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PARTISAN REVIEW
nuclear catastrophe or nuclear war. Fifteen or twenty years ago, that fear
was much more widely felt. The current mood is one of indifference or
complacency. I am dismayed by the frequency, the ease, the glibness with
which President Clinton avails himself of the casual metaphor of the
bridge into the twenty-first century.
Steven Marcus:
I agree for the most part, and would like to make some
parallel points. If you think of H .G. Wells's
Time Machine,
at the end of the
ninteenth century there were several imaginings of the end of the world.
One was Darwinian, that is to say evolution would not end with the
human race, but the race itself would go through the processes of devolu–
tion and finally extinction, and the second law of thermodynamics would
ultimately bring about the end of the world. The end of the world, of
course, was subsequently dramatized with terrible force by World War
I.
The twentieth century in turn ended at about 1989, so we have been liv–
ing for some time in the twenty-first century. But as I have already said,
the twentieth century ended with the resolution of the Cold War and all
that such an astonishing conclusion entails. The fear of nuclear catastro–
phe, which might bring about the effective end of the world, has in fact
receded. It is at the moment no longer part of the popular imagination.
What has taken its place, but with nothing like the same staying force, is
the fear of ecological disaster. That is to say we will destroy the planetary
environment, and will reduce the physical terrestrial world to some sort of
wasteland. In short, it will render the earth uninhabitable. I think Denis
was partly right about President Clinton, but this was no surprise.
However, one thing has changed between the end of the last century and
this one, if not among people like President Clinton then certainly among
historians. What has passed is a belief that was held by people of great
intellectual stature until the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, and
no longer is: the belief in progress. You can't pick up a book by a
respectable contemporary historian and find anything like the belief in
progress that existed until about forty years ago.
Igor Webb:
We all assume, as has never been assumed before, that tech–
nological advances will continue and will produce better things, that we
have limitless, unforseen possibilites. But we no longer believe that that
necessarily implies anything for social relations, whereas it used to be
assumed that there was an intimate relationship between rationality, sci–
ence, and social order.
Robert Wistrich:
Professor Donoghue, do you think that our picture of the
last
fin
de siecle, particularly the portrait you drew of a tragic generation, may
not be all that representative of what a large number of people who were living
