We’ve never had it so good

What we are living on comes from what our ancestors stored up and we are using it up.

In my city of Melbourne, our ancestors were still largely living in tents when they planned our magnificent town halls, wide city streets, public transport with forethought, parks and the splendours of our city centre. We have even sold off the land they reserved for more public transport, and replaced many noble buildings with short-lived “anything goes” structures. Laws that kept water and utilities in public hands have been abandoned.

We remember many awful things that our predecessors did, but their good deeds were for our benefit.

We also benefit from the rest of the world which does not live as well as we do. We have goods made by exploited labour, and forest products and biofuels that come from areas that are cleared for our benefit. We take the fish from the sea, trawling the seabeds to scarify their spawning-beds.

We are continually being told of what we are taking from the next generations. We get fed up with being told.

We could however distinguish between what we have which is worth having and worth handing on to our children, and what we waste, which will mean less for our children.

There are many social goods which we should guard. We could lose them. There have been many societies before us which have reached their pinnacle, and then, it seemed, simply thrown their blessings away. We have an idea of progress which continues ever upward - or at least, until the recent rash of dystopias shown to us by our artists. The Victorian vision was expressed by Tennyson in a poem on the future, with the dream of world peace. We now have hardly a fictional portrait of the future which is not dire.

An ancient Greek view of history, Hesiod for example, was cyclic, with societies and nations declining from a Golden Age to Silver, Bronze or Brass, and Iron, with the lucky ones in the Golden Age throwing away the treasures around them. Even the coinage and pottery deteriorated, from technically skilled and aesthetically delightful, to rough and careless, almost as they had begun. Then another society went through the process.

Archaeology has extended that picture, finding societies that began with primitive nomads, to agricultural villages, the Iron and Bronze ages preceding the Gold, Silver, and Brass. The Roman Empire fitted that paradigm. By that standard, the Victorian age was our Golden Age. We are the age of Brass, and the age of Excess.

But we have the continuation of scientific and technological discovery. There are some signs that these might have reached their peak - we have been to the Moon, but not since. However, we know more about the far edges of our world, in space and in nanotechnology. We know more about ourselves, and our brains. How ironic if when we stand almost at the door of the answers to Life, we end it all.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have made more progress in quality of material life than ever before. This present generation has no idea that we have so much that we could give up as unnecessary, in order that the future generations may continue to live as well as we have.