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This video is part of a collaboration with author and futurist John Michael Godier.
It’s sponsored by Trade Coffee.
How will the world end?
Reflecting on that somber topic during the reign of Nero, the Stoic philosopher Seneca
decided that the most likely cause would be a universal flood, in which rain and surging
tides would merge with subterranean reservoirs to drown every land.
After imagining the last survivors starving on mountaintops as lightning played over the
swelling sea, Seneca looked further into the future.
The earth, he believed, would be restored after the deluge, and humanity re-created.
But the new men would be as corrupt as the old, and the world would be drowned again.
Seneca also believed, however, that before the coming deluge, human observation and research
would reveal more and more of nature’s secrets, solving puzzles that perplexed his own generation.
Seneca’s musings reflect the complexity of ancient ideas about the future, which differed
profoundly from our own.
Though prefigured during the Enlightenment, the modern assumption that the future will
be more technologically advanced, if not materially better, than the present is a product of the
nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution made a belief in continual progress both plausible
and fashionable.
Far from assuming progress, the foundational texts of classical literature proclaim the
decline of human society from a primeval golden age.
The most famous example, quoted and imitated throughout antiquity, is Hesiod’s description
of the ages of man, which presents humanity as the last and least in a series of mortal
races.
Decline was ongoing: soon, Hesiod claimed, humanity would lose its last semblance of
morality, and be destroyed by Zeus.
Greek thinkers often incorporated nostalgia for the lost golden age into a cyclical conception
of history, which applied the human progression of youth, maturity, and old age to whole societies.
The historian Polybius, for example, described the cycle of governments, from monarchy to
mob rule, through which all states inevitably pass, again and again, indefinitely.
Presocratic philosophers applied the same paradigm to the universe itself.
Heraclitus, for example, believed that all matter was continually resolving from and
dissolving into primordial fire, and Empedocles outlined a cosmic cycle of love and strife
that caused all matter to unite and disintegrate in turn.
Later, the Stoics held the universe was consumed by a conflagration at the end of every eon,
after which history repeated exactly: there would be another Athens, another Alexander,
another Rome.
Without necessarily arguing against a cyclical theory of history, a number of authors celebrated
technological advances.
Although there was some disagreement about the relative significance of ingenuity and
serendipity in driving progress, it was generally acknowledged that human discoveries had altered
life for the better.
The long list of inventions in Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedia, which ranges from the alphabet
to catapults, attests to widespread awareness of technological change over time.
Assertions that the future might be better than the present, however, emphasized moral
or political, rather than technological, change.
The most famous utopia in classical literature, the ideal city of Kallipolis in Plato’s
Republic, is if anything less technologically advanced than actual contemporary poleis.
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The Romans inherited Greek ideas about the future, and infused them with a sense of political
destiny.
After the unrest of the late Republic, Roman poets hailed the peace brought by the reign
of Augustus as a return of the primeval golden age, when war was unknown.
Though intended to please the emperor, these evocations seem to have reflected genuine
enthusiasm.
Whether there was any widespread expectation of actual improvement in the future, however,
is difficult to say.
The Romans imagined the original golden age to have been devoid of technology, since the
earth had freely provided all things.
Although the new imperial golden age was not associated with a rejection of existing comforts,
nor was it linked with any expectation of technological progress.
What sufficed in the present would provide for the future.
Long before the actual decay of Roman power, proclamations of the new golden millennium
coexisted with anxieties about future decline.
The Romans liked to claim that their ancestors had been simple and virtuous, and seldom missed
an opportunity to attack the corruption of their society – and especially its leaders
– by modern luxuries.
Such self-indulgence, they lamented, would doom the Roman people if not corrected.
The seemingly endless series of disasters that overtook the empire in late antiquity
seemed to vindicate this view – save in the eyes of the growing Christian community,
which had a very different conception of the future.
In contrast to the cycles of destruction and rebirth proposed by Greek philosophers, the
early Christians had a resolutely linear conception of time, which traced a divine plan of salvation
culminating in the Second Coming of Jesus.
Christian scholars posited that human history would last six thousand years – one millennium
for each of the six days of creation.
Some believed that the sixth millennium was nearly ended, and that the Second Coming was
at hand.
Others, notably St. Augustine, rejected any precise predictions.
Following a prophecy in the Book of Daniel, which foresaw the rise and fall of four great
kingdoms, early Christians tended to identify the Roman Empire as the last power that would
dominate the earth.
When it fell, they predicted, the end times would begin.
This interpretation would have a long history in the Eastern Roman Empire, where the fall
of Constantinople came to be closely associated with the apocalypse.
Although Christians believed that the Gospels were destined to be preached in every land,
and hoped for a universal community of believers, they did not expect the world to improve materially
in the future.
In this, at least, they agreed with the Romans.
Despite poetic effusions about a new golden age, the Romans expected decline.
With reform and discipline, they might delay dissolution.
But in the end, inertia would prevail.
The empire would fall, and all the ordered symmetries of civilization dissolve, to lie
in chaos until the world was renewed, and history repeated again.
To explore other visions of the future, and some of the fascinating parallels contemporary
thinkers have drawn between our own society’s destiny and the visions of the Greeks and
Romans, follow the link onscreen to the second part of this video, by futurist John Michael
Godier.
Thanks for watching.