Stefan Zweig was a European romantic who, shortly before committing suicide, far from a Europe that was disintegrating due to the most devastating of his many wars, wrote a wonderful and heartbreaking testament, entitled The World of Yesterday (1942), in which he spoke no of their own becoming, "but that of a whole generation, ours, the only one that has carried the weight of destiny, as, surely, no other in history."
The generation of the Austrian Jew Zweig is the one that was born in Europe at the end of the 19th century, lived in its youth the First World War and the triumph of the October Revolution and, in its maturity, the utopian perversion carried out by Stalinism, the Parallel rise of National Socialism and fratricidal conflicts such as the Spanish civil war. The European batch that, already in its old age, attends the beginning of World War II, with the Holocaust included.
Stefan Zweig committed suicide in his Brazilian exile in 1942 and did not know that atomic bombs would drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Much more recently, the highly recognized and read Noah Yuval Harari (also Jewish, by the way, also heterodox, of course) reminds us in his 21 lessons for the 21st century that the man of today, our lucky generation, has been, at Throughout the history of Homo sapiens, the one that had the least risk of starvation, in a war or an epidemic, the three great scourges that have always persecuted humanity. And it offers figures that support its affirmation.
Harari, however, does not stop expressing his fears about the qualities and qualities of this present time in which a good part of the faith that liberal thought and model enjoyed, including globalization, has been lost, while the countries they are armored with walls of nationalism and exclusive religious fundamentalisms, when humanity is closer to a tremendous ecological disaster. And the Israeli historian also notes the uncertainties generated by a future presumably designed by artificial intelligences fed by algorithms or the like.
My fortunate generation, along with their tremendous scientific achievements, has also suffered profound trauma
I believe with Harari and with many others that I belong to the generation that has suffered less from war violence, that has been born with more years of life expectancy, has had more height to look out into the future, even to live it and congratulate itself on it. And also to be horrified by the possible variants of that future that seems closer and closer.
In the decades that go from our adolescence to adulthood, we have witnessed a change in the historical era: the devastating transit of mechanical and analog resources to the period of the digitalization empire, with all the multiple positive consequences and negative that such revulsive processes usually entail. Today we are beneficiaries of communication tools, knowledge, medical advances, and mobility that half a century ago seemed to be exclusive arguments for science fiction movies. The revolutions in information technology and biotechnology have changed almost everything, and it is certain that they will change it even more in a few years. Are we better for it? Will we live better in the future? Will the existentialist nonsense of life make more sense? I must admit that I have serious doubts about it. And not just because I'm getting old and, perhaps, becoming a pitiful conservative and my container of pessimism is overflowing. The universal situation that we live today, traced by fantasies like those of HG Wells in The War of the Worlds is a painful confirmation.
My fortunate generation, along with its tremendous scientific achievements, has also suffered profound trauma capable of altering many of our perceptions of life and the way we assume it. When we were enjoying youth, the appearance of HIV / AIDS appeared and traumatized us, a then fatal disease that affected the exercise of sexuality quite radically. Some twenty years later we were victims, and all of us, viewers, of the attack of September 11, 2001 that transformed the canons of security, introduced the fear of terrorism into State policy and turned it into an individual trauma that He managed to degrade the enjoyment of the trip, the adventure, the discovery (among other joys), to turn it into a task full of pitfalls and trauma (you cannot travel by plane with a glass of yogurt in your hand luggage). And if we thought that we already had enough, just when we reached the times of greatest political disenchantment of the last decades (or of disenchantment with the politicians and their actions that we have been suffering in the last decades), then the coronavirus or covid has arrived -19, which prevents us from traveling and recommends us not to get close to other people —and not to dream of having sex with a stranger. That we speak with a meter and a half of distance between us, that we confine ourselves ...
The world that seemed to expand and become less alien is today a hostile place, from which we must move away
The world that seemed to expand and become less alien (more globalized) is today a hostile place, from which we must move away if we want to live the eighty years on average that gave us medical advances, better food and the overcoming of great wars. We must lock ourselves in and communicate carefully, better if it is through Facebook or Instagram, without knowing how long we will not be able to attend a sporting event or a musical concert, because we must take care of large crowds of people. Run away from kisses and hugs.
The highly justified hysteria generated by this new virus has and will have truly apocalyptic proportions and consequences, regardless of their real justification, backed by the numbers of infected and dead. The truth is that economies are faltering, societies are closing, the wonderful science of the digital age slips and does not advance. The same science that decoded and synthesized the human genome but has not yet achieved an antidote against cancer, the most unstoppable epidemic of these times, which every day kills as many people as the coronavirus ...
How far will we go in this race of pain and fear? Nobody knows. Is it the end of time, of society? No, it is not the end of time or of society, but it may be the end of a way of living in time and in society. I feel that even with a (relatively) quick solution to the health crisis we are experiencing today and so terrifying us, our world will never be the same, and not for the better. And I am not one of those who believe that the world of yesterday was the happiest and that we must recover it, as Trump asks when he calls for returning to America the lost greatness. The greatness of the times of fierce legalized racial discrimination (forbidden the entrance of dogs, Jews and blacks) ?, for example. Or a greatness like that of a Putin who will be re-elected president ad infinitum: the recovery of Russian pride thanks to which citizens could perhaps choose between Tsarism and Stalinism, if there is anything they can choose.
Yesterday's world, yesterday of our privileged generation, was not better, although it seems more and more so. "It turns out we were better off when we thought we were worse off," someone told me. Because, even with the signs of solidarity and altruism that we have applauded, today's world is sick, not only of coronaviruses, but of other ills for which there will be no vaccines (nationalisms, fundamentalisms) and makes me fear how it will be organized the world of tomorrow, perhaps when the political powers tell us that we can kiss and hug each other again, talk to each other and touch each other ... and we are already afraid of doing it or, even, we don't know how to do it.
Leonardo Padura is a writer.
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