by A literary enthusiast’s thoughts on history and current events
I was reading Oscar Wilde today and marveling at how little has changed. He was writing about corruption in politics, about the hypocrisy of the ruling class, about the disconnect between public morality and private behavior. All of it could have been written yesterday.
The thing about studying historical literature is that you realize history doesn’t actually progress. We’re not getting better. We’re just going in circles. Different names, same problems. Different technologies, same human failures.
I was thinking about this while reading about Irish politics both historical and contemporary. About how Ireland’s relationship to Britain hasn’t fundamentally changed. About how class systems persist despite all our claims of progress. About how the issues that dominated Victorian literature still dominate now.
The difference is that people now have even shorter attention spans. They’re even less willing to think deeply about anything. They’re consuming shallow entertainment when they should be reading Wilde and Shaw and Beckett and understanding their world through the lens of literature.
But why would they do that when they could just scroll through social media instead? Why think about important things when you can just be entertained?
