The Master Narrative

Asked how he would rule over a country, Confucius said: ‘First of all things must be properly named. […] If things are not properly named, then what you say about them cannot be right.’

The proper name for today and the previous two hundred and fifty years or so is the Anthropocene, the confluence of historical and geological time, and a paradigm for all academic disciplines, humane, social and natural. First put forward by Crutzen and Stoermer in 2000, the concept was soon adopted by specialists in many disciplines, and is therefore entirely appropriate for a new master narrative following the end of the Cold War.

In the United States from 1991, celebration continued of the fall of its rival superpower, the Soviet Union. Now it was possible for John Lewis Gaddis to exonerate us all in 1997 with the assertion: it was ‘clear that there was going to be a Cold War whatever the west did’. He continued: ‘Who then was responsible? The answer, I think, is authoritarianism in general, and Stalin in particular.’ In 2000, recalling President Reagan's denunciation of the ‘evil empire’, he chided Cold War scholars for resisting moral distinctions: ‘It isn't “scientific”, we tell ourselves; it risks introducing bias into our work; it might lead to smugness, complacency, even triumphalist self-congratulation.’

Also in 1997, the geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, previously President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, declared with his own italics:

Making little or no reference to the United States’ internal problems such as inadequate health care or to global problems such as the environment, Brzezinski concentrates on how to secure what he considers to be ‘the chief geopolitical prize’, Eurasia.