Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (3 page)

The notion of writers like Proust and Joyce ‘destroying’ the nineteenth Century, as surely as Einstein and Freud were doing with their ideas, is not so fanciful as it might seem. The nineteenth Century saw the climax of the philosophy of personal responsibility – the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our actions – which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the classical world. As Lionel Trilling, analysing Eliot’s verdict on
Ulysses
, was to point out, during the nineteenth Century it was possible for a leading aesthete like Walter Paret, in
The Renaissance
, to categorize the ability ‘to burn with a hard, gem-like flame’ as ‘success in life’. ‘In the nineteenth Century’, Trilling wrote, even ‘a mind as exquisite and detached as Pater’s could take it for granted that upon the life of an individual person a judgment of success or failure might be passed.’
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The nineteenth-century novel had been essentially concerned with the motal or spiritual success of the individual.
A la Récherche
and
Ulysses
marked not merely the entrance of the anti-hero but the destruction of individual heroism as a central element in imaginative creation, and a contemptuous lack of concern for moral balance-striking and verdicts. The exercise of individual free will ceased to be the supremely interesting feature of human behaviour.

That was in full accordance with the new forces shaping the times. Marxism, now for the first time easing itself into the seat of power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through the empirically-perceived veneer of things to the hidden truth beneath. In words which strikingly foreshadow the passage from Freud I have just quoted, Marx had pronounced: ‘The
final pattern
of economic relationships as seen on the surface … is very different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their
inner but concealed essential patterne.’
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On the surface, men appeared to be exercising their free will, taking decisions, determining events. In reality, to those familiar with the methods of dialectical materialism, such individuals, however powerful, were seen to be mere flotsam, hurled hither and thither by the irresistible surges of economic forces. The ostensible behaviour of individuals merely concealed
class patterns of which they were almost wholly unaware but powerless to defy.

Equally, in the Freudian analysis, the personal conscience, which stood at the very heart of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and was the principal engine of individualistic achievement, was dismissed as a mere safety-device, collectively created, to protect civilized order from the fearful aggressiveness of human beings. Freudianism was many things, but if it had an essence it was the description of guilt. ‘The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it’, Freud wrote in 1920, ‘is called by us the sense of guilt …. Civilization obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.’ Feelings of guilt were thus a sign not of vice, but of virtue. The super-ego or conscience was the drastic price the individual paid for preserving civilization, and its cost in misery would increase inexorably as civilization advanced: ‘A threatened external unhappiness … has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.’ Freud said he intended to show that guilt-feelings, unjustified by any human frailty, were ‘the most important problem in the development of civilization’.
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It might be, as sociologists were already suggesting, that society could be collectively guilty, in creating conditions which made crime and vice inevitable. But personal guilt-feelings were an illusion to be dispelled. None of us was individually guilty; we were all guilty.

Marx, Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1920s: the world was not what it seemed. The senses, whose empirical perceptions shaped our ideas of time and distance, right and wrong, law and justice, and the nature of man’s behaviour in society, were not to be trusted. Moreover, Marxist and Freudian analysis combined to undermine, in their different ways, the highly developed sense of personal responsibility, and of duty towards a settled and objectively true moral code, which was at the centre of nineteenth-century European civilization. The impression people derived from Einstein, of a universe in which all measurements of value were relative, served to confirm this vision – which both dismayed and exhilarated – of moral anarchy.

And had not ‘mere anarchy’, as W.B. Yeats put it in 1916, been ‘loosed upon the world’? To many, the war had seemed the greatest calamity since the fall of Rome. Germany, from fear and ambition, and Austria, from resignation and despair, had willed the war in a way the other belligerents had not. It marked the culmination of the wave of pessimism in German philosophy which was its salient
characteristic in the pre-war period. Germanic pessimism, which contrasted sharply with the optimism based upon political change and reform to be found in the United States, Britain, France and even Russia in the decade before 1914, was not the property of the intelligentsia but was to be found at every level of German society, particularly at the top. In the weeks before the outbreak of Armageddon, Bethmann Hollweg’s secretary and confident Kurt Riezler made notes of the gloomy relish with which his master steered Germany and Europe into the abyss. July 7 1914: ‘The Chancellor expects that a war, whatever its outcome, will result in the uprooting of everything that exists. The existing world very antiquated, without ideas.’ July 27: ‘Doom greater than human power hanging over Europe and our own people.’
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Bethmann Hollweg had been born in the same year as Freud, and it was as though he personified the ‘death instinct’ the latter coined as the fearful decade ended. Like most educated Germans, he had read Max Nordau’s
Degeneration
, published in 1895, and was familiar with the degenerative theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. War or no war, man was in inevitable decline; civilization was heading for destruction. Such ideas were commonplace in central Europe, preparing the way for the gasp of approbation which greeted Oswald Spengler’s
Decline of the West
, fortuitously timed for publication in 1918 when the predicted suicide had been accomplished.

Further West, in Britain, Joseph Conrad (himself an Easterner) had been the only major writer to reflect this pessimism, working it into a whole series of striking novels:
Nostromo
(1904),
The Secret Agent
(1907),
Under Western Eyes
(1911),
Victory
(1915). These despairing political sermons, in the guise of fiction, preached the message Thomas Mann was to deliver to central Europe in 1924 with
The Magic Mountain
, as Mann himself acknowledged in the preface he wrote to the German translation of
The Secret Agent
two years later. For Conrad the war merely confirmed the irremediable nature of man’s predicament. From the perspective of sixty years later it must be said that Conrad is the only substantial writer of the time whose vision remains clear and true in every particular. He dismissed Marxism as malevolent nonsense, certain to generate monstrous tyranny; Freud’s ideas were nothing more than ‘a kind of magic show’. The war had demonstrated human frailty but otherwise would resolve nothing, generate nothing. Giant plans of reform, panaceas, all ‘solutions’, were illusory. Writing to Bertrand Russell on 23 October 1922 (Russell was currently offering ‘solutions’ to
The Problem of China
, his latest book), Conrad insisted: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything
convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world …. The only remedy for Chinamen and for the rest of us is the change of hearts. But looking at the history of the last 2,000 years there is not much reason to expect that thing, even if man has taken to flying …. Man doesn’t fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle.’
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At the onset of the war, Conrad’s scepticism had been rare in the Anglo-Saxon world. The war itself was seen by some as a form of progress, H.G.Wells marking its declaration with a catchy volume entitled
The War That Will End War.
But by the time the armistice came, progress in the sense the Victorians had understood it, as something continuous and almost inexorable, was dead. In 1920, the great classical scholar J.B.Bury published a volume,
The Idea of Progress
, proclaiming its demise. ‘A new idea will usurp its place as the directing idea of humanity …. Does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very advanced stage of civilization?’
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What killed the idea of orderly, as opposed to anarchic, progress, was the sheer enormity of the acts perpetrated by civilized Europe over the past four years. That there had been an unimaginable, unprecedented moral degeneration, no one who looked at the facts could doubt. Sometime while he was Secretary of State for War (1919–21), Winston Churchill jotted down on a sheet of War Office paper the following passage:

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived – not without reason – that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals – often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into Submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.
³³

As Churchill correctly noted, the horrors he listed were perpetrated by the ‘mighty educated States’. Indeed, they were quite beyond the power of individuals, however evil. It is a commonplace that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too,
pari passu.
As the Ametican pacifist Randolph Bourne snarled, on the eve of intervention in 1917, ‘War is the health of the state.’
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Moreover, history painfully demonstrates that collective righteousness is far more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who had been re-elected on a peace platform
in
1916 and who warned: Once lead this people into war and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance …. The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every fibre of our national life.’
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The effect of the Great War was enormously to increase the size, and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of the state. Before 1914, all state sectors were small, though most were growing, some of them fast. The area of actual state activity averaged between 5 and 10 per cent of the Gross National Product.
³⁶
In 1913, the state’s total income (including local government) as a percentage of
GNP
,
was as low as 9 per cent in America. In Germany, which from the time of Bismarck had begun to construct a formidable apparatus of welfare provisions, it was twice as much, 18 per cent; and in Britain, which had followed in Germany’s wake since 1906, it was 13 per cent.
³⁷
In France the state had always absorbed a comparatively large slice of the
GNP.
But it was in Japan and, above all, in Imperial Russia that the state was assuming an entirely new role in the life of the nation by penetrating all sectors of the industrial economy.

In both countries, for purposes of military imperialism, the state was forcing the pace of industrialization to ‘catch up’ with the more advanced economies. But in Russia the predominance of the state in every area of economic life was becoming the central fact of society. The state owned oilfields, gold and coal mines, two-thirds of the
railway system, thousands of factories. There were ‘state peasants’ in the New Territories of the east.
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Russian industry, even when not publicly owned, had an exceptionally high dependence on tariff barriers, state subsidies, grants and loans, or was interdependent with the public sector. The links between the Ministry of Finance and the big banks were close, with civil servants appointed to their boards.
³⁹
In addition, the State Bank, a department of the Finance Ministry, controlled savings banks and credit associations, managed the finances of the railways, financed adventures in foreign policy, acted as a regulator of the whole economy and was constantly searching for ways to increase its power and expand its activities.
⁴⁰
The Ministry of Trade supervised private trading syndicates, regulated prices, profits, the use of raw materials and freight-charges, and placed its agents on the boards of all joint-stock companies.
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Imperial Russia, in its final phase of peace, constituted a large-scale experiment in state collective capitalism, and apparently a highly successful one. It impressed and alarmed the Germans: indeed, fear of the rapid growth in Russia’s economic (and therefore military) capacity was the biggest single factor in deciding Germany for war in 1914. As Bethmann Hollweg put it to Riezler, ‘The future belongs to Russia.’
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