Golden Ages

 Reading Gulliver's Travels, I get a sense of a writer who was deeply nostalgic for antiquity, particularly when the narrator laments the loss of 'vigor' which had characterized the early Greeks and Romans. It's been a common complaint that people have lost their vitality across generations, thus spawning a theory of the degeneration of character, as well as a longing for a time when character was stronger and more robust. Even some Buddhist suttas such as the Cakkravarti Sutta talk about times when people start to 'degenerate' in appearance and lifespan, due to previous negative karma that is played out across generations.
   Is this theory correct and true? Somehow, I think it's constructed from an assumption about what is right and good about people, and it's always based on a context. We can never really go back in time to see how people were, for even if we could do this, we would be basing our experiences on what we have already experienced up to that point. In a sense, there is never going back to an original point where human nature is 'pure', because this purity itself is a construction based on a notion of impurity. I sometimes think that with Buddhist sutras, the notion of a Dharma ending age is more serving to warn people to stay on their practice and read sutras, rather than referring to an actual point in history. In fact, one can say that Dharma ending ages can happen several times in a person's life, depending on the obstacles one encounters.
    Is there such a thing as a golden age, then? I think that the golden age is the promise that is always present to have a peaceful mind. It seems to arise not from the past but is always present in someone's psyche, as a kind of promise of what already is, but hasn't been realized.