Man is a constitutionally ungrateful creature, taking all progress immediately for granted and making the most of whatever complaints still come to hand. However privileged he is, either in relation to people who have lived in previous ages, or to contemporaries living elsewhere in the world or even in his own country, a man can always find reason to believe that he is the most unfortunate of creatures, and that all is for the worst in this, the worst of all possible worlds.
In this invigorating, clever and often very funny satire, Ross Clark mocks the pieties of our age that have replaced the pieties of our forefathers. Among them, of course, is that our industrialised society is uniquely horrible, polluting the earth to destruction, responsible for all the diseases that afflict us (albeit after an unprecedently long life) and depriving life itself of meaning.
The author imagines a world in which industrialisation has gone into reverse.
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