SOME historians, remarked Arnold Toynbee, hold the view that history "is just one damned thing after another." Himself a believer in orderly historical patterns, Toynbee disapproved of such an outlook. But 1968 seems bent on supporting what he called the "antinomian"* view.
One damned thing after another, indeed; also one tragic, surprising and perplexing thing after another. During the first eight months of 1968, events have moved at the pace of an avant-garde movie edited by a mad cutter. The alarms, the assassinations, the political reversals and the extremist cries have been so overwhelming that even last week's Czechoslovak tragedy may seem like only one more episode by Christmas. The common reaction is "What a year!", followed quickly by "What next?" Was there ever a year that could match this one for continued shocks, for a sense that "things fall apart, the center cannot hold"?
Murder and Malevolence
Of course. Some of the shock feeling is caused by a kind of historical provincialism: one often tends to feel that one's own time, one's particular moment, is the worst, the most significant ever. Historians are cooler about it. With cosmic detachment, they insist that the only crucial years are those providing great turning points in human affairs. For all its banner headlines, 1968 does not begin to compare with, say, 1848, when seismic revolutions cracked the old European order in the Austrian Empire, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and The Netherlands. To date, the 20th century's most fateful year was 1914, when the West plunged into what Winston Churchill called "another Thirty Years' War." That semipermanent conflict spanned such events as the Russian Revolution (1917), the Wall Street crash (1929), the rise of Nazism and the New Deal (1933). Indeed, 1968 should hardly unnerve those who recall 1939 and its sickening slide into World War II—or the incredible kaleidoscope of 1945, which alone produced the defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan, the first atomic bombs and the United Nations, plus the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt. And what subsequent year really compares with Cold-war 1948, when the Russians blockaded Berlin, took over Czechoslovakia (the first time), and bolted the Iron Curtain across Europe?
Even so, Americans have never before undergone so many sustained surprises both at home and abroad as they have in the past year. Last summer Israel smashed the Arabs, Red China exploded its first H-bomb, Johnson met Kosygin in New Jersey, the Bolivians killed Che Guevara, the Nigerian civil war began destroying Black Africa's most promising nation, and Negro rioters ran wild in Detroit and Newark.
Last fall Britain devalued the pound, the gold crisis agitated the world—and so did the first human-heart transplant.