Was there ever such a thing as a Golden Age? I've always been fascinated by this quote from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
This was the golden age of the Antonines and it covers the period 96 - 180 CE. If this is to be believed then when absolute power, guidance and wisdom are found together, then there lies the secret.If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.
But let's not forget that ancient Rome was filled with hovels, slaves, and prostitutes. It was also a place of paedophilia.
Then there were the awesome Greeks with their Arcadia, a magical if imaginary land of milk and honey. But let's not forget that Greece was a land of feuding states.
If you believe the movies, then the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1 of England was a golden age in the 16th century. She held back the Spanish and the Scots, but she had to deal with an abundance of other problems.
In France there were the years following the French Revolution until the fall of Napoleon.
It's been suggested that in Britain the second half of the 20th century was a golden age of relative peace and exponential wealth. Consumerism and the rise of youth as a cultural force meant that it became the New Jerusalem and London the New Babylon from the late 1950's onward to the eventual crash of the financial markets in the 1990's.
In America there was rampant consumerism and the Reagan years of the 1980's.
But really, wasn't this all a heap of nostalgia? And didn't the second half the 20th century with its asset stripping of the world and irreversible global warming just store up huge problems for the future?