Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Out of all this, however, it seems to me that we might still make something, at the very least an agenda for the way ahead. It is clear from the narrative of this book that the failures of science, as mentioned earlier in this chapter – in particular the failure of sociology and psychology – have been crucial to the past century, and have been intimately associated with the political disasters. The combined effects stemming from the successes of science, Uberai democracy, free-market economics, and the mass media have produced an era of personal freedom and a realised individuality unrivalled in the past. This is no mean accomplishment, but it still leaves a lot to be achieved. Look at America’s inability to deal with the race issue, which has cast its shallow down the century. Look at the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and, more recently, in Kosovo, so reminiscent of both the Holocaust and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Look at the figures for crime, drug abuse, illegitimacy, and abortion. All of these reflect, at some level, a breakdown in relations between different groups – different nations, different races, different tribes, different sexes, different families, different ages. The developments of the twentieth century have taught us more and more about ourselves as individuals, but they have not taught us much about ourselves as members of groups, interlocking groups, with shared responsibilities as well as rights. In sociology, the dominant influence of Marx has been to stress the way some groups (the middle classes, management) dominate and exploit others. This has caused massive neglect in the study of the other ways in which groups relate to one another. In psychology, Freud’s emphasis on individual development, again allegedly based on self-interest, hostility, and competition, has put personal realisation above everything else.

  The task before science is, therefore, as clear as it is urgent. It is to turn its attention to groups, groups of people, the psychology and sociology of groups, to explore how they relate to each other, how individuals relate to the different groups of which they are members (families, sexes, generations, races, nations), in the hope that we shall one day be able to understand and control such phenomena as racism, rape, and child and drug abuse.78 As Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), the critical distinctions between people are not primarily ideological any more – they are cultural, i.e., group-based.79 There is no question but that these are the most critical issues for sociology and psychology in the future.

  One final observation about science, free-market economics, and the mass media. The vast majority of ideas in this book were produced in universities, away from the hurly-burly of the market. The people who have had the ideas reported in these pages did not, for the most part, do what they did for the money, but because they were curious. Figures like Peter Brook and Pierre Boulez have deliberately avoided the market system, so that their work could develop in ways not constrained by market considerations. By the same token, the mass medium that has made the greatest contribution to our intellectual and communal life – the BBC – is again deliberately removed from the raw market. We should be aware that knowledge, particularly the production of basic science, ethical philosophy and social commentary appear to be human activities that do not lend themselves to market economics, though they clearly flourish in protected environments under such a system. Universities have evolved into highly tolerant communities, for the most part, where people of different ages, different backgrounds, with different outlooks, interests, and skills, can explore varied ways of living together. We should never forget how precious universities are, and that with our current problems, as discussed in the pages above, and notwithstanding anything else said in the rest of this epilogue, universities may offer a way forward, a lead, out of the impasse facing psychology and sociology.

  The New Humanities and a New Canon

  Science apart, the major division in Western thought today, which affects philosophy, literature, religion, architecture, even history, is between the postmodernists, who are happy with the fragmented, disparate, ‘carnival’ of culture (to use Stanley Fish’s phrase), and those traditionalists who genuinely feel this sells us short (the young particularly), that this approach involves an ethical betrayal, avoids judging what is better and what is less good in human achievement and, in so doing, hinders people in raising their game. Postmodernism and relativism are still in the ascendant, but for how much longer? While the cultures of Africa, Bali and other third world countries have been recovered, to an extent, and given a much needed boost, none has so far found the widespread resonance that the classical civilisations of the Middle East once enjoyed. No one doubts that jewels of art, learning and science have occurred in all places and at all times, and the identification and extension of this wide range has been a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship. In particular, the vast body of knowledge concerning the early, pre-Columbus native Americans, has revealed a very rich set of interlocking cultures. But have these discoveries produced any body of written material, say, which causes us to re-think the way that we live? Has it revealed any body of law, or medicine, or technology which leads us to change our ways either of thinking or doing? Has it reveled a completely new literature or philosophy with a new vision? The blunt answer is no.

  The possibility – one might almost say the probability – arises then, that, some time in the twenty-first century, we shall eventually enter a postpostmodern world, in which the arguments of Jean-François Lyotard, Clifford Geertz, Frederick Jameson, David Harvey and their colleagues are still accepted, but only up to a point. We shall have reached a stage where, even after all the cultures of the world have been recovered and described, there will still be a hierarchy of civilisations, in the sense that a few of them were vastly more important in shaping our world than others. It should be said that, at the end of the twentieth century, the traditional hierarchy (which implies the traditional met narrative’), despite various attempts to destabilise it, is not much changed.

  Hiram Bingham’s re-discovery of Machu Picchu, or Basil Davidson’s ‘recovery’ of Mapungubwe, or Clifford Geertz’s own ‘thick description’ of Balinese cockfights may, each in its own way, rival Plato’s Republic, or Shakespeare’s Falstaff, or Planck’s quantum. But – and this is surely the main point – though they are all part of the emerging ‘one story’ that is the crucial achievement of twentieth-century scholarship, Machu Picchu, Mapungubwe and Bali did not help shape the one story anywhere near as directly as the more traditional ideas did.

  It is not racist or ethnocentrist to insist on this. As Richard Rorty has correctly pointed out, thick descriptions of Balinese cockfights are themselves an achievement of Western anthropology. But I think the differences between the postmodernists and the traditionalists (for want of a better term) can be reconciled, at least partly. Neil Postman drew my attention to the fact that at the beginning of our century William James said that any subject, treated historically, can become a ‘humanity.’80 ‘You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a sheet of formulas and weights and measures.’ The narrative form, properly realised, brings with it a powerful authority, showing not only where we are at any point but how we arrived there. In the case of this narrative, the grand narrative that has emerged in the course of the twentieth century, the story is so overwhelming that I believe it can provide, or begin to provide, an antidote to some of the problems that have plagued our educational institutions in recent years – in particular, the so-called ‘culture wars’ and the battles over the Western canon.

  As was mentioned earlier, many avenues of thought, many disciplines, are coming together to tell one story. The most powerful advocate of this idea has been E. O. Wilson, who even resurrected the term consilience to describe the process. In his 1998 book of that name
, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson offered the arch-reductionist view of the world, not only describing the way scientific knowledge has come together but also putting forward the idea that one day science will be able to ‘explain’ art, religion, ethics, kinship patterns, forms of government, etiquette, fashion, courtship, gift-giving patterns, funeral rites, population policy, penal sanctions, and if that’s not enough, virtually everything else.81 At its most basic, he argued that colour preferences are largely innate, that the arts are innately focused toward certain themes, that metaphors are the consequence of spreading activation in the brain during learning and are therefore ‘the building blocks of creative thought.’82 Among the innate impulses that go to make up art are imitation, making things geometrical, and intensification. Good artists instinctively know what patterns arouse the brain most.83 In myth and fiction ‘as few as two dozen’ plots cover most epic stories that make up the classical corpus of many societies. These include emigration of the tribe, meeting the forces of evil, apocalypse, sexual awakening. ‘The dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence.’84 ‘We are entering a new era of existentialism,’ says Wilson, ‘not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre, giving complete autonomy to the individual, but the concept that only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible…. In the course of all of it we are learning the fundamental principle that ethics is everything. Human social existence, unlike animal sociality, is based on the genetic propensity to form long-term contracts that evolve by culture into moral precepts and law.’85

  In other words, for Wilson the arts also become part of one story. And it is this story, I suggest, which ought to become the basis of a new canon. Understanding this narrative, and the way it was arrived at, involves a good appreciation of all the important sciences, the significant phases of history, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the reasons for the underlying patterns. Great works of religion, literature, music, painting, and sculpture fit into this narrative, this system of understanding, in the sense that all cultures have been attempts to come to terms with both the natural and the supernatural world, to create beauty, produce knowledge, and get at the truth. The significance of language, the way languages are related and have evolved, and yet remain very different, fits in here. Evolution enables us to place the world of culture within the world of nature with as comfortable a fit as possible. It shows how groups are related to one another. In addition, this narrative shows how mankind is moving on, where the old ways of thought are being superseded. Many people will disagree with this argument, replying that there is no teleological direction in evolution. Even more won’t like, or will be sceptical of the thrust of what I have to say. But I think the evidence speaks for itself.

  That evidence, at the end of the century, suggests that we are already living in what may be called a crossover culture. While people lament the effects of the mass media on our intellectual life generally, an inspection of the shelves in any good bookstore more or less anywhere in the Western world shows that, on the other hand, one of the greatest growth areas is in what is called popular science. That phrase is in fact misleading, to the extent that many of these books are relatively difficult, examining for example the nature of matter, abstruse mathematics (Fermat’s last theorem, longitude), the minutiae of evolution, the byways of palaeontology, the origin of time, the philosophy of science. But a growing number of people now accepts that one cannot call oneself educated unless one is up-to-date on these issues. The numbers are small, relatively speaking, but it remains true that both this category of book, and its shelf space on bookshop walls, barely existed twenty years ago.

  To my mind this is very encouraging, not least because it will prevent too big a division opening up in our society between scientists and the rest. If – a big ‘if’ perhaps – the superstring revolution really does come to something, that something may prove very difficult for scientists to share with the rest of us. They are already at the limit as to what metaphor can explain and we must face at least the possibility that, some day, the secrets of the universe will only be truly available to those with an above-average grasp of mathematics. It is no use the rest of us saying that we don’t like the way knowledge is going. That’s where the advances are being made, and is an added reason why I am arguing for this particular new canon, taught – as James said – as a humanity, so that it is attractive to as wide a cross-section of people as possible.

  Evolution is the story of us all. Physics, chemistry, and biology are international in a way that literature, art, or religion can never be. Although science may have begun in the West, there are now distinguished Indian, Arab, Japanese, and Chinese scientists in great numbers. (In July 1999 China announced its capability to produce a neutron bomb, an intellectual triumph of sorts.) This is not to provide a framework for avoiding difficult judgements: science and liberal democracy are, or were, Western ideas. Nor is it a way of evading debate over the Western literary canon. But studying twentieth-century thought, as a narrative, provides a new kind of humanity and a canon for life as it is now lived. In offering something common to us all, a sketch of an historical/intellectual canon, it also begins to address our remaining problems. It is something we can all share.

  NOTES AND REFERENCES

  In these references, especially in regard to works published early in the century, I have given both the original publication details and, where appropriate, more recent editions and reprints. This is to aid readers who wish to pursue particular works, to show them where the more accessible versions are to be found. In addition, however, the publication history of key works also shows how the popularity of certain key ideas has varied down the years.

  Quite naturally, there are fewer references for the last quarter of the book. These works have had much less chance to generate a secondary literature of commentary and criticism.

  PREFACE

  1. Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, New York: Viking Press, 1975; Penguin paperback, 1996, page 4. The reference to the nightmare may be compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare & Co., 1922; Penguin edition of the 1960 Bodley Head edition, 1992, page 42.

  INTRODUCTION: AN EVOLUTION IN THE RULES

  OF THOUGHT

  1. Michael Ignatieff, Interview with Isaiah Berlin, BBC 2, 24 November, 1997. See also: Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 301.

  2. Martin Gilbert, The Twentieth Century: Volume I, 1900–1933, London: HarperCollins, 1997.

  3. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, De Prés et de Loin, translated as Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paula Wissig (translator), Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988, page 119.

  4. John Maddox, What Remains to Be Discovered, London: Macmillan, 1998, Introduction, pages 1— 21.

  5. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, page 21.

  6. Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences, London: Fontana Press, 1997, pages 577— 578.

  7. See, for example, Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  8. Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modem Culture, London: Duckworth, 1998, page 42.

  9. See Roger Shattuck, Candor & Perversion: Literature, Education and the Arts, New York: W. W. Norton, 1999, especially chapter six for a discussion of ‘The Spiritual in Art’, where the author argues that abstraction, or the absence of figuration in art, excludes analogies and correspondences – and therefore meaning.

  10. John Brockman (editor), The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, pages 18–19.

  11. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966; paperback edition,
Oxford, 1968.