What’s the Trouble?

Social Crisis, Crisis of Civilization, or Both?

We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and the rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines.

—Saul Bellow, Herzog

The rhetoric of apocalypse haunts the air and naturally fools rush in to use it. Some of it is indeed “mere junk from fashionable magazines,” and even those of us who know that we have lived through a terrible century can become impatient with the newest modes in fin du mondisme. Yet people who are anything but fools seem also to yield themselves to visions of gloom, as if through a surrender of ratio...