On 28 October 1929 the notorious stock market crash occurred on Wall Street, and U.S. loans to Europe were suspended. In the weeks and months that followed, and despite the misgivings of many, Allied troops prepared and then executed their departure from the Rhineland. In France, Georges Clemenceau died at the age of eighty-eight, while in Thuringia Wilhelm Frick was about to become the first member of the Nazi Party to be appointed minister in a state government. Benito Mussolini was clamouring for the revision of the Versailles Treaty, and in India Mohandâs Gandhi began his campaign of civil disobedience. In Britain in 1931 a National Government was formed to help balance the budget, while Japan abandoned the gold standard. There was a widespread feeling of crisis.
Sigmund Freud, then aged seventy-three, had far more personal reasons to feel pessimistic. In 1924 he had undergone two operations for cancer of the mouth. Part of his upper jaw had to be removed and replaced with a metal prosthesis, a procedure that could only be carried out using a local anaesthetic. After the operation he could chew and speak only with difficulty, but he still refused to stop smoking, which had probably been the cause of the cancer in the first place. Before he died in London in 1939, Freud underwent another two dozen operations, either to remove precancerous tissue or to have his prosthesis cleaned or renewed. During all this time he never stopped working.
In 1927 Freud had published The Future of an Illusion, which both explained away and yet amounted to an attack on organised religion. This was the second of three ‘cultural’ works by Freud (the first, Totem and Taboo, was discussed earlier: see above, page 141). At the end of 1929, as Wall Street was crashing, Freud delivered the third of these works, Civilisation and Its Discontents. There had been famine in Austria and attempted revolution and mega-inflation in Germany, and capitalism appeared to have collapsed in America. The devastation and moral degeneration of World War I was still a concern to many people, and Hitler was on the rise. Wherever you looked, Freud’s title fitted the facts.1
In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud developed some of the ideas he had explored in Totem and Taboo, in particular that society – civilisation – evolves out of the need to curb the individual’s unruly sexual and aggressive appetites. He now argued that civilisation, suppression, and neurosis are inescapably intertwined because the more civilisation there is, the more suppression is needed and, as a direct result, the more neurosis. Man, he said, cannot help but be more and more unhappy in civilisation, which explains why so many seek refuge in drink, drugs, tobacco, or religion. Given this basic predicament, it is the individual’s ‘psychical constitution’ which determines how any individual adjusts. For example, ‘The man who is predominantly erotic will give first preference to his emotional relationships with other people; the narcissistic man, who inclines to be self-sufficient, will seek his main satisfactions in his internal mental process.’2 And so on. The point of his book, he said, was not to offer easy panaceas for the ills of society but to suggest that ethics – the rules by which men agree to live together – can benefit from psychoanalytic understanding, in particular, the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, or conscience.3
Freud’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. The 1930s, especially in the German-speaking countries, were dominated more by a complete lack of conscience than any attempt to refine or understand it. Nevertheless, his book spawned a raft of others that, though very different from his, were all profoundly uneasy with Western capitalist society, whether the source of concern was economics, science and technology, race, or man’s fundamental nature as revealed in his psychology. The early 1930s were dominated by theories and investigations exploring the discontents of Western civilisation.
The book closest to Freud’s was published in 1933 by the former crown prince of psychoanalysis, now turned archrival. Carl Jung’s argument in Modern Man in Search of a Soul was that ‘modern’ society had more in common with ‘archaic,’ primitive society than it did with what had gone immediately before – i.e., the previous phase of civilisation.4 The modern world was a world where the ancient ‘archetypes’ revealed themselves more than they had done in the recent past. This explained modern man’s obsession with his psyche and the collapse of religion. The modern condition was that man knew he was the culmination of evolution – science told him so – but also knew that ‘tomorrow he will be surpassed,’ which made life ‘solitary, cold, and frightening.’5 Further, psychoanalysis, by replacing the soul with the psyche (which Jung clearly thought had happened), only offered a palliative. Psychoanalysis, as a technique, could only be used on an individual basis; it could not become ‘organised’ and used to help millions at a time, like Catholicism, say. And so, the participation mystique, as the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl called it, was a whole dimension of life closed to modern man. It set Western civilisation, a new civilisation, apart from the older Eastern societies.6 This lack of a collective life, ceremonies of the whole as Hugo von Hofmannsthal called them, contributed to neurosis, and to general anxiety.7
For fifteen years, Karen Horney practised in Weimar Germany as an orthodox Freudian analyst, alongside Melanie Klein, Otto Fenichel, Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham and Wilhelm Reich at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Only after she moved to the United States, first as associate director of the Chicago Institute and then in New York, at the New School for Social Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, did she find herself capable of offering criticism of the founder of the movement. Her book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, overlapped with both Freud and Jung but was also an attack on capitalistic society for the way it induced neurosis.8
Horney’s chief criticism of Freud was his antifeminist bias (her early papers included ‘The Dread of Women’ and ‘The Denial of the Vagina’). But she was also a Marxist and thought Freud too biological in outlook and ‘deeply ignorant’ of modern anthropology and sociology (she was right). Psychoanalysis had itself become split by this time into a right wing and a left wing. What may be characterised as the right wing concentrated on biological aspects, delving further and further into infantile experience. Melanie Klein, a German disciple of Freud who moved to Britain, was the leader of this approach. The left wing, which consisted in the main of Horney, Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan, was instead more concerned with the individual’s social and cultural background.9
Horney took the line that ‘there is no such thing as a universal normal psychology.’10 What is regarded as neurotic in one culture may be normal elsewhere, and vice versa. For her, however, two traits invariably characterised all neurotics. The first was ‘rigidity in reaction,’ and the second was ‘a discrepancy between potentiality and achievement.’ For example, a normal person by definition becomes suspicious of someone else only after that person has behaved badly toward them; the neurotic ‘brings his or her suspicion with them at all times.’ Horney didn’t believe in the Oedipus complex either. She preferred the notion of ‘basic anxiety,’ which she attributed not to biology but to the conflicting forces of society, conflicts that act on an individual from childhood. Basic anxiety she characterised as a feeling of ‘being small, insignificant, helpless, endangered, in a world that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy.’11 Such anxiety is worse, she said, when parents fail to give their children warmth and affection. This usually occurs in families where the parents have their own unresolved neuroses, initiating a vicious circle. By definition, the neurotic personality has lost, or never had, ‘the blissful certainty of being wanted.’12 Such a child grows up with one of four rigid ways of approaching life, which interfere with achievement: the neurotic striving for affection; the neurotic striving for power; neurotic withdrawal; and neurotic submissiveness.13
The most contentious part of Horney’s theory, for nonpsychoanalysts, was her blaming neurosis on the contradictions of, in particular, contemporary American life. She insisted that in America more than anywhere else there existed an inherent contradiction between competition and success on the one hand (‘never give a sucker an even break’) and good neighborliness on the other (‘love your neighbour as yourself); between the promotion of ambition by advertising (‘keeping up with the Joneses’) and the inability of the individual to satisfy these ambitions; between the creed of unfettered individualism and the ever more common curbs brought about by environmental concerns and more laws.14 This modern world, despite its material advantages, foments the feeling in many individuals that they are ‘isolated and helpless.’15 Many would agree that they feel isolated and helpless, and maybe even neurotically so. But Horney’s theory never explains why some neurotics need affection, and others power, and why some become submissive. She herself denied that biology was responsible but never clarified what else might account for such large differences in behaviour.
Horney’s feminism was new but not unique. The campaign to gain women the vote had exercised politicians in several countries prior to World War I, not least in Austria and Great Britain. Immediately after the war other matters had taken priority, both economically and psychologically, but as the 1920s passed, the status of women again became an issue.
One of the minor themes in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room is the easy effortlessness of the men who led Britain into war, and their casual treatment of women. Whereas all the men in the book have comfortable sets of rooms from which to embark on their fulfilling lives, the women always have to share, or are condemned to cold and draughty houses. This was a discrepancy Woolf was to take up in her most famous piece of nonfiction, A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929. It appears that being turned away from an Oxbridge college library because she was a woman propelled her to write her feminist polemic. And it is certainly arguable that the greatest psychological revolution of the century has been in the female sensibility.16
By 1929 Virginia Woolf had published six novels. These included Jacob’s Room, in the miracle year of 1922, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando in 1928. Her success, however, only seems to have made her more unsettled about the situation most female writers found themselves in. Her central argument in the 100-page essay was that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’17 Her view, which was to be echoed by others in different ways later in the century, was that a writer ‘is the product of his or her historical circumstances and that material conditions are crucially important’ – not just to whether the books get written but to the psychological status of the writer, male or female. But women were the main focus of her attention, and she went on to show how, in Britain at least, until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, a married woman’s income legally belonged to her husband. There could be no freedom of the mind, she felt, without freedom of circumstance. This meant that prior to the end of the seventeenth century there were very few women writers, and those who did write often only dabbled in it. Woolf herself suffered, in that the boys in her own family went to boarding school and then to university, whereas she and the other girls were educated at home.18 This brought several consequences. Female experience was underreported in fiction, and what experience was reported was inevitably distorted and/or restricted to certain kinds. For example, she felt that Jane Austen was not given access to the wider world that her talent demanded, with similar restrictions applying also to Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘It cannot be doubted that the long years of seclusion had done her [Browning] irreparable damage as an artist.’19
Though she felt feminist anger, Woolf was very clear that such anger had no place in fiction, which should have larger ambitions for itself, and she criticised earlier writers, like Browning and Charlotte Brönte, for giving way to that anger. She then moved on to consider the ways in which the female mind might complement the male mind, in an effort to show what literature has lost by the barriers erected against women. For example, she considers Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the androgynous mind, with male and female qualities coexisting in harmony, to be open to all possibilities. She makes no case for the superiority of either sex, but rather for the mind that allows both sympathies equal access. She actually wrote that it is ‘fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’20 She herself described A Room as a trifle, but she also said she wrote it with ardour, and it has certainly been a huge success. One reason is the style. When the book was published, in October 1929, it was reviewed in the Sunday Times of London by Desmond MacCarthy, who described it as ‘feminist propaganda’ but added ‘yet it resembles an almond-tree in blossom.’21 Woolf’s style is conversational, intimate. She manages to be both angry and above anger at the wrongs done to women writers, and would-be women writers, in the past. She devotes pages to the lunches she has eaten at Oxbridge colleges – where she says the food is much better in the women’s colleges than the men’s. And she makes it matter. Of course, Virginia Woolf’s fiction should be read alongside A Room of One’s Own. She did help emancipate women not only by her polemic but also by her example.
Psychoanalysts and novelists were not the only people analysing the shortcomings of civilisations. Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and reporters were all obsessed by the same theme. The 1930s were an especially fruitful time for anthropology. This discipline not only offered implicit comparison with, and criticism of, the capitalist way of life, but provided examples of more or less successful alternatives.
Franz Boas still dominated anthropology. His 1911 book The Mind of Primitive Man made clear his loathing of nineteenth-century ideas that took for granted the inherent superiority of white Westerners. For Boas, anthropology ‘could free a civilisation from its own prejudices.’ The sooner data from other civilisations could be gathered and assimilated into the general consciousness, the better. Boas’s powerful and passionate advocacy had made anthropology seem a thrilling subject and an advance on the outmoded ethnocentrism of previous decades and the vague biologism of psychoanalysis. Two of Boas’s students, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, produced highly influential studies that further undermined biologism. Like Boas, Mead and Benedict were interested in the link between race, genetics (still an infant subject) and culture. Mead had a master’s degree in psychology, but like many others she found anthropology more alluring and had been inspired by Ruth Benedict. Reticent to the point where her fellow students thought her depressed (they hated what they called her ‘castor oil’ faces), Ruth Benedict began to inspire respect. She and Mead eventually formed part of an influential international network of anthropologists and psychiatrists which also included Geoffrey Gorer, Gregory Bateson, Harry Stack Sullivan, Erik Erikson, and Meyer Fortes.
For Boas anthropology was, as Mead later put it, ‘a giant rescue operation’ to show the importance of culture.22 Boas gave Margaret Mead the idea that made her famous while she was still in her twenties: he suggested she study adolescence in a non-Western society. It was a clever choice, for adolescence was arguably part of the pathology of Western culture. In fact, adolescence had been ‘invented’ only in 1905, in a study by the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (a friend of Freud).23 His Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education referred to over sixty studies of physical growth alone and portrayed adolescence ‘as the period in which idealism flowered and rebellion against authority waxed strong, a period during which difficulties and conflicts were absolutely inevitable.’24 In other words, it was psychologically crucial. Boas was sceptical of the idea that the problems of adolescence were purely or largely biological. He felt they must owe as much to culture as to genes.25
In September 1925 Margaret Mead spent several weeks in Pago Pago, capital of Tutuila, the chief island of American Samoa in the southwest Pacific Ocean.26 She stayed at a hotel made famous by Somerset Maugham in his 1920 story ‘Rain,’27 learning the basics of the Samoan language before launching on her field study.28 Mead told Boas that from her preliminary survey she proposed to spend her time on Ta’u, one of three small islands in the Manu’a group, about a hundred miles east of Pago Pago. This was ‘the only island with villages where there are enough adolescents, which are at the same time primitive enough and where I can live with Americans. I can eat native food, but I can’t live on it for six months; it is too starchy.’29 A government steamer stopped at the islands every few weeks, but she thought that was too infrequent to spoil the island’s status as an uncontaminated separate culture; the people of Ta’u were ‘much more primitive and unspoiled than any other part of Samoa…. There are no white people on the island except the navy man in charge of the dispensary, his family, and two corpsmen.’ The climate was far from perfect: year-round humidity of 80 percent, temperatures of 70–90 degrees, and ‘furious rains’ five times a day, which fell in ‘drops the size of almonds.’ Then the sun would come out, and everything on the island, including the people, would ‘steam’ until they were dry.30
Mead’s account of her fieldwork, Coming of Age in Samoa, was phenomenally successful when it appeared in 1928. Her introduction to the book concluded with an account of what happened on the island after dark. In the moonlight, she wrote, ‘men and maidens’ would dance and ‘detach themselves and wander away among the trees. Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight; then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of lovers, as the village rests until dawn.’31 She described ‘horseplay’ between young people, ‘particularly prevalent in groups of young women, often taking the form of playfully snatching at the sex organs.’ She said she was satisfied that, for these girls, adolescence ‘represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly development of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed by no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions…. To live as a girl with as many lovers as possible and then to marry in one’s own village, near one’s own relatives and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.’ Samoans, she insisted, had not the faintest idea of ‘romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity.’32 At the same time, the concept of celibacy was ‘absolutely meaningless.’33
Samoa, or at least Ta’u, was an idyll. For Mead, the island existed only in ‘pastel tones,’ and she assumed that the picture was true for Samoa as a whole. In fact, this generalisation was inaccurate, for the main island had recently, in 1924, seen political problems and a killing. In Ta’u Mead was isolated and treated very well, the Samoans nicknaming her ‘Makelita’ after one of their dead queens. One of the reasons why Coming of Age in Samoa was so successful was that when her publisher, William Morrow, received the first draft of the manuscript, he suggested that she add two chapters explaining the relevance of her findings for Americans and American civilisation. In doing so, she stressed ‘Papa Franz’s’ approach, emphasising the predominance of culture over that of biology. Adolescence didn’t need to be turbulent: Freud, Horney, and the others were right – Western civilisation had a lot to answer for. The book was welcomed by the sexologist Havelock Ellis; by Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist and the author of The Sexual Life of Savages; and by H. L. Mencken. Mead quickly became the most famous anthropologist in the world.34 She followed Samoa with two more field studies in the early 1930s, Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). In these books, one critic remarked, Margaret Mead took a ‘diabolical delight’ in stressing how little difference there is between so-called civilised man and his more ‘primitive’ cousins. But that was unfair. Mead was not uncritical of primitive societies, and the whole thrust of her books was to draw attention to variation in cultures. In New Guinea, children might be allowed to play all day long, but, she said, ‘alas for the theorists, their play is like that of young puppies or kittens. Unaided by the rich hints for play which children of other societies take from the admired adult traditions, they have a dull, uninteresting child life, romping good-humoredly until they are tired, then lying inert and breathless until rested sufficiently to romp again.’35 In Sex and Temperament, in which she looked at the Arapesh, she found that warfare was ‘practically unknown,’ as was personal aggression. The Arapesh had little in the way of art and, what she foundest oddest of all, little differentiation between men and women, at least in terms of psychology.36 Moving on from the Arapesh to the Mundugumor, on the Yua River, a tributary of the Sepik (also in New Guinea), she found a people that, she said, she loathed.37 Only three years before, headhunting and cannibalism had been outlawed. Here she recorded that it was not uncommon to see the bodies of very small children floating, ‘unwashed and unwanted,’ down the river.38 ‘They are always throwing away infants here,’ Mead wrote. Babies that were wanted, she said, were carried around in rigid baskets that they couldn’t see out of and which didn’t let in much light. The children were never cuddled or comforted when they cried, so that for Mead it was hardly surprising they should grow up feeling unloved or that Mundugumor society should be ‘riddled with suspicion and distrust.’ In the third society, the Tchambuli, fifty miles up the Sepik River, the familiar roles of men and women in Western society were reversed. Women were the ‘dominant, impersonal, managing partners,’ and men were ‘less responsible and emotionally dependent.’39 Mead’s conclusion, after this ‘orgy of fieldwork,’ was that ‘human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.’
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, published the same year as Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, might have been called ‘Sex and Temperament, Economic Exchange, Religion, Food Production and Rivalry in Three Primitive Societies,’ for the two books had much in common.40 Benedict looked at the Zuni Indians of New Mexico (native Americans were called ‘Indians’ in those days, even by anthropologists), the Dobu of New Guinea, and the Kwakiutl, who lived on the Pacific coast of Alaska and Puget Sound. Here again large idiosyncrasies in culture were described. The Zuni were ‘a people who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues,’ who placed great reliance on imitative magic: water was sprinkled on the ground to produce rain.41 Children were whipped ceremonially from time to time ‘to take off the bad happenings.’42 Ownership of property – in particular the sacred fetishes – was in the matrilineal line, and the dominant aspect of Zuni life, religion apart, was its polite orderliness, with individuality lost within the group. The Dobu, in contrast, were ‘lawless and treacherous’; ‘the social forms which obtain in Dobu put a premium on ill-will and treachery and make of them the recognised virtues of their society.’43 Faithfulness was not expected between husband and wife, broken marriages were ‘excessively common,’ and a special role was played by disease. If someone fell ill, it was because someone else willed it. Disease-charms were widely sold, and some individuals had a monopoly on certain diseases. In trade the highest value was put on cheating the other party. ‘The Dobu, therefore, is dour, prudish and passionate, consumed with jealousy and suspicion and resentment. Every moment of prosperity he conceives himself to have wrung from a malicious world by a conflict in which he has worsted his opponent.’44 Ecstatic dancing was the chief aspect of Kwakiutl religion, and inherited property – which even included areas of the sea, where halibut was found, for example – was the chief organisational basis of society. Immaterial things, like songs and myths, were forms of wealth, some of which could be gained by killing their possessors. The Kwakiutl year was divided into two, the summer, when wealth and social privileges were honoured, and winter, when a more egalitarian society prevailed.45
Benedict’s chapters reporting on primitive societies were bracketed by polemical ones. Here her views clearly owe a huge debt to Boas. Her main theme aimed to show human nature as very malleable; that geographically separate societies may be integrated around different aspects of human nature, giving these societies a distinctive character. Some cultures, she said, were ‘Dionysian,’ organised around feeling, and others ‘Apollonian,’ organised around rationality.46 And in a number of wide-ranging references she argued that Don Quixote, Babbitt, Middletown, D. H. Lawrence, the homosexuality in Plato, may all best be understood in an anthropological context, that is to say as normal variations in human nature that are fundamentally incommensurable. Societies must be understood on their own terms, not on some single scale (where, of course, ‘we’ – whites – always come out on top). In creating their own ‘patterns of culture,’ other societies, other civilisations, have avoided some of the problems Western civilisation faces, and created their own.47
It is almost impossible now to recover the excitement of anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s.48 This was an era before mass air travel, mass tourism, or television, and the exploration of these ‘primitive’ societies, before they changed or were killed off, was one of the last great adventures of the world. The anthropologists were a small number of people who all knew each other (and in some cases married each other: Mead had three husbands, two of them anthropologists, and was for a time Benedict’s lover). There was an element of the crusade in their work, to show that all cultures are relative, a message wrapped up in their social/political views (Mead believed in open marriage; Benedict, from a farming family, was self-educated).
Benedict’s book was as successful as Mead’s, selling hundreds of thousands of copies over the years, available not just in bookstores but in drugstores, too. Together these two students of Boas, using their own research but also his and that of Malinowski and Mead’s husband, Reo Fortune, transformed the way we look at the world. Unconscious ethnocentrism, not to say sexual chauvinism, was much greater in the first half of the century than it is now, and their conclusions, presented scientifically, were vastly liberating. The aim of Boas, Benedict, and Mead was to put beyond doubt the major role played by culture in determining behaviour and to argue against the predominating place of biology. Their other aim – to show that societies can only be understood on their own terms – proved durable. Indeed, for a comparatively small science, anthropology has helped produce one of the biggest ideas of the century: relativism. Margaret Mead put this view well. In 1939, lying on her back, her legs propped against a chair (‘the only posture,’ she explained, ‘for a pregnant woman’), she jotted down some thoughts for the foreword to From the South Seas, an anthology of her writing about Pacific societies. ‘In 1939,’ she noted prophetically, ‘people are asking far deeper and more searching questions from the social sciences than was the case in 1925…. We are at a crossroads and must decide whether to go forward towards a more ordered heterogeneity, or make frightened retreat to some single standard which will waste nine-tenths of the potentialities of the human race in order that we may have a too dearly purchased security.’49
Sociologists were not tempted by exotic foreign lands. There was enough to do at home, trying to make sense of the quiddities thrown up by Western capitalism. Here, a key figure was Robert E. Park, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the man who more than anyone else helped give sociology a more scientific status. Chicago University was the third of the three great research universities established in America in the late nineteenth century, after Johns Hopkins and Clark. (It was these research universities that first made the Ph.D. a requirement for would-be scholars in the United States.) Chicago established four great schools of thought: philosophy, under John Dewey, sociology, under Park, political science, under Charles Merriam, and economics, much later in the century, under Milton Friedman. Park’s great achievement in sociology was to turn it from an essentially individual, observational activity into a much more empirically based discipline.50
The first noteworthy Chicago study was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, now generally forgotten but regarded by sociologists as a landmark that blended empirical data and generalisation. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki spent several months in Poland, then followed thousands of Polish immigrants to America, examining the same people on both sides of the Atlantic. They gained access to private correspondence, archives from the Bureau of Immigration, and newspaper archives to produce as complete a picture as possible of the whole migration experience. That was followed by a series of Chicago studies which examined various ‘discontents’ of the age, or symptoms of it – The Gang, by Frederic Thrasher, in 1927; The Ghetto, by Louis Wirth, Suicide, by Ruth Shonle Cavan, and The Strike, by E. T. Hiller, all published in 1928; and Organised Crime in Chicago, by John Landesco, released in 1929. Much of this research was directly related to policy – helping Chicago reduce crime or suicide, or get the gangs off the streets. Park always worked with a local community committee to ensure his studies chimed with the real concerns of local people. But the importance of Chicago sociology, which exerted its greatest influence between 1918 and 1935, had as much to do with the development of survey techniques, nondirective interviewing, and attitude measurement, all of which were intended to produce more psychological ways of grouping people, going beyond the picture painted in bland government censuses.51
The most significant Chicago survey was an examination of the discontent that most maimed American civilisation (a rival even to the unemployment caused by the Great Depression): race. In 1931 Charles Johnson published The Negro in American Civilisation and for the first time froze a statistical picture of the black American against which his progress, or lack of it, could be measured.52 Johnson was actually on the faculty of Fisk University when the book came out, but he had trained under Park and, in 1922, published The Negro in Chicago as one of the sociology department’s series of studies.53 Johnson, more than anyone else, helped create the Harlem Renaissance and believed that if the American Negro could not achieve equality or respect in any other way, he should exploit the arts. Throughout the 1920s, Johnson had edited the New York magazine for blacks, Opportunity, but toward the end of the decade he returned to academia. The subtitle of his new book was ‘A Study of Negro Life and Race Relations in the Light of Social Research,’ and the research element was its strong point. The book, the most thorough analysis of Negro status yet produced, compiled government records and reports, health and crime statistics, charts, tables, graphs, and lists. At that time, many blacks – called Negroes then – could remember slavery, and some had fought in the Civil War.
The statistics showed that the lives of blacks had improved. Illiteracy had been reduced among Negroes from 70 percent in 1880 to 22.9 percent in 1920. But of course that compared very badly, still, with the white illiteracy rate of 4.1 percent in 1920.54 The number of lynchings was down from 155 in 1892 to 57 in 1920 and 8 in 1928, the first time it had fallen to single figures. But eight lynchings a year was still a fearful statistic.55 More enlightening, perhaps, was the revealing way in which prejudices had evolved. For example, it was widely assumed that there was so pronounced a susceptibility among Negroes to tuberculosis that expenditures for preventive or corrective measures were practically useless. At the same time, it was believed that Negroes had a corresponding immunity to such diseases as cancer, malaria, and diabetes, so that no special measures of relief were necessary. It did not go unnoticed among Negroes that the majority opinion always interpreted the evidence to the minorities’ disadvantage.56 What Johnson’s survey also showed, however, and for the first time in a thorough way, was that many social factors, rather than race per se, predetermined health. In one survey of fifteen cities, including New York, Louisville and Memphis, the population density of Negroes was never less than that for whites, and on occasions four times as high.57 Mortality rates for Negroes in fifteen states were always higher than for whites, and in some cases twice as high. What emerged from the statistics was a picture that would become familiar – Negroes were beginning to occupy the inner-city areas, where the houses were smaller, less well built, and had fewer amenities. Already there were differences in what was then called ‘law observance.’58 A survey of ten cities – Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and others – showed Negroes as two to five times as likely to be arrested as whites, though they were three and a half times less likely to be sentenced to a year or more in prison. Whatever was being shown here, it wasn’t a biological propensity on the part of Negroes to commit violence, as many whites argued.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s chapter in Johnson’s book repeated his argument that the supposed biological differences between the races must be ignored. Instead attention should be focused on the sociological statistics – now amply widened – which disclosed the effects of discrimination on the status of the Negro. The statistics were particularly useful, he said, in the realm of education. In 1931 there were 19,000 black college students compared with 1,000 in 1900, 2,000 black bachelors of arts compared with 150. Those figures nailed the view that Negroes could never benefit from education.59 Du Bois never wavered from his position that the obsession with biological and psychological differences was a device for prejudiced whites to deny the very real sociological differences between races, for which they – the whites – were largely to blame. Herbert Miller, a sociologist from Ohio State University, felt that the tighter controls on immigration introduced in the 1920s had ‘profoundly affected race relations by substituting the Negro for the European’ as the object of discrimination.60 The long-term message of The Negro in American Civilisation was not optimistic, confounding America’s view of itself as a place where everything is possible.
Charles Johnson, the black, urban, sophisticated polymath and star of the Harlem Renaissance, could not have been more different from William Faulkner, a rural, white monomaniac (in the nicest sense) from the Deep South. Between 1929 and 1936 Faulkner produced his four masterpieces, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the last two of which specifically confront the issue of black and white.
Faulkner, who lived in Oxford, Mississippi, was obsessed by the South, its obsession with itself and with its history, what his biographer called ‘the great discovery.’61 For Faulkner the South’s defeat in the Civil War had trapped it in the past. He realised that whereas most of America was an optimistic country without much of a past, and with immigrants forever reshaping the present, the South was a very different enclave, almost the opposite of the thrusting North and West Coast. Faulkner wanted to explain the South to itself, to recreate its past in an imaginative way, to describe the discontents of a civilisation that had been superseded but refused to let go. All his great books about the South concern proud dynastical families, the artificial, arbitrary settings in which barriers are forever being transgressed, in particular those of class, sex, and race. Families are either on the rise or on the wane, and in the background is shame, incest, and in the case of Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! miscegenation. These unions raise passions, violent passions, death and suicide, frustrating dynastic ambitions.
Most typical of Faulkner’s approach is Absalom, Absalom! for in addition to its plot, this book, like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, is notoriously difficult. Faulkner imposes strong demands on the reader – flashbacks in time, rapid alternation in viewpoint without warning, obscure references that are only explained later.62 His aim is to show the reader the confusion of society, unhelped by the author’s guiding hand. Just as his characters work on themselves to create their identities and fortunes, the reader must work out Faulkner’s meaning.63
Absalom, Absalom! begins when Miss Rosa Coldfield summons Quentin Compson, a friend and amateur historian, and tells him a story about the rise and fad of Thomas Sutpen, the founder of a southern dynasty whose son, Henry, shot his friend Charles Bon, who he had fought with in the war, causing the demise of the dynasty.64 What motive could Henry Sutpen have had for killing his best friend? Gradually Compson fills in the gaps in the story – using his imagination where facts are too sparse.65 Eventually, the mystery is solved. Charles Bon was actually the fruit of an earlier union by Thomas Sutpen and a Negro (and therefore his eldest child). In Sutpen’s refusal to recognise his eldest son, we see the ‘great guilt’ underlying the whole edifice of the dynasty, and by implication the South itself. Faulkner does not shirk the moral dilemmas, but his main aim was to describe the pain that is their consequence. While Charles Johnson catalogued the shortcomings of northern urban American society, Faulkner illuminated – with sympathy – that the South had its imperfections too.
If race was (still) America’s abiding problem, in Europe and particularly in Britain it was class that divided people. Here, one man who did so much to publicise the great poverty associated with Britain’s lower classes, especially in the 1930s following the great crash, was the writer and reporter George Orwell. It was no accident that Orwell was a reporter as well as a novelist, or that he should prefer reportage to bring home his message. The great age of reportage, as Eric Hobsbawm tells us, had only recently begun, in the 1920s, following the growth of new media, like Time and newsreels. The word reportage itself first appeared in French dictionaries in 1929, and in English in 1931. Many novelists of the time (Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis) were or had been or would become reporters.66
Orwell, born Eric Blair in the remote town of Motihari in Bengal, northwest of Calcutta, on 25 June 1903, received a conventional – that is to say, privileged – middle-class upbringing in Britain. He went to Saint Cyprian’s school near Eastbourne, where Cyril Connolly was a friend and where he wet the bed, then was sent to Wellington and Eton.67 After school he joined the Indian imperial police and served in Burma. Dissatisfied with his role in the imperial police, Blair cut short his time in Burma and began his career as a writer. ‘Feeling tainted by his “success” as a young officer in the East, he wanted to shun anything that reminded him of the unjust system which he had served. “I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man,” he explained later. “Failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” ’68
It is too simple to say that Blair’s desire not to succeed was the direct result of his experience in Burma.69 The idea had planted itself in his mind long before he became a police officer. Saint Cyprian’s, says his biographer Michael Shelden, had prejudiced him against success very early in life by giving him such a corrupt view of merit. Winning was the only thing that mattered at the school, and one became a winner by ‘being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people’ – in short, ‘by getting the better of them in every way.’ Later, he put it like this: ‘Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.’70 He was made to feel that he was one of the weak, and that, whatever he did ‘he would never be a winner. The one consolation for him was the knowledge that there was honour in losing. One could take pride in rejecting the wrong view of success … I could accept my failure and make the best of it.’71 Of Orwell’s four most famous books, two explored in reportorial fashion the weakest (and poorest) elements of society, the flotsam of the 1930s capitalist world. The other two, produced after World War II, explored the nature of power, success, and the way they so easily become abused.
After leaving the police, Blair stayed with his parents for a few months but in the autumn of 1927 found a small room in the Portobello Road, in west London. He tried his hand at fiction and began to explore the East End of the city, living cheek by jowl with tramps and beggars in order to understand how the poor lived, and to experience something of their suffering.72 Having rejected ‘every form of man’s dominion over man,’ he wanted ‘to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.’ Blair worried at his appearance on these visits. He acquired a shabby coat, black dungaree trousers, ‘a faded scarf, and a rumpled cap’. He changed the way he spoke, anxious that his educated accent would give him away. He soon grew to know the seedy area around the West India docks, mixing with stevedores, merchant sailors, and unemployed labourers and sleeping at a common lodging house in Limehouse Causeway (paying nine pence a night). Being accepted in this way, he decided to go ‘on the road’ and for a while meandered through the outreaches of the East End, overnighting in dingy ‘spikes’ – the barracks of local workhouses. These sallies formed the backbone of Down and Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. Of course, Orwell was never really down and out; as Michael Shelden says, his tramping was something of a game, one that reflected his ambivalence toward his own background, his ambitions, and his future. But the game was not entirely frivolous. The best way he could help those who were less fortunate was to speak up for them, ‘to remind the rest of the world that they existed, that they were human beings who deserved better and that their pain was real.’73
In 1929 Orwell went to Paris, to show that the misery wasn’t confined to just one country. There he took a small room at a run-down hotel in the rue du Pot de Fer, a narrow, mean lane in the Latin Quarter. He described the walls of his room as thin; ‘there was dirt everywhere in the building and bugs were a constant nuisance.’74 He suffered a nervous breakdown.75 There were more cheerful neighborhoods not far away, however, in one of which could be found the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where Jean-Paul Sartre was a star pupil and where Samuel Beckett was just beginning to teach. Further on was the place de la Contrescarpe, which Hemingway describes in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, affectionately sketching its mix of ‘drunks, prostitutes, and respectable working folk.’76 Orwell says in the book that he was the victim of a theft that left him almost penniless.77
The book was published by Victor Gollancz, who had begun his company in 1929 with offices in Covent Garden. Gollancz was a driven man, a canny bargainer, and soon his business was thriving. He paid his authors small advances but spent much larger sums on advertising. He published all kinds of books, but politics was his first love, and he was a passionate socialist. Orwell’s book was as much sociological as political, but it appealed to Gollancz ‘as a powerful statement against social injustice.’78 Published at the beginning of January 1933, it was an immediate success, widely praised in the press (by, among others, Compton Mackenzie). Orwell realised that no quick or glib remedy for poverty could possibly work. What he was after was a change in perception, so that poverty would no longer be regarded ‘as a kind of shameful disease which infects people who are incapable of helping themselves.’79 He emphasised the point that even many charity workers expected ‘some show of contrition, as though poverty signified a sinful soul.’ This attitude, he felt, and the continued existence of poverty were linked.
Down and Out was followed by three novels, Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Each of these examined an aspect of British life and helped establish Orwell’s reputation. In 1937 he returned to his reportorial/sociological writing with The Road to Wigan Pier, which arose out of his heightened political awareness, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, and Orwell’s growing conviction that ‘Socialism is the only real enemy Fascism has to face.’80 Gollancz had asked him to write a book about unemployment – the scourge of the 1930s since the great crash. It was hardly an original idea, and indeed Orwell had himself refused an almost identical proposal from the News Chronicle some months before.81 But feeling that he had to be more politically engaged, he agreed. Starting in Coventry, he moved north to Manchester, where he boarded with a trade union official who suggested that Orwell visit Wigan.82 He found lodgings over a tripe shop, sleeping in shifts, and in his room he found no sign that anyone had bothered to clean or dust ‘in ages’; he was told by other lodgers ‘that the supplies of tripe in the cellar were covered with black beetles’. One day he was ‘disconcerted’ to find a full chamberpot under the table at breakfast.83 According to Shelden, he spent hours at the local library compiling statistics on the coal industry and on unemployment, but most of the time he spent travelling, inspecting housing conditions, the canals, and the mines, interviewing workers and unemployed. He later described Wigan as a ‘dreadful place’ and the mines as a ‘pretty devastating experience.’ He had to go to bed for a day to get over it.84 ‘He had not realised that a man of his height could not stand upright in the mine, that the walk from the shaft to the coal face could be up to three miles and that this cramped combination “was enough to put my legs out of action for four days.” Yet this walk was only the beginning and end of the miner’s work day. “At times my knees simply refused to lift me after I had knelt down.” ’85
Figures Orwell obtained in the library – available to anyone – established that miners suffered an appalling rate of accidents. In the previous eight years, nearly 8,000 men had been killed in the mines; one miner in six was injured. Death was so common in the mines it was almost routine: ‘A shilling was deducted from the men’s pay whenever a fellow-miner was killed – and the money contributed to a fund for the widow. But this deduction, or “stoppage,” occurred with such grim regularity that the company used a rubber stamp marked “Death stoppage” to make the notation on the pay-checks.’86 After two months in the north, Orwell was on the train home when he had one final shocking image of the cost exacted by the town’s grim reality. He noticed a young woman standing at the back of her house, trying to unblock a pipe with a stick. ‘She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that “It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,” and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums…. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe.’87
Orwell had been made so angry by his experiences that he wrote the book in two parts. In the first he let the harsh facts speak for themselves. Part 2 was an emotional polemic against the capitalist system and in favour of socialism, and the publishers entertained some doubts about its merit.88 Many critics found little sense of remedy in this section, its prose vague and overwrought. But the stark details of part I were undeniable, as shaming for Britain as Johnson’s were for America. The Road to Wigan Pier caused a sensation.
Criticism of a very different aspect of civilisation came from the writer Lewis Mumford, part of a coterie who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in New York. In the early 1920s Mumford had taught architecture at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and was then taken on as architecture correspondent for the New Yorker. His growing fame led to more lecturing at MIT, Columbia, and Stanford, which he published as a book, Technics and Civilisation, in 1934.89 In this work he charted the evolution of technology. In the eotechnic phase, society was characterised by machines made of wood, and driven by water or wind power.90 In the palaeotechnic phase, what most people called the first industrial revolution, the main form of energy was steam and the main material iron. The neotechnic age (the second industrial revolution) was characterised by electricity, aluminum, new alloys, and synthetic substances.91
For Mumford, technology was essentially driven by capitalism, which needed continued expansion, greater power, greater reach, faster speeds. He thought that dissatisfaction with capitalism arose because although the neotechnic age had arrived by the 1920s, social relations were stuck in the palaeotechnic era, where work was still alienating for the vast majority of people in the sense that they had no control over their lives. A neat phrasemaker (‘Robbery is probably the greatest labour-saving device ever invented’), Mumford posed as a solution ‘Basic Communism,’ by which he didn’t mean Soviet communism so much as the municipal organisation of work, just as there was the municipal organisation of parks, fire services and swimming pools.92 Mumford’s book was remarkable for being one of the first to draw attention to the damage capitalist enterprises were doing to the environment, and how consumerism was being led, and misled, by advertising. Like many others, he saw World War I as the culmination of a technological race that met the needs of capitalists and militarists alike, and he thought the only way forward lay in economic planning. Cannily, Mumford predicted that the industrial proletariat (Orwell’s subject) would disappear as the old-style factories became obsolete, and he thought the neotechnic industries would be spread more evenly across countries (less congregated around ports or mines) and across the world. He forecast that Asia and Africa would become market and neotechnic forces in years ahead. He predicted that biology would replace physics as the most important and contentious science, and that population would become a major issue of the future. The immediate dangers for Americans, however, arose from a ‘purposeless materialism’ and an unthinking acceptance that unbridled capitalism was the only organising principle for modern life. In this basically optimistic book (there was a section on the beauty of machines), Mumford’s criticisms of Western society were ahead of their time, which only makes them more impressive, for with the benefit of hindsight we can say that he was right far more than he was wrong.93
Four years later, Mumford published The Culture of Cities, which looked at the history of the city.94 Beginning around 1,000 AD, when Mumford said the city revived after the Dark Ages, he defined cities according to the main collective dramas they played out. In mediaeval cities this was the market, the tournament, and the church’s processionals. In the Baroque city, the court offered the best drama, and in the industrial city the station, the street, and the political meeting were what counted.95 Mumford also distinguished six phases of city life: eopolis – village communities, domestication of animals; polis – an association of villages or blood groups, for defence; metropolis – the crucial change to a ‘mother city,’ with a surplus of regional products; megalopolis – beginning of decline, mechanisation, standardisation (a megalopolis was characterised by the lack of drama, replaced instead by routine); tyrannopolis – overexpansion, decadence, decline in numbers; nekropolis – war, famine, disease. The two last stages were predictions, but Mumford thought that megalopolis had already been reached in several cases, for example, New York.96 Mumford believed that the answer to the crisis of the alienation and poverty that characterised cities was to develop the regions (although he also considered garden cities). Here too Mumford was prescient; the last chapter of his book is almost wholly devoted to environmental and what we would now call ‘quality of life’ issues.
Despite his focus on the environment and the effects of technology on the quality of life, Mumford was not anti-science in the way that some others were. Even at the time that people like Freud and Mead and Johnson thought science could provide answers to society’s ills, sceptics thought that every advantage of science was matched by a corresponding disadvantage. That was what gave it such a terrible beauty. Also, religion may have taken a battering at the hands of science, but it had not gone away, not by a long chalk. No doubt chronic unemployment had something to do with the scepticism toward science as a palliative, but as the 1930s progressed, religion reasserted itself.
The most extraordinary element in this reaffirmation of religion was a series of lectures given by Ernest William Barnes, the bishop of Birmingham, and published in 1933 as Scientific Theory and Religion.97 Few readers, picking up a book by a bishop, would expect the first 400 pages to consist of a detailed discussion of advanced mathematics. Yet Ernest Barnes was a highly numerate scientist, a D.Sc., and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In his book he wanted to show that as a theologian he knew a great deal about modern science and was not afraid of it. He discussed all the recent developments in physics as well as the latest advances in geology, evolution, and mathematics. It was a tour de force. Barnes without exception endorsed the advances in particle physics, relativity, space-time, the new notions of an expanding universe, the findings of geology about the age of the earth and the record of life in the rocks. He was convinced of evolution.98 At the same time, he dismissed various forms of mysticism and the paranormal. (Incidentally, despite its panoramic survey of recent twentieth-century science, it made not a single mention of Freud.)
So what would the bishop say about God? His argument was that there is a Universal Mind which inhabits all matter in the universe, and that the purpose of the universe is to evolve consciousness and conscience in order to produce goodness and, above all, beauty. His view on immortality was that there is no such thing as a ‘soul,’ and that the goodness and beauty that people create lives on after them. But he did also say that he personally believed in an afterlife.99
A copy of the book was sent to another eminent theologian, William Ralph Inge, dean of St Paul’s and the man who had quoted Rupert Brooke’s poems during his sermon on Easter Sunday, 1915. When he received Barnes’s book, Inge was already correcting the proofs of a book of his own, God and the Astronomers, which was published later that same year, 1933. It too had started life as a series of lectures, in Inge’s case the Warburg lectures, which he gave at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel in London.100 As well as being dean of St Paul’s, Inge was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Hertford College, Oxford, and well known as a lecturer, writer, and intellectual. His provocative views on contemporary topics had already been published as Outspoken Essays. God and the Astronomers tackled the second law of thermodynamics, entropy, and evolution. For Inge these fields were linked fundamentally because each was about time. The idea of a universe being created, expanding, contracting, and disappearing in a final Götterdämmerung, as he put it, was clearly worrying, since it raised the idea that there is no such thing as eternity.
The chief effect of evolution was to demote ideas in the past, arguing that more modern ideas had ‘evolved’ beyond them.101 Inge therefore deliberately made widespread use of the ancient philosophers – mainly Greek – to support his arguments. His aim was to show how brilliant their minds were, in comparison to those of the present. He made several references to ‘dysgenic’ trends, to suggest that evolution did not always produce advances. And he confessed that his arguments were intuitive, insisting (much as the poets were doing in Weimar Germany) that the very existence of intuition was a mark of the divine, to which science had no real answer.102 Like Henri Bergson, Inge acknowledged the existence of the élan vital and of an ‘impassable gulf between scientific knowledge and God’s existence. Like Barnes, he took as evidence for God’s existence the very concept of goodness and the mystical experiences of rapture that, as often as not, took place during prayer, which he said could not be explained by any science. He thought that civilisation, with its pressures and pace, was distancing us from such experiences. He hinted that God’s existence might be similar to the phenomenon that scientists call ‘emergent property,’ the classic example here being molecules of water, which are not themselves liquid in the way that water is. In other words, this was a scientific metaphor to support the argument for God.103 Inge, unlike Barnes, was unable to accept recent scientific advances: ‘It is a strange notion that God reveals himself more clearly and more directly in inanimate nature than in the human mind or heart…. My conclusion is that the fate of the material universe is not a vital question for religion.’104 Like Barnes, Inge made no reference to Freud.
A year after Barnes and Inge had their say, Bertrand Russell published a short but pithy book, Religion and Science. Russell’s relationship with religion was complicated.105 He had a number of friends who were religious (in particular Lady Ottoline Morrell), and he was both envious of and irritated by them. In a letter written in January 1912 he had said, ‘What we know is that things come into our lives sometimes which are so immeasurably better than the things of everyday, that it seems as though they were sent from another world and could not come out of ourselves.’106 But later he added, ‘Yet I have another vision … in this vision, sorrow is the ultimate truth … we draw our breath in pain … thought is the gateway to despair.’107
In Religion and Science, Russell covered much the same ground as Barnes and Inge – the Copernican revolution, the new physics, evolution, cosmic purpose – but he also included an analysis of medicine, demonology, and miracles, and a chapter on determinism and mysticism.108 Throughout most of the book, he showed the reader how science could explain more and more about the world. For a scientist, he was also surprisingly easy on mysticism, declaring that some of the psychic experiments he had heard about were ‘convincing to a reasonable man.’ In his two concluding chapters, on science and ethics, he wrote as a fierce logician, trying to prove that there is no such thing as objective beauty or goodness. He began with the statement, ‘All Chinese are Buddhists.’ Such a statement, he said, could be refuted ‘by the production of a Chinese Christian.’109 On the other hand, the statement ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’ cannot be refuted ‘by any evidence from China [i.e., about Buddhists in China]’, but only by evidence that ‘I do not believe what I say.’ If a philosopher says, ‘Beauty is good,’ it may mean one of two things: ‘Would that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘All Chinese are Buddhists’) or ‘I wish that everybody loved the beautiful’ (which corresponds to ‘I believe that all Chinese are Buddhists’). ‘The first of these statements makes no assertion but expresses a wish; since it affirms nothing, it is logically impossible that there should be evidence for or against it, or for it to possess either truth or falsehood. The second sentence, instead of being merely optative, does make a statement, but it is one about the philosopher’s state of mind, and it could only be refuted by evidence that he does not have the wish that he says he has. This second sentence does not belong to ethics, but to psychology or biology. The first sentence, which does belong to ethics, expresses a desire for something, but asserts nothing.’110
Russell went on, ‘I conclude that, while it is true that science cannot decide questions of value [Inge’s argument], this is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.’111 Again, there was no reference to Freud.
A quite different line of attack on science came from Spain, from José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, published in 1930. Ortega was professor of philosophy at the University of Madrid, and his main thesis was that society was degenerating, owing to the growth of mass-man, the anonymous, alienated individual of mass society, this growth itself of course due in no small measure to scientific advances. For Ortega, true democracy occurred only when power was voted to a ‘super minority.’ What in fact was happening, he said, was ‘hyper-democracy,’ where average man, mediocre man, wanted power, loathed everyone not like himself and so promoted a society of ‘homogenised … blanks.’ He blamed scientists in particular for the growth of specialisation, to the point where scientists were now ‘learned ignoramuses,’ who knew a lot about very little, focusing on their own small areas of interest at the expense of the wider picture. He said he had found such scientists ‘self-satisfied,’ examples of a very modern form of degeneration, which helped account for the growing absence of culture he saw encroaching all around him.
Ortega y Gasset was a sort of cultural social Darwinist, or Nietzschean. In The Dehumanisation of Art, he argued that it was ‘the essential function of modern art to divide the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot.’112 He thought that art was a means by which the elite, ‘the privileged minority of the fine senses,’ could recognise themselves and distinguish themselves from the ‘drab mass of society,’ who are the ‘inert matter of the historical process.’ He believed that the vulgar masses always wanted the man behind the poet and were rarely interested in any purely aesthetic sense (Eliot would have been sympathetic here). For Ortega y Gasset, science and mass society were equally inimical to ‘fine’ things.
With fascism on the rise in Germany and Italy, and the West in general beset by so many problems, people began to look to Soviet Russia to examine an alternative system of social organisation, to see whether the West could learn anything. Many Western intellectuals, such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, paid visits to Russia in the 1920s and ‘30s, but the most celebrated at the time was the journey by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, whose account of their visit, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? was published in 1935.
Well before the book appeared, the Webbs had a profound influence on British politics and society and were very well connected, with friends such as the Balfours, the Haldanes, the Dilkes, and the Shaws.113 Sidney Webb became a cabinet minister in both interwar Labour governments, and the couple formed one of the most formidable intellectual partnerships ever (Sidney was once called ‘the ablest man in England’).114 They founded the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1896, and the New Statesman in 1913, and were instrumental in the creation of the welfare state and in developing the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation that believed in the inevitability of gradual change. They were the authors, either singly or jointly, of nearly a hundred books and pamphlets, including The Eight Hours Day, The Reform of the Poor Law, Socialism and Individualism, The Wages of Men and Women: Should They Be Equal? and The Decay of Capitalist Civilisation. Committed socialists all their lives, the Webbs met when Beatrice wanted someone to help her study the co-op movement and a friend suggested Sidney. Lisanne Radice, the Webbs’ biographer, makes the point that, on the whole, Sidney and Beatrice were more successful together, as organisers and theoreticians, than he was as a practical politician, in the cabinet. Their prolific writings and their uncompromising socialist views meant that few people were indifferent to them. Leonard Woolf liked them, but Virginia did not.115
The Webbs went to Russia in 1932, when they were both already in their mid-seventies. Beatrice instigated the visit, feeling that capitalism was in terminal decay and that Russia might just offer an alternative. In their books, the Webbs had always argued that, contrary to Marx, socialism could arrive gradually, without revolution; that through reason people could be convinced, and equality would evolve (this was the very essence of Fabianism). But with fascism on the rise, she and Sidney felt that if capitalism could be swept away, so too could Fabianism.116 In these circumstances, Russian collective planning became more viable. At the end of 1930 Beatrice began reading Russian literature, her choice being assisted by the Soviet ambassador to London and his wife. Almost immediately Beatrice made a note in her diary: ‘The Russian Communist government may still fail to attain its end in Russia, as it will certainly fail to conquer the world with a Russian brand of Communism, but its exploits exemplify the Mendelian view of sudden jumps in biological evolution as against the Spencerian vision of slow adjustment.’ (The social Darwinist Herbert Spencer had been a close friend of Beatrice’s father.) A year later, just before her trip, Beatrice wrote the words that were to be remembered by all her detractors: ‘In the course of a decade, we shall know whether American capitalism or Russian communism yields the better life for the bulk of the people … without doubt, we are on the side of Russia.’117
The Russia the Webbs set foot in in 1932 was near the end of the first Five–Year Plan, which Stalin had introduced in 1929 to force through rapid industrialisation and rural collectivisation. (Such plans were popular just then: Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in 1933, and in 1936 Germany brought in the four-year Schacht plan for abolishing unemployment by expanding public works). Stalin’s ‘plan’ led directly to the extermination of a million kulaks, mass deportation and famine; it extended the grip of the OGPU, the secret police, a forerunner of the KGB, and vitiated the power of trade unions by the introduction of internal passports, which restricted people’s movement. There were achievements – education improved and was available to more children, there were more jobs for women – but, as Lisanne Radice describes it, the first Five-Year Plan, ‘stripped of its propaganda verbiage … foreshadowed a profound extension of the scope of totalitarian power.’118
The Webbs, treated as important foreign guests, were kept well away from these aspects of Russia. They had a suite at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad, so huge that Beatrice worried, ‘We seem to be a new kind of royalty.’ They saw a tractor plant at Stalingrad and a Komsomol conference. In Moscow they stayed in a guest house belonging to the Foreign Ministry, from where they were taken to schools, prisons, factories, and theatres. They went to Rostow, 150 miles northeast of Moscow, where they visited several collective farms. Dependent on interpreters for their interviews, the Webbs encountered only one failure, a motor plant that was not meeting its production targets, and the only statistics they managed to collect were provided by the government. Here were the founders of the LSE and the New Statesman accepting information from sources no self-respecting academic or journalist would dream of publishing without independent corroboration. They could have consulted Malcolm Muggeridge, the Manchester Guardian’s correspondent in Moscow, who was married to Beatrice’s niece. But he was highly critical of the regime, and they took little notice of him. And yet, on their return, Beatrice wrote, ‘The Soviet government … represents a new civilisation … with a new outlook on life – involving a new pattern of behaviour in the individual and his relation to the community – all of which I believe is destined to spread to many other countries in the course of the next hundred years.’119
In Lisanne Radice’s words, Soviet Communism: a new civilisation? was ‘monumental in conception, in scope, and in error of judgement.’120 The Webbs truly believed that Soviet communism was superior to the West because ordinary individuals had more opportunity to partake in the running of the country. Stalin was not a dictator to them, but the secretary of ‘a series of committees.’ The Communist Party, they said, was dedicated to the removal of poverty, with party members enjoying ‘no statutory privileges.’ They thought OGPU did ‘constructive work.’ They changed the title of their book in later editions, first to Is Soviet Communism a New Civilisation? (1936), then Soviet Communism: Dictatorship or Democracy? (released later the same year) – suggesting a slight change of heart. But they were always reluctant to retract fully what they had written, even after the Stalinist show trials in the later 1930s. In 1937, the height of the terror, their book was republished as Soviet Communism: a new civilisation – i.e., without the question mark. On their forty-seventh wedding anniversary, in July 1939, Beatrice confided to her diary that Soviet Communism was ‘the crowning achievement of Our Partnership.’121 Dissatisfaction with the performance of capitalism led few people as far astray as it did the Webbs.
Russian communism was one alternative to capitalism. Another was beginning to reveal itself in Germany, with the rising confidence of the Nazis. During the Weimar years, as we have seen, there was a continual battle between the rationalists – the scientists and the academics – and the nationalists – the pan-Germans, who remained convinced that there was something special about Germany, her history, the instinctive superiority of her heroes. Oswald Spengler had stressed in The Decline of the West how Germany was different from France, the United States and Britain, and this view, which appealed to Hitler, gained ground among the Nazis as they edged closer to power. In 1928 this growing confidence produced a book which, almost certainly, would never have found a publisher in Paris, London, or New York.
The text was inflammatory enough, but the pictures were even more so. On one side of the page were reproductions of modern paintings by artists such as Amedeo Modigliani and Karl Schmidt-Rotduff, but on the other were photographs of deformed and diseased people – some with bulging eyes, others with Down’s syndrome, still others who had been born cretinous. The author of the book was a well-known architect, Paul Schultze-Naumburg; its title was Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race); and its thesis, though grotesque, had a profound effect on National Socialism.122 Schultze-Naumburg’s theory was that the deformed and diseased people shown in his book were the prototypes for many of the paintings produced by modern – and in particular, expressionist – artists. Schultze-Naumburg said this art was entartet — degenerate. His approach appears to have been stimulated by a scientific project carried out a few years earlier in the university town of Heidelberg, which had become a centre for the study of art produced by schizophrenics as a means of gaining access to the central problems of mental illness. In 1922 psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn had published his study Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Image-making by the Mentally 111), based on material he gathered by examining more than 5,000 works by 450 patients. The study, which demonstrated that the art of the insane exhibited certain qualities, received serious attention from critics well beyond the medical profession.123
Art and Race caught Hitler’s attention because its brutal ‘theory’ suited his aims. From time to time he attacked modern art and modern artists, but like other leading Nazis, he was by temperament an anti-intellectual; for him, most great men of history had been doers, not thinkers. There was, however, one exception to this mould, a would-be intellectual who was even more of an outsider in German society than the other leading Nazis – Alfred Rosenberg.124 Rosenberg was born beyond the frontiers of the Reich. His family came from Estonia, which until 1918 was one of Russia’s Baltic provinces. There is some evidence (established after World War II) that Rosenberg’s mother was Jewish, but at the time no suspicion ever arose, and he remained close to Hitler for longer than many of their early colleagues. As a boy he was fascinated by history, especially after he encountered the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain.125 Chamberlain was a renegade Englishman, an acolyte and relative by marriage of Wagner, who regarded European history ‘as the struggle of the German people against the debilitating influences of Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church’. When Rosenberg came across Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century on a family holiday in 1909, he was transformed. The book provided the intellectual underpinning of his German nationalistic feelings. He now had a reason to hate the Jews every bit as much as his experiences in Estonia gave him reason to hate the Russians. Moving to Munich after the Armistice in 1918, he quickly joined the NSDAP and began writing vicious anti-Semitic pamphlets. His ability to write, his knowledge of Russia, and his facility with Russian all helped to make him the party’s expert on the East; he also became editor of the Völkischer Beobachter (National Observer), the Nazi Party’s newspaper. As the 1920s passed, Rosenberg, together with Martin Bormann and Heinrich Himmler, began to see the need for a Nazi ideology that went beyond Mein Kampf. So in 1930 he published what he believed provided the intellectual basis for National Socialism. In German its tide was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, usually translated into English as The Myth of the Twentieth Century.
Mythus is a rambling and inconsistent book, and consequently hard to summarise. (One example of how obscure it was: a contemporary admirer published a glossary of 850 terms that needed explaining.) It conducts a massive assault on Roman Catholicism as the main threat to German civilisation. The text stretches to more than 700 pages, with the history of Germany and German art making up more than 60 percent of the book.126 The third section is entitled ‘The Coming Reich’; other parts deal with ‘racial hygiene,’ education, and religion, with international affairs at the end. Rosenberg argues that Jesus was not Jewish and that his message had been perverted by Paul, who was Jewish, and that it was the Pauline/Roman version that had forged Christianity into its familiar mould by ignoring ideas of aristocracy and race and creating fake doctrines of original sin, the afterlife, and hell as an inferno, all of which beliefs, Rosenberg thought, were ‘unhealthy.’
Rosenberg’s aim – and at this distance his audacity is breathtaking – was to create a substitute faith for Germany. He advocated a ‘religion of the blood’ which, in effect, told Germans that they were members of a master race, with a ‘race-soul.’ Rosenberg appropriated famous German figures from the past, such as the painter Meister Eckhart and the religious leader Martin Luther, who had resisted Rome, though here again he only used those parts of the story that suited his purpose. He quoted the works of the Nazis’ chief academic racialist, H. F. K. Guenther, who ‘claimed to have established on a scientific basis the defining characteristics of the so-called Nordic-Aryan race’. As with Hitler and others before him, Rosenberg did his best to establish a connection to the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Germany, and he brought in Rembrandt, Herder, Wagner, Frederick the Great, and Henry the Lion, to produce an entirely arbitrary but nonetheless heroic history specifically intended to root the NSDAP in the German past.
For Rosenberg, race – the religion of the blood – was the only force that could combat what he saw as the main engines of disintegration – individualism and universalism. ‘The individualism of economic man,’ the American ideal, he dismissed as ‘a figment of the Jewish mind to lure men to their doom.’127 At the same time he had to counter the universalism of Rome, and in creating his own new religion certain Christian symbols had to go, including the crucifix. If Germans and Germany were to be renewed after the chaos of military defeat, ‘the Crucifix was too powerful a symbol to permit of change.’ By the same token, ‘The Holy Land for Germans,’ Rosenberg wrote, ‘is not Palestine…. Our holy places are certain castles on the Rhine, the good earth of Lower Saxony and the Prussian fortress of Marienburg.’ In some respects, the Mythus fell on fertile ground. The ‘religion of the blood’ fitted in well with new rituals, already developing among the faithful, whereby Nazis who had been killed early on in the ‘struggle’ were proclaimed ‘martyrs’ and were wrapped in flags that, once tainted with their blood, became ‘blood flags’ and were paraded as totems, used in ceremonies to dedicate other flags. (Another invented tradition was for party members to shout out ‘Here’ when the names of the dead were read out during roll call.) Hitler, however, seems to have had mixed feelings about the Mythus. He held on to the manuscript for six months after Rosenberg submitted it to him, and publication was not sanctioned until 15 September 1930, after the Nazi Party’s sensational victory at the polls. Perhaps Hitler had put off approving the book until the party was strong enough to risk losing the support of Roman Catholics that would surely follow publication. The book sold 500,000 copies, but that means little, as all secondary schools and institutes of higher education were forced to buy copies.128
If Hitler did delay publication because of the effect Mythus might have on Catholics, he was being no more than realistic. The Vatican was incensed by its argument and, in 1934, placed it on the Index of Prohibited Books. Cardinal Schulte, archbishop of Cologne, set up a ‘Defence Staff of seven young priests, who worked round the clock to list the many errors in the text. These were published in a series of anonymous pamphlets printed simultaneously in five different cities to evade the Gestapo. The most brutal use of the book was as a tool to expose priests: Catholic Nazis were ordered to refer to the Mythus in the confessional, and then denounce any priest who was so duped into criticising the ideology of the NSDAP.129 For a time it seems that Rosenberg truly believed that a new religion was coming into being – he told Hermann Goring as much in August 1939. Within a month, however, Germany was at war, and after that the impact of the Mythus was patchy. Rosenberg himself remained popular with Hitler, and when the war began, he was given his own unit, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, charged with looting art.
Although they were incoherent and arbitrary, Art and Race and the Mythus were linked by the fact that each attacked the intellectual and cultural life of Germany. Whatever their shortcomings and failings, however crude and tendentious, they represented an attempt by the Nazis to focus on thought beyond the confines of party politics. In publicising such views, the Nazis now left no doubt as to what they thought was wrong with German civilisation.
With many people so worried about the direction civilisation was taking, with evidence for such a dire fate being adduced on all sides, it is perhaps not surprising that such a period, such a mood, produced one of the great works of literature of the century. One could argue that John Steinbeck was the chronicler of unemployment in the 1930s, that Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin served as an antidote to the sinister absurdities of the Mythus. But the worries and the bleak mood went far wider than unemployment and Germany, and this pessimism was clearly captured by someone else – by Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World.
Seven years younger than his brother Julian, the eminent biologist, Aldous Huxley was born in 1894.130 His poor eyesight exempted him from service in World War I and he spent the time working on Lady Ottoline Morrell’s farm near Oxford, where he met Lytton Strachey, T. S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell. (Eliot said Huxley showed him some early verse, which he was ‘unable to show any enthusiasm for.’)131 Very well read and deeply sceptical, Huxley had written four books by the early 1930s, including the novels Crome Yellow and Antic Hay.132 Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel, a pessimistic taste of the possible horrific consequences of twentieth-century thought. It is, at one level, science fiction. But Brave New World was also designed to be a cautionary tale; if Freud, in Civilisation and Its Discontents, explored the superego as the basis of a new ethics, Huxley described a new ethic itself – in which the new psychology was as much to blame as anything.133
Huxley’s targets in the book are primarily biology, genetics, behavioural psychology, and mechanisation. Brave New World is set well into the future, in AF 632, AF standing for After Ford (which would make it around 2545 AD). Technology has moved on, and a technique known as Bokanovsky’s Process enables one ovary in certain circumstances to produce sixteen thousand persons, perfect for Mendelian mathematics, the basis for a new society in which vast numbers of people are, even more than now, all the same. There are neo-Pavlovian infant-conditioning methods (books and flowers are linked with noxious shocks), and a ‘sleep-teaching process by which infants acquire, among other things, the rudiments of class-consciousness.’134 Sex is strictly controlled: women are allowed a pregnancy substitute, and there are bandolier-containers, known as Malthusian belts, which carry not bullets but contraceptives. Polygamy is the accepted norm, monogamy a disgrace. The family, and parenthood, are obsolete. It has become ‘improper’ to want to spend time alone, to fall in love, and to read books for pleasure. In a chilling echo of the Mythus (Huxley’s book was published in the same year), the Christian cross has been abolished by the simple expedient of having its head removed to form the letter T, after the ‘model T Ford.’ Organised religion has been replaced by ‘Solidarity Services.’ The book solemnly informs us that this new world resulted from a nine-year war in which biological weapons wrought such devastation that ‘a world-wide federation and foolproof control of the people were the only acceptable alternative.’ Huxley is specific about the eugenics that help exercise this foolproof control, showing how eggs are graded (alphas to epsilons) and then immersed in ‘a warm bouillon containing free-swimming spermatozoa.’ We encounter half-familiar organisations such as the ‘Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre.’ Some of the characters – Mustapha Mond, the Resident Controller for Western Europe, and Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne – remind us of what the new world has lost from the past and what the society has chosen to remember. Huxley is also careful to show that snobbery and jealousy still exist, as does loneliness, ‘despite all attempts to eradicate such feelings.’135
This sounds heavy-handed in summary, but Huxley is a funny writer. His vision of the future is not wholly bad – the elite still enjoy life, as elites tend to do.’136 And it is this which links Huxley to Freud, where this chapter began. Freud’s view was that a better understanding of the superego, by psychoanalysis, would ultimately lead to a better understanding of ethics, and more ethical behaviour. Huxley was more sceptical, and he had more in common with Russell. He thought there were no absolutes of good and bad, and that man must continually renew his political institutions in the light of new knowledge, to create the best society possible. The society of Brave New World may seem horrible to us, but it doesn’t seem all that horrible to the people in the story, who know nothing else, just as the Dobu, or the Arapesh, or the Kwakiutl, know nothing else beyond their societies, and are happy enough. To get the world you want, Huxley affirms, you have to fight for it. And, by implication, if your world is collapsing, you aren’t fighting hard enough. That was where, in 1932, he was most prescient of all, in suggesting that there was a fight coming.