Terence Corcoran: We seem to be living through an unhinged moment

This unhinged U.S. president has generated unhinged behaviour around the world, including in Canada. Photo by Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Article content

All Canadians and most of the world’s power elites are today familiar with the idea that the world is at a “hinge moment” in economic and political history. The leading purveyor of the concept in recent times has been Prime Minister Mark Carney, who reportedly first used the phrase in an April 2025 speech warning that President Donald Trump had created a “hinge moment” for Canada and the world.

Article content

Article content

But Carney did not invent the phrase that is intended to spread the idea that we are living through a precarious time in human history that requires dramatic iconoclastic responses.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Salman Rushdie, in his 2021 book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” pretty much defined the concept.

Article content

“When one lives at a hinge moment in history, as we do, as Shakespeare did when he wrote his protean plays, a moment when everything is in flux, everything is changing at immense speed, when the future is up for grabs and dark storm clouds rush across the sun, and when there are plagues and dragons loose in the world, then it becomes essential to admit that the old forms will not do, the old ideas will not do, because all must be remade, all, with our best efforts, must be rethought, reimagined, and rewritten.”

Article content

Before Rushdie published Languages of Truth, BBC commentator Richard Fisher produced a deep look into the question: “Are we living at the ‘hinge of history?’” Fisher raised the hinge issue in response to works by Will MacAskill, an Oxford University philosopher and founder of a religious/philosophy movement called “effective altruism.” In 2019 MacAskill launched an academic debate, first in an online forum, then in a paper, and finally in a New York Times bestseller, “What We Owe the Future,” a 2022 book that only mentions the hinge once but documents the numerous ways human existence is at risk due to human ignorance and malfeasance.

Article content

Article content

Like Rushdie, MacAskill lays out grim scenarios.

Article content

Article content

“We find ourselves living now at a time of extraordinary change. A time marked by the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are burning through our finite fossil fuel reserves, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered pathogens to value lock-in to technological stagnation — and can act to prevent them.”

Article content

Before MacAskill, British philosopher Derek Parfit is credited with creating the hinge idea. “We live during the hinge of history,” he wrote in 2011. A group of Swedish academics recently described Parfit’s hinge of history idea as “a metaphor, a rhetorical device for encouraging people to raise their sights and act with the long-term consequences in mind.” Parfit’s warnings are seen today as the launch pad for a fixation “focused especially on existential risks: human extinction, permanent civilizational collapse and other events which leave some humans living but in a radically reduced form.”