A Point of View: The endless obsession with what might be

BBC:

If we can stop thinking about what the future might bring and embrace the present for what it is, we would be a lot better off, writes John Gray.

It’s been some time now since history didn’t end. Twenty-odd years ago, when the Berlin Wall was coming down, there were many who believed that there would be no more serious conflicts.

The American writer Francis Fukuyama, who promoted the idea of the end of history in the autumn of 1989, declared that the chief threat in future would be boredom. A new era, different from any before, had arrived.

Of course it hadn’t. The end of the Soviet Union was followed by conflicts and upheavals of the sort that happen when empires fall apart – war in the Caucasus and economic collapse in Russia, for example.

In any realistic perspective the idea that a single event – however large – could mark the end of human conflict was absurd. But those who were seduced by the idea were not thinking in realistic terms.

They were swayed by a myth – a myth of progress in which humanity is converging on a universal set of institutions and values. The process might be slow and faltering and at times go into reverse, but eventually the whole of humankind would live under the same enlightened system of government.

When you’re inside a myth it looks like fact, and for those who were inside the myth of the end of history it seems to have given a kind of peace of mind. Actually history was on the move again. But since it was clearly moving into difficult territory, it was more comfortable to believe that the past no longer mattered.

Something similar seems to be happening today. For many people, the idea that the institutions that have been set up in Europe since the end of World War II might be breaking up is too horrific even to contemplate.

European institutions have preserved the peace for more than a generation and presided over a steady growth in prosperity. The very idea that they could now break up challenges the prevailing belief in steady improvement, which is the faith of practical men and women who imagine they have no religion.

As progress continues, these supposedly hard-headed people believe the gains that have been made in the past will be conserved, while lingering evils will gradually diminish.

Life’s framework

The implication is that sudden shifts are relatively rare in history. But consider continental Europe over the past 70 years – until recently a normal human lifetime. Unless they were Swedish or Swiss, an ordinary European man or woman lived during that period under several quite different systems of government.

Nearly all of Europe, some of it democratic, succumbed for a time to Nazism or fascism. Half of Europe moved from Nazism to communism with only a brief interval of democracy. Most of that half, though not Russia, became functioning democracies after the end of the Cold War.

Not only have political forms changed during a normal lifetime, systems of law and banking have come and gone along with national currencies. The entire framework in which life was lived has changed not once, but several times. In any longer historical perspective discontinuities of these kinds are normal.

It is periods of stability, such as the one that existed in at least the western half of Europe from the end of WWII up to the present, that are exceptional. When trying to understand what it means to live through a time of discontinuity, it’s often best to read the accounts of people who experienced a period of this kind. Here the writer Arthur Koestler is an illuminating example.

Born in 1905 into a prosperous, highly-educated family in Budapest, Koestler grew up in the chaos that followed WWI – when Central and Eastern Europe had become a battlefield of warring social and ethnic groups.

As the economy swung from inflation to deflation and back to hyperinflation, the middle classes were ruined while workers suffered mass unemployment.

Life-and-death crisis

Politics splintered into extremist parties with moderate groupings powerless to hold the centre ground. The old order had gone and there was no agreement on what might replace it. Steady, incremental improvement presupposes a background of stable institutions and some agreement on shared values.

In inter-war Europe, these conditions were lacking. As a result gradual progress was just another utopia. Believing that any kind of improvement would only be possible after a cataclysmic upheaval, Koestler became a communist.

He went on to have an adventurous and dangerous life travelling throughout Europe and the Soviet Union, being captured by Franco’s forces in Spain during the Civil War and sentenced to death only to be exchanged at almost the last moment for a Nationalist prisoner who was in Republican hands.

After he was freed, Koestler settled in France, where he was interned in a concentration camp at the outbreak of war and then escaped to Britain via North Africa after joining and quickly deserting the Foreign Legion.

Koestler’s book Scum Of The Earth, published in 1941, describes the sudden disintegration he witnessed in France as it fell to the Nazis. Searching for a metaphor to capture the collapse, Koestler turned to the world of insects.

He writes that when he heard the news of the evacuation of Sedan, where French and British forces had been resisting the German advance, he was reading the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck’s Life of the Termites, a study of the insect…

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