the story of the growing self-consciousness of Spirit, of God coming to know himself, through us, in time. The trajectory was clear: from slavery to freedom. (Not incidentally, this could also be expressed geographically: “World history travels from east to west; for Europe is the absolute end of history, just as Asia is the beginning.”) The latter arrived, for Hegel, in the perfection of the modern state, which, he wrote, “is the realization of Freedom, of the absolute, final purpose, and exists for its own sake . . . The state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.”
One hundred and twenty years later, Walter Benjamin, a different sort of German philosopher, saw things differently. Months before he ended his life in a hotel room on the French-Spanish border, despairing of an escape from the Nazis, he wrote twenty paragraph-length fragments on “The Philosophy of History.” In the ninth, the most famous of them, Benjamin described “the angel of history” being propelled blindly into the future, still facing the past: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel is pushed onward, Benjamin wrote, by a terrible storm. “This storm is what we call progress.”
Yesterday the Rhino—the perfection of the modern state—recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and promised to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The announcement was condemned by pretty much every government in the world except Israel’s. I spent the morning trying to figure it out. Surely there was some rationale for his recklessness, if not a strategy then at least some sleight of hand. As far as I can tell there wasn’t. To please his most rabidly right-wing and pro-Israel donor (the Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson) the Rhino had made a promise during the campaign. He was convinced that keeping it would please not only Adelson but the evangelical Christians who form a large part of his base. He is said to have refused to explain his decision to the Palestinian president, telling him only that “he had to do it.” Unnamed aides told The Washington Post that the Rhino “did not seem to have a full understanding of the issue.” So we race into the abyss.
I record this not as evidence that the Rhino is particularly stupid, shortsighted, addled, deluded, demented, arrogant, venal, and vain, though he is all of those things. And night is dark, the sun hot, and bright. The Rhino’s election and the recklessness with which he rules are not potential causes of global chaos but symptoms of a breakdown that is already under way. A healthy, confident nation would not have elected such a man. This one is sick to the bone, stumbling everywhere it steps, knocking things over, making a mess. Empires do not go down quietly. Usually they take the whole world with them for a while. The last great hegemonic handover, from Great Britain to the United States, followed two world wars and the loss of many millions of lives, most of them neither British nor American.
The Rhino, with his vituperative, uncomprehending eyes, his puckered lips and painted orange scowl, is the face of this collapse. He’s what we look like now. Every buried crime and contradiction on which the American polity was built sprawls in the open over the sidewalks and the streets and the endless crawl of cable news. The Klan is out of hiding. The dumb ones wear swastikas. The rest, in suits and ties, strut the soft-carpeted corridors of power. The rich are stealing everything. They don’t bother to hide the graft or to disguise the contempt in which they hold us. All the sexual horrors are spilling out, hungry priapic wraiths with sticky palms and iron grips haunting every workplace. This is what we look like. Nothing remains concealed. The past is returning. The unconscious won’t stay un. And into this cauldron the hurricanes and fires blow, one after another.
Or think of it this way. Hundreds of millions of years ago, our distant cousins—various phytoplankton and zooplankton, cycads and ferns—lived lives as full of passion and drama as any, and then went ahead and died. Buried in mud or water and deprived of oxygen, they were compressed over the centuries by layer after layer of sediment and stone. Slowly, pressure and heat transformed them into a black and viscous goo, into gas that stinks of flatulence, and into strange, hard, oily lumps. Cut to the early nineteenth century, when British industrialists found a use for these otherwise unpleasant substances, the transformed bodies of the earth’s early dead. They burned them, and made things move, and turned that motion into money, which could be turned into more money to mine more ancient fuels from the earth and make more things move and make more money. The carbon that had for millennia slept beneath the planet’s crust in vast and oozy subterranean cemeteries was suddenly spat into the air through smokestacks, chimneys, exhaust pipes. It stayed up there and commenced absorbing more and more of the radiant heat of the sun, causing the earth to precipitously warm, the ice at its poles to melt, its oceans to rise, their currents to shift. You are no doubt by now familiar with this process. What is it, really, though, but a haunting—the ancient dead disturbed from slumber, punishing us for our greed and blindness, our restless lack of reverence? What is it but the past come back, and time unhinged, collapsing?
Walter Benjamin attributed the failure of the social democratic politicians of his day to reckon with the threat of fascism to their “stubborn faith” in progress. If mankind was destined to advance, how could the fascists, with their crude and backward-looking talk of blood and soil, be taken seriously? But they were serious, and so are their descendants today.
The problem for Benjamin was not simply that faith in progress was mistaken. It was that the entire idea relied on a concept of time—a time that was “homogeneous” and “empty”—that was itself illusory, and dangerous. The opportunities and hazards of the present, Benjamin argued, could not be understood unless time itself was reconceived.
If this was true then, how much more so is it now, when fascism is not the only peril that we face?
Last night, by a hair, and against the wishes of nearly 70 percent of the state’s white voters, Alabama failed to elect to the U.S. Senate a man who spoke nostalgically of slavery and who was banned from his local mall for preying on teenage girls. Time is not moving smoothly forward. It’s circling back, getting knotted up in oblong loops, stopping, stuttering, plunging on.
In the summer of 2014 I was living in Ramallah. It was a very bad year. War didn’t break out until early July, but for most of June Israeli troops had been flooding the West Bank. The days were long, the nights even longer. I don’t remember sleeping much, only lying in bed, listening to the dogs bark, waiting for the call to prayer to announce the arrival of the dawn. The clashes at the checkpoints started in the afternoon and stretched late into the night: boys and young men throwing stones at soldiers who fired back with tear gas canisters, rubber-coated bullets, live ammunition. No one flinched at the blasts. The young men took breaks from throwing stones to direct traffic and smoke cigarettes, trying to keep the city flowing. Later, when everyone but the kids standing watch outside the refugee camps had gone to sleep, the soldiers came into the city to raid houses and make arrests. Shots and explosions shattered the night. Each morning’s news was worse than the last’s. Then the war started. Too much was happening, all of it bad.
Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I’ve felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino’s election. I don’t know what to call it. The Time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears