Regression
Glossary

pessimistic perspective


“We have a finite environment — the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

(David Attenborough)

 

“We have a finite environment — the planet. Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth in a finite environment is either a madman or an economist.”

(David Attenborough)

David Attenborough

David Attenborough

 

  • can one still believe our present/modern European (western-born) civilisation – the social amelioration, cultural enhancement, scientific development, technological improvement it achieved – really moving in such a “desirable direction”?

  • can one consider positively today’s tendency for an urban lifestyle – in both its material and immaterial aspects – to become, for the first time in Human’s History, the preponderant global human social-cultural pattern?

  • can one ignore actual main global negative issues – international instability, warfare capacity (weaponry) increase, social inequalities growth, financial unbalance, economic unsustainability (resource exhaustion due to extractivism), environmental damages (pollution, climate change, extinction of animal and vegetable species), &c.

 

  • may we consider our actual societies sufficiently aware of the main – local, regional and global – problems they should frontally facing and urgently solving?

  • can we assume our’s – today tending – global culture enough strengthened and structured to be capable of resolving present common global threatens end challenges?

  • will we have enough collective wisdom – knowledge, intelligence, mutual understanding, sharing capacity, &c. – to restrain global development into the limits of growth of our finite planet, to cpositively and efficiently to global warming process, to manage sustainably water resources, to come back to – or to develop new – renewable energy technologies, &c.?

From a classic – and quite a simplistic – perspective, Man’s History can be approached as a process successively (alternatively) determined (lead) by different societies geographically confined («civilisations») that develop through cycles of birth, growth, ageing and death, similar to people’s lives.

 

wheel of time

eternal return

fortune

ages of Man (golden, silver, bronze, iron, chaos)

The Roman poet Ovid (1st century BC – 1st century AD) tells a similar myth of Four Ages in Book 1.89–150 of the Metamorphoses. His account is similar to Hesiod’s, with the exception that he omits the Heroic Age. Ovid emphasizes the justice and peace that defined the Golden Age. He adds that in this age, men did not yet know the art of navigation and therefore did not explore the larger world, no man had knowledge of any arts but pre agriculture. In the Silver Age, Jupiter introduces the seasons and men consequentially learn the art of agriculture and architecture. In the Bronze Age, Ovid writes, men were prone to warfare, but not impiety. Finally, in the Iron Age, men demarcate nations with boundaries; they learn the arts of navigation and mining; they are warlike, greedy and impious. Truth, modesty and loyalty are nowhere to be found.

 

as a single