Finished reading this book on the Millenium and the thoughts of Stephen Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean Delumeau and Jan-Claude Carriere on time and modernity today. (You can probably guess which two of these intellectuals I'd heard of before reading the book.)
Entertaining stuff with some imagery and thoughts that will stick with me. I especially liked Delumeau's apocalypse and millenarianism scholarship as I've never been sure what millenarianism actually meant yet it seems to come up a lot in Medieval and Chinese history. Also entertaining to detect the faint sense of unease about the Millenium bug, one of the biggest mass worry bloopers of, well, this millenium or the last one depending how you want to look at it.
However, the sense of despondence about modernity irritated me as usual. Is it mandatory to feel that the Internet is the beginning of the end for society if one is over 30 years old? Umberto Eco spent a long time talking about how it removes the ability of society to selectively forget, something he sees as key to collective memory. To paraphrase, having 14 million webpages is the same as having none since there is no filter through which this mass of information can be measured. However, modern society provides this filter just as previous societies did when one chose whether to read Jane Austen or Proust. Our education, parents, friendship groups and even traditions can direct us towards certain google searches and url entries. Nobody seriously sits down at the computer and tries to decide which of the 14 million websites they want to go on today.
Another crack in my rose-tinted view of Umberto Eco can hopefully be attributed to poor translation. In the same sentence he praises the 20th centuries increased sensitivity and tolerance of different races and uses 'Bongo-Bongoland' as a fictitious example of a third world UN country. Ugh, talk about missing the point. That wasn't socially acceptable in 1999 was it?
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