The End of Mystery

The aggiornamento of the unseen

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1992) has become a byword for the application of over-enthusiastic historiography to current events, to the point that Fukuyama’s book almost falls into the category of ‘so bad it’s good’ – like those books, comics and films that have aged so badly that they are now charming monuments of nostalgia for a particular era and have developed their own cult following for that reason. Fukuyama’s book is such a monument: a memorial to the early 1990s, that extraordinary era of optimism when it seemed that the horrors of the 20th century had resolved themselves into an arc of glowing harmony and ever-increasing prosperity and liberty for us all. Those who grew up in that era – and I remain unsure whether it was good fortune or misfortune to do so – were imbued not only with youth’s customary sense of immortality, but also with a sincere belief that the age we were living in was the everlasting happily-ever-after of a story with lots of bad things in it, but which could never touch us again.

The distinctive collective psychology of the western world in the early 1990s – which is understandably difficult for people who didn’t live through it to understand – was a kind of ‘temporal particularism’, analogous to the naïve national particularism of people who think not only that their country is the best in the world but also that the circumstances that apply to other countries simply don’t apply to their own – a kind of ontological untouchability. We did not so much believe that we were living at the best time in history, as that time itself had ceased to apply to us because history was over. Every generation, naturally, privileges its now – perceiving its experience of the present as somehow more authentic than any that has gone before – but the early 1990s put that common illusion on steroids, because we were taught it by our elders and teachers as well as deciding it for ourselves.

But the roots of the temporal particularism of the 1990s are deeper than just the societal dopamine high brought by the end of the Cold War. The End of History and the mood it created was a supercharged version of the idea of ‘modernity’ that first emerged at the end of the 19th century. Modernity was the idea that not only a new age had dawned, but that the present age was different from any that had gone before it – a definitive punctuation mark in human culture. Modernity was not just a new era but an era that was, by definition, the present. In the ideology of modernity, the present is different from the past not only because we are the ones who happen to be living through it, but also because the present is qualitatively different from every past we can possibly look back to.

A moment’s thought might lead us to wonder how this can be the case; after all, the present is only contingently different, not qualitatively different, from the past. To state the obvious, for those who lived in the past, that which we think of as the past was the present. But modernity rebels against this idea, pitting past and present against one another as irreconcilable opposites. It is understandable that people will feel this way, especially if their world has been radically transformed by seemingly exponential technological and societal change. Such a society is radically alienated from its past, even within the lifetime of individuals – imagine growing up in a pre-industrial rural society and ending your life in a world of motor cars and cinema. But it is, ultimately, just a subjective experience. To us, the world of the angst-ridden Modernists is most definitely the past – even Postmodernism now feels as though it is slipping away into history. Of course it was untrue that modernity was a permanent and never-ending present.

But temporal particularism of this subjective kind still has a hold on us. People will exclaim ‘It’s 2024!’ whenever they encounter something they think does not belong in the present, as if time itself has value-laden characteristics. One of the strangest examples of temporal particularism was the aggiornamento in the Church of the 1960s, an era when declaring that something was inappropriate for ‘the modern world’ was a sort of magical incantation with intrinsic performative power. Everyone was supposed to know what ‘the modern world’ was, and if something was declared to be inappropriate for it, that declaration alone was sufficient to justify its abolition. Once again, a moment’s thought might lead us to ponder what exactly counts as ‘the modern world’; at any moment in time, there are many variations in society and culture where one person’s archaic and outmoded is another person’s normal, or even advanced. Who is right? It’s obviously a subjective matter. But the Emperor’s New Clothes of aggiornamento, which (if we’re honest) didn’t really mean anything other than a way of smashing things people didn’t like, tore relentlessly through the Christian churches in the 1960s and ’70s. It seems darkly ironic that an essentially mystical – even magical – conviction about what modernity is, and an evangelical certainty about the future trajectory of human progress, was deployed to further disenchant the Church and the world. The end of history was also the end of mystery; only a small range of unseen realities (modernity, progress, aggiornamento and so on) were ontologically acceptable – anything else was archaic mumbo jumbo.

But we know now, of course, that none of this was true. There are those who still cling to the illusions of the 1960s and the Fukuyama-esque naivety of the 1990s, or at least hanker after them (and part of me sympathises…); but enough history has happened to prove to anyone that we are very far from being at the end of it. In the 2020s Europe and America’s original sins are painfully recrudescent, red in tooth and claw. Yet what interests me are not so much the political consequences of the ‘return of history’, but the possibility that the return of history is also a return of mystery. For the fiction that we are somehow fundamentally different, more advanced, and less deluded than our predecessors has been exploded. We now know deep down that we are really no better than they were – the sleepwalkers of 1914, the guilty men of the 1930s, whatever we want to call them. And with that realisation comes the realisation that we are not just dwellers in the present. We are also dwellers in a past yet to come; and we will be judged, just as we judge the fools, cowards and ingenues of the past. We are no longer dwellers in permanent present that morally outshines the darkness of the past.

To my mind, this new way of perceiving ourselves has important consequences for how we perceive people in the past, and their relationship to mystery. In Magic in Merlin’s Realm (2022) I wrote about the return of magical thinking in modern politics, and it is easy to be dismissive of such a development and dismiss it as an aberration of ignorant political ‘deplorables’. But the reality is that return of magical thinking in politics is just one symptom of a far more profound and a far wider cultural shift which I have been struggling to articulate and define in this essay. It is part of a re-engagement, conscious or otherwise, with the whole human past and not just via an airbrushed, imagined present. That engagement is happening because the bubble of temporal particularism, of modernity, of postmodernity (whatever you want to call it) has been irrevocably punctured. And the result is that we find ourselves side-by-side with the people of the past and their concerns; the ditch we dug between past and present, under the comforting illusion of modernity, no longer seems to be there.

Put in a different way, I am increasingly aware of a movement in historiography, but also in culture more widely, to tear down the barriers that seemingly separate us from the past. It is a movement to reject the reductive instincts of modernism, and to reject postmodernism’s attempt to empty belief systems of meaning. It is a movement to recognise ourselves as no better than those who have come before us, subject to much the same forces and pressures – and the same limitations of human nature. And it is a movement that acknowledges that mystery is as much a reality to us as it was to our forebears; and that, perhaps, with the illusions of modernity gone, our world is just as enchanted as theirs was.