In this series of posts we are interacting with Richard Overy's history of the Inter-War years in Britain. [Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009)]. It was a period of profound social pessimism. It was widely believed that civilization was coming to an end. "The end of the world as we know it", was openly discusssed in newspapers and on radio. Studying this British Inter-War phenomenon is of particular interest and relevance in our day because it has once again become fashionable to prophesy that the end of civilization is nigh.
Of course the doomsayers in the thirties--which was just about everybody--were eventually proved wrong by the passage of time. But not before a great deal of damage was done--damage that is still with us to this day.
In tracing the major causes and pretexts for this pessimism during the Inter-War period, Overy points firstly to a new historical narrative. Until the time of World War One, the dominant narrative had been that history was moving forward and upward; progress was inevitable. However, after the War, new philosophies or theories of history emerged—well, actually they were old theories dusted off and reissued.
In particular ancient Greek and Eastern notions of human history being endlessly cyclical, repetitive, non-teleological, going nowhere once again took centre stage.
Specifically, it was advanced that no civilisation--however great or magnificent--could endure, but that in the past each had gone through a cycle of emergence, dominance, and then inevitable decline. These new (revived) theories of history changed the dominant eschatological outlook of Britain from an anticipated bright future to one of inevitable decline.
Historian Arnold Toynbee described the “bright outlook” that held sway before the War.
It was taken for granted by almost all Westerners . . . that the Western civilization had come to stay. Pre-1914 Westerners, and pre-1914 British Westerners above all, felt that they were not as other men were or ever had been. . . Other civilizations had risen and fallen, had come and gone, but Westerners did not doubt that their own civilization was invulnerable. (Cited by Overy, p.11.)This dominant consensus was shattered by the War. The popular press, reflecting the national mood, in the twenties began to promote remorselessly the imminent threat of the collapse and extinction of Western civilization. This view was endorsed repeatedly by intellectuals, authors, playwrights, and philosophers.
Oswald Spengler, drawing upon Nietzsche, in The Decline of the West put forward the idea of history moving in cyclical patterns. His book had an enormous appeal in post-War Germany and was of significant influence in Britain. The argument was grounded in a particular variant of the naturalistic fallacy: that human history is necessarily bound to an organic pattern where living beings are born, grow to strength, then weakness, then death. The fatalistic optimism of the pre-War period was now being supplanted by a fatalistic pessimism in the post-War period. Declension was inevitable.
Spengler's views were taken up and made the dominant narrative of the period by Oxford historian, Arnold Toynbee, who spent all his professional academic career putting empirical historical flesh upon Spengler's idealist bones, attempted to trace out the endlessly repeated cyclical patterns in past civilisations. The pattern was: creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism. (Overy, p.40) Readers of Toynbee rapidly concluded that they were living in the days of stagnation, division, and were about to enter a time of state absolutist barbarity. The rise of Stalin and Hitler put empirical meat into this ideological lunchbox.
A growing belief in an inevitable, historically determined, circular decline of Western civilisation as part of a universal human pattern became the dominant narrative of history amongst intellectuals and the media in Britain in the twenties and thirties, which provided academic credence to the prediction of the coming collapse. The absolutism of inevitable progress was replaced by the absolutism of inevitable non-directional historical cycles. All Unbelieving thought tends to whipsaw between these two polar opposites.
The Christian view of history is profoundly different. Firstly, the final determined certainty of human history and of eschatology is indescribably and unimaginably good for His people because all human history (past, present, and future) now belongs to Christ. Secondly, as human history now moves ineluctably towards this glorious triumph and fulfilment there are many mini-risings and fallings. These are not organic, nor do they reflect an ultimate fate-driven cyclicality in history. Rather they reflect the blessings and curses of the covenantal structure that runs through all human history, and through which the Lord brings His Kingdom to pass. If a people honour, serve, and obey God they are blessed; if they turn away, they fall under the curses of the covenant.
But ultimately faithful love, service and obedience will be the norm universally, for such things depend not upon man who runs, nor upon he who wills, but upon the King of all kings Who is seated at the right hand of God. All enemies are gradually and ineluctably being placed under His feet.
Humanist man—that is the devotee of the West's current established religion—will continue to be racked by cycles of ridiculous vaunting optimism followed by decades of deep despair. As his most gilded idols fail and are crushed, dark demons emerge to taunt and to haunt. The two Inter-War decades in Britain provide a classic example of this religious syndrome. For puny man does not have Atlas-like shoulders to bear up the world. When his dreams of false greatness are dashed, nightmares of dark demons grow.
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