21st.

'Far from this being, as cultural conservatives assert, a period of unique moral depravity, family life and the raising of children is, for most people, now surely better in the west than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

The conservatives' supposedly moral concerns turn out to be nothing but an example of the age-old custom of first idealising and then sanctifying one's own culture. The past they invoke is fabricated from their own anxieties and obsessions. It has nothing to offer us.'
---G. Monbiot.

The disturbing thing is just how many people sincerely want to believe there's depravity, moral decadence, a falling away from some prime, pristine point in time; the origins, free from the plurality and complexity of the world, a time when everything was in it's place, neatly ordered, recognized. Maybe it's deep rooted, that kind of nostalgia? But you can't help wondering if it finds more fertile ground at particular junctures in history, or-at the personal level-when one is of a certain age? If there's one thing worse than an old fogey it's a young fogey! 

Atomisation, angst, anxiety, and alienation. You don't really buy any of that (except in small doses) and those who pedal it, shovel it out to the students, are an odd breed indeed. Over here it's very much: Tradition, the 'golden age of Islam',our culture of honour and respect (for women, the environment, elders etc., etc) Except, of course, no-one's ever actually, you know, seen it.

So, today, the unfashionable thought that, you know what, things are actually a lot better than they've been; the untimely thought that the Enlightenment (without the fanaticism bit) is actually not half bad (Calvino's baron). The shocking news that market societies have their virtues (and not just their vices). When all is said and done, who would like to go back (assuming such a thing were possible)? Minorities, women, gays and lesbians, peasants? I somehow doubt it. The old (Republican) virtues, the old religious moralities were, it seems to me, reserved for the few-and sod the rest!

21 st century enlightenment:

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