Special Issue on Crisis and Rupture
Desirable Futures—New Histories
The COVID-19 pandemic, war, social tensions, political conflicts, and climate change have only amplified already existing fears about our collective futures. Amid these threat multipliers, actor William Shatner, famous for his role as Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, traveled to space in 2021 with Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin. Expecting to feel exhilarated and elated, Shatner instead wept for the Earth: “I realized it’s dying.” His response is part of a larger realization that the human history of the Earth—the Anthropocene—is believed by many to be approaching an end.
Along with this recognition that we have devastated Earth, national and global trends have altered our communities and cultures for several decades, placing us at the end of a long and stable period, as American geopolitical analyst Peter Zeihan notes in The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization (2022). According to Zeihan, compared to what will happen in the near future, the period from 1945 until now has been the best possible era. Looking ahead, however, “The 2020s will see a collapse of consumption and production and investment and trade almost everywhere. Globalization will shatter into pieces. Some regional. Some national. Some smaller. It will be costly. It will make life slower. And above all, worse. No economic system yet imagined can function in the sort of future we face.” Noticeably absent, though, from Zeihan’s Cassandra list is an anticipated future and any cultural dimension. Along with this “catastrophic convergence” comes what could be called the end of history.
[To read the full article, please download the PDF below–coming soon!]