Kicking the table over

Mariella Frostrup has sadly left Radio 4's Open Book programme for fresh Murdoch woods, but she has left behind a cache of excellent interviews, including this one with Robert Harris. Towards the end, he accepts Frostrup's suggestion that he is a political novelist, even though he is generally described as a thriller writer. 

Scandal, ambition, they are worldly subjects, not interior, they are not domestic, so that there is almost no language for this, except for the thriller

The interview took place before the current pandemic was declared, but well into other pattern-breaking events:

Something lies behind Brexit and Trump and all the other things that are going on and the interesting novel would be to try and find what that other thing is [but we may have to wait] ten or twenty years to really get a sense of what it is that has shaken up our world so much. [...] It's like the period before the First World War where you had a long period of peace and relative prosperity but it's almost as if we as a species had got bored and we wanted to kick the table over and try something different and we had these new technological means to fight war and everyone wondered whether it would be worth a try [and] there was a sort of general ferment and I wonder whether we are living through something like that now.

Part of the trouble is the tendency of empires which see their power beginning to diminish, or at least see stronger rivals emerging, lashing out in a demonstration of military prowess. This is not an original theory; some old Greek, whose name I have forgotten, put it forward thousands of years ago. The pattern has repeated down the ages. The UK demonstrated it in South Africa and Austro-Hungary in the Great War as power inexorably slipped towards the United States. I would argue that Russia's doomed adventure in Afghanistan is another such case. In 2016, US voters, sensing their position in the world slipping, elected a president professing to "make America great again", conducting trade wars and seemingly intent on picking a fight with the new rising power, China. 

But something else is going on. Other rising nations like Brazil and India, which should be comfortable with the current situation, have elected ultra-nationalist, divisive leaders who can only impede their development. China, which has no need of a confrontation, is equally as provocative as the US. It does seem as if the world is bent on collective suicide.