From: Music As Prayer How easily we are tempted to think that our present generation is superior to the generations that have preceded us. We learn about cruel practices of the past and judge them as barbaric while congratulating ourselves on being more civilized. We read about the ignorance of the past and dismiss it as folly while priding ourselves on how knowledgeable we are. We study tools and machines from the past and describe them as primitive while reveling in the sophistication of our technology. We see fashions from the past and assess them as quaint and dated while admiring the newest style as chic and smart. It all adds up to what I call the hubris of the present moment, an arrogance that fails to see that we share with past generations the same mixture of cruelty and kindness, wisdom and foolishness, beauty and terror. Future generations will find distortions and absurdities in our values, practices, and inventions that never occurred to us. The hubris of the present moment is a spiritual illness because it cuts us off from the wisdom and insights of the past while blinding us to our own inadequacies. We need to be more [...]
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