Stranger Than We Can Imagine (2 page)

Each of the history books in front of me traces a different path through that territory, but those paths are not as different as you might think. Many are written by politicians or political journalists, or have strong political bias. They take the view that it was politicians that defined these troublesome years, so they follow a path that tells that story. Other books have staked out paths through the art or technology of the period. These are perhaps more useful, but can feel abstract and removed from human lives. And while these paths differ, they do converge along well-trodden highways.

Finding a different path through this territory is daunting. A journey through the twentieth century can seem like an epic quest. The gallant adventurers who embark on it first wrestle with three giants, known by the single names of Einstein, Freud and Joyce. They must pass through the forest of quantum indeterminacy and the castle of conceptual art. They avoid the gorgons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand whose glance can turn them to stone, emotionally if not physically, and they must solve the riddles of the Sphinxes of Carl Jung and Timothy Leary. Then things get difficult. The final challenge is to somehow make it through the swamp of postmodernism. It is not, if we are honest, an appealing journey.

Very few of the adventurers who tackle the twentieth century make it through postmodernism and out the other side. More typically, they admit defeat and retreat to base camp. This is the world as it was understood at the end of the nineteenth century, just over the border, safe in friendly territory. We are comfortable with the great discoveries that emerged up until then. Innovations such as electricity or democracy are comprehensible, and we take them in
our stride. But is this really the best place for us? The twenty-first century is not going to make any sense at all seen through nineteenth-century eyes.

The territory of the twentieth century includes dark patches of thick, deep woods. The established paths tend to skirt around these areas, visiting briefly but quickly scurrying on as if fearful of becoming entangled. These are areas such as relativity, cubism, the Somme, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics and climate change. They have a reputation for initially appearing difficult, and becoming increasingly bewildering the more they are studied. When they first appeared they were so radical that coming to terms with them meant a major remodelling of how we viewed the world. They seemed frightening in the past, but they don’t any more. We’re citizens of the twenty-first century now. We made it through yesterday. We’re about to encounter tomorrow. We can take the dark woods of the twentieth century in our stride.

So this is our plan: we’re going to take a journey through the twentieth century in which we step off the main highways and strike out towards the dark woods. We’re aware that a century is an arbitrary time period. Historians talk about the long nineteenth century (1789–1914) or the short twentieth century (1914–91), because these periods contain clear beginnings and endings. But for our purposes ‘the twentieth century’ will do fine, because we’re taking a journey from when things stopped making sense to where we are now.

If we’re going to make it through, we’re going to have to be selective. There are millions of subjects worthy of inclusion in an account of this period, but we’re not going to get very far if we revisit all of our favourites for the sake of nostalgia. There’s a wealth of fascinating literature and debate behind everything we find, which we will have to ruthlessly avoid getting bogged down in. We’re on a mission, not a cruise. We set out not as historians but as curious travellers, or as adventurers with an agenda, because we are embarking on our travels with a clear sense of what we will be paying attention to.

Our plan is to look at what was genuinely new, unexpected and radical. We’re not concerned by the fallout from those ideas, so take it as read that everywhere we visit caused scandal, anger and furious denouncements by the status quo. Those aftershocks are an important part of history, but focusing on them can disguise an emerging pattern. It is the direction that these new ideas were pointing in that we’ll pay attention to. They point in a broadly coherent direction.

There’s a moment for every generation when memory turns into history. The twentieth century is receding into the distance, and coming into perspective. The events of that century now feel like they belong in the category of history, so this is the right time to take stock.

Here, then, is an alternative route through the landscape of the last century. Its purpose is the same as all paths. It will take you to where you are going.

Albert Einstein in Chicago, c.1930
(Transcendental Graphics/Getty)

ONE:
RELATIVITY

O
n the afternoon of 15 February 1894 the French anarchist Martial Bourdin left his rented room in Fitzroy Street in London. He was carrying a homemade bomb and a large amount of money. It was dry and sunny, and he boarded an open-top horse-drawn tram at Westminster. This took him across the river and on to Greenwich.

After leaving the tram he walked across Greenwich Park towards the Royal Observatory. His bomb exploded early, while he was still in the parkland. The explosion destroyed his left hand and a good chunk of his stomach, but did no damage to the observatory. A group of schoolchildren found him lying on the ground, confused and asking to be taken home. Blood and bodily remains were later found over sixty yards away. Bourdin died thirty minutes after the bomb exploded, leaving no explanation for his actions.

The Polish writer Joseph Conrad’s
The Secret Agent
(1907) was inspired by these events. Conrad summed up the general bewilderment about Bourdin’s actions when he described the bombing as ‘a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it is impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought […] One remained faced by the fact of a man blown to pieces for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other.’

It wasn’t Bourdin’s politics that puzzled Conrad. The meaning of the term ‘anarchism’ has shifted over the last century, so that it is now commonly understood as an absence of rules where everyone can do whatever they like. Anarchism in Bourdin’s era was focused more on rejecting political structures than on demands for unfettered personal liberty. Nineteenth-century anarchists weren’t
claiming the right to total freedom, but they were claiming the right not to be controlled. They recognised, in the words of one of their slogans, ‘No gods, no masters’. In terms of Christian theology, they were committing the sin of pride. This was Satan’s rebellion and the reason he was cast down from Heaven:
non serviam
, ‘I Will Not Serve.’

Nor was Conrad confused by Bourdin’s desire to plant a bomb. It was the middle of a violent period of anarchist bombings, which began with the assassination of the Russian tsar Alexander II in 1881 and lasted until the outbreak of the First World War. This was fuelled by the ready availability of dynamite and an anarchist concept called the ‘propaganda of the deed’, which argued that individual acts of violence were valuable in themselves because they served to inspire others. The anarchist Leon Czolgosz, to give one example, successfully assassinated the President of the United States William McKinley in September 1901.

No, the baffling question was this: if you were an anarchist on the loose in London with a bomb, why would you head for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich? What did it offer as a target that, for example, Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament lacked? Both of these buildings were closer to where Bourdin lived, had a higher profile, and symbolised the power of the state. Why didn’t he try to blow those up? It seemed that he had recognised some aspect or quality of the Royal Observatory that he felt was significant enough for him to risk his life to destroy.

In events and stories inspired by the Greenwich bombing, little attention is paid to the target. The explosion was fictionalised in Conrad’s novel and that book influenced the American terrorist Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. Alfred Hitchcock adapted the story in his 1936 film,
Sabotage
, in which he updated the bomber’s journey across London from a horse-drawn tram to a more modern bus. Hitchcock had his bomb explode early when the bus was on The Strand, a spooky fictional precursor to an incident sixty years later when an IRA terrorist accidentally blew himself up on a bus just off The Strand.

But while the target of the bombing may have made little sense to Conrad, that does not mean that it was equally meaningless to Bourdin. As the American cyberpunk author William Gibson would note, ‘The future is already here. It is just not very evenly distributed.’ Ideas spread unevenly and travel at unpredictable speeds. Perhaps Bourdin glimpsed something remotely resembling an idea that was otherwise invisible to Conrad. As the twentieth century began, the logic behind his target slowly came into focus.

The earth hurtled through the heavens. On its surface, gentlemen checked their pocket watches.

It was 31 December 1900. The earth swung around the sun and minute hands moved around clock faces. When both hands pointed up to twelve it meant that the earth, after travelling thousands of miles, had reached the required position on its yearly circuit. At that moment the twentieth century would begin.

In ancient history there is a concept called an omphalos. An omphalos is the centre of the world or, more accurately, what was culturally thought to be the centre of the world. Seen in a religious context, the omphalos was also the link between heaven and earth. It was sometimes called the navel of the world or the
axis mundi
, the world pillar, and it was represented physically by an object such as a pillar or a stone.

An omphalos is a universal symbol common to almost all cultures, but with different locations. To the ancient Japanese, it was Mount Fuji. To the Sioux, it was the Black Hills. In Greek myth, Zeus released two eagles in order to find the centre of the world. They collided above Delphi, so this became the Greek omphalos. Rome itself was the Roman omphalos, for all roads led there, and later still Christian maps became centred on Jerusalem.

On New Year’s Eve 1900, the global omphalos was the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, South London.

The Royal Observatory is an elegant building, founded by Charles II in 1675 and initially designed by Sir Christopher Wren. In 1900 the world was measured from a line that ran north–south
through this building. This international standard had been agreed at a conference in Washington DC sixteen years earlier, when delegates from twenty-five countries voted to accept Greenwich as the prime meridian. San Domingo voted against and France and Brazil abstained, but the meeting was largely a formality; 72 per cent of the world’s shipping used sea charts that listed Greenwich as zero degrees latitude, and the USA had already based its time zones on Greenwich.

Here, then, was the centre of the world, a seat of science bestowed by royal patronage. It overlooked the Thames in London, the capital city of the largest empire in history. The twentieth century only began when the clocks in this building declared that it had begun, because the calibrations of those clocks were based on the positions of the stars directly above. This modern, scientific omphalos had not lost the link between heaven and earth.

When you visit the observatory today, at dusk or night, you will see the prime meridian represented by a green laser beam, straight and steady, cutting across the sky. It begins at the observatory and is perfectly aligned to zero degrees latitude. The laser did not exist in 1900, of course. The line then was an idea, a mental projection applied to the real world. From here, a net of similar longitude lines stretched outwards to the west and east, reaching further and further around the curve of the globe until they met at the other side. They crossed a similar set of latitude lines, based at the equator, which stretched out to the north and the south. Together this mental web created a universal time zone and positioning system which could synchronise everyone and everywhere on the planet.

On New Year’s Eve 1900, people took to the streets in different cities and nations around the world and welcomed in the new century. Nearly a hundred years later, the celebrations that marked the next millennium took place on New Year’s Eve 1999 rather than 2000. This was a year early and technically wrong, but few people cared. When the staff at the Greenwich Observatory explained that the twenty-first century didn’t actually start until 1 January 2001,
they were dismissed as pedants. Yet at the start of the twentieth century the observatory had authority, and the world celebrated as they dictated. Greenwich was the place that mattered. So it was with some satisfaction that the members of Victorian society present checked their watches, awaited the correct time, and witnessed the birth of a new era.

It appeared, on the surface, to be an ordered, structured era. The Victorian worldview was supported by four pillars: Monarchy, Church, Empire and Newton.