WHERE DID WE ALL GO WRONG: An Essay On Tony Judt’s Prescient Ill Fares The Land

When I was in elementary school, almost 70 years ago, we learned that among the reasons we won our revolution was that the British were fat and happy, didn’t care enough about fighting for their American colonies, and hired at great expense mercenaries from Hesse to do the fighting for them. The yeoman farmers who fought for independence cared far more about winning than some Germans fighting so their lords and masters could rake in more English gold. While I was in college, Tom Disch’s story ‘Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire’, part of his magnificent dystopian novel 334, would make the same point to me about the decline and likely fall of our own short-lived empire.

Tony Judt’s 2010 Ill Fares The Land, was published just a few months before he died of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gherig’s Disease. Its strength is its inescapable moral rightness, which forces the reader into associations. I have mentioned the one which immediately occurred to me about a society that relies on mercenaries, and it has provoked the reflections above about my own generation. I think the argument about the transformation of our societies into increasing Orwellian, and even more prophetically, Philip K. Dickian worlds, is one which still needs to be addressed.

His examination of what had gone wrong over the previous 30–40 years in American and British society rang more than few familiar bells. Partly because Judt, who was only a few years older than I am, is…