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To determine what will have mattered in this jumble seems to require a sense of something beyond the particulars. One may say that the Depression mattered, along with the decolonization of Africa, that Communist China mattered, as did the oil embargo and Picasso and the push for women's rights. But was there not something else that mattered by which these things were connected? Hegel thought of history as an idea, "the Idea," which, he said, struggles constantly to become the "Absolute Idea." This Idea has made a pilgrimage from civilization to civilization. It started out in China and, having gone as far as it could go there, proceeded to India, thence to the Greeks and later the Romans. It settled next on the Germans and would, Hegel predicted, go from there to America. Since the Idea always travels west, it may finally land in Japan, where the Absolute Idea will be realized and all problems solved.
Weird and rosy as this vision is, there still is something to be said for an idea characterizing an age. The age in question does not extend exactly from 1923 to 1983, but within that 60-year period emerge oddly recurrent themes. In his recent survey of Modern Times, Paul Johnson sees the main characterizing idea of the period as the domination of the state: "At the time of the Versailles Treaty, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged state could increase the sum total of human happiness, [but] by the 1980s the view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing and dispirited band of zealots." Johnson has a conservative ax to grind, and so may exaggerate a single feature's importance. Still, if one keeps asking what will have mattered in this period, the domination of the state would offer one perfectly sound answer.
Or perhaps the dominating force of the past 60 years has been that of death—not merely the numbers killed, the more than 100 million casualties of wars, executions, assassinations, terrorist attacks, concentration camps, but the rise of violent death as a central presence in the world, as a normal expectation of events. Death has enjoyed great prominence before, in the plague periods and times of other natural disasters. But in this century the primary killers have been people. A subject of the day concerns the "right to die," to choose a firing squad, to pull the plug. There is talk, perhaps exaggerated, perhaps not, of the whole planet dying.
But death seems a specter, not the idea itself. The idea has to do less with what actually happens than with feelings and presumptions about the age in which one lives, a sense of intellectual familiarity that allows one to accept whatever occurs in his lifetime, however terrible, as somehow fitting and proper. The flesh has been heir to some considerable shocks these 60 years. Why were we not more shocked?