“We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilisation, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the failing dusk.” When, inspired by W. H. Auden's long poem The Age of Anxiety (1947), the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. made this observation, in The Vital Center: The politics of freedom (1949), he was writing in the tense period as the aftermath of the Second World War gave way to conceivable nuclear apocalypse, when weariness with the arc of human history made positive political commitments difficult to come by, and even more difficult to sustain. In this respect, the passage easily works for our own times.
Since the financial crash of 2008, across Europe and in the United States, there has been (to borrow a phrase from Frank Kermode) a “sense of an ending”. Liberal orthodoxies have fallen into radical doubt. Populist movements are arrayed against the political and economic order that has stood in place for the past fifty years. Electorates have leaped into unknown futures. The grounds of civilization won't break up under our feet so much as recede under melting ice caps and rising seas, while the indices of progress – life expectancy, equality, happiness and trust in political institutions – have gone into reverse in many parts of the world. Recent headlines sum up the mood: “Happiness is on the wane in the US, UN global report finds”, the Guardian, March 2017; “Trust is collapsing in America”, the Atlantic, January 2018; “Life expectancy in America has declined for two years in a row”, the Economist, January 2018; “Is inequality rising or falling?”, the Economist, again, March 2018, bolstered by the “World Inequality Report: Executive Summary, 2018” by Thomas Piketty et al. The World Bank has also reported that while fewer people are living in extreme poverty around the world, the decline in poverty rates has slowed. This narrative of decline and fall exists alongside more positive assessments of humankind's peaceful and enlightened trajectory, such as those advanced by Steven Pinker. But the optimists have seemed less persuasive, generally unable to nullify the vogue for Apocalypticism.
Read Full Article »