Civilizational Malaise
The Western view of the world and its future may be shifting under the realities of today's world.
My reading of the Strangers and Brothers series of novels by C. P. Snow, has, as reading must, blended with the events of present times. Snow places his protagonist in the midst of the ideas and events in Britain during and after the second world war. Today is not unlike these times.
In The New Men, Snow writes of the development of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In his view this horror (along with the holocaust, the economic collapse of the 30s, ethnic cleansing and revolutionary movements) led to fundamental changes in Western society and individual lives.
First, there was the crushing blow to 19th century optimism as to the inevitability of material progress and human brotherhood. It was, as many have written, a civilizational crisis, a crisis of belief in what four centuries of scientific and humanist advancement had led the West to expect from history.
And to survive this loss and the fear it generated a price—acceptance of a social order that insisted on conformity to societal needs and institutional stability.
It wasn’t that the “rats” were leaving the ship. It was that many accepted bondage to the task of managing the seas in what now seemed a renewed, but dangerous, voyage.
The choice seemed to be either an all or nothing commitment to a career and the hoped for rewards (respect, security and some degree of comfort) or a private life off the grid, able to follow personal choices and improvisational lives.
These apparent contradictions came to a head in the 1960s and 70s and were resolved by the illusions of the Reagan years and Panglossian prescriptions to live and let live in a world again seemingly more “civilized.”
Nine-Eleven shook this consensus to a limited extent, as did periodic environmental catastrophes (famine etc.), augmented by ethnic conflict. But outside limited breakthrough narratives of scholars and humanitarian witnesses, we endured the limitations of a plague and watched popular demands for freedom channeled into establishment-baiting political movements on the hard right.
Now in the light of climate change, world-wide poverty, the return of authoritarian rule in many countries, the war in Ukraine and what is happening in Israel and Gasa, we again find it hard to deny the same doubts and fears that Snow speaks about in his novels.
Again, we are called to doubt the liberating promise of “the enlightenment” and dismiss as unrealistic the hope that technology will free humanity from the bonds of necessity, i.e. the daily struggle for food and shelter and safety. We are offered Gaza and Ukraine and the streets of American cities as “our future.”
Again, will we make commitments to machine-like organizations and elite privilege and abandon any desire to be ourselves, any hope to live abundantly in unexplored realms of flesh and spirit?