Comment

Stan Grant
The year that changed the present

In 1979, I was entering my last years of school and The Clash released their landmark album London Calling. It became the soundtrack of my emerging political awareness. Its startling array of jazz, blues, rockabilly, ska, reggae, funk and disco, with a punk attitude and energy, was a cry of anguish from a generation who had lived with the Cold War fear of nuclear war.

The Ice Age is coming, The Clash told us. We need to brace for meltdown.

So much of the future was being written in a year when I was becoming conscious of the adult world.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher led a Conservative government to power as Britain’s first female prime minister. A couple of years later Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor turned Californian governor, would become president of the United States.

Reagan forecast the end of the “Evil Empire”. The march of freedom and democracy, he said, would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history”.

In 1979, the Red Army invaded Afghanistan, presaging the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, ushering in the Taliban and solidifying the place of Al Qaeda. The scene was set for the 2001 terrorist attacks on America and the “wars on terror” to come.

In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini launched an Islamic revolution that toppled the Western-backed shah. There has been a hot-and-cold state of war between Iran and the West ever since.

The year 1979 marked the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, which would transform communist China into the biggest engine of global economic growth and challenge American supremacy.

From Europe and the US to the Middle East, Russia and China, the dominoes were in place.

In his book Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, Christian Caryl wrote: “The forces unleashed in 1979 marked the beginning of the end of great Socialist utopias that had dominated so much of the twentieth century.”

Fast-forward and how does the world look?

Thatcher and Reagan’s project of Hayekian market-first neoliberalism appeared briefly triumphant, until it exhausted itself on greed, corruption and indifference.

Islamic fundamentalism has drained the West of blood and treasure and incited and inflicted misery on its own people.

The Soviet Union is gone, replaced by Vladimir Putin’s revanchist Russia, whose military expansionism has redrawn the borders of Europe.

China has taken an even sharper authoritarian turn under Xi Jinping. The Chinese Communist Party was predicted to collapse, or at least become more like the democratic West; instead it has exploited America’s decline.

The year 1979 lit the fuse for Western triumphalism and hubris and its authoritarian, tribal, fundamentalist shadow. Our competing utopian visions have rendered humanity expendable and our world incomprehensible. We are joined in a death-dive.

Physicists talk of an event horizon behind which all time collapses – 1979 is our event horizon.

But 1989 is more popularly considered a hinge point. The collapse of the Berlin Wall was declared the “end of history”. It was meant to usher in a new world of freedom and liberty. More astute observers would recognise that the wheels were in spin a decade earlier.

I am a child of The Clash, and 1979 hovers over my life and my journalism. Since then I have reported from at least 70 countries, have covered the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism and democratic crises, and have seen up close the return of China as a global power.

I am persuaded now that journalism is incapable of comprehending this world. It is a failing of the craft as much as the practitioners. Journalists are distracted by the kinetic force of events and miss that ideas are the true engine of history.

I have been guilty of the same sins. Simply, journalists are cursed to live in exceptional times. Each new generation of journalists sees the world anew.

Stories are reported with the novelty and naivety of youthful wonder and excitement. In few exceptions do I glean any wisdom.

Witness the reporting of Trump’s America, the war in Ukraine and the calamitous Middle East. It escapes much daily reportage that we have seen all this before, and worse. For all of his excesses, Trump sits within the rogues’ gallery of American presidents.

Presidents, tyrants and terrorists are actors in a psychodrama that dates from the 17th and 18th century revolutions of science and reason and the twin political revolutions of America and France, triumphs of the will that ushered in a post-metaphysical age, untethered from faith, nature or traditions.

What we call modernity is the task of imposing a new order on disorder. It has been a bloody undertaking of competing ideologies, each professing a utopian future.

Journalists seek to tell this through the crises du jour or the great men and women of history. Yet the events turn and the despots and heroes come and go, leaving a new generation to be puzzled by our existence and how we got here.

It has been said of Hegel that his philosophy is something lonely, it does not belong on the streets, and in the marketplace. There are “bayonets, cannons, and bodies”, he wrote, but of philosophy the “soul of its commander is spirit”.

Philosophy isn’t so much about answering the great questions of life as it is about asking better questions. As I reported from around the world, as I looked into the faces of terrorists, as I walked through bloodied marketplaces, as I sat with people huddled in fear, as I watched governments fall and evil prosper, I needed to know more than simply what happened or whose side was winning or losing.

I needed to know if morality mattered, if justice was just a mirage, if there was any such thing as truth. Journalism alone could not give me that.

The ground is shifting beneath our feet. For at least three centuries we have taken for granted that the laws and beliefs of the West constitute the natural order of things, as if these are as immutable as the law of gravity.

The West’s gospel is progress. Immanuel Kant believed history straightens the crooked timber of humanity, until we converge in a cosmopolitan dream of perpetual peace – a world beyond our tribes.

It is a glorious dream unrealised. History shows us humans need their tribes: they will go to war for the tribe. The European Enlightenment notion of an arc of freedom has inflicted its own tyranny. Historian Priya Satia has said, “the conviction that history is necessarily a story of progress has conveyed us to the brink of disaster”.

Hegel warned that the end of history may also lead to what he called a “highway of despair”.

What is our despair? Alienation, the loss of community, the betrayal of leaders, the corruption of capitalism, the destruction of the environment, dehumanising racism, the brutality of authoritarianism.

History has its hinge points: 1688, 1776, 1789, 1914, 1940. In each case, the world was irrevocably changed.

We are haunted by 1979. We are swept along on a tide of ideas that determine the events of our lives.

As The Clash’s Joe Strummer sang: “London is drowning / and I live by the river.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "The year that changed the present".

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