Source: The Atlantic
by Adam Kirsch
“In an influential essay published in the euphoric year of 1989, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history.’ But it felt more like the resumption of history. Throughout four decades of nuclear brinkmanship, humanity had been living in fearful expectation, like Brutus in Julius Caesar: ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.’ Now the doomsday weapons had been, if not abolished, at least holstered, and the passage of time could mean progress, rather than a countdown to annihilation. Somehow, things haven’t turned out that way. Young people today are no less obsessed with climate disasters than Gen X was with nuclear war. Where we had nightmares about missiles, theirs feature mass extinctions and climate refugees, wildfires and water wars. And that’s just the beginning.” (12/31/24)