Back and Forth

Tonight, I watched 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' and though it is far from the scope of this class, it made me reflect on something we discussed the other day. Thinking about the rigidity of the social customs of the play compared to time periods after is much like the ebb and flow we talked about, or rather, the great pendulum. It's odd to think about, how we as a civilization seem to go through periods like this, on again off again, full speed or at a crawl, forward progress or near stagnation. Like the swing between the belief in rationality as a supreme virtue and the praising of irrationality. This transition was observed between the era we are currently studying, the Enlightenment, and the following one, the Romantic. It's almost as if people take something so seriously for a while that they can't possibly stand it anymore, so they feel compelled to swing over to the other side. What's even more remarkable is that these transitions involve not just a few human beings, but many, whole societies even. Makes one wonder which side of the pendulum's swing we're on at this moment. Reason seems likely, but so does Irrationality. I suppose there's really no way to accurately analyze our own time, we're far too biased and involved.