Living at the End of an Age

New Dawn Magazine: Apocalyptic literature and prophecies are found throughout history. But as the ‘world’ has not ‘ended’, our modern day smug intelligentsia – imbued with a belief in ‘progress’ and the Darwinian concept of history that sees a ‘march of humanity’ – scoffs at such notions. Dr. A. R. Wallace, a leading Darwinian scientist of the Victorian era, in a book optimistically entitled The Wonderful Century (1898), wrote of this as the best of all times:

Not only is our century superior to any that have gone before it but… it may be best compared with the whole preceding historical period. It must therefore be held to constitute the beginning of a new era of human progress…

The philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler predicted the ‘decline of the West’ in the aftermath of World War I. The word most commonly used to describe him, even by his admirers, was that of a ‘pessimist’. Does one, however, become a ‘pessimist’ to acknowledge the mortality of organisms, and acknowledge they have life cycles that end in death? Such is life; such is history..read more>>>...