The ‘end of history' was the source of our ills

Times

5 hours ago

All the best scenes in Shifty, Adam Curtis's new documentary about Britain in the late 20th-century, concern the Millennium Dome. With skilfully spliced footage of its gaping interiors and weirdly looming riverside bulk, the dome is transformed into an almost gothic symbol of fin de siècle spiritual vacuousness. A planning committee decides that it is to have a 'spirit zone', but nobody can decide what religions should be represented there. In a drab conference room a man with an uninspiring powerpoint enthuses that the phrase 'HOW SHALL I LIVE?' should be projected onto a blank wall instead. Isn't that a bit 'banal', wonders Simon Jenkins. He is quickly shouted down.
You don't have to buy all of Curtis's arguments — was Margaret Thatcher really the sole author of modern hyperindividualism? — to appreciate his refreshingly eerie and desolate portrait of that much-mythologised period, the 'end of history'. To many today, the late 1990s and early 2000s are a lost Edwardian summer of stability and peace. The endless trend pieces about 'Nineties nostalgia' are more than mere fluff. The undying popularity of Friends, Harry Potter and Bridget Jones among those not alive to see them first time round, and the lucrative resurrections of Oasis and Pulp, represent something real.
For people my age and younger, the vanished era of post-Cold War tranquillity is as psychologically significant as the Second World War was to some baby boomers; it is the same painful sense of having just missed a glorious cresting wave in the tide of history. But rather than envying the heroism of our fathers, we covet their low house prices and political stability. To many Gen Zers (almost half of whom tell pollsters they wish TikTok didn't exist) the last years before iPhones have an archaic charm. Apparently banal clips of Noughties life acquire viral currency as artefacts of an innocent time before digital corruptions — the latest TikTok phenomenon is footage of the band MGMT performing dorkily at Yale to a conspicuously non-smartphone waving audience.
According to the popular story, a series of earthquakes shook us out of paradise: 9/11, the 2008 crash, social media, mass migration. But as Curtis shows, our unhappy age is a natural evolution of, not an aberration from the 1990s. History doesn't rupture, it mutates. The myth of the blissful end of history is just as bogus as the myth of the long Edwardian summer (in the years before the First World War, readers will recall, Britain was on the brink of civil war over the question of Home Rule for Ireland).
The seeds of our present discontent were already germinating in that lost Eden at the end of history. The world Curtis portrays in Shifty is quite spookily familiar. The sleazy politicians of John Major's decaying government (the Starmer administration fleetingly strikes the viewer as almost attractive) have lost both public trust and the capacity to direct events. In the furious eyes of miners filing grimly out of shuttered pits in County Durham you glimpse the first sparks of the populist conflagration soon to engulf western democracies (and, perhaps, a foreshadowing of the AI-driven white collar deindustrialisation to come). Above it all, the unaccountable barons of high finance perch in their glittering silver towers.
Off screen in America, political polarisation was already carving ideological rifts down Thanksgiving tables. Newt Gingrich had long since resolved that politics was a 'war for power' and embarked on his attritional battles over the budget with Bill Clinton. The scandal over Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the Republicans' subsequent impeachment campaign split the country with almost Trump-era vitriol. In elite universities a movement known as 'political correctness' was campaigning to jettison pale stale writers from the canon, prompting one of the great public intellectuals of the age, Robert Hughes, to warn against the politicisation of art and a burgeoning cult of 'victimhood'.
There were no smartphones, true. But the advent of 24-hour news represented a media revolution nearly as important. One of the most effectively jarring moments in Curtis's series juxtaposes the hectic, adrenalised tone of 1990s TV news with a clip showing the staid formality of the BBC in the 1960s. The contrast is almost as stark as that which divides Newsnight from TikTok. By the 1990s, television was fragmenting into an infinity of cable news channels. Anybody who has read Neil Postman's polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) knows that his criticisms of TV — its inanity, its lack of deep context, its weird juxtapositions of the trivial and the serious — precisely anticipate the smartphone.
Screens were already isolating us in the 1990s. Curtis supplies tragicomic footage of an elderly couple sitting side by side in morose silence, hypnotised by a documentary about turtles. Membership of clubs and churches declined, and television was rated the most popular leisure activity. The five hours a day the average person dedicated to TV in 1990 seems restrained compared with the virtually constant smartphone use that characterises many modern lives, but it's also hard to argue that it represents the quasi-Amish technological continence of Gen Z mythology.
Though the romanticisation of the 1990s is not exactly baseless — I would rather live in an age before inflated house prices and the automation of the written word — it is overdone. The crises of the present age have helped expose a cultural and spiritual hollowness that was already evident at the turn of the millennium. Perhaps a country that chose to celebrate itself by constructing a huge and vacant white space was always going to end up in trouble