There’s an evergreen appeal to books about the world going to hell. There might be better or worse times to tell a story about civilization falling apart – the ‘30s and ‘70s were ripe for it; the ‘60s and ‘90s not so much. We’re in one of those doomsaying boom times again.
I think of Oswald Spengler publishing his ground-breaking feel-bad chart-topper The Decline of the West in 1918, just when no one would deny that things had gone very wrong and were likely going to get worse. He must have smiled tightly to himself as he anticipated the public reacting to his assertion that “we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of a late life, to which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’ Athens but in Caesar’s Rome.”
