Antiquity versus Modernity: Aspects of Lifestyles and Life-conditions

Abstract

Biology and ecology set optimal limits to our potential for development and significant deviations from these limits threaten our well-being and existence. Yet there seems to be little, if any, concern, for those significant deviations that are atavistic and are reinforced by or are generated from Western industrial modernity, which most Third World countries have adopted as their favoured approach to national development. This paper focuses on nine of the areas in which these deviations occur. The measure of deviation, explicitly or implicitly made, is a select set of lifestyles and life-conditions in modernity and antiquity. The emphasis in this paper on ecologically or biologically efficient lifestyles and life-conditions in antiquity is not a recommendation to return to the ways of antiquity; it is to highlight the principles and values of wellness embedded in those ways in order to provoke further discussions and to imply either that creative adaptations of those lifestyles and life-conditions are desirable or that policy interventions may be required to address deviations from them.

Keywords: antiquity, modernity, life-conditions, biology, ecology