Lessons

by Ian McEwan

Never forget that all citizens deserve the regime they are willing to endure…our

The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear.

In that time, moral standards were high in public life and so, therefore, was hypocrisy.

Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames.

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol? He had thought 1989 was a portal, a wide opening to the future, with everyone streaming through. It was merely a peak. Now, from Jerusalem to New Mexico, walls were going up. So many lessons unlearned. The January assault on the Capitol could be merely a trough, a singular moment of shame to be discussed in wonder for years. Or a portal to a new kind of America, the present administration just an interregnum, a variant of Weimar. Meet me on the Avenue of the Heroes of January Sixth. From peak to midden in thirty years. Only the backward look, the well-researched history could tell peaks and troughs from portals.

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