education himself. Thanks Charlotte Mason and Ambleside Online.
