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Ecclesiastes 1 has it right: "There is nothing new under the sun."

We Americans - particularly we baby boomers - tend to think history began with us. The counterculture in the Õ60s was infamous for considering history irrelevant. The idea was that one could pretty much instantly abandon millenniums of tradition - even those written eons ago into our DNA - and achieve Nirvana with a simple, maybe drug-induced, change of heart. All you need is the feeling of love.

But it isn't just boomers who've expressed this sort of "irrational exuberance." America long has embraced optimistic ideas about progress and boundless growth.

Lately, we've taken a shine to "new" notions - "discovered" only recently by people in the New World who heard of them from American Indians and Eastern mystics - that nature is all about harmony between opposites, and one must be careful not to upset the balance, lest the karmic correction kick our butts.

We've wedded this awareness lately to science and technology, believing, for example, that we can correct the errors of global warming without too much trouble - by developing energy alternatives, stingier appliances, carbon-sequestration techniques and desalinization plants. We'll win control over nature after all and go about our business, albeit a little more wisely.

I suppose we can hope. But some of us in the West long have sensed otherwise.

Consider the Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, who lived from 610-546 B.C. A lot of philosophers, such as Aristotle, wrote about his many ideas. But only a few of his original words survive. They make a cosmological observation of profound pessimism.

Frederich Nietzsche - admittedly a dark soul - translated it this way (in English): "Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time."

Anaximander believed that, before the creation, there was the apeiron - the boundless, the unformed, that to which one could not attribute any qualities - the untouchable, invisible, insensible stuff from which all existing things sprouted.

Anaximander reasoned that, at creation, the apeiron mysteriously divided into the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. Each element then began stealing from the other. Say, earth took water to form trees. But the penalty for the greed was death - the dissolution of objects into their original elements. Trees, for example, would decompose into earth and water.

The profoundly dark and ultimately hopeless idea implies that any such theft is wrong - that taking far more than one's share, as humans are doing lately, is heading in exactly the wrong direction, if we want the human adventure to last awhile.

Anaximander's idea is some 2,600 years old. He is one of the first Western philosophers to write down his thoughts. This doesn't consider the millions of years of hominid existence before the invention of writing - years in which our ancestors lived in relatively small numbers, not daring or, perhaps, not able to appropriate more than their fair share.