In the mid-1980s, while covering most of the developing world, I began to realize something was happening that seemed, at least at the time, counter to the common wisdom.
My American generation of post-World War II optimists had simply assumed that nations as we knew them would naturally hold together. They would brook their problems, but their coherence as organized, civilized societies and states would remain; progress was inevitable for all human beings.
But suddenly I saw, to the contrary, that many countries we had expected would continue to "work" were instead beginning to disintegrate. Our blithe, too-casual assumptions about man's perfectible modern nature turned out to be, in truth, anti-historical.
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