Europe's Perplexities--Three Decades Ago

The more things change--so a French aphorism instructs us--the more they are the same. The other day, in the course of writing my ruminative memoirs, I reflected that we have gained no ground in our attempt to restore some political and economic and moral stability to our civilization over the past thirty years--not even in Western Europe. All the pother about a reinvigorated Europe, invincibly democratic, triumphantly modernist, prosperous beyond the dreams of avarice--why, it has turned out to be pother. The deadly flood of chemicals down the Rhine from Switzerland is a recent demonstration of the gross misunderstandings of the evangels of "development."