Talkin’ about a Revolution

Summary

Hegel’s World Revolutions, by Richard Bourke, Princeton University Press, 344 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0691250182 Is human history ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ or rather a heroic story of the inevitable unfolding of human progress? Apart from professional optimists like Steven Pinker, most of us might feel on safer ground with Macbeth’s verdict. The less sanguine view of our past as one damned thing after another is more readily compatible with the currently lamentable state of the world. At the time of writing this piece (early January 2025) it is yet to be announced by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists how close to midnight we currently are on the Doomsday clock. In January of last year the board members of the Bulletin, which includes no less than eight Nobel scientists, judged that we are as close as 90 seconds to self-destruction. The following trends were cited to justify their unnervingly bleak diagnosis of our situation: The war in Ukraine and the widespread and growing reliance on nuclear weapons increase the risk of nuclear escalation. China, Russia and the United States are all spending huge sums to expand or modernise their nuclear arsenals, adding to the ever-present danger of nuclear war through mistake or miscalculation. In 2023, Earth experienced its hottest year on record, and massive floods, wildfires and other climate-related disasters affected millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, rapid and worrisome developments in the life sciences and other disruptive technologies accelerated, while governments made only feeble efforts to control them. (https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/) The Bulletin assures us that ‘the world can be made safer. The Clock can move away from midnight.’ Fair enough, but any honest reckoning with global events in the last twelve months must conclude that the only credible direction the Clock can move is forward and ever closer to our annihilation. How quickly hum...