Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The Age of Fantasy

Almost a decade ago when I was attending the extremist Moody Bible Institute, Tim Sigler mentioned how the Age of Enlightenment would have been better named the Age of Endarkenment. At the time I wondered how he could say such a thing about the rise of systematic empiricism and reason, but now I'm coming to see that his position is increasingly common. Not only are the fundamentalist Christians giving up on reality, it is becoming increasingly obvious that humanity globally is entering the Age of Fantasy.

On of the ways humanity is giving up on reality is the increasing abandonment of faith in academia. Even intelligent people looking into subjects outside their speciality are often only able to find a terrain of conflicting 'expert opinions'. This leads people into a chaos of confusion, not knowing who they can trust about some of the most basic facts of life. Very quickly the falsities pile up, leading to frequent arguments based on ignorance (I'm sure you've encountered some). Only the very best of our kind will stop an argument to agree that neither of them know enough, and so return to research more.

George Monbiot recently posited the question: "Why does a crazy set of beliefs in one field seem to migrate into unrelated subjects?" He concludes his thought with the following:
To dismiss an entire canon of science on the basis of either no evidence or evidence that has already been debunked is to evince an astonishing level of self-belief. It suggests that, by instinct or by birth, you know more about this subject (even if you show no sign of ever having studied it) than the thousands of intelligent people who have spent their lives working on it. Once you have have taken that leap of self-belief, once you have arrogated to yourself the authority otherwise vested in science, any faith is then possible. Your own views (and those of the small coterie who share them) become your sole reference points, and are therefore unchallengeable and immutable.
Indeed, it is this leap into self-belief that so many have now taken. Adrift in the postmodern Sea of Uncertainty, people increasing settle for escapism and don't even try to find reality. And our world certainly does offer an array of fantastic escape routes - supernatural or virtual, temporary or ongoing. "Anything is possible in Second Life" claims the popular online game. Primitivist John Zerzan writes, "Immersive and interactive, [virtual reality] provides the space so unlike the reality its customers reject. ... It is 'less lonely and less predictable' than the life we have now. This inversion of reality is the consolation of the supernatural of many religions, and serves a similar substitutive function." As humanity looks to the extremes of religion and technology, the world around us gradually loses its existence.

John Dominic Crossan claims, "since the Age of Enlightenment has been replaced by the Age of Entertainment, the future clash would not be between science and religion but between both of them and fantasy." He continues, "In 1999 I never imagined, even as prophetic nightmare, the speed with which faith-based thinking would morph into fantasy-based dreaming to infiltrate medicine, education, domestic program, foreign policy, and even news reporting." That was in 2007. The shift to the fantastic has hardly slowed down since.

We're in a newly emerging age. This is an Age where fantasy seeps into every area of our lives. This is an Age in which every US Republican Senator denies human-caused climate change. This is an Age where people prefer to escape reality than face it. This is an Age of increasing confusion, increasing blindness, increasing non-existence. This is the Age of Fantasy.