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The sickness unto death on being human in the age of ecology.

Article Excerpt
"NOTHING," observed Dr Johnson, "can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature." In fact, the substance of this sentence is almost the definition of a quotable quote. We tend to go back again and again to those nicely turned phrases which, in some way, reinforce our general view of human nature. One such quote comes from the Latin poet Horace (65-8 BC). It has to do with the general tendency of older folk to denounce the depravity of the present time and to look back to the days of their youth when things were so much better. Very often, we get just the drastically shortened Latin version--laudator temporis acti. But Horace is much more specific. As a man enters old age, he supposes that such a person becomes "testy and querulous, given to praising the way things were when he was a boy, to play the critic and censor of the new generation".

Now what Horace said two thousand years ago still strikes us as being absolutely true. We have heard our parents and grandparents speak in just such a fashion. But then, we tend to reflect that it is one of the great glories of youth to ignore the dire predictions of old age and to step forward into the world if not with confidence and hope, then at least with gay abandon. This also is part of human nature and has its own stock of well-worn quotations going back to very ancient times.

It is tempting, therefore, to see some sort of a general law, just as Seneca (in De Beneficiis) did around about the time of Horace:

Our ancestors made this complaint, we make this complaint, our descendants will make this complaint: that morals have been overturned, that wickedness reigns, and that human affairs are going downhill and to hell in a hand basket. But things are standing in the same place and will continue to do so, just shifted a bit in one direction or the other, as waves which the approaching tide has carded further in or the receding tide has held back on the inner part of the shoreline.

If such a state of affairs is, indeed, true, then we ought to have cause for hope. However, for the remainder of this essay, I want to suggest that between the days of Seneca or Horace and our own, some general assumptions regarding the meaning of human history have changed radically such that no amount of reflection on the human past can serve as a guide to the future. We are in unknown territory.

I NEED TO BEGIN with some general reflections on the nature of human history. Just as it is proper to talk of a history of philosophy, it is also proper to talk of a history of history. The very process by which we turn a vast assemblage of dates and events into some sort of meaningful story has itself changed over the millennia of recorded human affairs. What is implied here is that history does not assemble itself but, rather, requires some principle of interpretation on our part.

For many of the ancients, such a principle was to be found in the idea of the Four Ages. Here, it was supposed that the history of the earth underwent a declension from a glorious age of gold, through an age of silver, then bronze, and finally, iron. This corresponds, in general terms,...