The field of History is today ruled by the deconstructionists. They used to be called “revisionists,” but they shed that title once they succeeded at “revising” core narrative foundations of the West such that they could set terms pretty much wherever they pleased. The Left’s power in the field having been solidified, the true Revisionists now belong to the Right (Thomas777 being a good example). And righteous though they are, they have next to zero institutional power.
So the deconstructionists march on, and one pillar of the time-honored conception of history they like to attack is the idea of the “Golden Age.” The aim, of course, is to discredit the idea that America or Great Britain or the European West at large had peaks toward which the wrong people might orient themselves. Periods they might use as a north star in shaping the future, at the implicit detriment to their enemies.
“If that was the peak, what were some key features we might replicate now?” one might ask. “Oh dear, some of those don’t sound nice at all.”
“No they weren’t nice,” say the deconstructionists. “So much inequality. So much in-group preference. Nothing was ever nice, actually.”
The idea is anti-progressive in that it suggests a cyclical view of history. Rise and fall, up and down, over and over again. Progressives liken a Golden Age to a utopia, and progressive dogma maintains that utopia is something that has never existed, and something toward which we must always strive. Leftism is a state of permanent revolution, and it cannot tolerate the romantic pull of the past. One could say this is less true of the focus on “indigenous issues,” which would seem to suggest a Golden Age of Native Americans nobly working with the land before the Europeans came and destroyed the primordial Eden. The trouble with this is that the Leftist project doesn’t really care about the Native Americans. They are a battering ram, a means of extracting guilt from targeted groups. And the Left knows any close examination of American tribal cultures reveals that they were not aligned with Current Year progressive moral standards, and so would still be bound for the trash heap.
The Left’s aversion to hierarchy is also key to their dismissal of the “Golden Age” idea. There certainly has never been a Golden Age for humanity a whole, and if one civilization was up, others had to be down. Groups built and fought and died for their own at the expense of others. The reality is that human groups — from the tribe to the culture to the civilization — have always existed within the constant churn of competition inherent to nature, and hierarchy both between groups and within them is the natural tendency in order to attain some form of stability. This reality is intolerable to the Leftist project, and to even acknowledge it poses a threat to the rickety systems thrown up over the ashes of institutions it has destroyed.
Golden Ages have existed, though as the Left would content, they were not perfect and did not work well for all. They were not “equitable.” They were eras where a culture or civilization was operating as its peak in the important zones — cultural self-confidence, functional institutions, healthy family life, material wealth, etc. The past does not repeat, but Golden Ages usually look back on similar eras that came before them. The Romans molded their peak with an eye toward the Greeks, the Achaemenid Persians with an eye toward the Babylonians, the Aztecs with an eye toward the Toltecs. They respected what came before, regarded it with some level of awe, and understood that the past may be greater than present. It drove them forward and filled their hearts with competitive fire.
That they were bound to experience decline themselves likely did not dawn on them as they ascended. It probably took them by surprise, a dawning realization often in the middle of the fall, when it’s too late to reverse. Perhaps they too attacked the idea of the Golden Age once they were past it. “Nothing was ever nice, actually.”
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