Unmoored future

I've been reading, with relish, Rebecca Solnit's new book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. The work builds out the long-term perspective she thinks needed to resist the "amnesia" which normalizes current crises, and calls out  

the assumption that we might be at the end of something—even the end of time, for those fond of apocalypse and doom—but couldn’t possibly be at the beginning of something else. We assume that the present is not in labor to bring forth a future unlike itself—and it is easier to see the old world dying than the new world beginning. But beginnings are what come after endings. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2026). 20) 

I haven't finished the book yet, but her "new world beginning" could be (she insists that hope requires not certainty about the future but an open future) a world in which every one matters (65). This is a vision which current reaction is trying mightily to destroy, but the forces which made such great strides toward it in recent generations remain active - and gain new allies all the time, for instance from post-Neodarwinian biology and the spread of Buddhist ideas in the west. The future won't be like the past or the present, but we know what's worth struggling for.

I've also encountered a different, more global, account of a new world emerging out of the Trump-turbocharged demise of the old in brilliant editorial from Equator. The editors argue that the U.S. debacle in the Strait of Hormuz recapitulates Japan's defeat of the Russian Imperial Navy in the Tsushima Strait in 1905. The Russo-Japanese War marked the first time a non-European country defeated a European one, and opened up the anti-imperial movements which defined the twentieth century. I quote (as one says) at length:

Hormuz erupts in a landscape where the West’s moral and material “soft power” has been incinerated in the ruins of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and undermined by the spectacle of blatant white supremacism and risible incompetence in Washington. The emotional and psychological consequences of this collapse of post-historical illusion are profound. ...

There is no denying the historical novelty, the sheer originality, of the US – a country founded to rid citizens of the weight of history and orient them towards the future. And so the global disaffection with America today is arguably a more extensive and traumatic event than the European Romantics’ disillusionment with revolutionary France, or the twentieth-century loss of faith in communism. Millions of people around the world came to invest their faith in the American dream; the dissolution of this ardently imagined homeland leaves a great part of humanity spiritually and ethically adrift. … 

For two generations of unbudging Atlanticist commenta-tors, the “rest of the world” appeared only as a deviation from the path to modernity. A state like Iran could never be understood on its own terms – as a resilient formation with a long civilisational history and own internal logic – but only as a pathological resistance to inevitable convergence with the Western model. 

The West had steadily deprived itself of the vocabulary to describe places, whether China or Iran, that sought modernisation outside the liberal-capitalist mould. … 

The danger of this present moment lies in the fact that while the West’s narrative has collapsed, its capacity for violence remains. The American-Israeli axis, shorn of its moral pretensions, can still inflict enormous physical harm, yet this power no longer carries the weight of authority, since the world increasingly no longer sees its own future in the mirror of America’s present. There is no successor hegemon waiting to provide a fresh universalism, but a post-American future is becoming imaginable. In its place emerge the rudiments of a consciousness liberated from the vanities of the West: one that can make intelligible a freshly revealed world, and transmute the widespread despair of our age into intellectual excitement and rejuvenation. 

This is exciting, if unsettling. Is universalism over, to be replaced by one or other kind of civilizational pluralism? That's what rising authoritarianisms around the world would like us to think inevitable. But nothing's inevitable. And could we go back even if we wanted? The US dream to rid citizens of the weight of history and orient them towards the future involved a transcending of traditions as well as a recombining of them in novel, less oppressive formations, and the populations of less aging countries are - if unmoored from the tarnished US dream - alive with intellectual excitement and rejuvenation. 

Let us hope (in Solnit's engaged activism of hoping) that this new world is one in which every one matters!