Alienation and Revolution

Abstract

A recent letter to the editor of one of the newspapers I read suggested that our present era should go down as the Age of Apprehension rather than the Age of Aquarius. The writer went on to list thirty "crises"—ranging from Russia to a higher rate of V.D.—that depress the minds of the citizenry. He then concluded: "And just in case any reader refuses to get drowned by these, there's always the H-bomb hanging over our heads." The news, to be sure, is rarely good these days. But it is more than a question of bad news. A letter of this sort rather vividly and even pathetically expresses the widespread sense of malaise that characterizes these times. We seem indisputably to be living through one of those periods of cultural collapse that periodically overtakes history, a time when the human estate is at low ebb, only tenuously connected to the sources of its replenishment.