Living in The Dark Ages

 WE ARE LIVING in the dark ages, which future historians will possibly designate as having spanned two thousand years, from the collapse of the roman Empire to the reinvention of civilization around the year twenty five hundred A.D..if, as might be hoped, our descendants are kinder, wiser, and more compassionate than we were. If not, as Einstein said in a time capsule, may the devil take them. We prefer to think of ourselves as enlightened, progressive, modern, just as our ancestors did two hundred years ago, two thousand years ago. In a sense we are; history for the most part is a story of human progress. Our descendants, assuming they have become more civilized than we were, may well marvel that in the twenty first century, in a world with an abundance of food, millions of people did not have enough to eat, when better economic efficiency would have ensured that everyone did. Assuming they have become more peaceful, they might be amazed at the level of violence tolerated in the twenty first century, and in the fact that during the twentieth century more than one hundred million people died fighting in wars. They will likely marvel in disgust that the vast majority of the world's material and monetary wealth was owned and controlled by a tiny fraction of the population, which generally hoarded it uselessly, preventing by design any equitable distribution of wealth which would have stabilized the world's economies and given all of humanity an acceptable living standard, rather than dividing the world into a small elite wealthy class and a huge impoverished class. Billions of hungry, impoverished people, suffering needlessly. They might shudder in horror that for decades many countries maintained large stockpiles of deadly nuclear weapons which threatened the very survival of the planet and the human race. But perhaps their greatest amazement and disgust they will reserve for humanity's wanton destruction of the ecosystem, bringing about catastrophic climate change through their insatiable greed and lust for even increasing material wealth. While the natural environment steadily deterioration, twenty first century people seemingly ignored its deterioration, preferring to pretend that the problem was not real. They will find it disgusting that the problem was left to their descendants to cope with, and will be acutely aware of the sacrifices that were later made in solving a problem which never should have happened in the first place. As twenty fifth century people look back on their ancestors, they will perhaps find it difficult to regard us as anything other than uncivilized barbarians.