This hilarious and depressing and weirdly arousing Standard piece about contemporary dating got me thinking.

Thinking about progress, myth of. Post-Enlightenment, occidental man is gripped by the notion that we are, or have, 'advanced,' that we are slowly but steadily ascending a pyramid to some utopian state where everyone is great, everything swell.

Nothing is more absurd than this, the teleology delusion.

While technology has admittedly grown more complex, other areas of our society have experienced alarming corruption or degradation. Among them, courtship rituals. Also, language, which has undergone extensive simplification. Though functional literacy has increased, what might be called 'deep literacy' has devolved at a staggering rate.

We are not moving upward or forward. Nor are we moving downward or backward. Both are equally strange notions. Human civilization is like a collection of billiards on a pool table, some of the balls large and some tiny and some middle-sized, each for every institution and individual in the world. These billiard balls are ever colliding, smashing and interrupting and intercepting and jostling one another in ways sometimes predictable but more often surprising. Yet for all their movement, they remain on a level plain, and as time passes some shrink and disappear, others swell and explode, but never do they stack, never do they fall. The motion is random and horizontal, not methodical and vertical. (This is Oakeshottian imagery, no?)

I think!