Is the world we value falling apart?

From time to time, people get worried and ask one another: ‘Is the world falling apart?’ I imagine this is a universal phenomenon, but my experience of it is largely confined to the West (here meant more as a cultural than a geographical expression). It happened in the 1930s, when the broadly correct answer to the question was ‘Yes’, and in the 1970s, of which more later. It happened more recently, after 11 September 2001 and during the financial crash of 2008/09. Some asked the question after Brexit. I have heard it asked again by many highly disparate people in the few days since the American-led Nato scuttle from Afghanistan. What is the answer?

My own first encounter with these gloomy discussions was in the 1970s. The political and economic background was a Cold War in which the West seemed enfeebled, the oil-price shock, inflation, the US retreat from Vietnam and — though it passed ignorant teenage me by at the time — the end of Bretton Woods. At the close of the decade, the Iranian revolution was added to the woes. In Britain, the background included endless strikes. When I first began to read this paper as an undergraduate in the late 1970s, Christopher Booker was prominent in its pages with his Jungian analyses of the collapse of civilisation and his invocation of pessimistic sages such as Solzhenitsyn. Auberon Waugh, though temperamentally averse to apocalyptic Bookerism, shared the theory of decline and his comic genius delighted in it. When writing about British workers, he always put the second word in inverted commas, insisting he would never buy shares in any business dependent on their efforts. He boasted of filling his large cellars with wine instead.