The eventless 21st century

IN 1925, Mussolini consolidated his dictatorship with a major speech before parliament, while Hitler published the first volume of Mein Kampf and also established the SS. In India, both the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) and CPI (Communist Party of India) were founded, as the handicrafts movement took off and the first local electric train was inaugurated. Globally, the first true television images were transmitted, and the 150mph speed barrier was broken for automobiles. Heisenberg published his paper on quantum mechanics, and the modern airline industry kicked off. The first major surrealist art exhibition took place in Paris, and Louis Armstrong’s records fueled the Jazz Age. Woolf, Cather, Gide, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Proust and Kafka published landmark novels, while Auden and Isherwood reconnected as adults and Eliot became a director at Faber. Major operas by Berg, Ravel and Busoni premiered, and the Bauhaus moved to Dessau. All this, in a random year of the early 20th century. Modernism, the cultural peak of industrial capitalism and liberal democracy, furiously fed both art and politics, and was disseminated globally through a technological firestorm whose fumes we still breathe. Growing communal riots, a dwindling Khilafat movement, and an already spent moderate nationalism marked 1925 in India, as if yesterday were today. By comparison, what do we have in 2025? Or really, the entire first quarter of the 21st century? What is the last fundamental breakthrough of any kind you can remember? As neoliberal capitalism and liberal democracy collapse, there will be openings for humane creators. Nothing, I would argue. Nothing of note in philosophy, literature, music, art, architecture, science and technology, film, social sciences and economic policy except whatever remains of the aftereffects of the major discoveries of the 20th century. There has never been a less creative period globally since the beginning of the capitalist-imperialist onslaught against the world’s major civilisations half a millennium ago. Individual accomplishments in various fields certainly persist but are not part of any larger trends. The two greatest movies of the 21st century, In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Drive, were both released a quarter century ago, and summed up 20th-century aesthetics rather than looking forward. Brilliant films come out of Iran, South Korea, Thailand and elsewhere, but there is little cinematographic advancement, compared to the 1960s and 1970s when every week witnessed an astounding new film. Popular music died long ago in the West, compared to the era of innovative bands, and the last rites were pronounced over jazz decades ago. Art and architecture have long descended into superficial parodies empty of ideological content, while the social sciences and humanities have totally succumbed to a postmodernism without a belief system. Hardly any novels of note have appeared in the West in this period, except by a few émigré writers. Big Science, in the form of Big Physics and Big Biology, is singularly uninterested in addressing the practical problems currently degrading individual and collective health and well-being. The present system is not creative enough to address environmental collapse. The only area of innovation seems to be computer technology, namely the internet, which fuelled the dominance of social media. Lately, the buzz is all about artificial intelligence. But present computer technology is only an intensification of mid-20th-century innovations, and AGI (artificial general intelligence), according to real scientists, is decades away, if it can ever be realised. Computer technology has largely become an instrument of the global crumbling of political ideology. The counterargument to my narrative would be that we couldn’t possibly be living in more momentous times. The Western empire is collapsing before our eyes, while another is rising in the East. Except for a few languishing economies in Africa and Asia (Pakistan being one of them), the entire world is experiencing economic modernisation. I would answer that what resonates with me is the attempted erasure of individual cultures around the world, even as the empire dies a gruesome death. By the time it is dead, will anything worth salvaging remain of any culture in the world? Will it have degraded the livability of the planet, including such basics as production of real food, so much that we will view this period’s “development” entirely negatively? The answer to why creativity, in both the arts and sciences, is in eclipse everywhere is that the West’s half a millennium of hegemony is ending in a parody of apocalypse. Its most obvious manifestation is America’s self-devouring frenzy, inevitably hurtling toward domestic ethnic cleansing by way of the blunt instrument of mass denaturalisation. But American fascism borrows uninterestingly from 20th-century fascism, featuring nothing surprising. The more it advances...

The eventless 21st century

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The eventless 21st century

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