Modernity’s Ills

Book reviewed: In the Shadow of Tomorrow by Johan Huizinga

“We are living in a demented world.” Thus opens In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Modern Distemper, a study of the crisis of the modern world. The book was published in 1936, and its author, the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, was writing about his times. By the end of the first page, the modern reader might well wonder if Huizinga was writing about our times. Consider: “We see forms of government no longer capable of functioning, production systems on the verge of collapse, social forces gone wild with power. The roaring engine of this tremendous time seems to be heading for a breakdown.” Copy and paste this into any piece about the world of 2023, and no one will blink an eye. That the book came out three years after the Nazi seizure of power and three years before the Nazis started the Second World War is not very reassuring. But Huizinga is not in the reassurance business. As he writes at the conclusion of the first chapter, optimism is the luxury of those who either lack the insight to understand what ails the modern times or those who think they have the solution to fix everything.

Huizinga’s own life story has yet to be properly told. According to one article about Huizinga I’ve unearthed, entire biographies have been written about him — if so, they have left no traces, at least not in English. I own three books by Huizinga; all three lack a proper preface or an introduction, and furnish only a bare-bones biographical outline. Such information as I’ve been able to find online has not greatly expanded my understanding of the man — perhaps Dutch speakers will have better luck. The raw facts are as follows. Born in 1872 in Groningen, Huizinga spent most of his life in academe. He first specialized in India and taught Indian literature at a university, but it was European culture where Huizinga made his name, writing books about Erasmus and cultural history, among other things. He is best known for The Waning of the Middle Ages, a classic study of the tail end of the medieval period in France and the Netherlands (and a work I hope to review as well). A man of liberal sensibilities in the classic sense of the word, he saw the Nazi regime for the barbarian machine that it was, and he must have been fairly vocal with his views — when the Nazis came, they had Huizinga arrested and confined to a concentration camp. He was only released towards the end of the war, ostensibly on health grounds, and died soon after. Such was the shadow of Huizinga’s own tomorrow. This information aside, his life seems to have been swallowed up by the sand dunes of history.

Anyone who has a bone to pick with his age runs the risk of being perceived as an old fogey out of step with the times, yearning nostalgically for some past golden epoch when women dressed more modestly, milk didn’t curdle, and the sun was more radiant. Even the most sensible takedown of modernity can sometimes seem like a case of sour grapes. Perhaps conscious of this risk, Huizinga goes out of his way to acknowledge the positive aspects of modernity; the tone is occasionally tentative, never apodictic. Huizinga starts his diagnosis by attempting to locate a past point of reference that might be used for comparative purposes. He finds nothing that is satisfactory. The great cultural transitions (from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, from the Middle Ages to Modernity, and from the 18th century to that of the 19th) were, by the standards of the present age, fairly tame in the way they upended cultural institutions. Even the changes wrought by the revolutionary period of 1789–1815, including all the successive phases, were less fundamental than the turmoil of the two decades following the outbreak of the First World War. Additionally, the decline of such great civilizations as that of the Roman Empire was typically marked by a “declining efficiency of the government, technology at a standstill, diminishing productivity . . .” This is nothing like the world of Johan Huizinga, which at the time of writing had been introduced to the marvels of air travel and wireless communication, and it is nothing like our world of the smartphone, QR codes, and AI. In terms of the technology and tools available to modern man, we cannot seriously talk of decline and decadence, a point also made by Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses. Whatever the ills afflicting the modern age, the “height of the times” has clearly never been higher, rendering discussions of stagnation complex, to put it mildly. So where to from here?

Our interpretation of the historical process — what Huizinga calls a “systematic formulation of crisis consciousness” — is very different from earlier historical periods. Before rationalism took hold, history was seen in eschatological terms; the world was meant to end and be judged, and avoidance of evil was pointless. History had only two possible directions: reversion or annihilation. It was either a return to an anterior, sublime period or a rendezvous with the apocalypse. This does not obtain today. For modern man, the historical process is a “progressive irreversible sequence.” There is a general sense that, wherever we head and however uncertain the direction in which we are heading, there is no going back. This sentiment is a function of modern man’s belief in progress, in unending improvement, in the ceaseless betterment of social conditions, a belief affirmed by advances in technology. But while these advances are part of our culture, they are not, and cannot be, the entire culture. Progress indicates direction and not the final destination, which can be salvation as well as perdition, a utopia as well as a dystopia. Huizinga notes that a culture can run aground on “real and tangible progress.”

For Huizinga’s arguments to make sense, it is crucial to understand his threefold definition of culture: a proper balance between spiritual and material values, an element of striving, and control over nature. In Huizinga’s analysis, modern society doesn’t score well on all three. Our highly refined economic system is hyper-commercialized and wasteful; the modern production apparatus, though highly efficient and calibrated, does not turn its output to man’s advantage. Modern man’s lack of spiritual goals — which, if present, would normally complement his economic output — has caused “poverty in the midst of plenty.” We know how to make things, and we make them well; the trouble is that we don’t know why we are making them. Social conditions are more than just the fulfillment of material desires; they must lift man morally and aesthetically. A society, Huizinga writes, can be rich culturally even if it doesn’t have important technical achievements to speak of, but it cannot be cultural if it lacks charity or mercy.

Our element of striving is also found wanting. An element of striving involves an ideal that society aspires to. That ideal is homogeneous and necessarily metaphysical (e.g., the glory of God, justice, virtue, etc.). Huizinga insists that the ultimate aim of culture must be metaphysical; a society that doesn’t have ideals that transcend the material world doesn’t have culture. When metaphysics is purged from man’s aims, ideals are reduced to order, security, and various socioeconomic considerations; these only tend to divide people. For Huizinga, the split of culture into “class cultures” or “national cultures” is emblematic of this polarization; all it does is lead one society to assert itself against others. There is no unifying homogeneity of culture, just a conglomerate of conflicting desires.

Finally, there is a problem with our control over nature. This control is not just domination over external elements with which man has had to wrestle since the dawn of human history, but also domination over human nature. Human nature is controlled through the exercise of a “genuine ethical impulse” on the part of a community. This is embodied by the “service-concept” — the willingness of every member of society to be in the service of something or someone higher up in the society’s hierarchical structure, whether it be an employer or God (this is not dissimilar to Ortega y Gasset’s notion of the concept of nobility — the noble man is one who places demands on himself and accepts submission to authority). “The uprooting and discrediting of the service-concept has been the most destructive function of the shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century,” Huizinga writes, thus joining the conservative anti-Enlightenment chorus that holds the Age of Reason responsible for the desecration of tradition. The erosion of absolute ethical values loosens our control over the human part of nature; control over nature is then only halfway complete.

What are the ills of the modern age? Huizinga’s list is long. First, there is the weakening of judgment. Huizinga identifies two major attributes of the modern age: universal education and instant communication (quaintly referred to as “instant publicity” throughout the text). We regard both as unquestionable accomplishments. Huizinga is not so sure. The people of the past, though mostly illiterate and poorly informed, tended to be aware of their intellectual limitations; the awareness of their limitations gave them wisdom. The average Westerner today knows a little bit of everything; his knowledge is highly diversified. But this diversification renders his knowledge scattered and superficial. Everyone fancies himself an expert on every topic under the sun; in reality, this translates into a society full of chattering dilettantes. People are in possession of vast amounts of knowledge (or at least of tools to extract it), but the ability to analyze this knowledge, as well as the capacity to make sound judgments, is impaired. In connection with this, Huizinga makes an interesting observation. In the past, people made their own entertainment when they danced, sang, or played; now they outsource these activities and are content with non-participatory viewing. Whether in the domain of art or sport, modern man is basically a voyeur. Homo ludens (incidentally, a term coined by Huizinga and used by him as the title of a different work) has become passive — a sign of “cultural enfeeblement and devitalization.” In a strikingly penetrative criticism of the preponderance of imagery over text in modern society, Huizinga notes that, unlike reading, the habit of watching causes atrophy of a series of intellectual functions, hampering concentration: “Mechanical reproduction of sound and spectacle virtually precludes the element of surrender and absorption: there is no awe, no stillness, no communing with the innermost self.” And without those things, there can be no true culture. The weakening of judgment magnifies the risk of susceptibility to commercial advertising and, more nefariously, political propaganda.

Concomitant with the weakening of judgment is a decline of the critical spirit — call it the triumph of unreason. Part of it is a reaction against the overreach of science, a reaction that Huizinga understands: the human condition cannot be rationalized away entirely. But there is more to this than a pushback against the limits of science. The willingness to be objective and exacting in pursuit of truth has slackened. The demarcation lines between the logical and emotional functions have become blurred; sentiment has begun to encroach on areas that must be solely the preserve of logic. The modern mind has fallen prey to all sorts of fallacies and absurdities: “A vast and murky twilight seems to have spread over numberless minds.” Thought is no longer anchored in tradition; everything is relative; truth is whatever one wants it to be. Huizinga anticipated our post-truth society: “With the growing worthlessness of the spoken or printed word consequent upon its ever greater distribution which the progress of civilization has made possible, the indifference to truth increases in direct proportion.” For those who insist on thinking critically, strength of conviction is hard to come by; for the shallow and prejudiced, it has never been easier.

Huizinga dedicates an entire chapter to the use of science — or rather, its misuse — by modern man. Science is meant to enhance life; from weapons of mass destruction to methods of birth control, it also destroys it. Huizinga acknowledges that science has always been used for purposes of warfare; the difference, however, is that things such as explosives, bacteria, and gases were once firmly in the purview of God, Fate, Nature, or other supernatural beings. Now man has taken the place of God, appropriating phenomena previously located in the realm of higher powers and using them to annihilate his own kind. Huizinga believes this appropriation to be a blasphemy against some divine law; it is so Satanic that if human civilization were to incinerate itself in the process, it would be a fitting punishment.

The mood of the modern times is anti-noetic, meaning it is hostile to thought. Huizinga distinguishes between knowing (the will to know) and being (the will to live). Knowing is intelligence, while being is existence. (The Russian philosopher Berdyaev would have attributed knowing to the inner self, meaning culture, and being to the outside world, meaning civilization; but Huizinga never gets around to differentiating between culture and civilization.) The antinomy of being and knowing is at the heart of the fundamental conflict of modern civilization, and it is the will to live, the vital impulse, that has been gaining the upper hand. With the help of technology, modern society has shifted the center of gravity to being. This in turn has led to the “worship of life” — the gratification of the vital impulse, a surfeit of existential “full-bloodedness,” the perfection of external conditions. Life has been made easy — too easy. High standards of living are a double-edged sword. Precisely because existence was far more arduous in the past, man looked upon his existence with a dose of healthy fatalism; the precarity of everyday life, the ever-present proximity of Thanatos, heightened the value of each moment and made it more enjoyable. Modern man, on the other hand, has been spoiled rotten by a state of heretofore unimaginable plenitude, an overabundance of conveniences, and all the trappings of modern civilization. Life has simply become too good. The result is that man believes that he ought to be, and indeed has the right to be, happy; at the same time, the lack of constant precarity (and so the heightened enjoyment of every moment that lends itself to pleasure) makes him viscerally unhappy.

Huizinga insists that, as culture involves an element of striving, and any kind of striving presupposes overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of a goal, culture goes hand-in-hand with battle. In Christianity, the battle is against evil — not only, and perhaps primarily, against external evil, but, more importantly, the evil within us. But the will to live turns this battle outward, neglecting the inner evil. This is the dichotomy of Civitas Dei and Civitas Terrena, the city of God and the earthly city. Huizinga tactfully points out that the history of the Christian peoples is not the same thing as the victory of Christianity: “Within the limits of Christian doctrine the needle of human conscience could indicate the Christian’s duty along a scale which went from absolute non-resistance to ruthless warfare.” Nevertheless, the Christian system provided a point of reference, and the overlords of society flouted its main tenets at their own risk. Now that Christian doctrine has been elbowed out by secularism, the definition of life struggle (and evil) has evolved as well, having been moved from the individual conscience to the public life of the community. Evil is no longer private but public. What Huizinga more or less means is that, to give a concrete example, crime happens because the economy is sluggish and prices are rising, and not because some people have a propensity to do wicked things. The notion that some people are bad is simply not ventured into. In this moral framework, evil is either an internal weakness to be overcome or an external resistance to be defeated. Huizinga doesn’t think that it’s always a bad thing — societal plagues such as prostitution or poverty do need to be regarded as collective — but the risk is that, human nature being what it is, it will eventually permeate the attitude towards external resistances. An intrinsic part of human nature, Hatred will be projected onto entire groups instead of individuals. This is exactly what happened in Nazi Germany.

Another modern pathology is the deterioration of moral standards. This does not mean that modern man is more immoral than his ancestors; in fact, if outward appearances are anything to go by, the level of morality has not fallen, if only because our sophisticated society has learned to better police itself. The secularism of modern man notwithstanding, Christian ethics still maintains its hold on society — through inertia. But no statistics can capture the innate morality of an individual. We can count the number of thefts in a given year, but we cannot gauge things such as sincerity and loyalty — things that make up the moral fabric of any society and are manifested daily in a thousand little ways. Huizinga sees a dark triad undermining Christianity: philosophical immoralism, “certain scientific systems,” and “aesthetic-sentimental doctrines.” Of the three, philosophical immoralism has had the least effect. The scientific systems that have been pernicious to Christian morality, in Huizinga’s view, are Marxism and Freudianism — Marxism because it reduces the human condition to economics and makes man a creature of socioeconomic considerations, Freudianism because it locates the highest values in the flesh. The aesthetic-sentimental doctrines of which Huizinga speaks pertain to literature. As Western society secularized itself in the 18th century, the balance between aesthetics and sentiment was thrown out of kilter; literature turned away from Christian ideals, acquiring a taste for the romanticization of sin, for the glorification of “the Gretchens and Manon Lescauts” of the world. It was all downhill from there. Literature abandoned ethical values in favor of the scandalous and the immoral; as every generation needs to outdo the previous one to attract the reading public, literary works sank further and further into depravity. “To keep a hold on its public a literary genre must go on surpassing itself until it collapses” — such is the price of épater les bourgeois.

It’s not just literature, either. Modern art is also showing signs of sickness. Like the mood of the times, it is anti-noetic, having succumbed to the vital impulse and its needs. Contemporary art seeks to represent the human condition without the aid of the intellect, neglecting the use of the mind in the making of art. Like science, it strives to be original — but it is not science, and the pursuit of originality makes it vulnerable to toxic external influences. The tendency of modern art to label its practitioners as followers of such and such “isms” — the designation, labeling, and compartmentalization of the arts — is a telltale sign of malady: historically artists created works of art without worrying about which movement they would fall under.

Modern society has become puerile. Puerility is a mismatch between a society’s intellectual power and the behavior that it adopts; a puerile society celebrates adolescence (Ortega y Gasset also wrote that mass-man is inspired by the cult of youth). The puerility of modern society is manifested in the mutual contamination of the serious (the running of society) by the playful (festivities, performances, rituals, etc.). Huizinga acknowledges that the serious also mixed with the playful in the past, but in the modern world the confusion between the two has reached its greatest intensity. The adolescent mindset spawns a lack of a sense of decorum, of personal dignity, of respect for others; it encourages excessive preoccupation with oneself. The ultimate tendency of puerility is narcissism. Modern technology exacerbates this: man, Huizinga says, is like a child in a fairy tale — and he is no more mature for it. From politics to cultural discourse, triviality and primitivism pervade everything.

There are a few other debilities, but they are minor and can be omitted. By now, the overall diagnosis should be clear. Modernity is ailing because there is no metaphysically inspired system of values that can confer a sense of permanence, of timelessness, upon man. The absence of such a system makes values dependent on fads and fashion, and turns modern civilization into a culturally enfeebled, vacuous affair that, despite (or, rather, because of) its technological prowess, is now an existential threat to itself.

If Huizinga had gone to sleep in 1936 and woke up today, à la Rip Van Winkle, he’d find himself in a world even less healthier than the one he diagnosed. We are plagued by many of the same problems — it’s Huizinga’s society on steroids. The developed countries have mostly eradicated illiteracy, and virtually any kind of information can be obtained with a few easy clicks. Our knowledge is more diversified than at any other point in history, and we have access to massive pools of information. None of this makes us any wiser. Modern man is distracted; he is also exceptionally complacent and self-satisfied. Review any Twitter conversation, on any topic, and you’ll see that these days everyone is a specialist in everything, from the war in Ukraine to the pandemic. The problem isn’t ignorance so much as ignorance of one’s ignorance. People can google anything under the sun, but their critical faculties have been blunted. How else to explain the docility and servility with which most of the modern world submitted to all sorts of inanities during the pandemic? How else to explain that even experts were often no better than laymen, and some of them far worse? The “global health event” offered many examples of highly credentialed people who were perfect exhibits of the “vast and murky twilight” Huizinga mentions.

Owing in no small measure to social networks, modern society is largely driven by emotions; its reflexes are thespian, its mood often hysterical. As a result of the growing virtualization of modern society, homo ludens has become even more passive. It is not just with entertainment that man is a viewer and not a doer; insidiously, relationships, social interactions, and reproduction are also being drained of active participation. I think here of the growth of virtual communication (at the expense of real-world interaction), of instant accessibility of online pornography, and of all kinds of weird online communities (e.g., incels). Love is digitalized; one reads with unease about various innovations such as the recent invention of “robotic lips for remote kissing,” pioneered by a university in China. The oxymoronic “social distancing” practiced during the pandemic is a health measure tailor-made for the passive modern homo ludens and one that has a good chance of becoming a lifestyle.

The term “biopolitics” was not yet in use when Huizinga wrote In the Shadow of Tomorrow, but the text prefigures it. In fact, it is telling that Huizinga himself falls back on medical metaphors to describe modern society (as do I, in this review and elsewhere). The use is conscious: “Here we find ourselves carrying on the argument in medical metaphors. Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point.” Literally, one might add in 2023. Biopolitics — the management of the biological life of the population — is a result of a highly sophisticated but spiritually shallow civilization. When the modern world went into lockdown mode in 2020, it created a fissure between physical life and spiritual life; to protect their physical life, people gave up (or were forced to give up) everything that made life worth living — social interactions, religious worship, festivals, etc. This was not the first time people had gone into quarantine, of course, but the scale and intensity were unprecedented. It wasn’t just that many people felt it was necessary; there was a widespread acceptance of what was incongruously called the “new normal,” although there was little that was normal about it. Three years later, many are still choosing to observe health protocols for which there is minimal justification. This obsession with physical safety — to the detriment of humanness — can only be understood in the context of Huizinga’s worship of life.

The proliferation of weapons that afforded wholesale butchery of people was the misuse of science Huizinga observed with horror in his own time. The scope of misuse has been expanded in ways that Huizinga would have found impossible to imagine — or not. Guided by the ethos of the Tower of Babel, modern civilization creates its own Frankensteins. The “lab leak hypothesis” has been upgraded from a conspiracy theory to the most plausible explanation for the origin of Covid-19 (back in the spring of 2020, a headline said, “Scientists are tired of explaining why the Covid-19 virus was not made in a lab”). The development of AI programs such as ChatGPT, however impressive, has the potential of obliterating millions of jobs. We optimize science and technology to make both serve us; we might be producing our future masters. In a way, the empty streets of so many cities we saw during lockdowns were a symbol of obsolescence — the obsolescence of man himself. It was as if humanity had become superfluous. An aberration or a postcard from the future?

In the chapter concerning the worship of life, Huizinga writes: “These are strange times. Reason, which once combated faith and seemed to have conquered it, now has to look to faith to save it from dissolution.” Absent a metaphysical system of values, people begin to look for timeless ideals in areas of life that cannot, and were never meant to, provide them. Science becomes “the science,” public health experts the new high priests, and the faithful are persuaded to follow nonsensical rituals — all under the guise of reason. Those who disagree are branded as heretics, to be shunned, ostracized, and excluded from the body politic. Still regarded as the bastion of reason by Huizinga back in the 1930s, science has been infected by belief and unreason. Strange times indeed. Too, the constant calls to be heroic by following health protocols (“stay home, save lives,” “wear a mask,” “get the vax”) one heard during the pandemic are also symptomatic; Huizinga writes that modern heroism is a tonic intended to revive the flagging spirits of modern man. Modern civilization requires heroism precisely because it is weak. “The exaltation of the heroic is in itself a crisis phenomenon. It shows that the ideas of service, task and fulfillment of duty no longer exercise the necessary motive power on the public at large. They have to be amplified as through a loudspeaker. They have to be reflated, perhaps inflated.” In Huizinga’s day, heroism meant going to the battlefield. In our age of biopolitics, it means wearing a mask or getting the jab.

As modern man continues to perfect his social conditions with the use of technology, the chasm between his demands to be happy and his prospects of true happiness can only widen. Hence the rise in mental health issues in developed countries. Modern man is more neurotic, more anxious, more depressed. He is also incredibly puerile — more puerile than ever. Our technological tools are awesome, but the way we use them — online porn, TikTok, social networks, video games — is often not. The title of the first trending video on the YouTube homepage offered for my viewing pleasure right now is “Try Not to Laugh Challenge! Funny Fails” (126 million views). Modern man really is a child in a fairy tale. The way he talks, dresses, and amuses himself is adolescent; so is his desperation to be noticed, his incurable exhibitionism, his fear of obscurity, his tendency to simplify everything and reject all limits. Everyone wants a moment of fame — forget the traditional fifteen minutes, a “short” will do just fine, so long as it gets enough likes. There seems to be nothing that many people won’t do if they can get it to “go viral.” Narcissism has been de-pathologized. The byword of the modern times is “OK, boomer” — older generations have no lessons to impart, while those who have lived before us are irrelevant, mere compost for the comfort of the present generation. The constraints of human anatomy invite tantrums; when personal requests are not gratified, elementary biology is canceled. The young eco zealots throwing slime at priceless paintings to save the planet may be fringe, but their hysteria are of a piece with the zeitgeist of the modern times. A serious society would not allow a teenager from Scandinavia with no life experience to lecture a hall of fawning adults, nor would it elect someone like Justin Trudeau, who seems to have never outgrown his frat-boy stage, to run things. Both Thunberg and Trudeau are perfect images of our callow era.

Huizinga belonged to the same constellation of critics of modernity as Spengler and Ortega y Gasset, and In the Shadow of Tomorrow is a good companion to the latter’s The Revolt of the Masses. It is not quite as well written. The text is somewhat muddled in places, though this might have something to do with the translation (the work was rendered into English by J. H. Huizinga, whom I take to be the author himself, in which case the infelicities are understandable). “For the revulsion in art and literature is merely idle most apparent aspect of the revulsion of culture as a whole” is not the only sentence that left me scratching my head. The text lacks structure; the arguments are presented somewhat haphazardly, making the book a hard one to review. Huizinga never really separates culture from civilization, and he never defines “civilization” — a shortcoming in a text that uses the term continuously. He makes bold assertions but offers no examples to give them the weight of the factual (as when he writes that leaders who ran afoul of Christian values in the past tended to incur the wrath of their subjects). His ecumenical hopes — Huizinga writes that it is conceivable all the churches will one day “meet and penetrate one another on the rock bottom of Christianity in a world which also grasps the straightness of Islam and the depths of the East” — seem charmingly naïve, and his staunch defense of internationalism and supranational organizations, while perfectly understandable in the 1930s, is harder to defend in an age when supranational organizations have become vehicles for anti-democratic policies and private opaque interests.

On the whole, though, Huizinga’s diagnosis is excellent and thought-provoking. It is also free of illusions. For all his pacifism and belief in international solidarity, he knows that regeneration cannot be imposed by fiat or top-down approach. What’s needed is a spiritual renaissance, and that can only come from within. Huizinga calls for a new askesis — but it’s not the kind of askesis propounded by Berdyaev, whose reading of history was entirely metaphysical. Instead of renouncing the earthly in return for heavenly bliss, the new askesis will involve “self-domination and tempered appraisal of power and pleasure.” Worship of life will need to be dialed down, and a healthy relationship with mortality reestablished. This is not a pipe dream. Huizinga believes that there is a possibility of reversal in the history of civilization — not in the sense of returning to an earlier period, but more as in restoring eternal truths that are impervious to change.

The prognosis, then, is not entirely pessimistic. In his two-sentence preface to the work, one of the shortest I’ve ever come across, Huizinga insists he is an optimist. The text makes it clear that, for all his criticism of modern civilization, Huizinga feels ambivalent about it. It’s not all black and white. Modernity has strong undercurrents of cultural power and wealth, and there are always good men silently fighting the good fight. I doubt Huizinga believed history had a libretto. The future will be nothing like the past; the outcome of any epoch contains an element that will strike posterity as entirely novel, unexpected, and unpredictable. While this element might mean ruin, nothing is preordained. “As long as expectation can hesitate between ruin and salvation it is our duty to hope,” he writes — and we hope along with the author.