THIS is indeed a chilling book, full of doom, without specifying exactly which apocalyptic warnings about social en it can be expected. The various great minds" who have contributed essays, interviews and addresses to the century's end are almost all men and they are, to a man, fearful of what the future holds.
The technophagie majority of the late twentieth century", according to the philosopher and founding father of the ecology movement, Ivan Illich, describes "people who feed on the waste of development". It is a population, globalised, anonymous and utterly lost, comprising, in Illich's words:
Half of Chicago's inner city youth, who have dropped out of school, as well as two thirds of Mexico City's dwellers, whose excrement goes untreated. From New York's underclass to Cairo's "city of the dead" where people live in cemeteries, these survivors are the spontaneous architects of our post modern "future".
It doesn't really get much bleaker than that. Race war, an enfeebled Europe stuffing its face with what the Polish born poet Czeslaw Milosz calls "rapacious consumerism"; the bloody rant of old style nationalism resurfacing in the ethnically cleansed heartlands of an eastern Europe mordantly depicted in Bernard Henri Levy's contribution, "Bosnia and the Diet Coke Civilisation": "In Sarajevo, there is no oil. Only an idea that is the essence of Europe: tolerance and coexistence."
Meanwhile, the "onslaught of the western media" is neatly summarised by Akbar S. Ahmed's fervid defence of Islam: "Whereas a century ago Muslims could retreat so as to maintain the integrity of their lives, their areas are now penetrated, and technological advances have made escape impossible: the satellite in the sky can follow any camel across the Arabian desert, the laser guided missile can land in any home in any remote Afghan mountain valley, and the VCR is available in the desert tent as well as the mountain village."
At Century's End is full of such recognitions, and a parallel belief that resistance is called for a spiritual crusade, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which will base it self upon "the principle of self restraint" and "self limitation", although he fails to elaborate upon the do's and don'ts of such wishful thinking.
READING from the same hymn sheet, the exUS national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, believes that the place to start the fight back against "the morally corrosive inroads of permissive cornucopia" is with what he calls the "development of moral consciousness . . . of the desirability and utility of moral imperatives, and through that to adopt an ethos of self restraint instead of self indulgence".
Which is all very well when you're sitting securely on top of the pile, but cold comfort for the unemployed hordes" and remaindered families scratching out a living amidst said western indulgence in Chicago, Mexico, Birmingham, Berlin or, for that matter, Dublin.
At Century's End is a fascinating portrait of intellectual wars past and present, and of what artists from Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Oliver Stone, to politicians such as Nelson Mandela, Peres and Gonzalez and philosophers such as the magisterial Isaiah Berlin have made of the life of our times so far.
Interesting too that, other than the enlightened Irish imprint, Wolfhound, which took over this title from the American edition compiled from the pages of New Perspectives Quarterly, the only recurring point of Irish reference I came across was to the late Samuel Beckett in whose work so much of this talk of ending and beginning is authentically prefigured.