Downing tools for the summer usually provides a rare chance to stop, take stock and—if need be—rethink. Ordinarily it’s a brief but precious window, unmatched at any other time except, perhaps, new year. How different things are in 2020. The summer “break” for many of us will involve staying in the same home where we have, in effect, been “paused” since the first stirrings of spring.
In many respects—financial, medical, social—we will be counting the cost for a long time. But like any really big disruption, the effects are not uniform: there will be silver linings to the deadly Covid-19 cloud. Some are immediately obvious, like rediscovering the forgotten joys of our local neighbourhood and the possibility, at least, of kicking our climate-endangering aviation addiction.
But those long months with more than the usual time to read and think have, it turns out, also proved to be important ones for the life of the mind. In this Summer Special double issue, Prospect identifies the world’s 50 leading writers, scientists and thinkers for these strange times and, as I explain in introducing the choices, it is a completely new set—with not a single holdover from last year. The emergency has put a new premium on more practical minds and ideas, and the variety is something to marvel at. You can vote to crown the top thinker of all, as well as telling us who you think we missed. We’ll report back in the next issue.
As well as settling on new priorities, locked-down minds would seem to be given to wrestling with old demons. Having flared up as a straightforward response to US police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement spread with striking rapidity across the Atlantic (Colin Grant), and soon morphed into a disruptive discussion about the stories that both Britain and the United States tell themselves about their pasts. Sarah Churchwell opens our trio of essays on “the history wars” by taking us back from the statues being toppled in Washington, Bristol and London this summer, and into the origins of the myth of “Anglo-Saxon” supremacy. This might surprise you, but an awful lot of the trouble turns out to be down to Sir Walter Scott—when you read her piece, you’ll find a meticulous case for his prosecution.
Fiery debates about “who we are” as a country can easily lapse into a shouting match between rival tribes. Kenan Malik despairs of the turn to identity politics, which he believes is—in under-appreciated ways—warping the thinking of the right as much as the left. To transcend the sectarian divisions, and distil truly shared wisdom from the dark chapters of the past, societies must find a way to atone. Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo cast their eyes round the world at different attempts to achieve at first truth and then reconciliation, before homing in on the unhappy case of post-Stalinist Russia and the happier one of post-Nazi Germany. Their conclusion? Just as each country commits its own atrocities, so each must find its own distinctive way to weave the ugly facts into its national story. There is, in other words, no universal way to call a satisfactory truce in a history war.
Elsewhere in this double issue, the most packed that Prospect has ever produced, we explore a neglected social problem: the fading right to have daylight in urban homes; reacquaint ourselves with a half-forgotten historical statesman (Chris Mullin on Ernest Bevin); and find room for arresting new fiction, plus a trio of extended fiction reviews). While day-to-day life may have stopped recently, the political jostling never does—and it can never be safely ignored. So we also provide authoritative briefings on the manoeuvrings in London (Jonathan Powell, Michael Heseltine and David King) and Washington—courtesy of Sam Tanenhaus’s chilling portrait of Bill Barr, the US attorney general, who seems willing to do anything to win Trump a second term.
Acrimony and fear abound; politics is brutal and the basic rules of the game are increasingly contested. But the great minds saluted in this issue, as well as the rich writing, are a reminder of the human imagination and human intelligence which will, we must hope, eventually usher in a brighter tomorrow.
