Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  Economic hard times always exacerbate the miseries of minorities. In the economically afflicted Europe of the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Semitism became an uncontainable contagion. Politicians exploited it. Some of them seem to have believed their own rhetoric and genuinely to have seen Jews as imperilling welfare or security. For demagogues of the right Jews were indelibly communist; for those of the left they were incurably capitalist. Anti-Semitic regimes had always tried to ‘solve’ the Jewish ‘problem’ by eliminating it – usually through hermetic sealing in ghettos, forced conversion, or mass expulsion. The Nazi ‘final solution’ for eliminating the Jews by extermination was an extreme development of a long tradition. About six million Jews perished in one of the most purposeful campaigns of genocide in history. Throughout Europe west of the Soviet border, fewer than two million survived. It was an act of European self-amputation of a community that had always contributed disproportionately to the life of the mind, to the arts, and to wealth creation.107

  ‌The Balance of Progress

  Early in the nineteenth century, as Napoleon’s career drew to a close and the world emerged from the horrors of revolution and the disasters of war, Thomas Love Peacock – one of the funniest novelists ever in England and, therefore, in the world – wrote his first book. Headlong Hall is a dialogue among characters representative of rival trends in the thinking of the time. At the start of the tale, we learn,

  Chosen guests had, from different parts of the metropolis, ensconced themselves in the four corners of the Holyhead mail. These four persons were, Mr Foster, the perfectibilian; Mr Escot, the deteriorationist; Mr Jenkison, the statu-quo-ite; and the Reverend Doctor Gaster, who, though of course neither a philosopher nor a man of taste, had so won on the Squire’s fancy, by a learned dissertation on the art of stuffing a turkey, that … no Christmas party would be complete without him.

  For Mr Foster, ‘everything we look on attests the progress of mankind in all the arts of life and demonstrates their gradual advancement towards a state of unlimited perfection’. Mr Foster, in whom Malthus was savagely satirized, spoke consistently against the illusion of progress: ‘Your improvements proceed in a simple ratio, while the factious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one … till the whole species must at length be exterminated by its own infinite imbecility and vileness.’

  At the end of the century, their debate remained unresolved. The world was, perhaps, a machine, but was it a factory of progress, or was it grinding toward stasis, like the mills of God? Did material progress corrupt eternal values? Did enhanced technology merely increase the range of evil? Were vast, impersonal forces leading the world to ends beyond the reach of freedom, and, if so, for good or ill?

  For a while, God looked like one of the casualties of progress. At the start of the century, Pierre-Simon Laplace, who had formulated ways of interpreting every known phenomenon of the physical world in terms of the attraction and repulsion of particles, boasted that he had reduced God to an unnecessary hypothesis. On Dover Beach, around the midpoint of the century, the poet Matthew Arnold heard with regret the ‘long, withdrawing roar’ of the ‘Sea of Faith’. Evolution made God’s role as an originator of new species redundant. In 1890 the anthropologist James Frazer published The Golden Bough – achieving, it seemed, in fact the fictional ‘key to all mythologies’ that Mr Casaubon had sought. Frazer treated Christianity as unremarkably mythical – a set of myths among others – and predicted, in effect, the replacement of religion by science. Appeals to reason and science have justified atheism in every age. Even for believers, confidence or resignation that humans can or must manage without divine help has always been a practical recourse from our inability to harness God for our purposes. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did the idea arise of combining these strands and inaugurating a quasi-religion of atheists to rival real religions.

  An early sign was the Cult of the Supreme Being, launched in revolutionary France (see here). Despite its short life and risible failure the cult showed that it was possible to start an anti-Christian religious-style movement from scratch. It took over half a century more, however, for Auguste Comte to propose ‘a religion of humanity’ with a calendar of secular saints that included Adam Smith and Frederick the Great. Increasingly, Christian evangelists’ success in industrial workers’ slums alerted proselytizing atheists to the need and opportunity to fight back. Meanwhile, from within Christian ranks, Unitarians, whose radical form of Protestantism denied the divinity of Christ, spawned dissenting congregations that took scepticism beyond old limits; in dedication to social welfare they discovered an ethos that could outlive faith. Finally, Darwinism stepped into the mix, suggesting how the impersonal force of evolution might replace the majesty of providence. If science could explain a problem as mysterious – to use a term Darwin used himself – as the diversity of species, it might yet, for those susceptible to a new kind of faith, explain everything else.

  The most influential of the new, quasi-religious movements was that of the Ethical Societies, which Felix Adler launched in New York in 1876 as a ‘new religion’. His aim was to base moral conduct on humane values rather than on models of God, or on dogmas or commandments. Morality, he said, ‘is the law which is the basis of true religion’.108 A renegade Unitarian minister, Moncure Conway, took the movement to England. The more its influence extended, the less it came to resemble a religion, although a US high court decision of 1957 granted Ethical Societies the rights and status of religion, and British Humanists campaign for equal broadcasting time with the religions privileged in BBC schedules.109

  A word to the wise may be in order. The modern humanist tradition had nothing to do with the so-called Renaissance curriculum that displaced theology and logic in favour of ‘human subjects’ (rhetoric, grammar, history, literature, and moral philosophy). The popularity of this ‘Renaissance humanism’ owed nothing to supposedly encroaching secularism. It was a response to increasing demand for training suitable for civil lawyers and civil servants.110 Nor should the humanism of the repudiators of religion be confused with the ‘New Humanism’, which is properly the name of a movement of reaffirmation of belief in the value and moral nature of human beings after the horrors of the mid-twentieth century.

  Reports of God’s death have always been premature. As in the previous century, late-nineteenth-century revivalism in just about every tradition responded to atheism and secular religion. In 1896 Anton Bruckner died while composing his Ninth Symphony, out-noising religious doubts in a glorious finale of resurgent faith. Meanwhile, a new kind of religion imitated science by asserting certainties that, in the next century, as we are about to see, would prove to be delusive. Charles Hodge, who ran the Presbyterian seminary in Princeton, had written a reply to Darwin, not dismissing evolution but recommending literal readings of the Bible as similar and superior to scientific laws. In 1886, Dwight L. Moody founded a seminary in Chicago on the same basis. Nature, he admitted, could disclose truths about God, but the Bible overtrumped other evidence. The divines who followed Hodge and Moody in Princeton and Chicago tried to root the study of God in incontrovertible facts, in imitation of the methods of the observatory and the lab.111 No one succeeded in the search for certainty, but the search was still on. Almost at the very end of the century, however, science strayed onto experimental terrain where its predictions began to break down, and where we must now follow.

  ‌Chapter 9

  The Revenge of Chaos

  Unstitching Certainty

  Historians, I find when I join my fellow professionals in projects, colloquia, or conferences, are often escapists. Revulsion from the present and fear of the future drives them to the past. ‘When in the past would you most like to have lived?’ is a tempting question with which to start a game for players to outbid each other in ever more bizarre and self-revelatory choices of eras barbarous or bloody, glorious or gaudy. What period, dear Reader, would you choose? For someone with intellectual proclivities,
who loves ferment, finds innovative thinking exciting, and relishes the bewilderment of confrontation with subversive ideas, the best time, I think, would be the decade and a half or so before the outbreak of the First World War.

  The early years of the twentieth century were a graveyard and a cradle: a graveyard of longstanding certainties; the cradle of a different, diffident civilization. An astonishing, unsettling succession of new thoughts and discoveries challenged assumptions that had supported preponderant cultural trends of the previous couple of centuries in the West and therefore, by extension, in the world: ways of life, attitudes of mind, distributions of power and wealth. A sudden intellectual counter-revolution dethroned certainties inherited from the Enlightenment and scientific tradition. By 1914 the world seemed atomized, chaotic, seething with rebellion, raw-emotioned, sex-mad, and equipped with terrible technologies. Yet, although thinkers of the first decade and a half anticipated most of the great themes of the rest of the century, in politics none of the new ideas of the new age was powerful enough entirely to dissolve the legacy of the last. The ideological confrontations that rent the twentieth-century world between fascism and communism, authoritarianism and democracy, scientism and sensibility, reason and dogma, were battles among ideas of nineteenth-century origin.

  Most history books treat the years preceding the First World War as a period of inertia when nothing much happened – a golden afterglow of the romantic era, which turned blood-red. It was as if the trenches of the Great War were channels for everything that followed. Thinking had to start anew in a scarred and blighted world, because the old order was invisible among the twists of barbed wire or from inside the foxholes and bomb craters. In consequence, it is hard to look back across the trenches and see the early twentieth century in its true light, as the most startlingly intense era ever in the output of revolutionary thought. We have, therefore, to start in or around the year 1900, looking at scientific ideas first, because science set the agenda for other disciplines and dominated the hierarchy of ideas.

  Understanding the theory of relativity is the key to everything else because of the way Einstein’s ideas reshaped the thinking that followed: the subversive consequences during the years in which he perfected his thinking; the reaction in favour of what turned out to be spurious certainty and menacing order; the overlap between relativity and relativism. Relativity, its context, and its effects are worth a short chapter of their own: the prelude to the rest of twentieth-century thinking in the final chapter of this book. Starting with science and mathematics, then turning to philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and art, we shall end by broaching the political reaction that, surprisingly perhaps, some artists helped to lead. Einstein’s essential predecessors, without whom his work would have been unthinkable, or, at least, unconvincing, come first: Henri Bergson and Henri Poincaré.

  ‌Relativity in Context

  Nineteenth-century certainties began to unwind almost as soon as the new century opened, when Henri Bergson, who was born in the year Darwin published On the Origin of Species, tried to trump Darwin’s thinking. As a schoolboy, Bergson seems to have been one of those annoyingly precocious young people who give the impression of being born middle-aged. He had studious habits, encumbering spectacles, and mature good manners. He kept himself mysteriously aloof from his contemporaries and classmates. His cerebral priorities bulged from an alarmingly big forehead.1 Every intellectual assignment seemed to suit him. His maths teachers felt betrayed when he opted for philosophy. His mastery of Latin and Greek empowered him, he claimed, to read and think beyond the confines of the language of his day. Like all French professional intellectuals, he had to undergo punishingly protracted education and endure professorial apprenticeship in secondary schools. At last, he fulfilled his promise and became the great celebrity-guru of his era.

  Bergson imbibed British pragmatism. Though he thought in abstruse, metaphysical French, he liked to have hard, scientific data to work with. He began his study of mind, for instance, with observations of the persistence of memory in severely brain-damaged patients – victims of industrial accidents and wars; the evidence led him, however, to conclude that mind is a metaphysical entity, better than the brain. He trusted intuition as a source of truth but grounded it in experience. He had a connoisseur’s eye and often adduced art as evidence of how perceptions transform reality. Not surprisingly, he loved impressionism, which replaces distinct facts, such as our senses register, with subtle forms abstracted in the mind. He preferred questions to answers and hated to spoil good problems with cut-and-dried solutions that truncate thought.2

  He became one of the most admired philosophers of his day. His books sold in tens of thousands, which seemed a lot at the time. At the École Normale or the Collège de France impatient audiences turned up early to be sure of their seats ahead of his classes. When some American ladies arrived late for a lecture after crossing the Atlantic to hear him, they professed themselves content with the aura of a hall in which he had spoken. Theodore Roosevelt could understand little of his readings in Bergson’s work, which was notoriously difficult, but demanded that the genius be his guest at breakfast.

  In the work generally considered his masterpiece, L’Évolution créatrice, Bergson characterized and christened the motive force of the universe. He called it élan vital. It did not command nature from within, like evolution, nor from without, like God. It was a spiritual force with the power to reorder matter. How it differed from the ‘World-soul’ that some romantics and magicians had sought was never clear, perhaps not even to Bergson. He invoked it in order to express the freedom we retain to make a future different from that which science predicts. He dismissed the claim that evolution was a scientific law and redefined it as an expression of the creative will of living entities, which change because they want to change.

  Critics accused Bergson of irrationalism on the grounds that he was attacking science, representing objective realities as mental constructs, and ascribing purpose to unthinking creation. His thinking was welcome, however, to people who found scientific determinism constraining, inhibiting, or menacing. He comforted, for example, everyone who feared or doubted the standard threats of the seers of the time, who forecast allegedly inevitable proletarian revolution, or Aryan supremacy, or immolation by entropy. Bergson was the century’s first prophet of the resurgence of chaos, the first architect of disorder, because he described a world in which agents were free to do anything. ‘Intellect’, he said, ‘is life … putting itself outside itself, adopting the ways of unorganised nature … in order to direct them in fact.’3

  If Bergson’s version of evolution seems rather mystical, a further idea of his, which he called ‘duration’, proved more impactful, albeit almost equally unintelligible – baffling partly because his definition was opaque: ‘the shape taken by the succession of our states of consciousness when our inner self lets itself live … when it abstains from establishing a separation between its present states and the preceding states’.4 This seemingly abstruse idea also affected real life by vindicating freedom, countering the determinism that prevailed among social and scientific theorizers, and restoring faith in free will. Duration becomes intelligible when we peer inside Bergson’s mind and unpick the process by which he thought it up and of which, fortunately, he provided a narrative. His account begins with his early efforts to teach schoolboys about the Eleatics and about Zeno’s paradoxes in particular (see here). He suddenly realized – at least, he represented his insight as the result of a sudden intuition, rather like a religious convert describing a ‘Damascus moment’ – that in Zeno’s imaginary races and journeys and arrow flights, or in any passage of time or episode of change, moments are not separable or successive. They are continuous. They constitute time rather in the way points form a line. When we speak of time as if it were made of moments – like matter, made of individual atoms – our thinking is ‘contorted and debased by association with space’. Time is not a ‘brief history’ of a
tomized events, but a mental construct. ‘I admit’, Bergson conceded:

  that we routinely locate ourselves in time conceived as analogous to space. We’ve no wish to hear the ceaseless hum and buzz of deep life. But that’s the level at which real duration lies … Whether it’s inside us or outside us, whether in me or in external objects, it’s the continuous changing (la mobilité) that is the reality.

  People who need to cling to fixed points, he suggested, may find the idea ‘vertiginous’. Bergson, however, found it reassuring, because it resolved the paradoxes with which Zeno confounded the world.5 Up to this point Bergson’s idea of time resembled and may have reflected St Augustine’s, a millennium and a half before (see here). But Bergson went further. More exactly, he suggested, time is a product of memory, which is different from perception and therefore ‘a power independent of matter. If, then, spirit is a reality, it is here, in the phenomena of memory, that we may come into touch with it experimentally.’ Constructing time, according to Bergson, is not just a human proclivity. All creatures do it: ‘Wherever anything lives, there is open, somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.’6 The future, one might be tempted to say, is only the past we have not yet experienced. To those who understood duration, or who thought they did, it seemed a useful concept. As we shall see, it helped shape the revolution in our understanding of language, pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, who in lectures he gave in 1907 proposed that text is a kind of verbal duration, in which terms, like moments, are inseparable. Many creative writers, who got the same sort of idea directly from Bergson, felt liberated in narration from the discipline of chronology. Novels in the ‘stream of consciousness’ – a term William James coined after reading Bergson – were among the result.7