Amid a blurring of all forms, in a twilight of apathetic uncertainty brooding over a ghostly world, man like a lost child gropes his way by the help of a small frail thread of logic through a dream landscape that he calls reality and that is nothing but a nightmare to him.
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers
In a recent note, I reflected on the need - and difficulty - of ‘knowing the time’. One is struck by the sense of disorientation that prevails, as events tumble ahead of our capacity to comprehend them. The demand is for content and quick takes, and so we are immediately told why an election outcome was to be expected, why the fall of a regime was a matter of time. Neil Postman had the measure of this in 1985, even if he underestimated how far we could collectively descend into triviality:
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.
What Postman identified with remarkable prescience was the disintegration of values that was commencing, a process that has now fully manifested itself. Hermann Broch identified a similar dynamic as a contributing feature of the collapse of Europe into war in 1914:
… like strangers they exist side by side, an economic value-system of “good business” next to an aesthetic one of l’art pour l’art, a military code of values side by side with a technical or an athletic, each autonomous, each “in and for itself,” each “unfettered” in its autonomy, each resolved to push home with radical thoroughness the final conclusions of its logic and to break its own record. And woe to the others, if in this conflict of systems that precariously maintain an equilibrium one should gain the preponderance and overtop all the rest, as the military system does in war, or as the economic system is now doing, a system to which even war is subordinate,—woe to the others! For the triumphant system will embrace the whole of the world, it will overwhelm all other values and exterminate them as a cloud of locusts lays waste a field.
The incentive set is to explain and over-explain what is unfolding, to post and to pump, but a more honest position is to pause and reckon with these twilight conditions. Amidst this confusion and disorientation, history might act as a flashlight, perhaps allowing for some incomplete illumination.
Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Great War, Paul Valéry reflected on an inability to appreciate how dead civilisations speak to the present:
We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.
If one puts aside tiresome attempts to compare the United States to ancient Rome or Weimar Germany, there is value in recalling the fragility of political and social structures. As Valéry concluded, ‘we later civilisations ... we too now know that we are mortal.’ After all the veneration of disruption, and movements based on confronting and overthrowing, it is worth appreciating that one order is not necessarily replaced by another, what follows can simply be disorder. ‘No longer and not yet … between them yawns an empty space’, as Broch wrote in The Death of Virgil.
In The Age of Empire: 1875–1914, Eric Hobsbawm judged:
In itself there is nothing about the historical pattern of reversal, of development undermining its own foundations, which is novel or peculiar to this period as distinct from any other.
This observation is borne out by the manner in which his rendering of pre-war Europe resonates with our contemporary confusion:
What is more, the culture and intellectual life of the period show a curious awareness of this pattern of reversal, of the imminent death of one world and the need for another. But what gave the period its peculiar tone and savour was that the coming cataclysms were both expected, misunderstood and disbelieved. World war would come, but nobody, even the best of the prophets, really understood the kind of war it would be. And when the world finally stood on the brink, the decision-makers rushed towards the abyss in utter disbelief.
There is an eery valance between our present and this earlier experience of globalisation and subsequent dissolution into world-breaking conflict. These have been times of unbounding, lowering of barriers, removing limits, conditions in which ‘everything is permitted’. The ledger is forgotten, but the consequences accumulate.
In the current moment we are confronted with extreme visions on all sides, from apocalyptic renderings of climate doom to millenarian readings of AI, and in-between failing and flailing institutions filled with petty minds and tiresome egos. What can be suggested with some confidence is that most of the trendlines are escalatory and disintegrative, it is difficult to find a systemic actor that has a compelling and positive vision of order. If disruption is what you want, be careful what you wish for.
In a recent LRB piece, Christopher Clark engages with Perry Anderson’s preference for structural arguments over contingent ones when considering the causes of the Great War. The historiographical debate continues precisely because there is so much evidence on both sides, as Robert Musil judged shortly after, ‘it would be senseless to reduce a catastrophe of such enormous proportions to a single formula’. He further observed:
The way the world careened into the War evinced above all a debilitating lack of intellectual and spiritual organization: our unwillingness to take the signs seriously, to recognize the uncontrolled forces and counterforces…
Again, this is a description that speaks to our present, in which we are confronted with actors and institutions operating in a value vacuum. These are conditions of intellectual and spiritual disorganisation and disorientation, amplified and encouraged by economic and technological structures that mediate against the good.
Stefan Zweig begun his memoirs, The World of Yesterday, with the following judgement: ‘when I attempt to find a simple formula for the period in which I grew up, prior to the First World War, I hope that I convey its fullness by calling it the Golden Age of Security.’ It increasingly feels that we have reached a similar point, the end of another golden age.