A THOUGHT FOR TODAY...


I subscribe to Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day mailing list. So I get a new word in my email inbox every Monday through Friday.

It's a wonderful piece of daily email, I highly recommend signing up:

 Subscribe to A.Word.A.Day

But that's not the point of this post; along with the word for the day Anu includes a quote; a "thought for today" and today's was:

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present. 
--Thomas Babington Macaulay, author and statesman (25 Oct 1800-1859) 

Now, I do tend to subscribe to the notion that human nature overall has not changed overly much since prehistoric times and the general vicissitudes of life, love, growing up, and just figuring out how we can get along with one another appear to be remarkably the same across time and space once you get past some social and cultural inflections.

So I agree with Macaulay in principle that pessimistic visions of how bad things are now in comparison with some idyllic prior state are either clouded by mistaken notions of what it was like or willfully discount critical mitigating factors to their paradisaical vision.

However, writing in the first half of the 19th Century, he was in no position to take into account our present 21st Century situation...

We've arrived at the recognition of our ability not only to slay one another on a massive scale he could scarcely imagine; but also simultaneously ruin much of our living space in the process.

In fact we seem to be doing a pretty good job of fouling our (and every other organism's) living space anyway, just by doing our thing and not cleaning up after ourselves.

So, while I don't think humans are any more (or less) degenerate or society more (or less) decadent than at times in the past. I do think we are in the unprecedented position of being able to destroy ourselves and the habitable planetary biosphere; intentionally or no.




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