To whom do I speak today?
Brothers are evil,
Friends today are not of love.
To whom do I speak today?
Hearts are thievish,
Every man seizes his neighbor's goods.
To whom do I speak today?
The gentle man perishes,
The bold-faced goes everywhere...
To whom do I speak today?
When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct,
He stirs all men to mirth, although his iniquity is wicked...
The above admonition was composed in ancient Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, thousands of years ago, but the words are those which every generation hears.

There is a proneness in periods of crisis and transition, to conjure up in the mind a fantasy of a previous golden age, when people were of sterling worth and life was lived in accordance with the noble virtues. But, we may well ask, when was there such an age, and where? If people who harbor such quaint notions were to read history, they would realize that such a belief is just about as valid as that there ever was a time "when flowers bloomed for ever and sweethearts were always true," in the words of the old song. Ancient history and the Middle Ages are definitely OUT as far as morality is concerned. Without going so far back, merely a couple of hundred years, Smollett wrote this of eighteenth century England:

Commerce and manufacture flourished to such a degree of increase as has never been known in this island; but this advantage was attended with an irresistible tide of luxury and excess which flowed through all degrees of people, breaking down all the bounds of civil policy, and opening a way for licentiousness and immorality. The highways were infested with rapine and assassination; the cities teemed with the brutal votaries of lewdness, intemperance, and profligacy.

In the nineteenth century (relatively recently), Wordsworth wrote:

The wealthiest man among us is the best:
No grandeur now in nature or in book
Delight us. Rapine, avarice, expense,
This is idolatry; and these we adore.
Plain living and high thinking are no more;
The homely beauty of the good old cause
Is gone, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.
And James Hemming, a modern writer in his book Individual Morality:

Nineteenth-century London was frequently shaken by the destructive antics of informally organized hooligan gangs of young aristocrats. Those young roughs, having idled away their days, spent their nights beating people up, smashing up coffee stalls, alarming women and such like — the Bucks, the Corinthians, and all their imitators and hangers-on. Such bands were following, somewhat less cruelly, in the tradition of the nefarious Mohocks, who terrorized eighteenth-century London.

Sexual propriety? Quoting again from Hemming:

Brothels in the nineteenth century were big business, and, laws to forbid living on the immoral earnings of women, after several rebuffs in Parliament, did not reach the statute books till 1885.

But this was in England, the most progressive country in Europe. There is no evidence for believing that conditions were better on the Continent.

Understandably, twenty-five years after World War II, we are still appalled by the memory of the Nazi gas-chambers and the genocide which was their aim. This is by no means an isolated instance of genocide. History bears witness to similar incidents of destructive hate, culminating in mass murder. The Albigenses were wiped out to a man, and in 1572, at the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve, thousands of Huguenots were slaughtered, Pope Gregory XIII commanding bonfires to be lit and a medal to be struck in celebration! The idea that the mass destruction of one's ideological enemies is justified was already old in the days of the Old Testament. Saul was commanded:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

All of the foregoing is not intended as apologetics justifying violence, bloodbaths, or individual or collective acts of immorality but merely to dispel the myth that there was ever a previous idyllic phase, when man could have said with some semblance of truth:

God's in His Heaven
And all's right with the world.
So, let us lay to rest forever the belief that in the past men were truer, kinder, more upright, and generally more worthy than they are today. Let us give that piece of romantic fiction the respectable funeral that it deserves. Our ancestors and predecessors were no better than we are, and we are certainly not worse than they were. In many respects we have improved considerably on the ways of our forbears. Actually, there has been a great deal of progress, considering that slavery hung on in England until 1772, in America till 1863, and serfdom in Russia till 1861. And, in spite of the injustices and lack of moral scruples that still exist, there is more awareness, kindliness, and sensitivity in many human societies than there has ever been before. Today when a national disaster of great magnitude occurs in a country, quite often the rest of the world rallies around and helps — perhaps not to the extent that it should, but nonetheless, to some extent. Such a broadening expansion of the human conscience would have been deemed a Utopian ideal in former times and impossible.

When acts of genocide were perpetrated in the past, people just accepted it: that was that, and there was nothing to be done about it. In our time, the whole world was revolted by the Nazi gas-chambers, eventually rose against the loathsome disease of Fascism and smashed it even thought it took the combined might of the allied force five years of bitter conflict to do so.

However, in the past, without exception, whatever was inflicted upon a people, they mostly took. Today they don't — they protest, they demonstrate, they kick up a fuss. They have become articulate because they have realized that the greatest evil of all is not poverty, racialism, or war but powerlessness. Naturally, such an unexpected show of interest in public affairs is embarrassing to governments accustomed to an inert and docile population and there is some wistful talk by diehards of "the silent majority," but the present indications are that "the silent majority" is likely to become a silent minority in the face of such urgent problems as over-population, and destruction of natural resources, which, if left unchecked, will make the earth uninhabitable within a foreseeable future. However, against this general tendency is the lamentable fact that nothing was done about the rape of Tibet, and even now there are no large-scale or forceful protests being made about the genocide that is being practiced in that country by the Chinese.

So, far from feeling dejected and dispirited about mankind, we should be hopeful and buoyant. There would be infinitely more cause for alarm and despair if people were as easy to manipulate as sheep or merely apathetic. The arguing and the restlessness throughout the world is about the principles on which we should run our lives, a struggle for values other than the profit motive, for ways and means to make possible greater co-operation between individuals and nations, and for moral maturity in coping with man's new powers and responsibilities. People discuss, argue, petition, protest, demonstrate because of their sympathy, compassion, and love for mankind. It is very difficult to differentiate between the three or to recognize precisely the line of demarcation where one ends and the other begins, because they are illimitable. There are, of course, others who see in these conflicts only hatred but this view is hardly tenable because it is much easier and much more comfortable to remain uninvolved, drifting with the current, nor swimming against it.

The Ven. Nyanaponika has summed up the interdependence of the Four Divine Abidings in the following quotation:

Love imparts to equanimity its selflessness, its boundless nature and even its fervor...

Compassion guards equanimity from falling into cold indifference and keeps it from indolent or selfish isolation. Until equanimity has reached perfection, compassion urges it to enter again and again into the battlefields of the world.

Sympathetic joy gives to equanimity the mild serenity that softens its stern appearance. It is the divine smile on the face of the Enlightened One.