Lessons

by Ian McEwan

The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense. He accepted that pessimism was the good companion of thought and study, that optimism was the business of politicians, and no one believed them. He knew about the reasons to be cheerful and had sometimes cited the indices, the literacy rates and so on. But they were relative to a wretched past. He couldn’t help himself, there was a novel ugliness about. There were nations run by well-dressed criminal gangs intent on self-enrichment, kept in place by security services, by the rewriting of history and passionate nationalism. Russia was just one. The USA, in a delirium of anger, delusional conspiracies and white supremacy, could yet become another. China had refuted the claim that trade with outsiders opened minds and societies. Now the technology was on hand, it might perfect the totalitarian state and offer a new model of social organisation to compete with or replace liberal democracies—a dictatorship sustained by a reliable flow of consumer goods and a degree of targeted genocide. Roland’s bad dream was of freedom of expression, a shrinking privilege, vanishing for a thousand years. Christian medieval Europe did without it that long. Islam had never much cared for it. But each of these problems was parochial, local to a mere human timescale. They shrank and tightened into a bitter kernel contained within the ...