PARIS: When confronting bad news these days, many tend to assume that it’s just a bump on the road and that things will work out. President Obama was fond of invoking Martin Luther King’s assertion that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Yet could we be wrong in assuming that, in spite of some backsliding here and there, forward movement is inexorable?
On Sunday, November 11 — at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — we will commemorate the end of the largest and bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen. World War 1 marked a turning point in human history — the end of four massive European empires, the rise of Soviet communism, the entry of the United States into global power politics. But perhaps its most significant intellectual legacy was the end of the idea of inevitable progress.