Reflections on the Third World

Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, (we are told) had her ears licked by a serpent while asleep and so got her prophetic gift: forever after she was fated to foretell the evil results of successive events. All civilizations have had their Cassandras, but probably none more than twentieth-century Europe. A symposium in Le Figaro in 1898 (“What’s wrong with France?”) reads uncannily like a Partisan Review symposium 70 years later. Visions of doom have been fashionable for a long time, and their prophets sometimes address large audiences. Brahmaism taught that the world was in decline, Horace and Livius are full of dire predictions following the general relaxation of Roman discipline, and every self-respecting writer in the tenth century began his chronology: “While the world is approaching its end….” Henry and Brooks Adams wrote long ago about the decline of Western man and Baudelaire hated Paris (“centre et rayonnement de betise univer...