Weirdos whose ideas changed all of our lives
HISTORY
STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE: MAKING SENSE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
by John Higgs
(W&N £20)
PETER LEWIS
THIS is an alternative history of the much-documented 20th century, which managed to be both the best and the worst century on record.
We know all the landmarks: the world wars, the atomic bomb, the great booms and busts, the rise and fall of dictatorships of unprecedented nastiness, the triumphs and weaknesses of democracy and capitalism. But what about personal lives? How was people’s behaviour changed by revolutionary invention?
Late 20th-century Man — with his fast personal transport, instant worldwide communications and a plethora of screen information, entertainment and games — was like an alien from outer space compared with, say, my grandfather in his horsedrawn carriage or bus, with only a newspaper as his window on the world.
However, this is all technology. The nugget that John Higgs is after is the fundamental change in our ideas — the most influential factor in any human story.
We began by inheriting a centuries- old hierarchy of kings and emperors and a tradition of obedience to the leadership of strong men or women. Almost all were cleared away by World War I, and their empires melted away over the next 50 years.
What emerged from the rubble was a generation of iconoclasts who disregarded tradition and started afresh. Higgs begins with Einstein, who demolished the safe, calculable world of Newtonian physics and rewrote our understanding of the universe.
He moves on to Freud, who made us doubt how well we know ourselves, as so much of the mind is motivated by the unconscious. He introduces us to weirdos such as the Baroness Elsa von Frey-tag-Loring-hoven — a notorious performance artist and show-off in Twenties New York.
She wore a cake as a hat, spoons as earrings and postage stamps as make-up and lived in poverty. She was a punk before her time.
Marcel Duchamp made his name by inventing the ‘readymade’ — an everyday object presented as a work of art. The most famous was the urinal, which he turned on its side and renamed ‘Fountain’.
Was it art if he said it was? The same debate preoccupies us today over bottled sharks and cages full of flies. Higgs has found convincing evidence it was Baroness Elsa who sent him the urinal. Perhaps, in future, she will get credit for it.
The outburst of artistic experiment included Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce’s stream of consciousness prose and surrealist painters such as Dali. Higgs uses such disparate figures and more as examples of the rise of individualism, which became the underlying philosophy of the rest of the century.
Despite attempts to restrain it, such as Britain’s heroic post- war effort to build a welfare state, individualism has led to self-interest becoming the motive of the majority.
Large corporations founded by entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford took for granted their right to make as much money as possible — whatever the cost to the environment.
PEOPLE were only shocked out of these assumptions at the end of the century. It wasn’t the mission to the Moon that opened people’s eyes — it was the sight from the Moon of the blue Earth floating in a dark cosmos, all alone, beautiful and vulnerable, protected only by the thinnest atmosphere, which we are wrecking with our carbon emissions.
Higgs sums up: ‘ The 21st century appears to be the penultimate century in terms of Western civilisation.’
His one hope is that the internet has formed a worldwide network that unites people and which may convert them from self-interested individualists into co- operative carers for our precious planet.
As a history, does this succeed in making sense of the 20th century?
It is an unorthodox approach, and you can pick holes in his argument, but it is a challenging book that stimulates the reader to think radically. Its warning of doom cannot be sounded too often.