Force Over Ideology?

A brief 110 years after my grandparents arrived in a totally empty place--the West Texas plains of the American frontier--I stand here in the culturally and intellectually crowded arena of an international literary congress; sure evidence that an accelerated, perhaps too accelerated, rate of change is one of the defining characteristics of our century.

In our time, it may be that acceleration has itself become a force, and that it is this force which has begun to over-run or out-run ideology; social modalities that once took a generation to form now appear and evolve and oftentimes decay within four or five years. My father was a child of the frontier, where the only threats were local; I was a child of the New Deal, by which time the threats had become international; for my child, as for your children, the threats are global. On a planet whose rain forests are disappearing, whose ozone layer is thinning, whose waters are dying, a planet which the threat of nuclear catastrophe shades like a heavy, ever-threatening lightning cloud, issues of common survival, so recently the province of the frontier family, are now the province of all of us--the planetary human family.”

--From Larry McMurtry’s speech on “The End to Ideologies” delivered at the P.E.N. International Congress in Maastricht.