I think this is probably mostly because there’s an important sense in which world has been changing more slowly (at least from the perspective of Americans), and the ways in which it’s changing feel somehow less real.
Maybe another factor is that a lot of the unbounded, grand, and imaginative thinking of the early 20th and the 19th century ended up either being either unfounded or quite harmful. So maybe the narrower margins of today are in part a reaction to that in addition to being a reaction to fewer wild things happening.
For example, many of the catastrophes of the 20th century (Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism) were founded in a kind of utopian mode of thinking that probably made those believers more susceptible to mugging. In the 20th century, postmodernists started (quite rightly, imo) rejecting grand narratives in history, like those by Hegel, Marx, and Spengler, and instead historians started offering more nuanced (and imo accurate) historical studies. And several of the most catastrophic fears, like those of 19th-century millenarianism and nuclear war, didn’t actually happen.
Nice post!
Maybe another factor is that a lot of the unbounded, grand, and imaginative thinking of the early 20th and the 19th century ended up either being either unfounded or quite harmful. So maybe the narrower margins of today are in part a reaction to that in addition to being a reaction to fewer wild things happening.
For example, many of the catastrophes of the 20th century (Nazism, Maoism, Stalinism) were founded in a kind of utopian mode of thinking that probably made those believers more susceptible to mugging. In the 20th century, postmodernists started (quite rightly, imo) rejecting grand narratives in history, like those by Hegel, Marx, and Spengler, and instead historians started offering more nuanced (and imo accurate) historical studies. And several of the most catastrophic fears, like those of 19th-century millenarianism and nuclear war, didn’t actually happen.