If man were to pioneer time
travel in the same manner as he did for air travel and space travel, and were
this innovation commercialized in like fashion, that the ordinary man of
ordinary income might afford to make journeys back in time leisurely, it would
become imperative for him to develop, alongside this innovation, new forms of
sensitivity training, that he would know, in entering into an “archaic”
society, to treat it as his own, so as not to disturb the natural progression
of historical events, just as a certain respect for foreign cultures is
essential to one’s National Security. He would have to shed all of the pretense
in style, behaviour, and demeanour which he will have taken for granted in his
Present Age, adopting the linguistic, social, and personal customs of whichever
time and place he will have made his vacation destination.
Though the concept of commercial
time travel is farfetched “even by” our “advanced, modern” standards, this
thought experiment nonetheless presents us with an outlook upon history which
is thoroughly rational, sensible, and sophisticated, for we are invited to
suspend our prejudicial preferences for the Present Age, truly internalizing
the notion that what is Evil Now might have been Good Then, and what APPEARS Good
Now may “prove” to be Evil later.
Were such an innovation to
transpire, undoubtedly the MOST qualified time travelers would be the most
nostalgic Souls, those readers of old, dusty tomes who struggle to discern the
vernacular of Shakespeare from the modern meme. The classical Man of Letters
would have relatively less difficulty in immersing himself within the customs
of the Past than the millennial radical, simply because he already inhabits history
to a wider and more profound extent, owing to his literacy, which the latter enviously
dismisses as laughably “archaic”. This elucidates a central problem in our very
recent episteme of history: that it seldom regards any time period ON ITS OWN
TERMS, except insofar as the trends of a present, protected culture persist in the
blatant defiance of “progress”.
Were such a technological breakthrough to transpire, we should not be surprised to find that our Present Age, in its infernal infatuation with itself and its own self-professed progressive righteousness, would fall swiftly into bad repute by future scholars as having been one of the Darkest Ages of Human History.
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
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