I understand why. Many well-known assumptions seem to have been overturned recently. Beliefs that the banks would not fail, that Britain would always be a member of the EU, that our civil liberties could not be arbitrarily taken away from us by government, that international borders were inviolable and invasions did not take place – all are one with Nineveh and Lasticho. But I’m afraid the resonance of this word is a bad sign. After all, look closer and the last few years don’t seem so unusual. We’ve had financial crises in the past: remember the collapse of BCCI in 1991, the banking crisis in the early 1970s or the closing of Equitable Life to new business in 2000. We’ve also had energy crises, in 1973 and 1979 – and fueled protests in 2000 that almost brought the country to a standstill. And is the invasion of Ukraine really so unprecedented? We had the Iraq War, arguably an invasion, whatever one’s view of its justification. the Balkan wars of the early 1990s that killed 100,000 people, displaced two million and brought back concentration camps, mass executions and genocide. or the 1998/9 Kosovo war that almost brought NATO and Russia into direct conflict: have we all forgotten General Mike Jackson’s refusal to “start World War III” at Pristina airport? The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 killed thousands and displaced many more. So did the Soviet repression of Hungary in 1956. As for Britain, the Suez Crisis killed 3,000 and caused a national nervous breakdown. and the Northern Ireland Troubles killed nearly 4,000 and severely disrupted life in Britain for two decades. And then there was the Falklands conflict and our long involvement in Afghanistan. Or take the pandemic. Covid-19 was certainly not the first. The influenza epidemics of 1957/8 and 1968/9 killed between one and four million worldwide, including many tens of thousands in the UK. But the less severe reaction from the authorities means that these have faded from popular memory. I say all this not to minimize or relativize the current crises. The invasion of Ukraine is no longer justified because other bad things have happened in Europe in the past. Rather, it suggests that estrangement is not something new, but a permanent part of the human condition. War, disease, economic disaster – these are not phenomena from the distant past or distant lands about which we know little. He has been with us, even here in the UK, all this time. So why do the last few years “feel” different to so many? I suggest that it is not because the world has changed, but because we have. Instead of seeing change, disruption and unexpected events for what they are, part of life, to which we must adapt, we have come to believe that they cannot or should not happen here. Nothing really bad should happen in Britain. If it does, the government should protect us. Normal life should be smooth, unchallenging and uninterrupted. The problem is, when we start thinking like this, we stop being resilient and start becoming fragile. Major world events and the changes they bring seem unnatural, not part of the routine of human existence. Every danger is great and the world seems more dangerous than ever. Then a vicious circle begins in which the government has to shield us from more and more difficulties. We start out in a world where the state bails out the banks but ends up in a world where it caps energy prices, subsidizes people to go to work and restricts our behavior for our own good – and who knows what else. The strange thing is that, in these circumstances, like an SUV driver isolated from the road in a highly safe vehicle, we can collectively start taking more risks because we believe we are protected from the consequences. So we become dismissive about the risk of nuclear escalation in support of Ukraine. We indulge in a decade of sub-zero real interest rates without caring what it does to the economy. Or we destroy our energy system and hope windmills fill the gap. Let’s face it: this whole worldview is a throwback. We didn’t build Britain, or indeed Western civilization, that way. Normal historical events are not one-offs. What is a crisis is a society where too many people want to stop the world and get off. But a society in which citizens are not expected to face challenges and do not have to face consequences is a society of children, not adults. Benjamin Franklin, on the last day of the US Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what had been agreed upon. He replied: “A democracy, if you can keep it”—that is, as long as Americans could maintain the habits of liberty, hardiness, and self-restraint that supported it. We should ask ourselves a similar question before it is too late: “Western civilization – can we preserve it?”
