It’s hard to express an atypical opinion on social media and not get shouted at by random men or women. Before you know it, you’ve been called western or complexed or negative or faithless or unpatriotic or delusional. There is more, but let’s keep this civil, shall we? Honestly, if I got a dollar for each label I was extended, I’d get that Hermes bag.
Theater-goers already know that the loudest boos come from the cheapest seats. In conversations too, nothing screams louder and more crassly than the wounded pride of people who know that they are becoming irrelevant.
The traditionalists you know can resent the so-called western thought processes and modernism all they want, but it is this enquiry and the permanent state of dissatisfaction with the status quo, that allows many people (not necessarily Westerners) to approach challenges as ‘problems to be solved’ rather than a divine decree to be endured. It was this enlightenment that had enabled Galileo, a conventional Christian, to go against the orthodoxy and claim that the earth revolved around the sun. These are the same principles at work in evolutionary biology that allow us to fight an invisible virus today with the tools we have (in contrast with say, the Black Death of the 16th century where the defeatist priests called it God’s punishment that could only be ended by praying). In sports and in life, where the eyes go, the body follows. If you keep looking back, you know where you’ll end up.
Enlightenment/modernism/liberalism/feminism, whatever else triggers people, are all products of human mind and collective experiences therefore they are not perfect. They don’t claim to have all the answers either. We can, however be sure that if what works today doesn’t work tomorrow, it will be replaced with something better. In that, both humans and their societies will remain a work in progress.
So sing along to Bono and Garrix:
We’ll build it better than we did before,
We are the people we’ve been waiting for.
Someone's Gotta Say It! 