Situational Awareness 2025: A Dying Blaze of Splendor
The Capitol dressed up for the inauguration. Photo: Mark Medish.
We returned to these places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.– T.S. Eliot “The Journey of the Magi” (1927)
Poets and historians remind us that situational awareness is a key life skill.
The impressive funerary proceedings for Jimmy Carter brought to mind the vivid opening scene of Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial Guns of August describing Europe veering onto the on-ramp to the First World War:
“So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration… three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun… After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens… Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.”
The onlookers that May morning in London were likely unaware they were witnessing the ending of an era, the imminent collapse of powerful empires and the unraveling of a century-long period of domestic and international order – the old dispensation — often known as “the concert of Europe.”
As we move from the civil solemnity of Carter’s funeral to the portentous pomp of Trump’s second inauguration, do we now find ourselves at such a historic turning — an inflection point, as policy wonks like to say — a hinge moment after which our reigning assumptions about the world that seem so solid will “melt into air,” to use the phrase of a noted manifesto-writing nineteenth-century German philosopher?
What is history’s clock saying about this moment? If an epoch is ending, what will be the motto of the era that might lie ahead – a restored Great America, a new Time of Troubles, a Dark Enlightenment, or something entirely different?
I do not know the answer. But judging from the strangely hollow-looking array of ex-, exiting and incoming presidents in the front pews of Carter’s service, these are fair questions to ask. And they raise the problem of historical perspective — the difficulty of knowing in real time the significance of the time we happen to be living in.
I was a Cuban Missile Crisis baby, born in 1962, the same year Tuchman published her book. Today is about as far removed in time from that perilous nuclear showdown, at the height of the Cold War, as that date was from the splendid Edwardian funeral. The human species was essentially the same, but each of those times seem fundamentally worlds apart, socially, materially, mentally and technologically.
This is why I recommend occasionally doing the “flash-back test” as a thought experiment to think in time and to appreciate the flow and flux of things. It’s simple to imagine: just reflect on the conventional wisdom about the state of the world in roughly 25-year intervals, basically a generational timespan.
For example, rewind back 25 years from today, seemingly on the edge of a Third World War, and we were still celebrating the galloping globalization of the 1990s — 9/11 had not yet happened.
Go back a quarter century, to 1975, and we were at another climax of the Cold War, after the fall of Saigon and the run-up to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Another 25 years, to 1950, the dawn of the age of nuclear confrontation and the specter of species annihilation. Next, back to the Roaring 1920’s, a burst of post-bellum optimism and freedom, before the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism. And so on.
For me, the most salient point is the Heraclitan quantity and quality of change in relatively short chunks of time, all in living memory but easy to forget. Historical perspective should teach a degree of epistemological modesty.
In thinking about the meaning of the present, we should be careful not to get carried away with metaphors, whether about domestic affairs or international relations. We always need and use theories and hypotheses as a basis for policies. And it is probably natural to indulge in grand narratives about the meaning of an epoch only to learn that things were — and are — far more contingent and fluid than imagined.
We are all too familiar with the regnant metaphors and prestigious mantras of recent times such as “the end of history,” “borderless world,” “the Washington consensus,” the “BRICs” thesis, “the rules-based liberal international order,” “the international community,” the “global war on terror,” and “American exceptionalism.”
These potent memes have been based on certain facts and rational aspirations — but they have also proved less trenchant, less inevitable and less durable than hoped and advertised by their promoters.
The problem is not that the narratives lack evidence, but that they are grossly over-written and over-determined relative to the complexity and contingency of what we should know is out there. They become dogma.
This is because our reductionist fables tend to be eloquently crafted and backed by eminent policy scholars, propagated by political leaders and elite pundits, fortified by groupthink and financed by vested commercial interests. Challenging the veracity of such grand narratives is rarely easy — until the conventional wisdom supporting them has faded and given up its glittering grip on power.
As my colleague Ivan Krastev at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences has recently observed of the U.S. election: “Trump captured the public imagination not because he had a better plan for how to win the war in Ukraine or manage globalization, but because he understood that the world of yesterday could be no more. The United States’ postwar political identity has vanished into the abyss of the ballot box. This Trump administration may succeed or fail on its own terms, but the old world will not return. Even most liberals do not want it back. Few Americans today are comfortable with the notion of American exceptionalism.”
When I worked in the early 1990s on the U.S. foreign assistance program for the former Soviet bloc countries, our top policymakers insisted on marketing the aid, whether cash or technical assistance, as support for “irreversible change,” which was supposed to be in our national security interest. It was practically a firing offense to disagree.
Apart from the many inherent problems of foreign aid (lack of scale, absorptive capacity, and local ownership of reforms), a central flaw with the irreversibility thesis was that the amazing fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR illustrated precisely the opposite reality: that paradigms could change, that policies are reversible and institutions can be undone.
To say that the Soviet Communist system collapsed of its own weight explains everything and nothing. All societies are in the same boat with respect to vitality, legitimacy and durability. Things are fluid, and nothing is inevitable until it is.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant famously asked, what may I reasonably hope for? The radical openness of history is at odds with both progressive determinism such as the Enlightenment theories of the historical process, whether Hegelian or Whig, with their faith in rationality and dreams of perfectibility on one hand, or the various old-school conservatisms which posit “plus ca change,” Original Sin or human nature as ineluctable limiting factors to societal progress.
I think we can and do make progress as a species and as social beings, even in a collective international setting, though not as much and not as inevitably as rationalist philosophers such as Harvard’s Stephen Pinker posit.
There is a middle school of pragmatism associated with the likes of John Dewey, Richard Rorty and Roberto Unger who in various ways expounded on “meliorism” or experimental improvement, which may be America’s best claim to political exceptionalism. But even this more nuanced and modest conception of the historical process is vulnerable to back-sliding and atavism in practice. Plasticity is not unidirectional.
The Enlightenment Project, vitally linked as it is to our sense of modernity and progressive values, will always inspire but it will also be haunted by the reality of bloody revolutions, two world wars and the Holocaust, as well as the nuclear threat.
It is not for nothing that the British art historian Kenneth Clark started his sprawling 1969 BBC series on “Civilisation” with an episode titled “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Far from being pretentious about European culture, looking at the sweep of history Clark was acutely aware of contingency, how societies can thrive, but also how great societies–”the old dispensation”–can decay and decline, how things can fall apart.