"The world had already changed before September 11. The world has been going through a process of change over the last 20 or 30 years. A civilization ends, another one begins"
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Saramago pushes back against the idea of September 11 as a clean break. The attacks were spectacular, but they did not inaugurate the forces that shape our time; they revealed them. Over the preceding decades, the world had been moving from the industrial, nation-centered order of the mid-20th century into a global, networked, market-dominated arrangement. That transition, rather than a single day, marks the threshold between civilizations.
The timeline he suggests spans the end of Bretton Woods, the oil shocks, deregulation, and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s; the fall of the Soviet Union and the unchallenged spread of global capitalism; the information revolution that collapsed distances and sped up finance, media, and work. Labor became more precarious, the social safety net thinner, and the public sphere more fragmented. Power migrated from parliaments to markets and from visible institutions to opaque networks. Security technologies, data collection, and media spectacle began to structure daily life. By 2001, the architecture of the new century was already standing.
Saramago’s claim also resists civilizational melodrama. He was wary of narratives that divide the planet into blocs fated to clash. The change under way was not about East and West or religious antagonism; it was about a reconfiguration of power, value, and time. After September 11, governments rushed to frame the moment as an epochal war, but for Saramago the deeper epochal story was slower and more structural, and it demanded political and ethical attention beyond emergency measures.
His novels from the 1990s and early 2000s echo this analysis. Blindness portrays a society unraveling under invisible pressures; The Cave indicts consumerism and the hollowing of life by a vast shopping complex. These allegories ask whether the new civilization being born will be humane. If one civilization is ending and another beginning, the urgent task is not to name the break, but to decide what principles will govern what replaces it.
The timeline he suggests spans the end of Bretton Woods, the oil shocks, deregulation, and the neoliberal turn of the 1980s; the fall of the Soviet Union and the unchallenged spread of global capitalism; the information revolution that collapsed distances and sped up finance, media, and work. Labor became more precarious, the social safety net thinner, and the public sphere more fragmented. Power migrated from parliaments to markets and from visible institutions to opaque networks. Security technologies, data collection, and media spectacle began to structure daily life. By 2001, the architecture of the new century was already standing.
Saramago’s claim also resists civilizational melodrama. He was wary of narratives that divide the planet into blocs fated to clash. The change under way was not about East and West or religious antagonism; it was about a reconfiguration of power, value, and time. After September 11, governments rushed to frame the moment as an epochal war, but for Saramago the deeper epochal story was slower and more structural, and it demanded political and ethical attention beyond emergency measures.
His novels from the 1990s and early 2000s echo this analysis. Blindness portrays a society unraveling under invisible pressures; The Cave indicts consumerism and the hollowing of life by a vast shopping complex. These allegories ask whether the new civilization being born will be humane. If one civilization is ending and another beginning, the urgent task is not to name the break, but to decide what principles will govern what replaces it.
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