Progress

Anyone aspiring to an understanding of the present must come to terms with the past. But the past is constantly expanding. Every generation entering the present of history must therefore become wiser or, if that proves impossible, more superficial than those which preceded it. There is something to be said for the perpetual lament for the degenerating present - there is, indeed, a change in the horizons of knowledge that is always taking place. Maybe the destruction of the literary canons has something to do with their own unlimited growth. Perhaps relativism is a concession to the impossibility - as the rate of acceleration increases and the permissibility of ignorance declines - of an adequate and attainable realm of common knowledge.