After the violence and social experiments of the twentieth century, it made sense to give up on grand ideologies, but the result is that we live in societies without narrative coherence, with old myths boiling up. “There isn’t a big story,” Curtis said. “And that’s true in China as much as it is here. Everyone’s just trying to manage the now and desperately hold it stable, almost like in a permanent present, and not step into the future. And I don’t think that will last very long… . Because if you’ve got a story about where you’re going, when catastrophes like 9/11 or covid or the banking crisis hit, they allow you to put them—even though they’re frightening—to put them into a sense of proportion. If you don’t have a story about where you’re going, they seem like terrifying random acts from another universe.”