so, now that i'm intrigued by all of this- where do you feel we are at in this belle epogue, is it nearing its end, still in the middle? is the sign of raw and harsh rock and roll on the radio a sign of pending cataclysm? i really don't see civil war on the horizon, nor does california seem that intent from declaring itself a sovereign nation-- the chinese pose an ecomomic challenge to the usa, but so did germany and japan-- no need to nuke anyone over that. so, is it all really about the radical islam? is that what triggers the end of our current golden era? or something else?
looking forward to your responses.
best
Jaz K.
Hey Jaz---this is a toughie, because the question you're posing involves history so recent that we're still in the midst of it. I feel kind of at sea on this---like most people, I am trying to be reaslistic---on the one hand, not in denial, but on the other, not looking for the apocalypse around the next corner. This is best I can do: if you look back at the original Belle Epoque that Jonathan was asking us to consider in relation to our own recent history, one of the things that strikes you is the naivete of people who had no clue about the scale of destructive horror that was about to be visited on them in WWI. The big European powers had all fought wars recently---the French and the Germans had had the Franco-Prussian War, the British had had the Boer War, the Russians, a bit later, the Russo-Japanse War---and these had been bloody, horrible affairs; but they didn't cause anyone to dispair about the future of Western civilization. People thought they understood what war was like, and many people seem to have thought, at the height of the Belle Epoque euphoria, that it was a thing of the past: history would precede from now on by management theory, not by bloodlust (sound familiar?) And then when WWI started and the unbelievable scale of the slaughter become evident---close to a million casualties at Verdun alone? Tens of thousands killed in the first day at the battle of the Somme, because of the radically improved German machine guns concealed in radically improved German bunker/trenches---a whole generation of English and German youth close to wiped out---something happened to the European mind-set: all that optimism wiped out overnight, with the ruling elites and the literati and intelligentsia going into a kind of trauma of dispair that they really never recovered from till after WWII. I think, myself, that a lot of that dispair was a response to the nature of modern war as WWI revealed it: total war, no one---soldier or civilians--- spared, new hell-weapons---the modern machine gun, gas shells, flamethrowers and tanks. Realization of what lay in store in the future, based on the new understanding of just how terrible war was going to be, was I believe a big part of the culture of despair in early/mid 20th century Europe, and a big part of that was the shock over a kind of warfare that very few people had envisaged.
Fast-forward to our own time, and I think we are now in the early stages of something similar---we suddenly realize that history is going forward in ways that we don't want it to and that the nature of contemporary warfare has yet again changed: not what we thought it had to be---nation-state against nation-state, with armies, national borders to be defended etc., but small, mobile groups of zealots who do not care whether they live or die, but intend to do as much damage as possible to
us, personally, as possible. We have been living for quite a while on the sweet realization that there is no more Soviet Union, that Russia is not remotely a credible military threat to us now, that we are for the first time in a very long time
safe---and then, of course, it turns out that we are terribly vulnerable, that our cities and buildings are targets, our ports are potential targets, our international air transportation are targets... this new picture of the world is I think as profoundly disturbing to our political and intellectual elites (and the rest of us too) as the vastness of the violence in WW! was to those of that era.
The Belle Epoque began with open borders and free movement of people back and forth without hindrance, a state of affairs that the growth of the European Union has tried to re-create in our own time. And it ended with barbed wire and the Treaty of Versailles. In our own time the same thing has happened---for our safety and survival, we feel the need to seal every last hole in our borders, monitor our own activities as much as possible, and in effect give up all the aspirations we thought were going to come true when the Cold War ended. I think we're in the same place that the West, particularly Europe, was in 1919, say---in deep shock, and bleak pessimism. Radical Islamist zealotry has been the tip of the spear we're looking at, no question. But now we know that anyone can do this---you don't need a nation-state, just a group of people enough burning conviction, to pose a serious threat to humanity, at least in the thinking of people whose thinking shapes opinion and attitude generally.
Your question about the very rough-edged and harsh trends in current music goes to the heart of this new reality we at least
feel we live in. I think people for the first time regard the personal threat of violence as something unconnected with crime (again, this is the view of the prosperous, living in protected enclaves) but rather with terrorism, violence as a way to coerce compliance with beliefs we have no intention of adopting as our own.
But I have no clue whether any of this makes any sense or is the best way to view our current situation... help! Anyone out there have another take on this? Jonathan??
