10 - Towards Jerusalem?

Summary

One is calling to me from Seir,

‘Sentinel, what of the night?

Sentinel, what of the night?’

The sentinel says:

‘Morning comes, and also the night.

If you will inquire, inquire;

come back again.’

(Isaiah 21.11–12)

At the end of his three volume analysis of the current world situation, Manuel Castells is upbeat:

History is just beginning, if by history we understand the moment when, after millennia of a prehistoric battle with Nature, first to survive then to conquer it, our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organization that will allow us to live in a predominantly social world. It is the beginning of a new existence and of a new age.

Peter Hall today seems to share this enthusiasm, but writing in 1988 he was much more cautious:

The watchman on the height is calling; but his message could spell doom to the city, unless the day rises also on the city of darkness just outside the gate. There is a riddle here, so far unanswerable by the wit of planners, or indeed, of that of any other kind of social engineer; and, as the millennium approaches, it casts a deep pre dawn chill.

This pre dawn chill seems to have evaporated at the turn of the millennium, but worries about the city of darkness just outside the gate – growing poverty, growing numbers, the ability to adequately feed and house them – nevertheless obtrude.