The End of the World as We Know It? Tony Judt on Mass Capitalist Delusions and History’s Tragi

By Theo Anderson The irony of history is that it’s about the future as much as the past. Humans choose facts and interpret them for the purpose of telling stories and creating meaning, and those stories are shot through with the storytellers’ hopes for the future. This seems heretical to many people, especially conservatives, who passionately defend the notion of objective history—at least in theory. In practice, conservatives’ relationship to biased history is like their relationship to judicial activism: it’s great so long as the tilt is right-leaning. The recent textbook controversy in Texas is the latest affirmation of this truth. In Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt, an eminent historian of Europe, looks to the recent past and the near-term future and sees our story taking a tragic turn. He’s especially troubled by the sharp social inequalities that have emerged in the past few decades, particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., and the decline in a common sense of purpose—a common faith—transcending self-interest. “We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers.” (The New York Review of Books excerpts a chapter, and Terry Gross, of NPR’s Fresh Air, recently interviewed him.) Judt thinks that the cult of wealth-creation has blinded us to non-monetary values, leaving us poorly equipped to talk about the most important questions. “We seem unable to conceive of alternatives” to the lure of the free market and “the delusion of endless growth.” “Unable to conceive alternatives” seems exactly right. It’s impossible to imagine alternatives because we don’t, as a nation, really know or understand the past. There is an overload of popular history out there: celebrations of the founding fathers, and books that tell the story of this or that event that supposedly “changed the world forever.” But there’s little general awareness of the most radical revolution of the modern era: the rise of consumer culture. Buying, accumulating, endlessly pursuing the new and improved—it all seems so natural, as if this is the way things have always been and always must be. It’s consumer culture—which germinated in the late-nineteenth-century U.S., flowered in the mid-twentieth century, and is spreading across the world—that feeds our national obsession with wealth. Lacking a sense of history, we are stuck in an eternal present, unable to even imagine a different way of being. Judt claims that “we cannot go on living like this.” I don’t know whether he means cannot or should not—whether it’s possible but unwise, or simply impossible. But it’s sobering to read Judt’s essay in conjunction with the “State of the World” report for 2010, published by the Worldwatch Institute. Its theme is “from consumerism to sustainability,” and it opens with the warning that “preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns.” Does consumerism contain the seed of its—and our—demise? As the saying goes: If a trend can’t continue, it won’t. We’re about to find out.