Children of Our Time

We are indeed children of our time. Our habits will naturally adjust to the environment we live in and so will our thinking and sense of reality. It’s inevitable, but it’s also rather unfortunate.

If there is a Truth, it must be timeless, and if there isn’t, any time, including our own, is a fumble in the dark as insignificant as any gloomy age preceding.

The scientific search for truth has progressed through the ages; it’s difficult to doubt that. Our understanding of the physical nature and how to conquer it, improves with every technical invention, but there is no reason to believe that our age has grasped the essence of life any better than the previous ones.

If anything, our time is characterized by an unprecedented skepticism. That wouldn’t be so bad if it made us examine our beliefs more carefully and turn over the evidence one more time before reaching a conclusion, but that’s not at all how the offspring of our age go about formulating their view. Instead skepticism has simply led to indifference. In the absence of obvious truths modern man refrains from actively believing, but since it’s not possible to go about the world without passing judgments on experience, the dominant view of the world is quickly adopted.

In the age of critical thinking, uncritical thinking is the norm. We believe in what we see because it passes for the absolute reality, but it is actually just an interpretation filtered through the fashionable perspective of our time.

Wouldn’t it be better to be puzzled? Wouldn’t it after all be preferable to imagine the possibility of fanciful fairies and demons causing oddities to appear? Instead we don’t even ask but accept the arbitrary judgment that the contemporary world has instilled in us.

Wouldn’t it be better to be a child again, not limited by our time but open to any time?