People are saying that this is the end. They say it’s the worst financial crisis of our lifetimes, and certainly the worst since the Great Depression. I have to confess that when it all began to unfold I started to panic. I relived all the difficult periods this magazine went through — and survived. Still, I was hit hard by the shock, the speed, and the seeming violence of the current crisis, especially since nearly everyone was predicting that even worse times were bound to come. Panic is nothing new to us. We live and work in a culture of panic. I’m part of the generation the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls “the children of catastrophe,” people who have persuaded themselves that their strength, their ideas, and even their style come from their ability to adapt to catastrophe of one kind or another, and that their power to survive has…