The Great Enervation

Commonly held attitudes about the overall health of society can be seen in the things we worry about.

Take, for example, a realization that seems recently to have come to numbers of people who share a given professional field or discipline. How widespread is the realization? That remains impossible to say, but whether you are a schoolteacher or a lawyer, or perhaps a scholar of the humanities, you begin to worry that your field has ceased to advance. There are fewer creative breakthroughs, everyone seems to be going through the motions, and the entire endeavor slopes toward listlessness.

You share this sense of things with colleagues, and you also share a bit of comfort in agreeing that there is a saving grace to be found in other spheres of endeavor than your own. Surely, you suggest, technology and the hard sciences are whirring ahead.