That humans live only around 73 years on average seems to me to create a blind spot in thinking about our presence in and understanding of history. Save for the most turbulent centuries, seventy-three years is just long enough for someone to feel a society’s values changing, witnessing moral concepts mutate, disintegrate, or be overcome. What results is a particular perspective on history, as in the idea that “things were more solid, more real, more moral, more grounded when I was younger.”
We live long enough to feel the grounds of the earth changing, but not long enough to feel it happen over and over — save the (un)luckiest of us, I suppose, who get to live in interesting times! If humans lived thrice as long, would we finally be the kinds of beings that could grasp how new values overcome current values, that this has happened over and over, and will never be different?
This triple-aged human would feel, again and again, the values of a civilization being rewritten, and could, for once, have the historical context to step back from history and see human values from the back.
Perhaps our long-lived human would also learn a bit of humility about the application of their values to history. They could take a stance against the tendency to graph current values onto the psychologies of past actors, the frustrating modern prejudice that the masses of societies past wanted just what we want—human rights, equality for all, quiet comfort and freedom from suffering, a thriving 401(k)!
The feeling that my values have “deteriorated” over time, the sense that “my values are eternal values,” both stem from the bias that human age brings to our perspective of history. History itself expresses the perspective of beings who live as long as humans do.