Ovid tells us that man has traversed four ages from gold to silver, bronze and iron. These terms are metaphors for a descent from an original age of peace, harmony, and eternal Spring to a silver age of seasons, some halcyon, some harsh, and hence the need for labor and shelter. Bronze brought with it war and austerity, and the age of iron finds the people corrupt and selfish. Modesty, truth and faith are gone, replaced by deceit, fraud, violence and greed.
Myths like this, and many of the musings of philosophy and religion, concern a fall from innocence and grace and the question of how to return to better days and escape the shackles of iron, what Blake called “the mind-forged manacles.” Aristotle, in common with many of the ancient religions of the East, called for a Middle Way, a Golden Mean, an idea that echoes the inscription at Delphi, “Nothing in Excess,’ that is, moderation in all things.
In our brute, ironbound political times, we are increasingly ignoring this wise counsel and going to extremes. Some are simply nihilists who long for destruction, Armageddon, Gotterdammerung. But often the zealots advocating a hard swerve to left or right justify it by claiming it will lead to an imagined utopia.
Typically the right aspires to return to an imagined golden age in the past. Then, it is supposed, America was pure and uncorrupted, safe prosperous, homogenous, undivided. When this golden era took place is never clearly defined or it is in the eye of the beholder. Was it at the time of the nation’s founding when giants walked the earth. Or perhaps during the homespun days of “Little House on the Prairie,’ or in the small towns or cozy suburbs of “Andy Hardy,’ “Father Knows Best,” or “Happy Days.”
The problem with these nostalgic reveries is that a little investigations suggests the times it question were less than golden. Memory has edited out the sorrow, strife and drudgery. No modern husband or wife would trade home appliances for the washboard or the ironing board, the car for the buggy, the minimum wage for the sweatshop, indoor plumbing for the outhouse, or nasty politics for Civil War.
The recent past contains robber barons, the gunning down of strikers, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and slavery. As in most romances, the past we are asked to imagine is sanitized and features people like us in a starring role, as landed gentry, say, instead of scullery maids, as decision makers or heirs to the estate, not disenfranchised second class citizens, servants, women, landless peasants.
At the other extreme, the left imagines not a golden age of the past, but one to come. Healthcare for all, wealth redistribution, free education, peace and prosperity for all. Liberty, equality, fraternity with automatons doing the heavy lifting.
Many of the Socialist Democratic governments of Western Europe have a modest form of this dream, but Americans seem unlikely to be willing to pay the cost in far higher taxes, far more ubiquitous regulation, bans on pollution, guns, hate speech, swashbuckling free markets.
The new deus ex machina to accomplish the full utopia is always turning over all labor to our robotic, algorithmic, big data overlords. The five-year plan and the commissar will be replaced by rational, but inhuman calculations by silicon masterminds. What could go wrong?
Well, what do we do with the surplus population when work is outsourced? They aren’t all going to stay home and write sonnets, concertos or create apps. As our present shows, the result of an evolving world where many of us are no longer of much use is a gig economy, middle-aged kids still living with their parents, displaced workers, financial impediments to marrying, having children, buying homes. Drinking, doping, despair and death. Crime, mass shootings, fury, division, blood in the streets. Dystopia rather than utopia, unless you are ensconced in the executive suit and the gated community.
Alas, we are probably going to have to muddle through the great disruption in the usual way. By sticking to the moderate middle way. Of course, the extremists love to say that the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos, but the only things at the extremists tend to be extremists. Often dead extremists, their victims, or both.
Going to extremes has historically brought a few people a demi-paradise and the rest a world of trouble. Betting you will be among the lucky few is a fool’s game. Besides, extremism is rarely attractive. As John Lennon charmingly pointed out, “If you go carrying’ pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow. Better to seek the hard work and boring compromises of doing nothing in excess, but accomplishing some incremental progress. Great leaps forward tend to be off cliffs.