Transfiguration. Consider it from where you stand.
Overnight the cold, cloudy wet spell was lifted, and
you wake beneath a Byzantine blue dome of glass1
A modest ritual my wife and I have is to go see a movie together the afternoon of Christmas Eve. With small children,
we don’t get out much for movies, and usually it has been the
only movie we see in the theater all year long. In 2011, we went
to see the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech, a film I found compelling given my own struggle with a stutter. Just watching the
opening scene, which shows King George VI struggling to give
a speech in a giant stadium, gave me a panic attack.
After the film was over, I found myself wondering about that
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epoch in Western history. I grew up in Asia, so my knowledge
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of early-twentieth-century European history was a bit thin.
Ever the history buff, I started to consume books about the period. Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August is exceptional; it
opens with the funeral of King Edward VII (the grandfather of
King George VI, whose story is told in The King’s Speech). This is
the book’s very first paragraph:
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910
when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England
that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could
not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green
and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes,
and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five
heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven
queens—four dowager and three regnant— and a scattering of
special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they
represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the
last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as
the cortege left the palace, but on history’s clock it was sunset,
and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of
splendor never to be seen again.2
It was an astonishing show of pomp and circumstance, and, to
contemporaries, it evoked the undeniable power and stability
of monarchies across Europe and the globe. Yet a few years
later the entire system of hereditary monarchy—a previously
essential institution—would be gone.
Let’s review for a moment exactly what was being torn
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asunder: Not merely monarchy, but an entire social, cultural,
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and intellectual order. “Revolution” is overused and overhyped,
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but the era of the world wars ushered in a truly dramatic
global transformation in just a few decades. Industrialization
reached its zenith with automobiles and airplanes, science
produced Einstein’s theory of relativity and other dramatic
breakthroughs, and we can also speak of the rise of professionalization, the beginnings of decolonization, suffrage for women
(and with the flappers a new sort of liberation for women), the
spread of mass communications, new movements in art and
philosophy—the list goes on and on. All these new ways of
thinking and new technologies worked together to destabilize
Victorian norms and, amid the tumult of war, build the world
we now inherit.
Astonished by “the sun of the old world . . . setting in a dying
blaze of splendor,” I kept reading and found myself fascinated
by letters circulated between three first cousins: King George V
of England, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and Tsar Nicholas II
of Russia. These leaders grew up together, spending holidays
with their grandparents—they adored (and were adored) by their
grandmother, Queen Victoria—and penning intimate letters
back and forth into adulthood. As the nineteenth century came
to a close, the three imagined their great-grandchildren as the
monarchs of Europe (and, indeed, the world) in our century.
They were as blind as everyone to the changes that industrialization was bringing, and they were also blissfully ignorant of
the growing dissatisfaction with hereditary monarchy. In one
letter, a court observer from Russia writes:
I must say there is life and merriment at the palace now. All the
princely youth who have gathered here are letting their hair
down. There is sunshine and laughter in all the corners of the
palace, in all the corners of the park, as if a swarm of twittering
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birds had arrived.3
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Sunshine and laughter— and meanwhile, Lenin was preaching
revolution in the streets. Had they lived, the three cousins,
“King, Kaiser, and Tsar,” would not recognize the world by 1960,
let alone today.
We’re at the beginning of a similar epochal change in human
history.4 Scan the headlines every morning—through your
Facebook and Twitter feeds— and you can feel history shifting
under your feet. Every day I find more and more evidence that
we are in the twilight of our own age, and that we can’t quite
grasp it, even if we can sense something is terribly amiss. This
transformation transcends any one realm of life— it’s allencompassing, even if, as we’ve seen, it proceeds unevenly and
paradoxically. Our twentieth-century institutions, which seem
as foundational or ahistorical as hereditary monarchy, are on
the cusp of collapse— or, if not outright collapse, of irrelevancy
and anachronism.
Frequently these institutions have had a hand in their own
demise. Then along came radical connectivity to hasten it by
shifting immense amounts of power and influence toward everyday individuals— and to a few huge, Even Bigger platforms
that dominate our digital world. What might have been a fiftyto one-hundred-year process has been compressed into a decade or even less. The End of Big replaces the elite, formal,
highly capitalized, institutionally backed provider of goods or
ser vices with your neighbor the poet/journalist/lawyer/soldier/
designer/(insert craft here). Soon, with 3-D printing, it won’t
just be media or intellectual property that anyone can create
and disseminate; it will be anything— shoes, mobile phones,
vehicles. And once anyone can create anything, brands and
elite notions of excellence in any field really will be obsolete. It
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will all come down to relationships, to my neighbor (physical
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or digital) and my neighbor’s work. If any of our institutions
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persist, it will be by virtue of sheer financial heft (although that
didn’t help monarchy), violence (also didn’t work so well for
the monarchy), or ingenuity. Let’s hope for the last of these.
With the established order declining so quickly, people are
getting anxious, depressed, and pessimistic. Over the last decade, doctors are writing more than twice as many prescriptions for anti-depressants, overwhelmingly for people without
a diagnosed mental health condition.5 The most popular stories of our age—Harry Potter, Batman, the Hunger Games, the
proliferation of zombie films and TV shows— all tell of dark
struggles between good and evil, the forces of good being tired
or compromised in some way. A sense of “let’s hunker down
for the coming storm” pervades our social consciousness, captured well in the title of a poem by Charles Simic (one of my favorites): “Against Whatever It Is That’s Encroaching.” Barack
Obama tapped into the ominous mood during his run for the
presidency in 2008, articulating our hopes for a way out, a positive change. Guess what? The mood is even more ominous today.
Adding to our anxiety is the sense that we’re powerless to
disengage from the technology. Radical connectivity is addictive. We have trouble resisting the siren song appeal of the inbox, the social network, the incoming text messages. Whether
at a conference or at home, we are glued to our devices, even
when it puts lives at risk. According to several studies, texting
while driving dramatically increases the risk of an accident,
because reading or sending a text diverts the driver’s eyes from
the road for an average of 4.6 seconds—the same amount of time
it would take to drive the length of a football field, blind, at 55
mph.6 A 2009 experiment by Car and Driver magazine suggested
that texting while driving was more dangerous than driving
while drunk, based on measurements of stopping distance and
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response time.7 And yet, despite the risks, the research, and the
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