Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  His first target was the awareness movement. ‘Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to “relate,” overcoming their “fear of pleasure.” ‘48 Echoing Steve Bruce, Lasch argues that we have entered a period of ‘therapeutic sensibility’: therapy, he says, has established itself as the successor to rugged individualism and to religion, though he prefers to characterise it as an antireligion.49 He further argues that eventually this approach will serve as a replacement for politics. Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Norman Podhoretz’s Making It are all examples of the self-absorption on the part of the middle and upper-middle classes, designed to insulate them against the horrors of poverty, racism, and injustice all around them. The new narcissism means that people are more interested in personal change than political change, and encounter groups, T-groups, and other forms of awareness training have, in effect, helped to abolish a meaningful inner private life – the private has become public in ‘an ideology of intimacy.’ This makes people less individualistic, less genuinely creative, and far more fad- and fashion-conscious. It follows, says Lasch, that lasting friendships, love affairs, and successful marriages are much harder to achieve, in turn thrusting people back on themselves, when the whole cycle recommences. He goes on to identify different aspects of the narcissistic society – the creation of celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous,’ the degradation of sport to commercialised entertainment rather than heroic effort, the permissiveness in schools and courts, which put the needs of ‘personal development’ above the more old-fashioned virtues of knowledge acquisition and punishment (and thus treat the young gently rather than inculcating the rugged individualism that was once the tradition). In this context he also raises an issue that assumed greater relevance as the years went by, namely the attack on elites and the judgements they arrive at (as for example in the canon of books to be studied in schools). ‘Two contributors to a Carnegie Commission report on education condemn the idea that “there are certain works that should be familiar to all educated men” as inherently an “elitist notion.” Such criticisms often appear in company with the contention that academic life should reflect the variety and turmoil of modern society instead of attempting to criticise and thus transcend this confusion.’50

  But, and here we get to the nub of Lasch’s criticism, he argued that the awareness movement had failed, and failed completely. It failed because, in so many words, it had produced a false consciousness. The emancipation that it supposedly brought about was in fact no emancipation at all, but merely a more sophisticated and more subtle form of control. The new awareness still involved old tricks to keep power and control in the hands of – generally speaking – those who had it before. The feminist movement may have brought about greater freedom for many women, but the cost was a huge rise in one-parent families, overwhelmingly a mother and child, which in turn put greater pressures on women and on the children, in many cases breeding a ‘revulsion’ against close personal relationships that made loving friendships more difficult and promoted a dependence on the self. One-parent families are often narcissistic families. In business, too, greater discussion and worker participation led in most cases only to talking shops, which may have made the management more liked but did not substantially change anything else. ‘The popularisation of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticised. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edict of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalise the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavlour.’51

  Modern (i.e., late 1970s) man, says Lasch, is imprisoned in his self-awareness; he ‘longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance.’52 Both Lasch and Tom Wolfe therefore concur in finding the awareness movement, the obsession with self, and the therapeutic sensibility not only unsatisfying but largely a sham.

  Roszak, Wolfe, and Lasch all drew attention to the way in which, for many, the private, confessional, anonymous nature of traditional religions was giving way to the public, intimate, narcissistic nature of the awareness movement. Another way of putting this is to say that one set of beliefs, one kind of faith, was giving way to another. Not entirely coincidentally, three books in the early 1970s by well-known historians examined analogous times in the past.

  Described by Christopher Hill as one of the most original books on English history, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) showed that although the psychological atmosphere of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was very different from the California or Paris of the late 1960s and early 1970s, nevertheless the parallels were there to be seen in the overlap between rival systems of belief, the link to societal change and political radicalism.53 Thomas explains that magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is to be understood as being on a par with, say, drink and gambling as a way of coping with the high number of uncertainties of life, and in particular with uncertainties in the medical sphere. Organised religion itself used many magical practices to enforce its way of life. Miracles were regularly reported until the Reformation.54 In 1591 John Allyn, an Oxford recusant, was said to possess a quantity of Christ’s blood, ‘which he sold at twenty pounds a drop.’55 One of the reasons why the Reformation succeeded was because sceptics no longer believed in the ‘magic’ surrounding Mass, whereby the Host was turned into the body of Christ and the wine into his blood.56 Thus Protestantism represented itself as a direct attempt to take magic out of religion.

  Sects proliferated because their leaders continued to promote supernatural solutions to earthly problems that the Reformation sternly resisted. (One of these, incidentally, was the interpretation of dreams – Thomas Hill’s Most Pleasaunte Art of the Interpretation of Dreames).57 Many women expected to see their future husband in their sleep. With the outbreak of civil war, the number of people claiming to be the Messiah shot up – William Franklin, a London ropemaker who made this claim, appointed disciples in the role of destroying angel, healing angel, and John the Baptist; his activities attracted ‘multitudes of persons’ before he was forced to recant before Winchester Assizes in 1650.58 Thomas believed that the chaos of the age, helped along by technological advance (in particular gunpowder, the printing press, and the mariner’s compass), was helping to create these sects, the avowed aims of which were only part of the attraction. Satisfaction was achieved by many participants simply by taking part in some symbolic, ritualistic action, irrespective of its purpose.59 There were many names for these magicians – cunning men, wise women, conjurers, sorcerers, witches – offering a variety of services from finding lost goods to healing and fortune-telling. Each had a method that involved an intimidating ritual.60

  But perhaps the strongest parallel was in astrology, which at that time was the only other system that attempted to explain why individuals differed from one another, or to account for physical characteristics, aptitudes, and temperament.61 Even Sir Isaac Newton produced The Chronolog
y of Ancient Kingdoms Amended in 1728, which attempted to use astronomical data to reconstruct the otherwise lost chronology of the ancient world, the aim being to explain why various peoples had the character, manners, and laws that they did.62 The appeal of astrology was intended to be intellectual, to provide a coherent and comprehensive system of thought, its other avowed aim being to help men resolve personal problems and to ‘take their own decisions.’63 Again, a number of celebrated figures with an interest in astrology are known to have had sectarian or radical associations – Anabaptists, Ranters, Quakers, and Shakers all included. According to Thomas the existence of rebellious feeling (in the political sense) led to prophecies, wish-fulfilment in effect, and these fuelled supernatural speculation.64 Technological change also had an effect on the idea of progress. This may have arisen from the crafts, where knowledge was cumulative; but it was not until the sixteenth century that the ‘modern’ idea that ‘newest is the best’ established itself, and only then after a protracted battle between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns.’ It rubbed off with sects, people imagining that, even in religion, newest might be best. For Thomas, magic arises at the weak point of the social structure of the time, whether that be social injustice, physical suffering, or unrequited offences. Ultimately, however, magic was a ‘collection of miscellaneous recipes’ rather than a comprehensive body of doctrine, such as Christianity, which was far more fulfilling overall. The century after the Reformation was a transitional period when magic continued because it offered something for those who found the Protestant notion of self-help too arduous.65 The changes are to be seen as a result of the shifting aspirations of people: as the development of insurance took the threat out of everyday setbacks, and medicine made genuine advances, magic contracted. Today it still clings on in astrology, horoscopes, and fortune-tellers.

  The World Turned Upside Down, published by Christopher Hill in 1972, overlapped with Thomas’s book.66 Hill considers the years in Britain immediately after the civil war, a time when, as in the 1960s and early 1970s, radical political ideas and new religious sects proliferated. Again, without making too much of the parallels, certain similarities may be noted, in particular the left- wing nature of the political ideas; the fact that these new religious notions internalised the spiritual, making God less ‘out there’ or ‘up there,’ more of a personal matter; and thirdly pacifism. Hill even went so far as to use the words ‘counter-culture’ once or twice. It was, he said, a period of ‘glorious flux and intellectual excitement,’ powered by large numbers of ‘masterless men,’ no longer tied to feudal masters – itinerant merchants, peddlers, craftsmen, vagabonds who, beholden to no one, no longer fitted into hierarchical society and therefore provided the backbone of the new sects: Anabaptists, Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians.67

  Hill discovered several new patterns of thought. One was a belief in the spirit of Christianity – mastering sin – rather than following the letter of the Bible; another was the stirrings of science and a mood of scepticism towards many of the traditional claims of Christianity. There were also many Communist ideas and constitutional criticisms, all of a left-wing kind, as we would recognise them. Property laws were attacked, and squatters appeared (also typical of the 1960s and early 1970s).68 Church services were run along more democratic lines. Members of the congregation were invited to publicly comment on, and criticise, sermons (several ‘riots and tumults’ being the result). With the collapse in traditional beliefs, in hell and heaven in particular, a widespread despair set in, and people talked far more freely than hitherto of suicide (a mortal sin in Catholicism). Many flitted from sect to sect. Hill noted a taste for nakedness and a general attitude to the insane that was a mixture of awe and fear: the mad were routinely regarded as prophets. A number of new schools and universities were started. The change in the status of women was also considerable, as evidenced not only in the higher rate of divorce but in the greater role they had in the sects (compared with the established church), with some sects, like the Quakers, abolishing the vow in the marriage ceremony of the wife to obey the husband, and others, like the Ranters, ceasing to regard sex outside marriage as sinful.69 Indeed, the Ranters’ views at times resembled Marcuse’s: ‘The world exists for man, and all men are equal. There is no after-life: all that matters is here and now…. In the grave there is no remembrance of either sorrow or joy…. Nothing is evil that does not harm our fellow men…. Swearing i’this light, gloriously, and “wanton kisses,” may help to liberate us from the repressive ethic which our masters are trying to impose on us.’70 Hill agreed with Thomas that this was a time when the idea of novelty, originality, ‘ceased to be shocking and became in a sense desirable.’ This was an all-important advance, not only because the acceptance of novelty hastened change, but because it drove man back in on himself, to see ‘what light was inside and how it could be made to shine.’

  A further shift took place in the nineteenth century, and it was this change that was described and analysed by Owen Chadwick in The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975).71 Chadwick divided his book into two. In part 1, ‘The Social Problem,’ he considered the effects of economic liberation, Karl Marx’s materialism, and a general anticlericalism. This ‘unsettlement’ was also the result of new machines, new cities, massive transfers of population. In part 2, ‘The Intellectual Problem,’ he looked at the impact of science on men’s minds, at the effects of new historical (including archaeological) researches and Comtean philosophy, and at the ethics that developed out of these and other changes. Certain trends, he says, are clear, like churchgoing statistics. There was a downward turn in France, Germany, and England in the 1880s; the larger the town, the smaller the proportion of people who attended church on a Sunday; a cheap press enabled more atheistic literature to be published. But Chadwick’s more original point is that as the nineteenth century wore on, the very idea of secularisation itself changed. To begin with it could be described as anticlericalism, and a fairly aggressive anticlericalism at that.72 With the passage of time, however, Christianity, while undoubtedly weaker, adapted to the new forms of knowledge, so that by the end of the century the secular world was in effect a separate realm from that of the faith. There were still areas of life, or experience, like mourning or providence, which were left to religion, but in general the heat and fury had gone out of the debate; the agnostics and atheists went their own way, following Marx, Darwin, or the radical historians; the religious moved in and out of science, accepting what they wished to accept.73 The secular world thought it understood religion, as a phase or stage on the way to a fully secular society, and the religious denied that science and history could ever address the matter of faith. Despite the tide, Chadwick’s book was in fact a chronicle of the tenacious hold that religion had on many people, the need for a spiritual mystery at the heart of existence.

  The works of Galbraith, Bell, Roszak, and Lasch, on the one hand, and of Thomas, Christopher Hill, and Chadwick on the other, complement each other. Two things stand out from the historical studies, as a prerogative for a change of sensibility: new modes of communication (which help change self-awareness), and new forms of knowledge, scientific knowledge especially, which threaten old explanations.

  Galbraith and Bell recognised this. No sooner had their analyses appeared than the most important of their predictions were confirmed. In the spring of 1975, two young men quit their regular positions, one as a computer programmer at Honeywell in Boston, the other as a student at Harvard, and started their own company, writing software for the new generation of small computers that had just been announced. A few months later, in 1976, a young microbiologist in San Francisco was approached by an equally young venture capitalist, and they too launched their own company, this one to synthesise a specific protein from strands of DNA. The first two were called Paul Allen and Bill Gates and they named their company Microsoft. The second two were Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and because neither Boyer & Swanson nor Swan
son & Boyer was acceptable, they named their company Genentech. As the last quarter of the century arrived, the new information technology and the new biotechnology were spawned in tandem. The world was about to be turned upside down again.

  * The economist Robert Solow made essentially the same observation in his work on growth theory.

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  GENETIC SAFARI

  In 1973 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was given to three men. Two of them had been on different sides of the Nazi divide in pre-World War II Germany. Karl von Frisch had suffered at the hands of Nazi students because he was never able to prove that he was not one-eighth Jewish. He survived only because he was a world authority on bees at a time when Germany was suffering a virus that threatened its bee population, and badly needed his help to bolster food production. Konrad Lorenz, on the other hand, had fully subscribed to the prevailing Nazi ideology about ‘degeneration’ among the German-Jewish population and willingly taken part in various highly dubious experiments, particularly in Poland. He was captured as a Russian prisoner toward the end of the war and not released until 1948. Subsequently he apologised for his prewar and wartime activities, apologies that were accepted by colleagues, the most important of whom was the third in the trio to share the Nobel Prize in 1973. This was Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutchman, who spent the war in a hostage camp in danger of being shot in reprisal for the activities of the Dutch underground. If Tinbergen accepted Lorenz’s apologies, he must have been convinced they were genuine.1 The award of the prize was recognition for a relatively new discipline in which each man had been a founding father: ethology, the study of animal behaviour with a strong comparative element. Ethologists are interested in animal behaviour for what that might reveal about instinct, and what, if anything, separates man from all other forms of life.