Imagine what historians will write about the period we are living in - the Age of Madness.

Today we read with disbelief about the Dark Ages - it was a bizarre time when man was at his maddest.

It is curious that all who have ever lived called themselves modern. Yet posterity is always baffled by the backwardness of the ancients.

The human story does not proceed along a straight line. It is a sideward walk of the crab, a backward push of the dung beetle, an unsteady step of the baby.

We tend to view life as (or expect from it) a pattern of directionality that proceeds from backwardness to civilisation.

We get flummoxed by our very own enigma when a First World War is followed by another war - when we had expected rationality to avert the recurrence of episodes of human suffering.

Man's great irony is that his exclusive gift, consciousness, is the very attribute that places him simultaneously above and below animality.

He is above animality in that consciousness enables him to contemplate the consequences of his deeds and, therefore, goads him to eschew the undesirable.

When Chris Hani was murdered, Nelson Mandela used rationality to calm our passion for war.

Man is also below animality since, ironically, consciousness renders him capable of defying the dictates of nature by bringing disaster upon himself. Think of people who knowingly build informal residential settlements in flood lines.

A glance at the state of mankind today might tempt some among us to conclude that the Lord is about to return - even that is a disease of the moderns.

All moderns don't like relying on the experience of the ancients to make sense of their contemporary conditions.

If we are to take Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma as manifesting a forewarning of the Lord's imminent return, surely the heavens should have sent their Son to save mankind from Adolph Hitler's sanguinary madness. Those who perished in previous wars died believing they were living through biblical last days. Those who survived, however, lived to confirm the delusion of the dead.

We are all human.

The sadist murderers of ISIS who post YouTube videos of beheadings are not special types of low humans. They, too, have a mind, body and soul - just like you.

To conceive of life as a straight journey from barbarism to nirvana is to idealise man beyond his essential nature.

The madness we see across the world today is not some kind of reverse development on the part of man. Madness and sanity are two sides of our nature.

When we live through a period of relative calm - such as we witnessed briefly following the end of the Cold War - we must not join the likes of Francis Fukuyama to declare the end of history.

There are people in South Africa who thought 1994 marked the beginning of a long cruise to the land of milk and honey.

It is not only optimists who misread human nature. Even pessimists succumb to their own one-sidedness, the tendency to regard man's occasional madness as the beginning of the end.

When Mandela was performing his rainbow dance, optimists soared very high in their blissful infatuation. Today, under Jacob Zuma, pessimists cannot imagine life after madness.

The history of the ancients (that is, of all people who once lived) teaches us the important lesson that highs and lows are normal in the evolution of humankind.

We must learn also from the past that periods of madness are precisely the environment from which heroes emerge.

Historians will no doubt record ours as the Age of Madness . What remains unclear is who will emerge as the heroes of our time.