At the end of 2001, a quotation from Dickens has kept popping up in my reading – the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The English department at the community college where I teach used this, and Thomas Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls,” as the basis for the department’s final essay assignment, but few of the hundreds of papers we read showed much insight into how these quotations apply to our own times. Newspaper columnists have naturally been more successful when taking up the “best of times, worst of times” theme, but I have found their perspective to be somewhat limited.

What both the Dickens and the Paine quotes underscore, of course, is their authors’ convictions that the times referenced in their works were major turning points in history, with Dickens looking back at the French Revolution and Paine writing a contemporary call to arms during the American Revolution. I think almost anyone would agree that both authors were correct in assessing these events as critical junctures in the history of Western civilization.

Are we at such a juncture again? Though I know enough of history to be aware that every age naturally looks upon itself as historically pivotal, I think we may indeed discover that the early years of the twenty-first century are especially so. Not the least of the reasons for this opinion is that globalization causes events in any corner of the planet to send out ripples that reach around the world, swiftly and dramatically.

Technology is, of course, largely responsible for this phenomenon. Technology is also one of the reasons why we stand at a pivotal point in history and why we are living in the best and worst of times. One does not need to think very hard to perceive the good and the bad sides of technology – that it has given us, concurrently, wonderful means for improving our lives and frightening means for massively destroying lives.

In addition, technology is moving at a pace never seen before. The rapidity of change in technology today – in every area from computer science to medicine, from daily living to the conduct of warfare – is like a tape running at fast forward, next to which the industrial revolution now seems like progress in slow motion.

Indeed, the rapidity with which the world we live in and the things in that world change is so much taken for granted that any reference to “our changing world” is a cliché. Yet, paradoxically, we are rarely fully aware of the impact of the change. We do not often reflect upon the interrelationship between the speed of work and the quality of work. Or, to take the idea to a more abstract level, we do not often reflect upon the effect of changes in our material lives on our moral and spiritual lives. Indeed, swept along by currents of change that require all our energy just to stay afloat, we find that we have little time to reflect at all. And this is perhaps the crowning irony of our age. In the midst of more time-saving devices than ever before, we do not have the time to reflect – only to endeavor to do as many things at once as we can.

We live in the best of times because the possibilities for the human race were never more promising; we live in the worst of times because we are in grave danger of pursuing all of these possibilities without due reflection, without thought to the consequences. We are also in danger because, in our headlong rush toward the future, we do not sufficiently consider the past and learn from it. The benefits of moving rapidly are greatly reduced when the movement consists of the repetition of past mistakes.

We have seen in the past year how individuals using our own technology against us can wreak havoc in a matter of minutes. To be sure, these were premeditated acts, carefully considered, albeit by twisted minds. But the real determiner of the direction of history will be, as it always has been, our ability to think, analyze, and reflect. We will not have much success at this if we are all, figuratively speaking, trying to talk on a cell phone, discipline a child, and plan dinner simultaneously while speeding through life at 80 m.p.h.

There is another benefit to taking time out to reflect. An old wish says, “May you live in interesting times.” Clearly, that wish has been granted because, whether these times are the best or the worst, they are certainly interesting. But, if we don’t take the time to reflect on them, we won’t appreciate how interesting they are.

Rich Turner