essay
by DANIEL PINCBECK
We find ourselves in a time that many of us, possessing any historical and cultural memory, experience as shock and catastrophe, with a feeling of societal shame and cultural disgrace. We have a sense of being unmoored, destabilized, overwhelmed by the flood of terrible political news, environmental data, forced displacements, and primitive displays, as well as the ratcheting up of war and violence. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” We are living that now. We sense we are only at the beginning of a phase of intensifying turbulence and worsening chaos, like a global endarkenment without end.
For a long time, in the liberal Westernized world, we…