Society has always had its “bears” or cassandras. But the significant factor of the Inter-War period in Britain was that a bleak view of the future was shared by so many. It became part of the popular discourse of the age. It is found, to be sure, most strongly amongst the intellectuals of the day. T.S.Eliot and the Bloomsbury group reflected the dour and bleak aspect. But, even deeply religious and socially conservative intellectuals such as J.R.R. Tolkien were depressed at the increasing mechanizing of society and the passing of a more kindly age.
But social depression was not just the preserve of the literary set. It captured professional economists, sociologists, physicians and the medical establishment; fear of what was believed to be coming—at least as the experts of the day foretold it-- motivated hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to mobilise, organise, and engage to try to prepare for, if not prevent the coming calamity.
It is striking that the language of menacing catastrophe surfaces in most areas of public debate and discussion and is not simply a literary trope. . . . The phenomenon was neither evidently reactionary nor exclusively avant-garde. For the generation living after the end of the First World War the prospect of imminent crisis, a new Dark Age, became a habitual way of looking at the world. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), p.3.
What interests us here is not so much whether the cassandra spirit was correct—clearly, in many ways it was not, for Britain continues to this day, and a civilisation of a kind endures. But more interesting are the causes of this widespread apocalyptic belief of approaching end times. Equally interesting are the experts and academics who, out of their ivory towers, led the charge proclaiming that the end of the world was nigh—and the kinds of remedies and solutions they proposed. We confront their step-children every day in our world.
What becomes abundantly clear is that those experts and academics who believed darkly that civilization was coming to an end did so on spurious analysis or false premises. Moreover, faced with the prospect of a collapse of civilisation, the academic experts offered no solutions—at least, none that were remotely palatable or viable. Nevertheless, they remained highly respected as experts and as people to be listened to: academia in general and science in particular retained its unassailable position as the authoritative logos for the human condition and solution to the ills of society. This condition abides to this day as well.
As Overy points out:
A significant aspect of the explanation, . . . is to recognize that the human and natural sciences had an important part to play in generating anxiety once scientific discoveries had filtered into the public arena . . . . There existed a wide expectation that science could supply the truths that politics could not, though science was then, as today, only true for the time being. . . . (S)cience, despite its assumed role as the voice of material reason, played a key part . . . in creating the morbid culture that inhabited the Western world view in the 1920s and 1930s. Overy, p.4,5.This phenomenon is eerily reminiscent of the role of “science” in our day whipping up morbid hysteria about the world facing a bleak future due to man-caused global warming.
In future posts we will trace some of the scientific “discoveries” that parlayed into “evidence” that a Dark Age was coming and that nothing could be done to prevent it. In the meantime, however, we should recall that the West was set up for these morbid “twilight years” in that in the previous decades Western society had been gripped by an overwhelming sense of optimism. Expectations of the dawning of a golden age had been very high in the US, the UK and Europe. The City of God was coming to earth, it was commonly and widely believed, and it was coming through the vast explosion of knowledge brought about by the application of the scientific method to the study of the natural world. Rationality was the redeemer of mankind. The West was advanced, prosperous, powerful and blessed precisely because it had laid aside myths and superstitions (particularly of religion in general and the Christian faith in particular) and had enthroned human reason as the final arbiter of truth and knowledge. The real was the rational and the rational was the real. It was setting mankind free.
Naturally, but fatuously, the triumph and advance of reason was applicable equally to human relations, society and activity as it was to discerning the laws of mathematics, chemistry and engineering. If reason solved the problems of constructing high rise buildings or of inventing and manufacturing the internal combustion engine, it would also solve the problems of how to construct advanced human communities, ridding the world of crime, or achieving peace between nations. Human reason would enable mankind to move easily and seamlessly between the “is” of the material world to the “ought” of human action, and in turn, reason would make the “ought” into the “is” of actual experience and existence.
The burgeoning optimism that characterised the first decade of the twentieth century was shattered by the First World War. It was hard to overstate the extent of dashed hopes—but it does provide one explanation of why the decades after the war were so racked with pessimism. If hope deferred makes the heart sick, hopes dashed must make it despair. Not only was World War One terrible bloody, it was fought between so-called rational civilised people. Moreover, it seemed utterly pointless, not just in the strategy and tactics of attrition which sought to win through grinding down the opponent to capitulation, but also in the reasons for which the war was fought. However much the Kaiser and German kultur was held up as an evil, rapacious enemy, every body knew that it was really little more than a mere family squabble.
How could such an enlightened people behave so badly, so brutishly? Cultural pride and vaunted self-aggrandizement was shattered. But notice—the War did not lead to repentance. It did not lead to the dethronement of human reason to its rightful place, nor to any breaking of the idols of rationalism and a return to the Lord Christ. Consequently, the judgement upon the West represented by World War One was not followed by hope and a new beginning because the old gods were still clung to. Human reason remained the inviolable authority—only now it was blighted with failure.
For the two decades after World War One the Western view of the world was essentially diagnostic: what went wrong; what caused the War; where did the disease lie; and would it prove fatal? It was the sheer number of the ostensible problems being faced that led the diagnostic temper into an acutely pessimistic frame of mind. The “solution” to one problem led to new maladies and threats.
The first explanation as to what was happening arose out of the study of history itself. From the Enlightenment to World War One the grand assumption of most historians was that history was linear and it was moving forward and upward. Progress was inevitable. After World War One this view ceased to be dominant and fell out of favour. It was replaced by a Greek view of history as endlessly circular, going nowhere. No civilisation survived. If it arose, it would be followed by an inevitable decline. The conviction grew that Western civilisation has reached its apogee; from this point it would inevitably decline and wane.
This new meta-narrative of human history made pessimism intellectually fashionable.
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