Wednesday Philosophizing

The following, written by sociologist Daniel Bell back in the 1950s (in his classic study The End of Ideology) might serve as a kind of antidote for those who feel that there's something uniquely dark about the present state of the world. I mean, that may very well be the case, but the reality is that it's a commonly held view by practically every other generation throughout history, so maybe we shouldn't assume the worst is about to befall us, or anyway, that we can't perhaps do something about it:

"There have been few periods in history when man
felt his world to be durable, suspended surely, as in
Christian allegory, between chaos and heaven. In
the Egyptian papyrus of more than four thousand
years ago, one finds: "... impudence is rife... the
country is spinning round and round like a potter's
wheel... the masses are like timid sheep without a
shepherd... one who yesterday was indigent is now
wealthy and the sometime rich overwhelm him with
adulation." The Hellenistic period as described by
Gilbert Murray was one of a "failure of nerve";
there was "the rise of pessimism, a loss of self-
confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal
human effort." And the old scoundrel Talleyrand
claimed that only those who lived before 1789
could have tasted life in all its sweetness."