Historical Taxonomy via Email: The Scotch Helped

This is a follow-up via email on a conversation topic at a friend's house.

Svenski,

I've been thinking about our conversation re "What are we now if we're post-everything?" I was mulling over the common designations of Western History A.D., and it occurred to me that labeling something as "after" another defining moment is standard: e.g. the Middle/Dark Ages. Standard divisions were devised by those in the Renaissance & Enlightenment who saw the period between the Classical World and the Humanist World as regressive downtime. So the "after something really important" motif isn't new. However, what if we tried to rethink the classifications along Christian lines? We would start the History of the West at the Incarnation, of course, but then we could possibly continue along the lines of the following:

I. The First Age: The Age of Faith. This would begin with Christ and the Apostles and continue to, say, Anselm and the beginning of Scholasticism (a watershed change in my mind). We could call these people Patristics or Primitive Christians.

II. The Second Age: The Age of Faith and Reason. This would catch what was going on in Scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. We could call them Medievals, to avoid confusion.

III. The Third Age: The Age of Reason. This would be the period normally called Modern, and we could call these people Moderns, simply because we don't like them.

IV. The Fourth Age: The Age of the Absurd. I would start this in the mid-Twentieth century sometime, probably with Sartre and Camus. The designation of this Age as "Absurd" accounts both for the Existentialism that it spawned and popularized (e.g. Camus in particular refers to the Absurd), but it would also refer to the Death of Reason, i.e. the inherent absurdity and insecurity and arbitrariness of reasoning in a post-everything world. I think that "absurd" accurately characterizes a lot of contemporary phenomena: multi-culturalism, the supremacy of the welfare-state, the end of the nuclear family, infinite genders, depth psychology, etc. We could call the people in this Age....Absurds? We can't call them Absurdists, as that's already taken, and Absurdites sounds like a sect of Coptic Christians. T said Absurdians, but somehow that reminds me of Abelard and retributive castration.

Anyway, I know that this is a pretty rough sketch, but let me know what you think.

Your friend,

Hoss