Innocence or Inconvenience?

Hello all! Thanks to everyone who posted a comment; I hadn't expected quite so big a readership in so little time!

***Warning: contains spoilers of The Village and The Last Samurai***

There are two films which I very much enjoy, along with a host of others--The Village, and The Last Samurai. Now, neither one of these films has much in common with the other. The Last Samurai is about Nathan Algren, an American cavalry captain who comes to Japan in the later half of the 19th Century to fight against the Samurai, who believe that a swiftly-modernizing Japan is changing too quickly, and forgetting its heritage. Nathan is captured by the Samurai in a disastrous battle. During his captivity there, he comes to love the culture, ideals, and honor of the very people he has come to fight, and in the end he joins their side.

The Village is a wonderful, poignant, brilliantly-made movie about pure, chaste love, set in the context of a lonely village in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside. The inhabitants of the village do not depart from the borders they have set for themselves, because they fear that if they go through the woods which surround them they will meet certain fearsome creatures, "Those we don't speak of," as they call them, whom their village elders have told them about. Ivy Walker then travels through these very woods, driven by her love of Lucius Hunt to find medicine to heal his injuries.

Not much in common, right? Well, no, not as far as plots go. But there is one thing that these two films share. Both of them focus on--and praise--societies which are simple, moral (one is Buddhist, but they do hold to a strict code of honor and religious devotion) and primitive in comparison to our society today. The people of the Village are living (or think they are living) in the 19th Century, but their culture is somewhat more timeless than that; their dress code and manner of speaking harkens back to the 18th Century, and the innocence they hold dear is timeless. The culture of the Samurai has hardly changed (in the film) since about a thousand years previously (read 876 A.D.).

The culture we live in today is drastically different from these. Astonishing technological advancements have made life easier to lead. With e-mail we can communicate from Oregon to Mozambique in a matter of seconds. With cars and airplanes, the world has become "smaller" as journeys have become shorter and less arduous. Weapons have become so complex and lethal that we are terrified by war on a large scale. The introduction of television has brought its own unique problems. We have transformed ourselves into an instant, momentary culture, inhabited by pleasure-seeking, "me first" individuals.

But these technological advancements have pros as well as cons. Even the so-called "poor" in Western nations have access to more goods and better hygiene than the richest emperors of one or two thousand years ago, and their levels of comfort and security are infinitely greater. Natural disasters can now be met with billions upon billions of dollars in government aid. Interconnected governments and transportation facilities allow food and water to be transported to needy people.

Which society, then, is better? Do you prefer a fast-paced, metropolized society of freeways and traintracks and nuclear weapons where all food must past the FDA and water is strained through purification systems before entering any household? Or do you prefer a society like those in The Village or The Last Samurai, where honor, innocence, and morality are preserved, at the expense of technology? I'm not saying that such a society is producible in its entirety in the real world; but with all of our advancements, have we made it harder for the Christian witness to be heard, or for God-glorifying innocence to be preserved?

I'm not really sure on all this, I'm just asking all of you. Was our modern age inevitable; should we press on to greater heights of technology? Or should we prize that innocence and morality? I'm not advocating that we destroy all of our computers and refrigerators and live in the Dark Ages. It isn't our modern trappings that we should be worried about (worried about as much, anyway), but our culture and our mindset. We need to bring back the love of things pure and beautiful. We need to pause in our swirl of gears and pistons and remind ourselves that God made the world wonderful. He gave us emotions and wonder and fascination. He gave us friendship and love, and laughter, and the ability to be noble.

What thinkest thou?

~Connor

Welcome to the Musings of Your Friendly Neighborhood Protestant

Hello! My name is Connor Hamilton, but since most of you who will be reading this already know that, I suppose there is no need to go much further into who I am. If you do not know me, and wish to find out more, then ask, and I'll be happy to tell you. :-)

I'm no stranger to blogs; I have a Xanga site, which will be (for the most part) devoted to posting of a less serious nature, although humor shall, I hope, be an integral part of this site. What would the world be without humor, anyway?

Here, however, I shall post theological and philosophical thoughts, and any other stuff that I feel like posting here! That is the fun of blogs, you know.

So, I hope to attract many friends here, and have many lively and interesting discussions with you all.

But I must devote time to school, as well as theology and philosophy and all the other cool things in life. Which means that I must get up early, which means that I must consequently go to bed early. Which means I must get off. So long, everyone!

~Connor