Globalization and the great unsettling

Across the globe, the period since the middle of the twentieth century can be characterized by an ontological unsettling of both the human and planetary condition. Notwithstanding earlier premonitions of global upheaval felt by intellectuals from Karl Marx and Mary Shelly to Friedrich Nietzsche and T.S. Eliot, the years that followed the dropping of the Atomic Bomb ushered in an unsettling of unprecedented depth and spread. It became a global condition. After a brief period of self- assured confidence during the 1950s in the capitalist West, and despite a continuing dance between hope and despair across the following decades, arguably the world as a whole descended into an uneven state of upheaval. It is indicative that one of the most cited poems across the course of the twentieth century is best known for its last two lines concerning the end of the world.