![]() ![]() Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered alarming descriptions of this future, writing in his book Émile (1762) that societies were “approaching a state of crisis and the century of revolutions”. Many doubted modern states could survive the volatile mixture of public debt, social inequality, and the international struggle for resources that threatened to plunge them into eternal war and revolution. ![]() ![]() In the European tradition, tributes to progress are regularly offset by nightmares of decline and fall, especially during times of socio-economic turbulence or technological breakthrough, when, like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, societies “sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts”.Įnlightenment thinkers in the 18th century were haunted by visions of the apocalypse. Since then, fascination with the end of times has been a constituent feature of humanity’s cultural and intellectual history. In his best-selling book Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes that it was during the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when worries about the future “became central to the human mind”. ![]()
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