it seems i often end up in conversations about the state of the world: about whether the human condition is, overall, getting better -- or worse -- or just staying the same.
a surprising number of my colleagues seem to agree with hesiod who, in his WORKS AND DAYS -- a poem in epic meter, approximately as old as the ILIAD and ODYSSEY of homer -- opines that our lot is steadily going to hell in a handbasket: from the originary golden race, he laments, we have steadily declined to the race of his own day -- the 'race of iron' that he wishes he had not been born into. [see the famous legend of the five races, lines 109-201.]
other folks, of course, take a much brighter view: every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.
there's plenty of leeway between these two extremes. and it also need not be simple or linear, of course. some things could be deteriorating even as others improve.
ever the optimist, i've looked hard for evidence of actual progress on the part of the human race. one thing that i thought -- thought -- i could point to as incontrovertible evidence of progress was our virtually global rejection of slavery. over the centuries from ancient rome to now, we have come to the point where, by the middle of the 20th century, we could conceive of and produce a so-called universal declaration of human rights. whatever its strengths or weaknesses as a document, the sheer fact of its existence ought to be cause for some satisfaction. and its very first article affirms that 'all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.'
in any case, when i made the observation to a [witty, sardonic] friend that at least we have dispensed with slavery in the modern world, he smirked at me and said: 'you want fries with that?'
and sarah baird just wrote in with this link to a story reporting that liz hurley and her tycoon husband 'paid their maid as little as £1.20 an hour' -- expecting her moreover to work interminable hours at a stretch.
are these examples, as some serious thinkers would assert, tantamount to modern slavery? and, to take an even more wide-angle view of the problem, have we indeed made any moral progress [as opposed to purely technological progress] since ancient times?
