Ovid And The Age of Lead - Matthew Raphael Johnson
Channel: Yanni McQueen
Date: 2020-11-09

Today's broadcast comes from Dr. Johnson's mistake of watching the “Presidential Debate”. Not finding enough words in English to describe the revolt against reason here, he goes to the work of Ovid, especially in his Metamorphoses. Here, Ovid lays out his conception of history based on constant decay.

Ovid's view is that things are changing for the worse, and human history is a story of degeneration. This is a process moving from the pristine simplicity of the Edenic Golden age, to the arrogant, violent and elitist world of today (and in Ovid's time). The Golden age was of innocence (knowledge was intuited, not grasped through concepts), the Silver age of culture and morals (the development of conceptual thinking), the Bronze age of warfare and the Iron age of total and constant war at every level. The Iron age is where language is used to deceive and all morals are deemed relative.

We live at the decay of the Iron age where even the language used to deceive is deceptive. It is the age of Lead. The decay from intuition to concept is a falling away from unity. Conceptual logic alienates and separates us from the world, but in the Bronze and Iron age, even this has broken down, and soon, it becomes a war of all against all. Here, there are no truths of any kind except life and death. Not even taxes were guaranteed at the time.

It was only the emperor that restored some kind of justice to the state, but even this was a facsimile to true justice. It was the only possibility at the time. Today, justice isn't reasonably possible because the very language used to understand it doesn't exist.