Apocalapse

So, who's falling asleep at the switch?

This week must have heartened millennarians everywhere - "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold," as Yeats presciently noted. And reaction from the G8 summit in St. Petersburgh illustrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that the current crop of world leaders are in the process of pulling a Neville Chamberlain of world-historical proportions - Rome (or Mumbai, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul and Tel Aviv) is burning, but the G8 seems more interested in throwing on more fuel rather than dousing the flames.

I spent the weekend reading Marshall Berman's astute 1980s book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, and two of the points he touches on bear repeating here. Berman examines modernity from all angles of development, including that of "the nihilism of the party of Order." Tsarist secret police inspiring chaos amoung both the proletariat and the aristocracy in 1905; the virulent societal cannibalism of the National Socialists; Stalinist death camps - these are just some particularly livid examples of institutional will transformed to bureaucratic holocaust, catastrophes that do profound damage to the governments that spawn them, and the innocents that lie unguarded around them, even as they promise improved security (sound familiar) to the populace.

The nihilism of the party of Order is on show again this week. Terrorists with nationalist aims destroy trains in Bombay; insurgents inflamed by a bungled occupation kill and kidnap in Iraq; and Israel and its institutional enemies (Hezbollah is a bureaucracy too, all terrorist organisations are) grind at each other, sure that, after just one more outrage in the air, reason will be forced to come out from hiding. These groups and governments are freeze-frame futurists - organisations that want their societies to embody one diffuse, nebulous, and ultimately impossible goal or idea, and stay that way ad infinitum. And when you have a slate cleaned by chaos, it's easier to keep things the way they are - terrorists, governments (and even some pedagogical theorists) love crises, because they mean anything can happen.

On the other hand, the second theme of Berman's to note right now is the cataclysm of "modernity by routine." Modern life is supposed to be about change, dynamicism, and all that jazz. But it's hard for people to live in tumult all the time, and Berman chronicles how a certain kind of corrupted modernism creates societies of banal, untroubled habits and stultified opinions. These cultures, Berman implies, ignore the frenzy of modern politics, culture, and existence at their peril - and when the wealthiest and most powerful states in the world are the apotheosis of "modernity by routine," (and represented by Cowboy George and Lil' Stevie Harper) we are all at risk.

Terrorists love that first aspect of modernity; the West is mired in the second. Uh oh.

Where have you gone, Winston Churchill ? - a man who was famous for changing his mind (and political party) often, for pragmatic idealism, for believing in people as well as in humanity, and for (usually) doing something when that something was the right thing to do. Whither statesmanship? Someone leading a G8 country had better read Berman's book, fast.