Thank you for this post Martin. The anecdotes you’ve assembled here are delightful and insightful.
The two Governments declare that France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. [...] And thus we shall conquer.
A world in which full political union between Britain and France is contemplated in desperation is very much less complacent than the world we live in today. It would be good for our world to become less complacent, but how can we become less complacent without a big crisis? What are the times and places where people have lessened their complacency and broken out of old equilibria without being faced by a existential threat to their way of life? The thing about 1940s Britain is that people did face an existential threat to their way of life, but it was not an existential threat to all life on the planet. Today it seems that many existential threats to the way of life, at least within the developed world, would also threaten all life on the planet.
Thank you for this post Martin. The anecdotes you’ve assembled here are delightful and insightful.
A world in which full political union between Britain and France is contemplated in desperation is very much less complacent than the world we live in today. It would be good for our world to become less complacent, but how can we become less complacent without a big crisis? What are the times and places where people have lessened their complacency and broken out of old equilibria without being faced by a existential threat to their way of life? The thing about 1940s Britain is that people did face an existential threat to their way of life, but it was not an existential threat to all life on the planet. Today it seems that many existential threats to the way of life, at least within the developed world, would also threaten all life on the planet.