Post-Apocalyptic life is a standard literary genre. The Terminator series, as well as the Mad Max series, show what life is like when some great catastrophe has engulfed and destroyed the civilized world. According to these tales, life has once again become short and brutal, peopled by grotesquely dressed and malformed people (and by machines), some saving remnant of humanity trying to preserve what is left of and trying to re-establish what had existed before the cataclysm. My favorite of these is the Alexander Korda version of H. G. Wells’ “Things to Come”, the movie made just before the impending Second World War, when it was expected that strategic bombing might reduce cities to rubble-- which it did, without, however, destroying the governance of those cities or nations. In Wells’ vision, civilization is reduced to barbarism until it is rescued by a cadre of airmen, known as “Wings Over the World”, who then build cities that are modernistic while its inhabitants wander around in togas and are given to bombastic speeches delivered by gigantic holograms of themselves, the young people driven to go on to the exploration of the Moon.

To the sociological mind, however, whatever is imagined can be exemplified by what actually comes to pass. There are many times in world history when a nation or a new civilization is reborn or created after the coming of a dark age, or when, even more generally, the old days have rather abruptly been put to rest and a new time is emerging, a new time beginning, as happened when the French started the clock over again as part of their understanding that their Revolution had put an end to the Old Regime that would be replaced by an age of citizenry and enlightenment. The new calendar lasted fourteen years. Similar new beginnings emerge after the execution of Charles I and the Russian Revolution and Hitler’s seizure of power, while the new beginnings that started with the eight years of violence and mayhem that was the American Revolution are still going on, so much so that there are those who will claim that the American Revolution was not really a cataclysmic upheaval but just a struggle among the colonial elites for power, even though the people of the time certainly thought, as the popular song of the time went, that “The World [was] Turned Upside Down”.