David Mamet begins his extraordinary essay Futility (link below), by saying that he does not know whether the United States will survive "in a form recognizable to my generation." The obvious temptation is to read this as another prediction of American collapse. Civil disorder, political polarisation, ideological extremism, institutional decay and economic trouble provide plenty of material for anyone wanting to imagine the republic going over the cliff.
But that is not quite what Mamet is saying. His argument is considerably more unsettling. America does not have to collapse for the America he knows to disappear. It merely has to survive long enough for the people who remember the old one to die.
That is the significance of perhaps the most important sentence in the essay: "We age and die, and a populace (i.e., ours) doesn't change because people change but because they die." It is a brutally simple theory of cultural transformation. Mamet has largely given up on the comforting democratic idea that argument changes societies. Perhaps occasionally it does. More often, one generation carries a collection of assumptions until it dies and another generation arrives carrying different assumptions that it regards as self-evident.
This changes the meaning of his opening question. Mamet is not asking whether the United States will still exist in 2050. Almost certainly there will be a country called the United States, with a president, Congress, Supreme Court, military, dollar, flag and Fourth of July. His question is whether institutional continuity necessarily means civilisational continuity.
History suggests that it does not. Rome continued to call itself Rome through transformations that would have astonished Romans of earlier centuries. Constantinople remained Roman long after the political world of Augustus had vanished. Countries retain names, monuments and constitutional forms while the assumptions giving those forms meaning change underneath them. Political systems can therefore survive their own civilisations.
This is where Mamet's apparently eccentric opening discussion of Morgan Robertson's Futility and Nevil Shute's No Highway begins to make sense. His interest is not really prophecy. He invokes Eric Hoffer's observation that the artist does not necessarily see the future; the artist sees the present. What later appears prophetic may simply have identified something already present that everyone else failed to recognise.
Robertson's fictional Titan striking an iceberg before the Titanic disaster provides Mamet with his most spectacular example. Shute's fictional aircraft failures provide another, although the engineering history of metal fatigue is considerably older and more complicated than Mamet's compressed account suggests. The important point is not supernatural foresight. The catastrophe already has antecedents before everybody agrees that catastrophe is possible.
Mamet then applies the idea to civilisation. We constantly imagine historical collapse as an event: the revolution begins, the currency fails, the government falls, the enemy crosses the frontier. But cultural discontinuity need not announce itself with anything so dramatic. The decisive event may have occurred decades earlier in classrooms, families, universities, entertainment, language and historical memory.
That is why Mamet spends so much of Futility talking about history rather than elections. He is worried about the disappearance of a common account of the past. He complains about the academic repurposing of history as an indictment of abuses and then asks the devastating question: what happens when even the category of fact becomes politically controlled?
There is an important distinction here. Every mature country must confront the crimes and failures in its history. American slavery was real. Segregation was real. The treatment of Native Americans involved terrible episodes. None of that disappears because somebody waves the flag harder. A civilisation capable only of celebrating itself becomes mythology rather than history.
But the reverse can also happen. A civilisation can teach its history so relentlessly as an indictment that succeeding generations inherit the prosecution case without inheriting any reason for preserving the defendant. That is much closer to Mamet's fear.
A society cannot survive indefinitely on self-accusation. Children need not be taught that their ancestors were saints, but they must eventually be given some answer to the question of why the civilisation they inherited deserves to continue. If the only morally serious things they learn about their country are slavery, racism, imperialism, dispossession, inequality and oppression, the rational conclusion is not reform. It is repudiation.
This is where Mamet's remarks about the American Century and the American Dream matter. A friend suggests that the pendulum will eventually swing back and reason, courtesy and patriotism will return. Mamet rejects the reassurance because a pendulum can return only if both generations recognise the same centre.
His generation, in Mamet's account, regarded such things as patriotism, restraint and civic courtesy as part of the operating equipment of a functioning society. A younger generation cannot "return" to those values if it has been taught that they were masks concealing exploitation in the first place. You cannot experience a restoration of something you regard as morally discredited.
That is a far more interesting proposition than saying America has become polarised. Everybody knows America is polarised. Pollsters measure it, politicians exploit it and television networks monetise it. Mamet is suggesting something deeper: the disputants may increasingly lack a common civilisation within which their disagreement can be resolved.
Political disagreement is not necessarily evidence of national weakness. It can be evidence of national health. Republicans and Democrats can disagree ferociously over taxes, welfare, immigration or foreign policy while continuing to agree that elections determine who governs, constitutional restraints matter, political opponents possess legitimate rights and the country itself is worth preserving.
The dangerous stage arrives when disagreement moves one level deeper. One faction no longer merely believes that the other has bad policies; it believes that the institutions through which the other can acquire power are themselves illegitimate. History becomes factional property, law becomes an instrument for defeating enemies, political violence becomes excusable when committed by the correct side, and losing an election ceases to be an unfortunate result within a shared system and becomes proof that the system itself has failed. At that point two political parties are no longer simply arguing about how to steer the ship. They are arguing about whether it is the same ship.
Mamet's invocation of Cassandra becomes important here. Cassandra's tragedy was not merely that she predicted disaster. It was that knowledge of the disaster was useless. Nobody believed her, and knowing what was coming gave her no power to prevent it.
Mamet increasingly sees the old observer in the same position. Age produces pattern recognition precisely when it removes the strength and sometimes the desire to do anything about the pattern. The elderly can warn the young that they have seen certain political enthusiasms before. The young reply, correctly in one sense, that this time is different. Every historical repetition arrives wearing contemporary clothing.
This explains Mamet's bleakness about debate. The assumption behind political argument is that the other person possesses roughly the same intellectual furniture and has merely arranged it differently. Produce better evidence, expose the contradiction and perhaps he will reconsider.
But what if the dispute concerns the furniture itself? What if one generation's patriotism is another generation's nationalism, one generation's tolerance is another's complicity, one generation's historical achievement is another's oppression, and one generation's constitutional restraint is another's obstacle to justice? Argument becomes increasingly difficult because the participants are no longer disputing conclusions drawn from common premises. They are disputing the premises.
This is also why Mamet's observation about generations dying is more important than his discussion of contemporary unrest. Political movements come and go. Administrations change. Riots end. Parties reinvent themselves. But demographic succession is irreversible.
The people who remember the Depression eventually disappear. Those who remember the Second World War disappear. Those who remember the Cold War disappear. Eventually even those who remember September 11 as lived experience rather than a chapter in a history book disappear. The events remain, but the memory changes category. Experience becomes story, story becomes history, and history becomes something institutions interpret for people who can no longer contradict the interpretation from memory.
Mamet illustrates this beautifully with his own father, an immigrant child raised by a single mother during the Depression. His father attempted to teach him through stories of poverty. Mamet acknowledges that the stories were moving but makes the crucial admission that to him they were nevertheless only stories. The experience could be communicated but never transferred.
That may be the most melancholy idea in Futility. Civilisations depend upon transmitting things that cannot actually be transmitted whole. A constitution can be copied perfectly. A flag can be reproduced indefinitely. Buildings can be preserved and holidays repeated. What cannot simply be copied is the accumulated emotional meaning that made those things important to the people who inherited them directly.
This is why the United States and indeed Australia, could survive Mamet's feared transformation without anything resembling conventional collapse. There need be no revolution, dictatorship or second civil war. Elections could continue every four years. Wall Street could open every morning. The military could remain the most powerful on earth and Americans could continue becoming richer.
Yet the civilisation could still become unrecognisable to him because the assumptions beneath the institutions had changed. Thanksgiving would remain on the calendar but mean something different. The Constitution would remain under glass but be interpreted through a different moral framework. The flag would still fly above government buildings while provoking an entirely different emotional response from the population beneath it. The colour of the population could change, as in ancient Rome.
The obvious reply is that this has happened before. The America of 2026 would already be unrecognisable in many respects to an American of 1826, and much of that transformation was unquestionably for the better. Slavery disappeared. Women acquired political rights. Racial segregation was dismantled. Religious and social freedoms expanded. A civilisation that never changes is not alive but embalmed.
That objection matters because otherwise Mamet's argument degenerates into the perennial complaint of old men that young people have ruined the country. Every generation eventually discovers that the world no longer regards its habits as eternal truths. But Mamet's challenge survives that objection. Change is inevitable; civilisational continuity is not. The question is whether a society can change while preserving enough of its underlying moral and historical inheritance to remain recognisably the same political community.
There is no scientific measurement for that threshold. GDP cannot tell us. Neither can the Dow Jones, military spending, election turnout or the number of flags hanging from porches. A civilisation exists partly inside people's heads. It consists of assumptions about what deserves loyalty, what behaviour produces shame, what history deserves remembrance, what institutions deserve restraint and what obligations citizens owe people they have never met.
When those assumptions change sufficiently, political continuity can conceal civilisational replacement. That is why Mamet's essay is more disturbing than another prediction of American collapse. Collapse at least produces an obvious enemy: stop the riot, defeat the invader, repair the economy, rebuild the institution. Mamet is describing something for which there may be no repair crew because the people who would order the repair no longer agree that anything is broken.
Morgan Robertson's iceberg therefore works better as an image than as prophecy. The important thing about the iceberg is not that someone predicted it. It is that the ship continued steaming normally until the moment when conditions already present became irreversible.
Perhaps Mamet is wrong. Perhaps the American talent for renewal will operate once again, and today's ideological passions will eventually become tomorrow's embarrassing university photographs. The United States has survived a civil war, political assassinations, depressions, racial conflict, riots, world wars and periods of extraordinary ideological division. Predictions of American decline have an impressive history of failure.
But that is not quite the wager Mamet is making. He isn't certain America will die. He wonders whether his America will die while America lives. Thinking about the Australia I knew as a youth in the 1950s, I can see that this is rapidly happening now.
Mamet calls his essay Futility. The title is therefore darker than the iceberg. The real futility may not be our inability to see catastrophe coming. It may be the impossibility of making the next generation remember a world it never experienced, value institutions it was taught to distrust, or feel gratitude for an inheritance it understands primarily as an indictment. That is the challenge we face, something Mamet does not address.