Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  The Japanese never really got to grips with the problem. Their scientists had looked at the possibility, but the special naval committee set up to oversee the research had concluded that a bomb would need a hundred tons of uranium, half the Japanese output of copper and, most daunting of all, consume 10 percent of the county’s electricity supply. The physicists turned their attention instead to the development of radar. The Russians were more canny. Two of their scientists had published a paper in Physical Review in June 1940, making certain new observations about uranium.40 This paper brought no response from American physicists, the Russians thus concluding (and maybe this was the real point of their paper) that the lack of a follow-through implied that the Western Allies were already embarked on their own bomb project, which was secret. The Russians also noticed what the Germans and the Japanese must have noticed as well, that the famous physicists of the West were no longer submitting original papers to the scientific journals; obviously they were busy doing something else. In 1939, therefore, the Russians started looking hard at a bomb, though work was stopped after Hitler invaded (again radar research and mine detection occupied the physicists, while the labs and materials were moved east, for safety). After Stalingrad, the program was resuscitated, and scientists were recalled from forward units. What was called ‘Laboratory Number Two,’ located in a derelict farm on the Moscow River, was the Russian equivalent of Los Alamos. But the lab only ever housed about twenty-five scientists and conducted mainly theoretical work regarding the chain reaction and isotope separation. The Russians were on the right lines, but years behind – for the time being.41

  On 12 April 1945 President Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Within twenty-four hours his successor, Harry Truman, had been told about the atomic bomb.42 Inside a month, on 8 May, the war in Europe was at an end. But the Japanese hung on, and Truman, a newcomer to office, was faced with the prospect of being the man to issue the instruction to use the awesome weapon. By V-E Day, the target researchers for the atomic bombs had selected Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the delivery system had been perfected, the crews chosen, and the aeronautical procedure for actually dropping the mechanism tried out and improved. Critical amounts of plutonium and uranium became available after 31 May, and a test explosion was set for 05.50 hours on 16 July in the desert at Alamogordo, near the Rio Grande, the border with Mexico, in an area known locally as Jornada del Muerto, ‘the journey of death’.43

  The test explosion went exactly according to plan. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of Los Alamos, watched with his brother Frank as the clouds turned ‘brilliant purple’ and the echo of the explosion went on, and on, and on.44 The scientists were still split among themselves as to whether the Russians should be told, whether the Japanese should be warned, and whether the first bomb should be dropped in the sea nearby. In the end total secrecy was maintained, one important reason for doing so being the fear that the Japanese might move thousands of captured American servicemen into any potential target area as a deterrent.45

  The U235 bomb was dropped on Hiroshima shortly before 9:00 A.M. local time, on 6 August. In the time it took for the bomb to fall, the Enola Gay, the plane it had been carried in, was eleven and a half miles away.46 Even so, the light of the explosion filled the cockpit, and the aircraft’s frame ‘crackled and crinkled’ with the blast.47 The plutonium version fed on Nagasaki three days later. Six days after that the emperor announced Japan’s surrender. In that sense, the bombs worked.

  The world reacted with relief that the war was over and with horror at the means used to achieve that result. It was the end of one era and the beginning of another, and for once there was no exaggeration in those words. In physics it was a terrible culmination of the greatest intellectual adventure in what has traditionally been called ‘the beautiful science.’ But a culmination is just that: physics would never again be quite so heroic, but it wasn’t over.

  Four long years of fighting the Japanese had given the rest of the world, especially the Americans, an abiding reason for being interested in the enemy, who – with their kamikaze pilots, their seemingly gratuitous and baffling cruelty, and their unswerving devotion to the emperor – seemed so different from Westerners. By 1944 many of these differences had become obvious, so much so that it was felt important in the military hierarchy in America to commission a study of the Japanese in order fully to understand what the nation was – and was not – capable of, how it might react and behave in certain circumstances. (In particular, of course – though no one was allowed to say this – the military authorities wanted to know how Japan would behave when faced with an atomic bomb, should one be prepared. By then it was already clear that many Japanese soldiers and units fought to the bitter end, even against overwhelming odds, rather than surrender, as Allied or German troops would do in similar circumstances. Would the Japanese surrender in the face of one or more atomic bombs? If they didn’t, how many were the Allies prepared to explode to bring about surrender? How many was it safe to explode?)

  In June 1944 the anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who had spent the previous months in the Foreign Morale Division of the Office of War Information, was given the task of exploring Japanese culture and psychology.48 She was known for her fieldwork, and of course that was out of the question in this case. She got round the problem as best she could by interviewing as many Japanese as possible, Japanese who had emigrated to America before the war and Japanese prisoners of war. She also studied captured propaganda films, regular movies, novels, and the few other political or sociological books that had been published about Japan in English. As it happened, her study wasn’t completed until 1946, but when it did appear, published as The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, and despite the fact that it was aimed at policy makers, it created a sensation.49 There were still half a million American servicemen in Japan, as part of the occupying force, and this once terrifying enemy had accepted the foreign troops with a gentleness and courtesy that was as widespread as it was surprising. The Japanese were no less baffling in peacetime than they had been in war, and this helped account for the reception of Benedict’s book, which became much better known than her earlier fieldwork studies.50

  Benedict set herself the task of explaining the paradox of the Japanese, ‘a people who could be so polite and yet insolent, so rigid and yet so adaptable to innovations, so submissive and yet so difficult to control from above, so loyal and yet so capable of treachery, so disciplined and yet occasionally insubordinate, so ready to die by the sword and yet so concerned with the beauty of the chrysanthemum.’51 Her greatest contribution was to identify Japanese life as a system of interlocking obligations, from which all else stemmed. In Japanese society, she found, there is a strict hierarchy of such obligations, each with its associated way of behaving. On is the name for the obligations one receives from the world around – from the emperor, from one’s parents, from one’s teacher, all contacts in the course of a lifetime.52 These obligations impose on the individual a series of reciprocal duties: chu is the duty to the emperor, ko to one’s parents – and these are subsets of Gimu, debts that can only ever be repaid partially but for which there is no time limit. In contrast, there is Giri, debts regarded as having to be repaid ‘with mathematical equivalence to the favour received’ and to which there are time limits. There is Giri-to-the-world, for example (aunts, uncles), and Giri-to-one’s-name, clearing one’s reputation of insult or the imputation of failure. Benedict explained that in Japanese psychology there is no sense of sin, as Westerners would understand the concept, which means that drama in life comes instead from dilemmas over conflicting obligations. Japanese society is based not on guilt but on shame, and from this much else derives.53 For example, failure is much more personally traumatic in Japanese society than in Western society, being felt as an insult, with the result that great attempts are made to avoid competition. In school, records are kept not of performance but of attendance only. Insults suffered at school can be harboured for years an
d may not be ‘repaid’ until adult life and even though the ‘recipient’ is never aware that ‘repayment’ is being made. Children are allowed great freedom until about nine, Benedict says, much more so than in the West, but at around that age they begin to enter the adult world of obligations. One result, she says, is that they never forget this golden period, and this accounts for many of the problems among Japanese – heaven is something they have lost before they are even aware of it.54 Another crucial aspect of Japanese psychology is that the absence of guilt means that they can consciously and carefully enjoy the pleasures of life. Benedict explored these – in particular, baths, food, alcohol, and sex. Each of these, she found, was pursued assiduously by the Japanese, without the attendant frustrations and guilt of the Westerner. Food, for example, is consumed in huge, long meals, each course very small, savoured endlessly, and the appearance of the food is as important as the taste. Alcohol, rarely consumed with food, often results in intoxication, but again without any feelings of remorse. Since marriages are arranged, husbands feel free to visit geishas and prostitutes. Sex outside marriage is not available to women in quite the same way, but Benedict reports that masturbation is available to the wife; here too no guilt attaches, and she found that Japanese wives often had elaborate collections of antique devices to aid masturbation. More important than any of these pleasures, per se, however, was the more widespread Japanese attitude that these aspects of life were minor. The earthly pleasures were there to be enjoyed, savoured even, but what was central for the Japanese was the interlocking system of obligations, mostly involving the family, such obligations to be met with a firm self-discipline.55

  Benedict’s study quickly established itself as a classic at a time when such international cross-cultural comparisons were thin on the ground (a situation very different from now). It was thorough, jargon-free, and did not smack of intellectualism: the generals liked it.56 It certainly helped explain what many in the occupying forces had found: that despite the ferocity with which the Japanese had fought the war, the Americans could travel the length and breadth of the country without weapons, being welcomed wherever they went. The important point, as Benedict discovered, was that the Japanese had been allowed to keep their emperor, and he had given the order for surrender. Though there was shame attached to military defeat, the obligations of chu meant that the emperor’s order was accepted without question. It also enabled the conquered people the freedom to emulate those who had conquered them – this, too, was a natural consequence of the Japanese psychology.57 There were no hints in Benedict’s study of the remarkable commercial success that the Japanese would later enjoy, but with hindsight, they were there. Under Japanese ways of thinking, as Benedict concluded, militarism was ‘a light that failed,’ and therefore Japan had now to earn respect in the world by ‘a New Art and New Culture.’58 That involved emulating her victor, the United States.

  PART THREE

  SARTRE TO THE SEA OF TRANQUILITY

  The New Human Condition and The Great Society

  23

  PARIS IN THE YEAR ZERO

  In October 1945, following his first visit to the United States, which had impressed him, at least temporarily, with its vitality and abundance, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre returned to a very different Paris. After the years of war and occupation, the city was wrecked, emotionally more so than physically (because the Germans had spared it), and the contrast with America was stark. Sartre’s first task on his return was to deliver a lecture at the university entitled ‘Existentialism is a Humanism.’ To his consternation, so many people turned up for the lecture that all the seats were occupied, and he himself couldn’t get in. The lecture started an hour late. Once begun, ‘he spoke for two hours without stopping, without notes, and without taking his hands out of his pockets,’ and the occasion became famous.1 It became famous not only for the virtuosity of its delivery but because it was the first public admission by Sartre of a change in his philosophy. Much influenced by what had happened in Vichy France and the ultimate victory of the Allies, Sartre’s existentialism, which before the war had been an essentially pessimistic doctrine, now became an idea ‘based on optimism and action.’2 Sartre’s new ideas, he said, would be ‘the new creed’ for ‘the Europeans of 1945.’ Sartre was one of the most influential thinkers in the immediate postwar world, and his new attitude, as Arthur Herman makes plain in his study of cultural pessimism, was directly related to his experiences in the war. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said. Speaking of his time in the Resistance, he described how he had lost his sense of isolation: ‘I suddenly understood that I was a social being … I became aware of the weight of the world and my ties with all the others and their ties with me.’3

  Born in Poitiers in 1905, Sartre grew up in comfortable surroundings with sophisticated and enlightened parents who exposed their son to the best in art, literature, and music (his grandfather was Albert Schweitzer’s uncle).4 He attended the Lycée Henri IV, one of the most fashionable schools in Paris, and then went on to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Initially he intended to become a poet, Baudelaire being a particular hero of his, but he soon came under the influence of Marcel Proust and, most important, of Henri Bergson. ‘In Bergson,’ he said, ‘I immediately found a description of my own psychic life.’ It was as if ‘the truth had come down from heaven.’5 Other influences were Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Sartre’s attention being drawn to the Germans in the early 1930s by Raymond Aron, a fellow pupil at the same lycée. Aron was at the time more knowledgeable than Sartre, having just returned from studying with Husserl in Berlin. It was Husserl’s theory that much of the formal structure of traditional philosophy is nonsense, that true knowledge comes from ‘our immediate intuition of things as they are’, and that truth can best be grasped in ‘boundary situations’ – sudden, extreme moments, as when someone steps off the pavement in front of an oncoming car. Husserl called these moments of ‘unmediated existence,’ when one is forced to ‘choose and act,’ when life is ‘most real.’6

  Sartre followed Aron to Berlin in 1933, apparently ignoring Hitler’s rise.7 In addition to the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, and Bergson, Sartre also took advantage of the intellectual climate created in Paris in the 1930s by a seminar at the Sorbonne organised by a Russian emigré named Alexandre Kojève. This introduced a whole generation of French intellectuals – Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and André Breton – to Nietzsche and to Hegel’s ideas of history as progress.8 Kojève’s argument was that Western civilisation and its associated democracy had triumphed over every alternative (ironic in view of what was happening then in Germany and Russia) and that everyone, eventually, including the presently downtrodden working classes, would be ‘bourgeoisified.’ Sartre, however, drew different conclusions – being far more pessimistic in the 1930s than his Russian teacher. In one of his most famous phrases, he described man as ‘condemned to be free.’ For Sartre, Following Heidegger much more than Kojève, man was alone in the world and gradually being overtaken by materialism, industrialisation, standardisation, Américanisation (Heidegger, remember, had been influenced by Oswald Spengler). Life in such a darkening world, according to Sartre, was ‘absurd’ (another famous coinage of his). This absurdity, a form of emptiness, Sartre added, produced in man a sense of ‘nausea,’ a new version of alienation and a word he used as the title for a novel he published in 1938, La Nausée. One of the protagonists of the novel suffers this complaint, living in a provincial bourgeois world where life drags on with ‘a sort of sweetish sickness’ – Madame Bovary in modern dress.9 Most people, says Sartre, prefer to be free but are not: they live in ‘bad faith.’ This was essentially Heidegger’s idea of authenticity/inauthenticity, but Sartre, owing to the fact that he used more accessible language and wrote novels and, later, plays, became much more well known as an existentialist.10 Although he became more optimistic after the war, both phases of his thinking are linked by a distast
e – one might almost say a hatred – for the bourgeois life. He loved to raise the spectre of the surly waiter, whose surliness – La Nausée – existed because he hated being a waiter and ready wanted to be an artist, an actor, knowing that every moment spent waiting was spent in ‘bad faith.’11 Freedom could only be found by breaking away from this sort of existence.

  Intellectual life in Paris experienced a resurgence in 1944, precisely because the city had been occupied. Many books had been banned, theatres censored, magazines closed; even conversation had been guarded. As in the other occupied countries of Eastern Europe and in Holland and Belgium, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), a special task force under Alfred Rosenberg, whose job it was to confiscate both private and public art collections, had descended on France. The paper shortage had ensured that books, newspapers, magazines, theatre programs, school notebooks, and artists’ materials were in short supply. Sartre apart, this was the age of André Gide, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, Lautréamont, of Federico García Lorca and Luis Buñuel, and all the formerly banned American authors – Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Damon Runyon.12 Nineteen-forty-four also became known as the year of ‘Ritzkrieg’: though the world was still at war, Paris had been liberated and was inundated with visitors. Hemingway visited Sylvia Beach – her famous bookshop, Shakespeare & Co. (which had published James Joyce’s Ulysses) had closed down, but she had survived the camps. Lee Miller, of Vogue, hurried to resume her acquaintance with Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Eluard. Other visitors of that time included Marlene Dietrich, William Shirer, William Saroyan, Martha Gellhorn, A. J. Ayer, and George Orwell. The change in feeling was so marked, the feeling of renewal so complete, that Simone de Beauvoir talked about ‘Paris in the Year Zero.13