Retracing The Same Trail

One of the remarkable things that I am constantly reminded of is how much the modern always requires novelty rather than wisdom.

It is an interesting conundrum, this sense that "modern" means "progress" and "progress" means "novel".  Perhaps it has always been so:  there runs in almost all Classical literature a tension between the looking back (to an ideal age that really never existed) and a looking forward to the modern world.  In some ways it can simply be how ancient ideas will be applied or how methods can be improved.  

Societies have done this sort of thing as well - sometimes in a relatively non-destructive manner (The Meiji Restoration) and sometimes in violent form (see any Communist revolution of the 20th Century).  The past is stripped out and replaced by the new, the modern.

The novel.

And then, suddenly, the modern realizes that the modern falls desperately short.

Take the above quote of Paisos of Athos. Paisos lived in the 20th Century and those concepts of simplicity are based on at least 2000 years of Christian history - or, one could argue, reaching back even further to the Stoic philosophers.  And yet, a great many people would rather ignore the advice of a man based on the belief that as a Christian (and an Orthodox monk at that), he has little to say to the "modern" world.  After all, he does not have any idea of the stresses and strains that modern life imposes.

This is almost inevitably followed up by a blossoming on the Social Internet and even in society of the concept at hand. Books are written, videos are produced, small animations dot Instapic and The Book of Face with the idea that a natural and simple life reduces anxiety and having things increases anxiety.  Groups are created, "Get Rid of Stuff January" becomes trendy, thrifting is now in (again).

And somehow this is all considered novel. As if previous generations had not recognized such things.

It does make me wonder:  What would things be like if instead of spending time reinventing and re-reinventing ideas and concepts, we simply took them at face value, practiced them, and turned our attention elsewhere?  What might we have accomplished in so many fields instead of walking the same meadows again and again which are crisscrossed with trails of those that went before, somehow convincing ourselves that we have a new a different trail this time?

It is not that we have a different trail.  It is just that we are so consumed with modernity and progress and novelty on the horizon that we cannot look down and realize that humanity has covered all of this a great many times before.