Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

in the most advanced capitalistic countries, not a nation of paupers and farmers which
ends up decapitating its own intelligentsia, to replace it with political bureaucratic hacks.
He considers equally disastrous the phenomena of capitalism and nationalism in the 20 th .
Century. Nationalism (which I have treated in other Ovi contributions: see http://www.
ovimagazine.com/art/1944) begins with World War I in 1914, a war largely provoked by
extreme nationalism, to continue only twenty years later as War World II. Most people
would consider those two conflagrations as nothing short than an unmitigated disaster for
civilization as a whole but especially for Europe, ushering in the disaster of the Cold War,
now being resurrected almost nostalgically by Mr. Putin.
What is interesting in the book’s analysis is that Hobsbaum does not stop with the merely
political and economic, but as the thorough historian that he is, he goes on to examine
the progress of the arts and societal changes in the latter part of the 20 th century and
finds those too a real disaster too in just about all its aesthetic forms. Hobsbaum writes
this on Post-war modernist art practice:”...consisted largely in a series of increasingly
desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable
individual trademark, a succession of manifestos of despair... or of gestures reducing the
sort of art which was primarily bought for investment and its collectors ad absurdum, as
by adding an individual’s name to piles of brick or soil (minimal art) or by preventing
it from becoming such a commodity through making it too short-lived to be permanent
(performance art). The smell of impending death rose from these avant-gardes. The future
was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was. More than ever, they knew
themselves to be on the margin.” So, here again Hobsbaum echoes Vico: the decadence is
historically not just political or economic but primarely cultural pertaining to the whole of
Western civilization. After all, lest we forget, this is the era of two World Wars, the lagers
and the gulags, not to count the innumerable genocides.
Moreover, Hobsbaum clearly points out the abysmal record of recent attempts to predict
the world’s future. “The record of forecasters in the past thirty or forty years, whatever their
professional qualification as prophets, has been so spectacularly bad that only governments
and economic research institutes still have, or pretend to have, much confidence in it.” He
quotes President Coolidge who, in a message to Congress on December 4, 1928, on the
eve of the Great Depression said this: “The country can regard the present with satisfaction
and anticipate the future with optimism.” Sounds like George Bush just before the great
recession of 2008.
Hobsbaum in fact, following the present historical trajectory predicts continued turmoil:
“The world of the third millennium will therefore almost certainly continue to be one
of violent politics and violent political changes. The only thing uncertain about them is
where they will lead,” and he then expresses this bold view: “If humanity is to have a
recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present.” This too is Vichian:
the future lies in a return to origins: in the beginning there is the end, and in the end there
is the beginning. Then he makes a startling prediction: “Social distribution and not growth