I have been thinking, of late, about this corrosive and entropic time we are living in as the modern iteration of “The Dark Ages”, but whatever has been the metaphorical and even biblical power of this word “dark”, it is irredeemably lost to us. God knows that our troubled and troublesome culture needs no more negative associations with “darkness”. People of color suffer enough from such connotations linking blackness or darkness with ominous negativity, or even outright evil. We necessarily must seek alternatives.
That, plus my cursory research into that medieval antecedent reveals that the period generally maligned as “The Dark Ages” (those 900 years beginning in the 5th century with the fall of Rome and the descent of the Vikings) wasn’t, in reality, the “darkness” Petrarch construed it to be when he assigned it that unflattering name.
Our age, however, seems every bit so empty. It isn’t this time the Roman Empire that is collapsing around us, but our own American version of it which has ceased to stand for much of anything, save a bullying and malignant sense of our own entitled exceptionalism. It isn’t literal Vikings who are falling upon us with a vengeance, but rather their political descendants who are channeling their vicious, marauding, “no holds barred” terror. “The Vacuous Age” seems as appropriately descriptive as it is sad.
And in the spirit of “vacuity”, there seems to be no mindfulness of the gravity endemic to this moment in history - no organizing, over-arching, meaning-making center. Whatever noble aspirations and elevating convictions - whatever grounding values and moral principles - that might have shaped and fueled us as a culture in prior seasons have dissipated, leaving behind a cacophonous emptiness, an anarchical void, a vapid toxicity.
We have entered in real life that moment in the movie “Ghostbusters” when the power to the containment grid was shut off, releasing all the heretofore captured and contained spooks who burst through the roof of the converted fire station and wreak havoc on New York City.
Our moral power has been shut off, and our collective ghosts have all been let loose. And it isn’t pretty.
In a word, we have become sociopathically mean - punitive, repressive, suppressive, manipulative, and dishonest. We behave violently, brutishly, selfishly. And we seem neither to notice or care. We do what we want to do for no apparent reason other than that it is what we want to do, regardless of whether it is noble, virtuous, or constructive.
We have become vacuous.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not mourning the demise of, or calling for the resurrection of some Falwellian “Moral Majority” which, in reality, represented neither morality nor a majority. I am, however, aching for the recovery of some ennobling center, some reweaving of the social fabric that honors the diversity of the public “commons”, that lives in and through an awareness of the larger realities that variously nudge and constrain and twistingly contort us - meta-forces like systemic evil, environmental degradation, capitalistic overreach, the erosion of respect for human life, and the reality of our own mortality. Deaf and blind to these framing forces, we will continue in our determined drive to wipe each other out. “Wipe”, on second thought, being exactly the wrong verb. Implicitly viewing each other and the world we collectively inhabit as toilets, we are suicidally, homicidally and quite literally poisoning and drowning ourselves and each other in our mutual defecation. Wiping is certainly in order, but we are too oblivious to our filth to recognize the need.
If it sounds bad, it is.
If it sounds hopeless, it isn’t.
If, as we have been taught since childhood, we are made in the image of God, we have the capacity to speak new, more generative words, and enact more rehabilitative behaviors. We can choose to stop shooting each other, denigrating and mocking one another. We can choose to stop ignoring, blaspheming and discarding all that simply is not “us”. Creation itself demonstrates the virtue of harmonious balance - of mutually beneficial interdependence - but we must rediscover the humility to observe and heed the instruction.
We can, of course, if we quit standing in our own way.
It just remains to be seen if we will - if we will choose to bring to an early close this Vacuous Age, and refill the cultural, moral and interpersonal emptiness with the vitalizing nectar that lubricates our rusted collective.
It remains to be seen if we will, and if it will take us 900 years to invite a new and more flourishing Renaissance.
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