I couldn't figure out a way to get the article in pdf to link up in the blog, but I think Jared's comments are interesting in and of themselves. Here's the letter:


Friends,

Here's an interesting article. NY Times, circa 1996. I just found it floating around the Blogosphere. You need Adobe Acrobate to view. Did you ever get tired of hearing about, say, the end of rock n roll, the collapse of western civilization, the 'death of God', all that other talk about 'endings' that seemed to reemerge among the chattering classes in the late 90's? I did. At Pomona I even wrote a very good paper attacking some assigned book called 'The End of the Nation-State', which was rewarded with a very poor grade by a teacher who seemed to want me to agree with her that the globalization of trade and capital flows had rendered national borders a 'destructive fiction'.

As I was walking to the library to write this email from my laptop, I was visited by an image from one of Rudyard Kipling's stories in which a colony of shrieking monkeys overtake an ancient ruin in northern Punjab and gleefully tear apart the abandoned city from top to bottom, hurling bricks from the roofs and balconies and smashing them in courtyards below. Maybe Kipling's fear of the centrifugal forces inherent in the British empire was a subtext to this metaphor. Maybe my fear of something similar brought the image to my own mind. But when I look at it carefully, I doubt that this is actually what is happening to our world and our civilization, if I may call it that. I doubt that we are decaying from within, in the manner of ancient Rome, eaten away by the corrosiveness of our own pessimism and decadence and despair as the culture mavens hurl bricks from above while we egg them on. Its something else, and its not, as I have also thought at times, simply the arrogance of someone wanted to puff himself up so much that he feels big enough to proclaim the death of this or that. No, I suspect this pundit is right in saying it was simply millenarian fever coupled with a lack of perspective. Our public intellectuals succumbed to it no more or less than anyone else. And now that the millenium has passed, I can feel America's optimism returning. I can feel more and more of the talking heads saying that while the thinkers are busy deconstructing everything, life goes on one way or another thanks to the action of those people - the great majority of humankind - who are actually engaged in the business of living it. One industry rises even as others fall; trends emerge while others disappear; the new is steadily replacing the old. So even though you see destruction and chaos all around you, be careful of making any conclusions about it until you look to see what's being created to take its place.

If you reply to this email, I think it will come to me alone. Type my address in your address field to be sure. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Jared