Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (2 page)

Interviewed on BBC television in 1997, shortly before his death, Sir Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas, was asked what had been the most surprising thing about his long life. He was born in Riga in 1909, the son of a Jewish timber merchant, and was seven and a half years old when he witnessed the start of the February Revolution in Petrograd from the family’s flat above a ceramics factory. He replied, ‘The mere fact that I shall have lived so peacefully and so happily through such horrors. The world was exposed to the worst century there has ever been from the point of view of crude inhumanity, of savage destruction of mankind, for no good reason, … And yet, here I am, untouched by all this, … That seems to me quite astonishing.”
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By the time of the broadcast, I was well into the research for this book. But Berlin’s answer struck a chord. More conventional histories of the twentieth century concentrate, for perfectly understandable reasons, on a familiar canon of political-military events: the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression of the 1930s, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, decolonisation, the Cold War. It is an awful catalogue. The atrocities committed by Stalin and Hitler, or in their name, have still not been measured in full, and now, in all probability, never will be. The numbers, even in an age that is used to numbers on a cosmological scale, are too vast. And yet someone like Berlin, who lived at a time when all these horrors were taking place, whose family remaining in Riga was liquidated, led what he called elsewhere in the BBC interview ‘a happy life’.

My aim in this book is, first and foremost, to shift the focus away from the events and episodes covered in conventional histories, away from politics and military events and affairs of state, to those subjects that, I feel confident in saying, helped make Isaiah Berlin’s life so astonishing and rich. The horrors of the past one hundred years have been so widespread, so plentiful, and are so endemic to man’s modern sensibility that it would seem conventional historians have little or no space for other matters. In one recent 700-page history of the first third of the twentieth century, for example, there is no mention of relativity, of Henri Matisse or Gregor Mendel, no Ernest Rutherford, James Joyce, or Marcel Proust. No George Orwell, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Margaret Mead, no Oswald Spengler or Virginia Woolf. No Leo Szilard or Leo Hendrik Baekeland,
no James Chadwick or Paul Ehrlich. No Sinclair Lewis and therefore no Babbitt.
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Other books echo this lack. In these pages I try to rectify the imbalance and to concentrate on the main intellectual ideas that have shaped our century and which, as Berlin acknowledged, have been uniquely rewarding.

In giving the book this shape, I am not suggesting that the century has been any less catastrophic than the way it is described in more conventional histories; merely that there is so much more to the era than war. Neither do I mean to imply that politics or military affairs are not intellectual or intelligent matters. They are. In attempting to marry philosophy and a theory of human nature with the practice of governance, politics has always seemed to me one of the more difficult intellectual challenges. And military affairs, in which the lives of individuals are weighed as in no other activity, in which men are pitted against each other so directly, does not fall far short of politics in importance or interest. But having read any number of conventional histories, I wanted something different, something more, and was unable to find it.

It seems obvious to me that, once we get away from the terrible calamities that have afflicted our century, once we lift our eyes from the horrors of the past decades, the dominant intellectual trend, the most interesting, enduring, and profound development, is very clear. Our century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science. The trend has been profound because the contribution of science has involved not just the invention of new products, the extraordinary range of which has transformed all our lives. In addition to changing what we think about, science has changed
how
we think. In 1988, in
De près et de loin,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, asked himself the following question: ‘Do you think there is a place for philosophy in today’s world?’ His reply? ‘Of course, but only if it is based on the current state of scientific knowledge and achievement…. Philosophers cannot insulate themselves against science. Not only has it enlarged and transformed our vision of life and the universe enormously: it has also revolutionised the rules by which the intellect operates.’
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That revolution in the rules is explored throughout the present book.

Critics might argue that, insofar as its relation to science is concerned, the twentieth century has been no different from the nineteenth or the eighteenth; that we are simply seeing the maturation of a process that began even earlier with Copernicus and Francis Bacon. That is true up to a point, but the twentieth century has been different from the nineteenth and earlier centuries in three crucial respects. First, a hundred-plus years ago science was much more a disparate set of disciplines, and not yet concerned with fundamentals. John Dalton, for example, had inferred the existence of the atom early in the nineteenth century, but no one had come close to identifying such an entity or had the remotest idea how it might be configured. It is, however, a distinguishing mark of twentieth-century science that not only has the river of discovery (to use John Maddox’s term) become a flood but that many
fundamental
discoveries have been made, in physics, cosmology, chemistry, geology, biology, palaeontology, archaeology, and psychology.
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And it is one of the more
remarkable coincidences of history that most of these fundamental concepts – the electron, the gene, the quantum, and the unconscious – were identified either in or around 1900.

The second sense in which the twentieth century has been different from earlier times lies in the fact that various fields of inquiry – all those mentioned above plus mathematics, anthropology, history, genetics and linguistics – are now coming together powerfully, convincingly, to tell one story about the natural world. This story, this one story, as we shall see, includes the evolution of the universe, of the earth itself, its continents and oceans, the origins of life, the peopling of the globe, and the development of different races, with their differing civilisations. Underlying this story, and giving it a framework, is the process of evolution. As late as 1996 Daniel Dennett, the American philosopher, was still describing Darwin’s notion of evolution as ‘the best idea, ever.’
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It was only in 1900 that the experiments of Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak, recapitulating and rediscovering the work of the Benedictine monk Gregor Mendel on the breeding rules of peas, explained how Darwin’s idea might work at the individual level and opened up a huge new area of scientific (not to mention philosophical) activity. Thus, in a real sense, I hold in this book that evolution by natural selection is just as much a twentieth – as a nineteenth – century theory.

The third sense in which the twentieth century is different scientifically from earlier eras lies in the realm of psychology. As Roger Smith has pointed out, the twentieth century was a psychological age, in which the self became privatised and the public realm – the crucial realm of political action on behalf of the public good – was left relatively vacant.
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Man looked inside himself in ways he hadn’t been able to before. The decline of formal religion and the rise of individualism made the century
feel
differently from earlier ones.

Earlier on I used the phrase ‘coming to terms with’ science, and by that I meant that besides the advances that science itself made, forcing themselves on people, the various other disciplines, other modes of thought or ways of doing things, adjusted and responded but could not ignore science. Many of the developments in the visual arts – cubism, surrealism, futurism, constructivism, even abstraction itself – involved responses to science (or what their practitioners
thought
was science). Writers from Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and T. S. Eliot to Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, to mention only a few, all acknowledged a debt to Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein or Sigmund Freud, or some combination of them. In music and modern dance, the influence of atomic physics and of anthropology has been admitted (not least by Arnold Schoenberg), while the phrase ‘electronic music’ speaks for itself. In jurisprudence, architecture, religion, education, in economics and the organisation of work, the findings and the methodology of science have proved indispensable.

The discipline of history is particularly important in this context because while science has had a direct impact on how historians write, and what they write about, history has itself been evolving. One of the great debates in historiography is over how events move forward. One school of thought has it
that ‘great men’ are mostly what matter, that the decisions of people in power can bring about significant shifts in world events and mentalities. Others believe that economic and commercial matters force change by promoting the interests of certain classes within the overall population.
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In the twentieth century, the actions of Stalin and Hitler in particular would certainly seem to suggest that ‘great’ men are vital to historical events. But the second half of the century was dominated by thermonuclear weapons, and can one say that any single person, great or otherwise, was really responsible for the bomb? No. In fact, I would suggest that we are living at a time of change, a crossover time in more ways than one, when what we have viewed as the causes of social movement in the past – great men or economic factors playing on social classes – are both being superseded as the engine of social development. That new engine is science.

There is another aspect of science that I find particularly refreshing. It has no real agenda. What I mean is that by its very nature science cannot be forced in any particular direction. The necessarily open nature of science (notwithstanding the secret work carried out in the Cold War and in some commercial laboratories) ensures that there can only ever be a democracy of intellect in this, perhaps the most important of human activities. What is encouraging about science is that it is not only powerful as a way of discovering things, politically important things as well as intellectually stimulating things, but it has now become important
as metaphor.
To succeed, to progress, the world must be open, endlessly modifiable, unprejudiced. Science thus has a moral authority as well as an intellectual authority. This is not always accepted.

I do not want to give the impression that this book is all about science, because it isn’t. But in this introduction I wish to draw attention to two other important philosophical effects that science has had in the twentieth century. The first concerns technology. The advances in technology are one of the most obvious fruits of science, but too often the philosophical consequences are overlooked. Rather than offer universal solutions to the human condition of the kind promised by most religions and some political theorists, science looks out on the world piecemeal and pragmatically. Technology addresses specific issues and provides the individual with greater control and/or freedom in some particular aspect of life (the mobile phone, the portable computer, the contraceptive pill). Not everyone will find ‘the gadget’ a suitably philosophical response to the great dilemmas of alienation, or ennui. I contend that it is.

The final sense in which science is important philosophically is probably the most important and certainly the most contentious. At the end of the century it is becoming clearer that we are living through a period of rapid change in the evolution of knowledge itself, and a case can be made that the advances in scientific knowledge have not been matched by comparable advances in the arts. There will be those who argue that such a comparison is wrongheaded and meaningless, that artistic culture – creative, imaginative, intuitive, and instinctive knowledge – is not and never can be cumulative as science is. I believe there are two answers to this. One answer is that the charge is false; there
is
a sense in which artistic culture is cumulative. I think the philosopher
Roger Scruton put it well in a recent book. ‘Originality,’ he said, ‘is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world. The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary…. What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.’
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This is similar to what Walter Pater in the nineteenth century called ‘the wounds of experience’; that in order to know what is new, you need to know what has gone before. Otherwise you risk just repeating earlier triumphs, going round in decorous circles. The fragmentation of the arts and humanities in the twentieth century has often revealed itself as an obsession with novelty for its own sake, rather than originality that expands on what we already know and accept.

The second answer draws its strength precisely from the additive nature of science. It is a cumulative story, because later results modify earlier ones, thereby increasing its authority. That is part of the point of science, and as a result the arts and humanities, it seems to me, have been to an extent overwhelmed and overtaken by the sciences in the twentieth century, in a way quite unlike anything that happened in the nineteenth century or before. A hundred years ago writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Thomas Mann could seriously hope to say something about the human condition that rivalled the scientific understanding then at hand. The same may be said about Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Claude Monet, or Edouard Manet. As we shall see in chapter I, in Max Planck’s family in Germany at the turn of the century the humanities were regarded as a superior form of knowledge (and the Plancks were not atypical). Is that true any longer? The arts and humanities have always reflected the society they are part of, but over the last one hundred years, they have spoken with less and less confidence.
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