A Rising Dark Age ?

Recent events and patterns in the world have led me to start asking a question - is Western Society in the throes of a rising "Dark Age"?

The last "Dark Age" was nominally from the collapse of the Roman Empire through to the Renaissance. During this time, we lost touch with many great teachings; governance became capricious and corrupt; life, in general was short, mean and brutal. The wealthiest had all the money; and power tended to concentrate among the wealthy and spiritually powerful.

Consider the patterns in the world today:

a) The United States has just re-elected a man who has made no bones about his desire to involve the religion in the business of statecraft.

b) Advanced education is becoming progressively more and more expensive, and steadily becoming out of reach for many parts of our society.

c) Governments in Canada and the US have steadily been cutting back on their funding of education at all levels, from primary through to post-secondary.

d) The Bush administration has a track record of modifying scientific study results to suit their political agenda. (Rather than using science to guide their agenda, they have used their agenda to distort science) Consider two key cases - environment (Kyoto), and stem cell research.

e) World leaders (esp. Bush, but others as well), seem to downplay the importance of knowledge and wisdom.

f) A serious imbalance in the market economy is emerging. While consumer demand is dropping for items, the prices are not coming down. Instead, the prices are remaining static or even going up. One theory I have heard postulated is that the stock market (another 'free market' is pushing against the corporations for 'share earnings', and the result is that companies are keeping prices high in order to make their earnings targets.

g) The US economy appears to be headed for a serious decline in the next few years. Energy costs are rising, but the effects of that are not reflected in the 'consumer price index' that they use to measure inflation (see item f above). Consequently the 'Federal Reserve' seems to be blind to what's happening around it. The 'war economy' needed to sustain activity in Iraq is driven primarily by borrowed monies - sooner or later, the lenders are going to start calling their loans in.

h) Rising religious influence in politics. Western civilization is predicated on the notion of separating church and state from one another. Throughout the western world, there are major lobby groups taking center stage that claim that the moral compass of state has been lost because it is no longer guided by 'god's law' {whatever that means}.

i) Intellectual understanding and thought is being denigrated and replaced by emotionalism, fear and arbitrary responses. Some of the comments about Presidential candidate Kerry were rather revealing. He was constantly criticized for being 'too wordy', or 'too intellectual' for people to understand. There was a time when intellectual prowess was the mark of a potential leader - now it is a mark for derision?

j) Statistically, the gap between the wealthy and the poor is growing in our nations, with the middle class not only bearing a higher proportion of the 'public burden', but also being stretched ever thinner as a proportion of the population.

k) Health care is becoming more and more inaccessible unless you have a bank vault full of money. In the United States, there are all sorts of obstacles to accessing health care; in Canada, it seems that the funding is in a perpetual state of crisis. I suspect the pattern repeats elsewhere as well.

There are many pieces to this puzzle - far more than can be adequately explored in one entry in a blog. Mostly what I'm seeing are a number of patterns that individually are likely benign, but they are beginning to align in a way that portends the emergence of a shadow over our civilization. One in which the balances of the 'free market' system get overbalanced, and casts the economic life of our nations into quicksand; the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few will further concentrate political power in those same hands; the cost of advanced education is reaching a point where only the wealthy will be able to afford it.

The net result? A descent into a cultural environment where education is minimal; moral absolutism begins to prevail - for no better reason than it is simple to understand. The economic, legal and political power structures will continue to concentrate power in the hands of a very few.

Of course, this is all very speculative - the optimist in me likes to believe that human kind is capable of rising above these issues. The pessimist however, is far less sure of our collective commitment to doing so.