"Ours is the crowning era foretold in prophecy: born of Time, a great new cycle of centuries begins. Justice returns to the earth, the Golden Age returns ..." - Virgil, Eclogue IV, trans. C. Day Lewis.

Earlier this year when I was painstakingly working my way through Dante, my concentration lapsed and, before I knew it, I had slipped past the scene describing the love of Paolo and Francesca which caused Dante to faint and which inspired various tellings of Francesca da Rimini.

This tiny sliver of pathos warmed hearts down the ages just as, in a different dimension, Faust chilled them. Not long afterwards, sensing how my lapse had taken place, I re-read some passages of Milton on Hell, comparing these with Dante and I then superimposed these, in my mind's eye, on various renditions of the Orpheus and Euridice story.

The point of these musings was that --- for most of this millennium --- Western culture has been nourished on a relative handful of stories from Scripture, joined later by the re-introduction of the Greek and Roman classics and their associated mythologies, painstakingly copied first by hand and then laboriously in manual typesetting. So scarce were the resources available to the learned and creative that they lingered over every word, every nuance, interpreting and reinterpreting.

It was only in the Eighteenth Century that a whole host of new stories were created with the birth of the novel and the outburst of romanticism.

Our Century is neatly summed up by its last great cornucopic manifestation, the Internet. The themes may be timeless, the variations predictable to a degree but we are a planet writhing under the unceasing whip of narrative.

There is, sadly, another less happy reason for the declining purchase of Dante, Milton, Marlowe or Goethe and that is our rendezvous with horrors much worse than any they imagined. What the gods have done to us and what we have done in the name of our gods down the ages is nothing to what, invoking no deity, we have done to ourselves. We watched the futility of the Somme and swore it would never happen again; our culture, seriously damaged by the trauma of the trenches, was shattered by the Shoah; and after Auschewitz we said it would never happen again, indeed, so evil and non-comparable - the word "peculiar" has lost its value - were Hitler and Stalin that we said it could not happen again; yet since Anola Gay greeted her returned son, we have, with the amnesia of self-preservation, watched mindless, causeless, human slaughter on an astronomical scale in almost every part of the inhabited world.

The miracle - and it is a kind of collective, psychological miracle - is that we have survived to tell any kind of tale, in some way to account for ourselves.

Morally muddled we may be - a quite different state from the hypocritical, of which we accuse each other - but we still believe that there is some value in being moral as opposed, say, to being pragmatic in a utilitarian sort of way which might conceivably have stopped Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the rest in their bloody, idealistic, blinkered tracks.

Our culture is muddled as most teenagers are muddled, driven by idealism, hormones and self-interest into paradoxes almost beyond endurance; for we have collectively passed out of the childhood of Christian good and evil, out of a belief in the golden age to which we might return, out of the naiveté of the unequivocal into the aching horror of power, responsibility, choice, relativism and ambiguity. There is nothing we cannot do but we only know this because, in the flickerings of the never night, of the ever-wakeful planet, we know there is nothing we have not done.

Culture has never quite come this far before. The prospect of fate tossing coins determining implosion or salvation flickers around the era of Alexander the Great and though the Romans were superlatively unimaginative in psychic and spiritual matters, there is a hint of the same Draconian dichotomy, fuelled in part by the corrupting influence of Oriental religiosity, not least Christianity, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius; but it was that very Christianity which, for more than a millennium, removed that dread potential for doom or glory from the earthly to the heavenly realm.

Martin Luther and the Council of Trent were, self-consciously, rearguard actions against the terrafication of the sublime and the Satanic.

No wonder we are in a state of almost chronic hysteria, addicted as much to sports shoes and adrenalin as booze and heroin. Law-makers may rail as our addictions shift from heroin to heroine but the key point is not to what we are addicted to but that addiction is intrinsic to our condition. As there is nothing we cannot imagine because there is nothing we have not done, our need to escape is palpable and totally explicable and comprehensible. Yet there is nothing which can provide more than a temporary respite; even greed fails us, its Faustian contracts falling due like manna.

We can expect nothing from our forefathers who say, absurdly, that we are morally inferior; they looked on while Hitler and the smoke rose. They say that our culture is corrupted by violence but what generation does not look at its parental photograph albums? They have plenty to say but nothing to tell us. We are as a whole generation to them as each teenager is to its parents but today the idea of the generation gap is more than a piece of youthful rebellion and parental nostalgia, it is wider than either can imagine from opposite positions of certainty and uncertainty.

Whereas they had religion, we have science but this is no time to erect a monument to science; no time to weigh its achievements against the obscurantism of clerics or the venality of politicians. To weigh evil as if it were toxic waste and declare its increase throughout the earth is a piece of childish fiction. If people believe in the constancy of God and the Devil then it follows that their relative strength cannot change through time. Better our muddle than the old certainties. We can only hope from what we learn for ourselves.

Perhaps our greatest problem is defining the selves from which we must learn. We are not classically, biologically driven people:

• we have separated procreation from sexual intercourse;
• we have separated parenthood from siring and bearing;
• our wealth has decreased our fertility and, not surprisingly, greatly increased the number amongst us who are lesbian and gay;
• we may alter the sex balance on our planet;
• we may eliminate seriously disabled foetuses;
• we may generate a race of physical and mental titans who may wipe out most of the rest of us; we do not know.

Nor do we know any longer where we are: whether we live in a place of peace and plenty or on the edge of a volcano; whether science will save us or poison us; whether there will be a single edible fish in fifty years; whether thirst will become the greatest scourge of all.

No wonder, then, that we sometimes behave as if every grain of wheat matters and at other times we are driven by despair to bloat ourselves, thinking, like victims of the bubonic plague in former times, that we will soon be dead.

As the teenage era of our culture, of the indulgence and the self-indulgence, the hormone spasms and the mood swings, come to an end, the manic, experimental introversion and charges of apparently rootless self-expression will elide into a broader, much more mature view of ourselves and where we live. This is a coincidence of culture and numeracy, neither a product of nor a moral imperative for the new millennium. Nonetheless, as numeracy helps us to grasp proportionality, now is a good time to look at where we have been and to understand its terror and our prospects.

The miracle of this Century is that we have recovered at all from our collective misdeeds, even though the recovery has been bought through obsession, addiction, escapism and manicured amnesia.

This is not to say that Christianity is dead but simply that we have come to the parting of the ways between worship and ethics; one can worship and err or behave righteously and not worship. To conclude otherwise, to perpetuate the myth of the moral leadership of Christianity, is to perpetuate the two-dimensional, false dichotomies of the nursery.

We know this; we see the plutocracy of Jesus turning its back on the ghetto but this does not force us to turn our back on salvation. This piece of numerate sleight of hand which has given us a millennium feast is as good a time as any to resolve to be ethically brave. In a milieu where everyone is a vigilante that is asking more of us than we can, to use the vogue verb, deliver, but it is unreasonable expectation which has driven us to our greatest achievements as well as to our worst atrocities. As we face an era of unprecedented complexity and, comfortingly, fabulous recursion, we are immensely lucky to have been psychologically nudged by chronological serendipity.

KEVIN CAREY is a writer , broadcaster and social entrepreneur. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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