The Birth of the 21st Century
From a socio-historical point of view, the 20th century ended somewhere around 1989-92 with the fall of the Berlin Walls and the disintegration of the communist bloc, and the 21st century begins with September 11th, 2001. The 90’s belong in a different period altogether, where the contextual question on everyone’s lips was “Fukuyama or Huntington?”
As the 90’s reached for a close, despite great efforts by people like the late Edward Said and Paul Berman, Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” became the prevailing rhetoric.
If we can look back at the 90’s, it appeared as an era of hope. This is what brought about Fukuyama’s “End of History” in the first place (though Fukuyama himself is not an optimist, but rather considers the market-bearing parliamentary democrat The Last Man). In the beginning of the 20th century there were maybe a handful of democracies; by the fall of the USSR there were over a hundred and fifty. Not all of them working, enlightened democracies, but democracies nonetheless. Fukuyama really meant that the Hegelian End of History is already within our reach, even if there are still a few stepping stones on the way, like a war in the Balkans or the Middle East, they pale in insignificance compared to the greater processes taking place. After a decade of Reagan/Thatcher, people like Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder took office, and it seemed that the old unending pendulum swings of right-left were reaching their conclusion as well; There’s a third way, another way, a synthesis.
This rhetorical optimism in discourse reached it’s peak around 99′, and came crashing down rather abruptly by the end of 2000. The .com bubble burst, the Israeli-Palestinian Camp David peace talks ended with a resounding failure, and George W. Bush was elected President of the United States because the Supreme Court would not recount the Florida votes.
The illusion of 90’s optimism and the Fukuyama rhetoric became abundantly clear when the second intifada begun in late 2000, the uneasy truths about the Rwanda Genocide turned to public discourse, and films like Black Hawk Down hit movie theatres in 2001.
By the end of that year, the 21st century was born.
Tagged as 21c, 21st century, 90s, berlin wall, communism, Edward Said, Francis Fukuyama, Hegel, illusionary, interbellum, liberalism, optimism, Sam Huntington, the clash of civilizations, the end of history, שי ברוג + Categorized as Futurism, Social Politics
So the 90’s are an intermediate times, bridging the gap between the two centuries.
Though a lot have happened at the end of the 80’s-start of the 90’s and all through the 90’s. Changes that affected the cultural aspects of all people.
It was the Internet’s big boom which meant more people could get live data from all around the world all the time which changed the way communications and the press works which, in turn, affected (probably) some of the election issues through out the world. Governments were no longer able to do a lot of things without the praying eyes of its citizens that now have the power to reach the rest of the world which is just a click away.
The changes in music and the coming of a lot of “underground” non mainstream music in to the mainstream changed a lot of things and opened up the minds and language barriers that were (at least up until then) only available “underground”.
I don’t think you can actually make a clear cut and say 9/11 was the point where the 21st century actually started. Like anything else in our world – its a big pile of mushy stuff that all happens at the same time while still having both ways (20th century and 21st century) co-existing at the same time while one will fade away and the other will stay (until something else fades that away).
Reading your thoughts makes me jealous for school, having the time, inclination, requirement to read all of those articles, process other people’s thoughts and try to gain meaningful insight.
Now I read e mails all day and all I want to do when I get home is watch stupid tv and go to sleep. I am becoming the masses and it pisses me off.
I wonder why people feel such a need to delineate the times of their lives. Looking at a western historical examination, history is getting shorter. We measure time in terms of ideas and development. Why is this important? Isn’t the majority of what happens in the world dictated by people quietly going about their business, whether that business is driving a bus or hacking people to death with a machete? These are not new ideas, either of them. I guess my point is that whether you call it the 20th century or the 21st century, the Dark Age, the Age of Terrorism or the Age of Technology, Generation Y, Generation Why Not, or The Seasame Street Generation, the majority of people in the world live basically the same way their parents and grandparents did. The changes are cosmetic (from the girl who spends 80% of her waking hours in front of a screen). But probably I’m missing the *actual* point because my brain has atrophied.
Eran – Undoubtedly the internet has had a vast effect on global culture, but I think outside the anglosphere it’s only in the last 2-3 years that we’re really starting to see it. Most Israelis didn’t have an internet connection in 1995, so the change was radical and exponential, in a social context. This is kindof my point really, where it takes empires ages to form, they collapse very swiftly. That’s what it means to be on the edge of chaos. So while it’s natural for there to be an abundance of processes all leading towards varying directions, it’s a relatively short critical moment of bifurcation which wholly determines the attractor for the rest of the function. If the 90’s were a time where different processes were pulling for different directions, I’d say 9/11 was the determining event which drew the function into a particular “wing”.
Ariel – Don’t kid yourself, I get back home and want to do nothing but crawl into bed and zombify in front of the screen. I manage somehow to get jam some information into my brain-meat at the late hours but it’s always a struggle.
I can’t say I agree though; I think there are a lot of places in the world where people live essentially the same life their parents and grandparents lived, but we’re decisively not in that part of the world. Our culture and lifestyle today is radically different than the culture and lifestyle of 100 years ago within our culture, and that, by my account, is what it means to live. My dad makes a living doing something which did not exist 100 years ago (market research). Hell, the field of psychology as a science is only about 120 years old. Take a look at the things which define your life, your preferences, politics, habits, hobbies, language games and cultural memes and you’ll see they’re substantially (and in my opinion qualitatively) different from your counterpart of a few decades ago.
“Everyone knows that the Spanish war was one of the decisive events of our epoch, everyone said so at the time it was being fought, and everyone was right. But the Spanish war lies a decade and a half behind us, and nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history- our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting-halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar” -Lionel Trilling in the Introduction to Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.