What IS A Golden Age?
The phrase “Golden Age” in Western culture comes from Hesiod’s Works and Days, written in the age of Homer, sometime between 700 and 650 BC. Hesiod imagined—or retold a popular story—about the ages of men as they were created by the gods. According to Hesiod’s account, the Golden Age of men lived in the time of Cronos, who famously castrated his father, Uranus, before being laid low himself by his son Zeus, who loves the lightning and gathers the clouds.
Hesiod’s Golden Age actually sounds rather boring.
“First of all the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods.”
As I’ve often said, “life is conflict and peace is death”—and if we believe that “Good times create weak men,” a quote attributed to G. Michael Hopf in 2016 and not ancient sources as many imagine, then the Golden Age that Hesiod described is perhaps not even something we should desire. Hesiod’s Golden Age is a dream of rest, a junkie’s heaven for weary souls.
This Golden Age is “the first matrix” described by Agent Smith, a dismal failure that the human mind found intolerable.
“…entire crops were lost…”
At any rate, even in ancient sources, the Golden Age does not last and does not describe the state of man as he is. Hesiod noted that “strife is wholesome for men.”
Those who dream of a world without strife deeply misunderstand the creature they want to inhabit their pastoral realm. Beware of the insidious visionaries who float ideas like “universal basic income” as they are often also fond of assisted euthanasia, which seems likely to be what people with nothing to do and nothing to work for will eventually request.
The most benevolent among them are projecting. A man such as myself can always imagine projects for himself that have little or no relationship to attaining currency. No one is paying me to write this essay and it is only related to some potential future income in the most abstract possible way.
But I know myself and other men well enough to know this is unusual. I was speaking to a normal, very intelligent man the other day. I think he’s an engineer of some kind, a family man who worked his way up from relatively humble beginnings. He told me he’d accumulated so much time off that his employers asked him to use a few weeks of vacation. He agreed to take the time, and then told me he didn’t know what to do with himself. He said he was going stir-crazy, so he bought some video games.
There’s nothing wrong with this guy. Men like this keep the world running. But they need to be challenged. They need a purpose. They need something to do.
The Arcadian reverie of the Hesiod’s Golden Age would be such a man’s perfect hell.
Men require something to push against. Some earth to turn. Some Herculean labors or dragons to slay. Something to do, something at which they can aim their strength, intellect, and effort.
Perhaps we are not so different after all, that engineer and I.
What would I have to write about—if nothing was wrong?
If nothing better could be imagined?
If men—men as they are now, not as they were in the days of crooked-counseled Cronus—if men are to dream of a Golden Age, then that age must be an age of “wholesome strife.”
An age of toil—an age of expansion and endeavor.
We do not look back at a renaissance and admire how men relaxed.
We admire their works—what they built and what they conquered, their inventions, their arts, and the beauty they left behind.
One thing is, I believe, certain.
We will never live in a Golden Age or see the fruits of one so long as we are looking backward, wishing we had been born in our fantasy of some other time, believing that our best is behind us.
Men are born of the earth, destined to reach forever upward—not to burrow back down into what is long buried.
The past is the place we come from, and there is wisdom there that we forget at our peril.
But our past is also a backstop.
Our past is the ground we thrust against to push ourselves ever higher.
Our most recent past has been the postmodern age of deconstruction, spiritual disease, and the dark humor of despair.
If we are to enter a Golden Age, we must escape the pull of postmodern nihilism and generate a sincere and subjective optimism.
We must find a belief in ourselves that we are good and loved by the gods and destined for the kind of success that can only be realized through vigorous action.
Our Golden Age will not and cannot be the passive, pastoral Golden Age of Cronus.
It will be a Golden Age of Men—the men alive today—which will always mean an age of action and creation.
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