Boethius, The Consolation 2.20

“O happy was that early age of men,

contented with their trusted and unfailing fields,

nor ruined by the wealth that weakens.

Easily was the acorn got that used to satisfy their longwhile fast.

They knew not Bacchus' gifts, nor honey mixed therewith.

They knew not how to tinge with Tyre's purple dyes the sheen of China's silks.

Their sleep kept health on rush and grass.

The stream gave them to drink as it flowed by.

The lofty pine to them gave shade.

Not one of them yet clave the ocean's depths,

nor, carrying stores of merchandise, had visited new shores.

Then was not heard the battle's trump,

nor had blood made red with bitter hate the bristling swords of war.

For why should any madness urge to take up first their arms

upon an enemy such ones as knew no sight of cruel wounds

nor knew rewards that could be reaped in blood?

Would that our times could but return to those old ways!

But love of gain and greed of holding

burn more fiercely far than Ætna's fires.

Ah! who was the wretch who first unearthed the mass of hidden gold,

the gems that only longed to lie unfound?

For full of danger was the prize he found.”

—from Book 2, Poem 5

The skeptic and cynic in me is always wary of thinking that the past must surely have been better than the present, that we were at some point in time closer to the gods, or that men once possessed far greater virtue than they do now. I am never quite sure what to think of this literally, though I suspect that, whatever we were like in prehistory, there is a great figurative truth here.

Whatever may have happened in a certain time or at a certain place, we are all indeed better and greater the closer we are to virtue and to its ultimate source, and we are all indeed worse and lesser the further we distance ourselves from virtue and its ultimate source. That distance may not necessarily be one of time or place, but it may be one of conviction.

I can easily imagine a state where man is content with what Nature has given him, where his is not tempted by wealth, where he is happy to embrace simplicity. He has not been dragged into gluttony, lust, and drunkenness, he is not obsessed with the profit of trade, and he does not seek to destroy his brothers in war.

What could make such a state of affairs possible, way back when, far in the future, or even right at this moment? Some would say that such a life is impossible, because people are just made to be bad. Yet I wonder if, in fact, they are made to be good, but only certain choices, the abuses of their freedoms, lead them to what is bad? Isn’t it what someone decides to love that will determine how well, or how poorly, he ends up living?

Lady Philosophy has already been making it clear that what we seek, and why we seek it, will end up making all of the difference. If we look to our own character as the measure of life, we will demand nothing more than what Nature has already given us. If we look to pleasure, power, or wealth as the measure of life, we will demand only to receive, and we will fight one another over the spoils.

I was always fascinated, and terrified, by that scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, “The Dawn of Man,” where the primates learn the use of violence to gain possession of the watering hole. I hope I was not alone in asking if this was a good or a bad thing, progress in the right direction or a step away in the wrong direction? I leave it to the anthropologists to look at the huge sweep of human development, but on merely a personal level, I could only wonder what I would choose to do, if I felt I needed to pay the price of murder in order to get first pick of what I could eat and drink?

Perhaps the very fact that I might understand something about the choice is the actual progress, that I can even make the choice to begin with, or that I can decide what I desire and what I despise.

Life is never as simple as a film, or even a history book, but the question rings in my ears, just as it does when I read the Consolation: when am I getting it right, and when am I getting it wrong? I can only answer that, once again, when I understand what is truly worth having in this life. Were all the riches we ended up finding a blessing, or a curse? The danger may well be making myself subject to their nature, and not to the nature within myself. 

Written in 9/2015