ABSTRACT
The three myths that I have mentioned still shape our intellectual and moral thinking, although the world has changed radically in the three or four centuries since they were coined. Most notably, our drama – the play in which we are all acting – has shifted to an enormously larger stage. We live now in a bigger world. It is bigger because the sheer number of humans has tripled in the last century and because we are now better informed about them, but also, even more crucially, because of the way in which our own power has increased. We urban humans have now become capable of doing serious harm all over the world, both to its human and its nonhuman inhabitants. This is something really new in human history. In fact it is possibly the biggest change our species has ever experienced, certainly the biggest since the invention of agriculture. No wonder if it throws us into culture-shock and makes us alter our concepts.
