culture of consumption, and ultimately the creation of a global market that embraces populations formerly excluded from any reasonable expectation of affluence. But the prediction that "sooner or later we will all be affluent," uttered so confidently only a few years ago, no longer carries much conviction. In view of the present rate of population growth, the attempt to export a Western standard of living to the rest of the world, even if it was economically or politically feasible in the first place, would amount to a recipe for environmental disaster. In any case, the advanced countries no longer have the will or the resources to undertake such a monumental program of development. They cannot even solve the problem of poverty within their own borders. In the United States, the richest country in the world, a growing proletariat faces a grim future, and even the middle class has seen its standard of living begin to decline.

The global circulation of commodities, information, and populations, far from making everyone affluent, has widened the gap between rich and poor nations and generated a massive migration to the West, where the newcomers swell the vast army of the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, drug ridden, derelict, and effectively disfranchised. Their presence strains existing resources to the breaking point. Medical and educational facilities, law enforcement agencies, and the available supply of jobs—not to mention the supply of racial tolerance and goodwill, never abundant to begin with—all appear inadequate to the enormous task of assimilating what is essentially a surplus or "redundant" population, in the cruelly expressive British phrase. The poisonous effects of poverty and racial discrimination cannot be ghettoized; they too circulate on a global scale. "Like the effects of industrial pollution and the new system of global financial markets," Susan Sontag writes, "the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world ... in which everything that can circulate does"—goods, images, garbage, disease. It is no wonder that "the look into the future, which was once tied to a vision of linear progress," has turned into a "vision of disaster," in Sontag's words, and that "anything ... that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe."

As a corrective to the idea of progress, the "imagination of disaster," as Sontag refers to it elsewhere, leaves a good deal to be desired. All too obviously, it simply inverts the idea of progress, substituting irresistible disintegration for irresistible advance. The dystopian view of the world to come, now so firmly established in the Western imagination, holds out

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