The dialectic of history, the often slow but inexorable movement of society from one extreme to the other, was a troublesome fact of life to Baron Pierre de Coubertin.  He had witnessed the traumas of war as a child and as an adult, and he hoped his global movement of sport would foster friendship, understanding and peace between all nations and draw the world toward the harmonious middle ground—what the Greeks called the golden mean. In his writings, he often emphasized the need for balance in the individual athlete—and the balance produced by social equality across the community.  But he was a realist, and knew that the utopia he dreamed of would be extremely difficult to achieve as the pendulum of history swung back and forth.  This quote is from his lecture, “Olympia,” which he gave in Paris in 1929.

“Moderation and the golden mean are utopias in all areas. The law of the pendulum applies to everything. The ancient world was much too taken with Olympism to be able to provide new harvests, just as the man of yesterday was far too deeply absorbed in the ascetic ideal to be open to being fruitful without first being freed of that yoke.”