Pessimism abounds. From the election of Donald Trump in 2016, to climate crisis, to antibiotic resistance, nuclear war and the end of capitalism, contemporary discourse is dominated by the language of uneasiness and apprehension.
It is taken for granted that civilisation is on the precipice of disaster. Optimistic voices can still be found, if one searches judiciously for them, but these are typically drowned out by jeremiahs and their terrifying predictions of impending doom.
We are living through another Morbid Age, as the historian Richard Overy named his 2009 book about the fear and paranoia that gripped British intellectual life in the years between the wars. The difference today is that fears of war, eugenics and psychoanalysis have given way to fears around climate catastrophe, immigration and the collapse of capitalism.
Referencing a quote by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who, while studying at Cambridge wondered whether very soon he and his contemporaries might be dead, Overy’s book asks why so many in the 1930s were ready to contemplate “the death of civilisation in a country whose political and social system has proved almost impervious to the savage violence and upheavals that scarred the history of the rest of Europe”.
Hobsbawm’s fear of imminent catastrophe was more understandable, perhaps, in 1939 when Adolf Hitler had recently annexed Czechoslovakia. But many similar sentiments appear in the media today. Moreover, they are often espoused with undisguised relish. A period of supposedly relentless advance — in this case the Nineties — has given way to a prevailing paradigm of decline and collapse.
Trump has provided the lightning rod for much of the recent catastrophism. “People aren’t wrong to point out that Trump certainly appears similar to Hitler in some ways,” wrote the former deputy editor of the Guardian opinion pages, Kira Goldberg, shortly prior to Trump’s election.
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