Yore

The more I read about medieval history, the more I realize how incredibly similar it was to our era. And yet, though this fact is easy to see on the intellectual plane, try as I might I can't get it to sink into the level of habit. Every time I think of the pre-1800 past, it's like this strange, exotic land where people were totally weird and awesome. And when I try to imagine why I continually fail on this account, I can only think of things like plastic, and airplanes. That is, the fact that my world is blanketed in plastic, etc---combined with the fact that I perceive the medieval world to have never had these things that (on an emotional, habitual level) are so central to my world---makes me feel a profound difference or disconnect between these realms.

But I started wondering today if this was "all part of the plan"---if "we moderns" blanket our world in plastic and make our cars look all sleek and give our kids robot toys and have them watch computer animation rather than live-action precisely out of an effort to create that distance, to sever any connection with the "backwards" world of yore. Of course plastic is awesome, and way better than almost everything at doing almost anything, but I wonder if a parallel motive for making it shiny and smooth and flat is exactly as an escape from origins. This may seem like old news: of course we like to look modern rather than primitive, because modern is better. But does the idea (or appearance) of "modernity" necessitate such a disownment of an earlier state? Perhaps this fact might have to figure in to any definition of modernity: modernity being (in part) that which fears being the same as the past and so defines itself, forcefully, overzealously, and everywhere, as modern.