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| Lileks: On the Absolute Critical Importance of the Weekend |
| 2008-06-16 |
| What is it with the pessimism of the overclass? If it wasn’t for doom and gloom, they wouldn’t have a reason to live. The latest example comes from ABC News, and suggests that this century may be the last one for civilization. Who says? Scientists! Ah, well, if it’s scientists, we’d best pay heed. Or perhaps you disagree; the century’s still fresh and young. It still has that new century smell. Warranty’s good for another few years, and besides, we haven’t dumped the trunk-junk accumulated in the previous century. We’ll figure something out. We always do. But you don’t get publicity by suggesting this century might be better than its predecessor, or by asking people to envision how cool the future might be. There are dozens of websites and Flickr sets devoted to retrofuturism, to the art of describing what things might be like. If you grew up in the 60s, you’ll remember all the paintings of space – useful space full of gleaming silver ships. That all ended with “2001: A Space Odyssey” which suggested that the future of space was long, dull, and lonely, punctuated with homicidal computers, trippy FX and enormous wise space-fetuses. Great film, but from then on, something seemed different about the future. Did we really want to live there? By the seventies, we’d starting looking back. The media remade the 30s and 50s in forms neither decade would have recognized, and sold them to folks who were disenchanted with the future and none too cheerful about the present. Now we have the disenchantment with progress combined with a grim, oddly self-satisfied form of pessimism, sprinkled with a little hysteria for that extra zing. It’s almost as if some would be delighted if this were civilization’s last century, for one of three reasons: 1. I told you so 2. We deserved it 3. The planet is better off without us. This last one is always an interesting assertion, because it suggests that the universe would be a better place if it had dodos, but no Beethoven. You could make the argument that we have vastly improved the universe, simply by adding Beethoven where none existed before, but no. Humanity is a virus, and perhaps this will be the century when the cure is found. The best anecdote for this nonsense is the weekend. It’s time for the simple human joys: hours spent with family or friends, gardening, a book, a meal taken in leisure, conversation, and all the other boons of civilization, hard-fought and hard-earned. If you’re not an optimist on Saturday night, you’re doing it wrong. |
| Posted by:Mike |