Wait a second

I never said I experience bliss. I just said that modern life is better than ancient life, and that only by romanticizing the past beyond reason and responsibility can one conclude otherwise. Modern life has a great many hassles, but we have it incaluably better than our ancestors. And I think we are far less lonely, thanks almost entirely to technology; communications technology is the obvious example of how modern life makes us less lonely, but there are other examples. I believe T.S. Eliot typified the sort of conservatism I am complaining about when he said that television was a way for a million people to laugh at the same joke, and all be alone. When you hear that, you’re supposed to think, oh, how awful modern life is—how sad and tragic and miserable. And then what? That it would be better if there was only a single television in the village, so that everyone had to watch it together? Or that there should be no TV at all? Nonsense! This nation was very much brought together by TV on September 11, and it’s brought together by TV constantly—we all can share jokes with one another that arise from a shared culture, thanks to The Simpsons or Seinfeld, or dozens of other shows. But the Eliot attitude—of automatically thinking that modernity is miserable, cold, and alienating—persists. Why? Because of a predisposition to think that anything having to do with the modern world is bad. I believe that predisposition is really psychological projection by people who a) feel lonely and needy themselves, and therefore assume the rest of us must feel that way also, and b) have contempt for humanity and are therefore hostile to anything that makes humanity happier, such as modern science and technology and capitalism. Well, no—many of us don’t feel that way. Modern life may not be bliss, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the good old days when you churned your own butter.

So, no, I do not find Sarah Hempel contemptible. But I do find her frightening, because I find her all too typical of conservative Christians who genuinely think that the world would be better off if we all went back to living in the dark ages, when everyone knew his or her place, women lived their lives as breeding machines, men obeyed their lords, and the priests doled out literacy to those they thought safe enough.