We are approaching the stasis of pre-modern days, when children could expect to live the lives of their parents and grandparents. Our relative isolation has enforced a form of peace, which some like me take to be stagnation. We cannot imagine how it was a hundred years ago, to experience the vertigo of accelerating change imposed by new technologies, by novel belief systems and by wars. People were blinded by the pace of events. They could not think clearly, even when there rose out of adversity some obvious benefits. It was repugnant to accept that the savagery of war had offered the
...more
