ABSTRACT
It is a common conceit to imagine that one’s own times are of unprecedented historical importance. Indeed, this century it sometimes seems that just about every decade has made some claim or other for its singular contribution. Reflect for a moment here on our tendency to think in terms of decades —the ‘depressed’ thirties, the ‘radical’ sixties, the ‘selfish’ eighties-and one will readily understand the point. When one adds to this disposition the fact that we are approaching the end of the second millennium, with all the attendant temptation to ‘take stock’ of whence we have come and where we may be going, then it is easy enough to appreciate why we should have such an enormous amount of commentary to the effect that we live in a period of especially profound and exhilarating (if disconcerting) transformation. Heaven knows, towards the close of the nineteenth century there was an extraordinary outpouring of fin de siècle angst, so we ought not to be surprised that the close of a thousand years provokes a tumult of anxiety, soul-searching and pronouncements on the ‘new’. So much of this has appeared recently that there is now almost a consensus that we inhabit a post-something or other type of society.
