O tempora O mores!

So here's a speech given in my "Thought and Society" class, in which we read something like rudimentary social theory and cultural criticism, except repackaged for the foreign student's gaze. The first chapter was about how modernization makes us sick, so our prompt was to write about health. My classmates all gave these well-reasoned presentations of scientific fact, but I took the opportunity to crank out a YPU joke speech about a favorite topic for pretentious, macaronic riffing: the fallenness of contemporary society.

Okay, so I followed the prompt pretty loosely. It's more of a sermon than a presentation, really-- a buffoonish Jonathan Edwards parody in which I tried to stuff as many breezy allusions as possible. This was actually really fun to write, and I had my teacher giggling the entire time at my ridiculousness.

After the program's over, I'll post a representative end-of-term speech for unscientific cross-comparison purposes. I've also appended a translation in which I've adhered slavishly to the syntax of the original Chinese, while simultaneously taking arbitrary liberties with its diction. Whatever.

Awkward English is awkward. But misreading canonical texts for the lulz is so much fun. Oh, the biblical quotes come from the Chinese Union Version and the NKJV.

In the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, there's a particularly poetic verse of luring speech: " Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love." What this holy love-verse describes is the close relationship between the soul and the Holy Spirit-- a relationship akin to romance, or marriage. But the metaphor used therein comes from medical science.

According to this conceit, the lover is an invalid and his passion a virus, quietly invading the soul's tissues and organs. Love assuredly can, like the Song of Solomon claim, deeply influence an individual's emotions and behavior. Yet to those living in the world at present, there is a graver illness threatening us. What, then, is this epidemic? Doubtlessly, it is modernity.

We had better revise the Song of Songs and sing, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of modernity." The sickness suffered by this generation of invalids is doubtlessly less poetic than that marveled at by the Song of Songs. The influenza of modernization is a sickness of the soul; what it threatens is the health of our moral sense.

Over the course of losing touch with our ancestors' life of labor, we have gradually lost touch with their virtue, taking the nomoi which they received from Heaven to be trash and so discarding them, in due course declining into a generation of irredeemable-- indeed, wholly depraved-- sinners. The conditions of the modern age lead one to recall the words of the Roman man of letters Cicero: "O tempora O mores!" O what times, O what customs!

Our time and our customs are assuredly different from those of our predecessors. At present, we have already lost the Mandate of Heaven, assassinated the philosopher-king, and rejected the grace of Jehovah; is it not the case then that we have for a long time not dreamed of the Duke of Chou?

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. The circumstances described by this sage of antiquity yet remain, and indeed have already transformed into a sickness unto death. What, then, is the only means of treating this disease caused by sin? A sincere and swift repentance.