Not always spoken out loud, there’s a fear out there that maybe we’re looking at the beginning of the end of the world. If the war in the Middle East doesn’t cause it, will the U.S. elections in exactly 52 weeks? Everyone says so, if their side loses. Maybe something else will end it all. Or, could it be that the world is effectively gone already? If so, can we start rebuilding before the hollowing shells of everyday existence cave in on us? Shouldn’t we, in any case?
End-of-the-world rhetoric is of course overwrought, some of it raised to spur electoral turnout. Some reflects people’s or groups’ particular phobias. Some is just lazy hyperbole. But some is genuine. Hamas’ atrocity-laden attack of October 7, Israel’s deadly response, and interests and actions of others – in the region and beyond – mix actual catastrophic possibilities with biblical imagery of Armageddon and Apocalypse. Or, as an Anglo -German aristocrat put it in 1918, the courtly pre-war Europe was driving toward its own end, and, as quoted by Margaret Macmillan (p. 641),
… we all actually knew, but didn’t know at the same time. It was a kind of a floating feeling that like a soap bubble suddenly burst and disappeared without a trace when hellish forces that were bubbling up in its lap were ripe.
Today, as Walter Russell Mead puts it, “we live in an era where the unthinkable can happen overnight.” These days “unthinkable” sets a high bar, but one that the world seems constantly to surpass. The unthinkable also does not always come in the form of war or death – or miracle. Seeing a movie about a quantum physicist may suddenly convince me that existence is an accident. An accumulating relaxation of social norms, about substance use, gender identity, coarse language, sex roles, street crime, business practices, media channels, and almost anything else, may hit a tipping point, leading me to conclude that “nothing is true but anything is possible.”
We do carry on in inertial habits, most of us going to work or school, buying groceries, watching shows and sports. But each new shock takes a chunk out of our living frames of reference. This is not new – the death of a loved one or a job layoff will re-order any life. And history always wrecks worldly frames of reference. The fall of the Roman Empire, movable print, the discovery of DNA, dynastic changes in China, the advent of the internet – all eroded their old worlds.
In 2023, a long running accumulation of disruptions, whether disastrous or miraculous, seems to be undoing the last of our frames of reference. “Real,” “right,” and especially “normal” no longer mean much, except within particular factions or sects. While this is a far cry from the planet’s physical demise, we can even picture that happening, via environmental catastrophe, deadlier pandemics, nuclear war, or something new. We carry that nagging belief that everything around us could very well disappear, even literally, and possibly tomorrow. Worse, we imagine these disasters more easily than ways to induce humanity to steer away from them. And we have no idea what a next world might look like.
Historically, living frames of reference have not been planned; they evolved as people worked, fought, finagled, or inspired each other. No one planned in advance for a Romanov dynasty, or that air traffic controllers should all speak English. Personal worlds are also unplanned – I got this job, I fell in love with this person, I settled down in this town. Now, if old ways are ending, can we count on fate and random evolution to make the next ones livable? Some cataclysmic scenarios see humanity having to start from scratch. How would that work?
The fact is no one ever started from scratch. The question is: what do people carry in their minds, to guide and shape new social orders and standards? The answer will vary among persons and peoples. Americans have a unique touchstone. Most nations and societies take identity from inherited traits, received traditions, and folkways from the past. America conceived itself as “we” who hold that all persons carry unalienable rights, and that government exists to preserve them. In those rights, Americans will define ourselves in what we will do, not by who we have been. This identity lacks venerable markers to recover old mores of church or tribe. But such markers can be made unrecoverable, obliterated like the Europe of 1913. Our faith in the free “pursuit of happiness” gives us an upheaval-proof starting point, to create whatever it takes with whatever is at hand, whatever the new realities, to nurture that freedom. If we observe this ethos together, we have a psychic bond, not like old ties of ethnicity or myth, but better suited for starting a new world.
So maybe the old world, in the spiritual, or moral or social sense, has already ended. Whether or not that’s the case, we need to outgrow old pursuits, of partisan politics, self-righteous demands, and selfish pursuits. America has a durable, shared ethos from which to face whatever may come. Now is the time to take it to heart.
Common Conviction 