Books, Arts & Manners: All about the Eve

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason, by Conor Cruise O ‘Brien (Free Press, 166 pp., $12)

IT is a natural inclination, as we approach the end of the present millennium, to take stock of our civilization and look to its future. If recent experience is any guide, however, much of that stock-taking will express the cal-lowest futurism. It will consist of empty techno-utopian babble about the prospects of improvement that are opened up by new technologies, whose inherent ethical ambiguities and potential for harm will be ignored; triumphalist affirmations of the end of history that neglect the oldest lesson of history, which is that no form of government is ever secure or final; and confident predictions of a global civilization built on a Western model, made at just the historical moment when the many evidences of Western decline are encouraging non-Western peoples to return to their own traditional values.

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John Gray

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On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason, by Conor Cruise O ‘Brien (Free Press, 166 pp., $12)

IT is a natural inclination, as we approach the end of the present millennium, to take stock of our civilization and look to its future. If recent experience is any guide, however, much of that stock-taking will express the cal-lowest futurism. It will consist of empty techno-utopian babble about the prospects of improvement that are opened up by new technologies, whose inherent ethical ambiguities and potential for harm will be ignored; triumphalist affirmations of the end of history that neglect the oldest lesson of history, which is that no form of government is ever secure or final; and confident predictions of a global civilization built on a Western model, made at just the historical moment when the many evidences of Western decline are encouraging non-Western peoples to return to their own traditional values.