In this series of posts, we have been reflecting upon Britain in the Inter-War years, as recounted by Richard Overy in his intellectual history account of that period entitled, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009).
Overy is concerned to document the sense of profound pessimism which gripped Britain for over two decades. The Cassandra chorus was led by the intellectual, educated elites of the day: historians, scientists, psychologists, economists, literary cognoscenti, buttressed by newspapers and radio, who were able to persuade the great majority that times were treacherous indeed and that civilization was coming to an end.
In our modern world we see flashes of this from time to time. The portended calamity over climate change (the end of the world as we know it) is one very modern example, but there have been others. We have been warned by ecologists of the terrible threat to the human race from overpopulation, from Islamic terrorists, from "peak oil", from global economic collapse, from asteroids--and so on. But one of the significant things about Britain in the Inter-War period was that pessimism took hold--it became the prevailing belief.
One of the lessons to be drawn from Overy's account is that when a secular humanist society falls from its manic to its depressive phase, the dangers are genuine enough. But the dangers come not from the supposed threats (which are usually due to unfounded fabrications by alarmist academics), but from the solutions and remedies proposed.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, we are told. And so, during the Inter-War years, sections of British society openly courted fascism and communism as a higher and better way. This is not an exaggeration. Hitler and Mussolini were generally believed to have achieved marvellous things in pulling Germany and Italy out of collapse respectively. Since, as was generally believed, Britain lay in a state of terminal decline and imminent threat, there was much that Britain could learn from National Socialism.
But far more commonly was it believed that much could be learned from Stalin. The Soviet Union was seen as a shining light set upon a hill, a beacon towards which Britain should move as it sought to shuffle off its Slough of Despond and move toward a better and brighter future.
Overy writes:
It is easy with hindsight to mock the apparently wilful blindness of the left (and not just the left) in Britain to the realities of the Soviet system. It can be understood only as a measure of the disgust felt about British failings and the apparent absence of other means to express that revulsion. If there was a growing progressive demand in the 1930's for a New Jerusalem, the Soviet Union gave evidence that the Promised Land was a possibility. (Overy, pp. 289f)While Overy offers the presence of despair as an apologia for the attraction and fascination with the Soviet Union, we do not. Rather it illustrates the dangers when despairing humanists grope for solutions within their dark caverns.
Denizens of the British progressive intelligentsia duly trooped to Soviet Union to see the miracle first hand. Almost all came back with glowing reports. All saw what they wanted to see, and proved easy dupes for Soviet propagandists. Like credulous infants they were. Beatrice and Sydney Webb published in 1935 a comprehensive study of the Soviet Union entitled Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? They willed themselves to see only good. For example, Sydney compared leather jackets on sale for four pounds in London with those in the Soviet Union which sold for the equivalent of sixty pounds: his conclusion? People in the Soviet Union are able to spend more freely! (Overy, p.292) Apparently this erstwhile economist refused to admit the darker truth that severe shortages were making clothing far too expensive for Soviet citizens. There is none so blind as those who will not see.
Webb was aware that certain Britons and Americans were claiming that there had been over 6 million deaths to famine but he reported that he could see no evidence of it.
“The cult of personality, whose existence they could hardly have missed they attributed to Stalin's remarkable successes and the 'traditional reverence' of the Russian people for an autocrat which the 'ruling junta', as they called it, indulged for stability's sake. Stalin was trapped by it, they argued, but not its cause.” (Overy, p. 239)The Webbs's work sold in large numbers--which is to say it was generally believable. George Bernard Shaw described it as a masterpiece. The suffocating statism of Gordon Brown is a direct descendant of its nineteen thirties progenitor
The bottom line is clear. When the whirlwinds of despair, crisis, and calamity arrive, secular humanists know only one type of solution and one type only: a vast expansion of the powers of the State (as the corporate manifestation of Man himself) to control and command to make changes and put things right. The consequences of all such “solutions” are worse, far worse than the problems they are meant to solve.
Beware when a secular humanist culture becomes depressed and desperate. The cure will be many times worse than the disease.
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