Stranger Than We Can Imagine

by John Higgs

  *

  Why was the reality of the First World War so different to initial expectations? Why was it not over by Christmas, in line with most contemporary assumptions about the nature of conflict? The answer, in part, is technology. It was the first industrialised war.

  Before the twentieth century, technology was understood as progress. There had been some protests about the impact of new inventions, most notably by the early nineteenth-century Luddites who destroyed industrial machinery to protest at the effect machines were having on traditional industries. More usually technological advance was believed to be a positive force, providing economic growth and proving mankind’s mastery over the natural world. Technology increased what we were capable of. Steam engines allowed us to move great weights, motorcars and bicycles allowed us to travel faster, and telescopes or microscopes allowed us to see what our eyes alone could not. Technology was a tool that provided power or precision, and it did our bidding. But around the beginning of the twentieth century technology started to shrug off our control. Disasters like the sinking of RMS Titanic on her maiden voyage, or the uncontrollable fire that consumed the German passenger zeppelin the Hindenburg, showed the downside of progress. Technology could now produce human disasters which were just as terrifying as natural ones. The pseudo-science of eugenics, which aimed to ‘improve’ the quality of the human race by favouring certain genetic traits, revealed that progress cared little for human emotions like empathy or concern for others.

  Professional soldiers in the First World War went to the front trained in the traditional military skills of horse riding and swordplay, but cavalry was soon replaced by tanks, poison gas and machine guns. Career soldiers were soon outnumbered by conscripts and volunteers. Soldiers were not galloping heroically over the fields towards their enemy, but hiding in sodden trenches which did not move for months or even years, along with rats and a terrible lack of food and supplies. And then there was the shelling.

  The troops lived under bombardments which could go on for hours or days or weeks, from the ear-splitting booms of close shelling to the low, bass grumbles of far distant explosions. Each shell arrived unannounced, as if from nowhere. The next shell always had the potential of being a direct hit. Bodies and body parts were lost among the mud and craters, only to resurface again after a later bomb fell. One legacy of shelling was the many Tombs of Unknown Soldiers around the world. These tombs were built after the war, containing anonymous bones which symbolised all lost soldiers. Grieving families paid their respects to remains that could be anyone, such was the ability of this conflict to dehumanise war.

  The word ‘shellshock’ was coined to describe the psychological breakdowns caused by this trauma. This was poorly understood at the time, with some dismissing it as cowardice or ‘low moral fibre’. We have since become familiar with the phenomenon, whose symptoms range from near-catatonia to panicked flight, and call it ‘combat stress reaction’. Put simply, technology had made warfare psychologically too terrible for soldiers to bear. It took just a few short years for the jubilation of the recruiting stations to become a determination that global conflicts such as this could never be allowed to happen again. This point was hammered home by the name that the conflict soon became known by: the War to End All Wars. When people dared to imagine that such an ingrained constant of history as war would never occur again, then we had clearly entered a new phase in the psyche of mankind.

  It was scale that both created and ended the imperial world. Empires were born when population growth caused egalitarian structures to break down. They ended when technology had grown to the point where warfare could no longer be tolerated. The imperial system, it turned out, was not the unarguable, unavoidable system of human organisation that it had been believed to be for most of history. It was a system that only functioned during a certain period of human and technological growth.

  If warfare was no longer acceptable in the industrialised world then emperors, tsars and kaisers could no longer be trusted with the power they held. They had stupidly led the world into horror once, and could do so again. The concept of emperors, one of the great constants in human history, was finished. It is impossible to imagine that a modern-day Emperor Norton would receive free food, clothes and travel if they claimed that title after the First World War.

  The traditional method of regicide was not hanging or burning, but beheading. If you intended to kill a king it was necessary to chop off his head, as Charles I of England and Louis XVI of France unhappily discovered. This was highly symbolic. It was not just their actual head you were hacking off, but the head of the political hierarchy. An absolute monarch was the omphalos around which the rest of society orientated itself. Squabbles with ministers aside, law and sometimes religion were whatever that emperor decreed them to be. You might not have liked what an emperor did, but you understood that power was theirs. You knew what your role in the hierarchy was, and you orientated yourself accordingly. Without the omphalos of emperors, society was a jumble of different, relative, individual perspectives, all fighting for credibility and political power.

  This is what was so remarkable about the changes that occurred in the first decades of the twentieth century. The sudden departure of emperors across huge swathes of the planet was the removal of single, absolute, fixed perspectives. This is a story we’ve already seen played out in different arenas. Art, physics and geopolitical structures all underwent similar revolutions around the same time, for seemingly unconnected reasons. Politicians were wrestling with the same challenges that faced Einstein, Picasso, Schoenberg and Joyce: how can we proceed, now that we understand there is no ultimate perspective that every other viewpoint is subservient to? How do we reconcile contradictory positions? When our previous ways of thinking are fundamentally flawed, how do we move forward?

  These developments would have no doubt pleased an anarchist like Martial Bourdin, who blew himself up by the Greenwich Observatory, had he lived to see them. But at the time when empires were falling, few people thought that the politics of anarchism were a plausible way to organise society. The immediate requirement was stability. Deleting an omphalos leaves you with the chaotic noise of multiple perspectives. Managing this requires a system like democracy.

  Limited forms of democracy had been growing for centuries but the vote had been typically limited to elite members of society, such as landowners. Now the long campaigns for universal suffrage, the right for every adult citizen to vote regardless of education, gender or wealth, were about to bear fruit. Universal suffrage appeared in much of Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Netherlands, in 1918 or 1919. In the United States the date was 1920, although some ex-Confederate states introduced racial exceptions that were later deemed unconstitutional. Female suffrage often took longer than male, for example in the United Kingdom which gave all adult males the vote in 1918 while women waited until 1928. In countries such as France, Argentina and Japan women had to wait until the end of the Second World War. But for those countries that did not take the communist route out of the failing imperial world, the trend was clear.

  Power could not be entrusted to absolute rulers in a world capable of industrialised warfare. The multiple perspective of democracy was safer than the single vision of an emperor. With those emperors gone, political power was redistributed into the hands of individuals.

  Aleister Crowley (second from left) with companions on an expedition, 1902 (Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty)

  FOUR: INDIVIDUALISM

  Do what thou wilt

  In April 1904 the British poet, mountaineer and occultist Aleister Crowley dictated a book which, he believed, was transmitted to him by a non-human intelligence called Aiwass. Aiwass was his Holy Guardian Angel, ‘a Being of intelligence and power immensely subtler and greater than aught we can call human’.

  Accounts of people who claim to receive information from spirits, angels, strange beings or other non-human sources are common throughout hist
ory, and the early twentieth century was no different. In 1913 the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung saw visions and heard voices of a being called Philemon. Philemon appeared as an old man with bull’s horns and kingfisher’s wings, and engaged Jung in deep discussion about the nature of the mind. In 1925 the Irish poet W.B. Yeats and his wife Georgie used automatic writing to contact spirits, who would announce they were ready to communicate by filling Yeats’s house with the scent of mint.

  When you look at the information received by Crowley, Yeats and Jung it does look remarkably like the work of Crowley, Yeats and Jung. The sources of those communications do not seem to be entirely external, unless non-human entities make contact with mankind in order to do sarcastic impersonations of their psyches. Why such beings would have such a weird sense of humour is a question as yet unanswered.

  The book Crowley believed he was transcribing is generally known as The Book of the Law because its proper title, Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, as delivered by XCIII=418 to DCLXVI, is less snappy. It consists of three chapters, each written over the course of an hour, during three days in a hotel room in Cairo. The text is powerful, unsettling and, in places, frightening. The words are short and blunt. This gives the book an insistent, staccato tone, especially when read out loud. The monosyllabic style is evident in its most famous line: ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.’

  Crowley had arrived in the hot, bustling streets of Cairo with his wife Rose in February 1904. The ancient city of mosques and citadels was then undergoing a period of growth and modernisation, and parts of downtown Cairo had been rebuilt in a Parisian style. These wide elegant boulevards with gas lighting stood in stark contrast to the narrow twisting streets and crowded markets of the rest of the city.

  This was the peak of the colonial period and Cairo, which was then administered by the British, was regarded as a great prize. Wealthy European travellers were drawn by the romance of the place and the desire to explore the Giza pyramids, the only one of the seven wonders of the ancient world still standing. The purpose of Crowley’s visit was to study local religion, play golf and to walk around wearing a jewelled turban, silk robes and a golden coat pretending to be a Persian prince. It was unexpected, therefore, when Rose announced she was channelling strange gnomic information regarding the god Horus, and that Horus was eager to have a word with her husband.

  It was all the more surprising because Rose had no interest in Egyptian religion. In order to test her knowledge Crowley took her to the Boulak Museum and challenged her to locate an image of Horus. Rose walked past a number of obvious representations of this deity and headed upstairs. There she immediately pointed to a small display case in the distance and cried, ‘There he is!’ The pair approached the case and found an otherwise unremarkable wooden stele from the twenty-sixth dynasty. The stele did indeed depict Horus, in the form of Ra Hoor Khuit. It was part of an exhibit that had been numbered 666 by the museum.

  This struck Crowley as hugely significant. The number 666 was important for him, and he referred to himself as ‘The Beast 666’. So when Rose announced that she had some instructions for Aleister, he followed them to the letter.

  Crowley was ordered to arrange their drawing room into a sparse temple and enter it for one hour, starting at noon exactly, on the following three days. There he was to write down exactly what he heard. On each of the three days he sat at a writing table and transcribed the words he heard from an English voice with a neutral accent that sounded like it came from behind him. The voice was of ‘deep timbre, musical and expressive, its tones solemn, voluptuous, tender, fierce, or aught else as suited the moods of the message’. This was the voice of Aiwass, an entity who acted as a minister for Horus. On each of the three days he transcribed one chapter of The Book of the Law.

  As far as Crowley was concerned, The Book of the Law marked a new stage in humanity’s spiritual evolution. Mankind was entering a period which he called the Aeon of Horus. The previous era, the Aeon of Osiris, was patriarchal in character and echoed the imperial age. You were expected to understand your place in the hierarchy and obey your superiors. The Aeon of Horus, in contrast, was described as being like a child: wild, spontaneous and self-centred. It would be a time when the exercise of individual will was paramount because, as Aiwass dictated, ‘There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt.’

  Crowley was announcing a new, replacement omphalos. It was one which would come to define the twentieth century: the individual. When the bonds of hierarchy were shattered, you were left with the multiple perspectives of a host of separate individuals. In the philosophy of individualism the self is the focus and is granted precedence over wider society.

  Support for individualism had been slowly building for centuries. You can trace its roots back to the Renaissance or the English Civil War. It was boosted by the Enlightenment and can be found in the work of writers such as François Rabelais or the Marquis de Sade. But few people had been willing to take it to its logical conclusion.

  Crowley was moving beyond the tradition of Christianity he was raised in. Christianity, like imperialism, was a system of subservience to a higher Lord. This Lord protected and saved his followers, but he also threatened them with judgement and punishment if they did not behave in the manner he dictated. It was a spiritual mirror to the political system: as above, so below. It is no coincidence that Western kings and emperors, from the Holy Roman Empire onwards, went to such lengths to impose that particular religion. Seen in this context, the end of the imperial world was always going to impact the Western world’s spiritual models.

  Crowley’s religion, which he called Thelema, was a product of this new era. Thelema was very different to Christianity in that it did not demand the bending of the knee to anyone. In the words of The Book of the Law, ‘Every man and every woman is a star.’

  In declaring the primacy of the individual, Crowley was also reducing the importance of the social groups that a person belonged to or identified with. Individualism was, by definition, isolating. Focusing on the individual inevitably meant that the focus shifted away from wider social connections, and everything outside the individual became categorised as separate and different. For those who self-identified as being one of the good guys, it became tempting to view this external other as bad. This isolating aspect of individualism was something Crowley understood completely. ‘I am alone,’ he wrote, ‘there is no God where I am.’

  The importance of individualism found particularly fertile soil in the United States, which as we have noted was always uncomfortable with the rigid hierarchy of empire. You can see how deeply individualism is ingrained in the American psyche by the unwillingness of American town planners to embrace European-style motoring roundabouts. Roundabouts are faster, cause fewer accidents and save fuel in comparison to traffic-light junctions, but they are viewed as being suspiciously un-American. As Dan Neil, the motoring correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, has noted, ‘This is a culture predicated on freedom and individualism, where spontaneous cooperation is difficult and regimentation is resisted … Behind the wheel, we’re less likely to abide by an orderly pattern of merging that, though faster for the group, may require an individual to slow down or, God forbid, yield.’

  The central character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is James Gatz, who grows up dirt-poor in a shack in North Dakota and changes his name to Jay Gatsby at the age of seventeen in an attempt to leave behind his roots. While serving in the First World War he meets Daisy Buchanan, a debutante from the opposite end of the social scale. Gatsby refuses to accept the social gulf between them and, through an act of individual will and the proceeds from illegal bootlegging, reinvents himself as a wealthy and admired member of the Long Island elite.

  Throughout the novel Gatsby stares at a green light across the bay from his home, which marks the Buchanans’ estate and the idealised, upper-class society it represents. He fixates on this light, turns it into his own private omphalos, and dev
otes his life to reaching it. It is this yearning to reach, and to deny the right of any social structure to prevent him from becoming what he wants to be, that is at the heart of his character. Gatsby refuses to ‘know his place’ or to allow anyone else to determine his goals. His dreams, ultimately, are not sufficient to overcome his background, but his dedication to becoming a ‘self-made man’ still marks him out as great. His spiritual centre, like Crowley’s, rests in his individual will.

  The most influential proponent of the argument in favour of taking a fundamentalist approach to personal liberty was probably the Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. Rand was born Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg in 1905. Her childhood was affluent and her father, a successful Jewish businessman, owned both a pharmacy and the building it was in. But when she was twelve years old, Rand’s happy childhood was overturned by the October Revolution of 1917. Her father’s property was confiscated and her teenage years became a time of uncertainty, desperation and poverty. This left her with a deep hatred of communism, socialism or any type of collectivist ideas. All these, she felt, were excuses to steal from those who earned and deserved their wealth.

  After a move to America and a failed attempt to make a living as a screenwriter, she wrote a novella called Anthem. Anthem describes a dystopian totalitarian future where the word ‘I’ was banned and had been replaced by ‘we’. The hero of her novel, who is initially named Equality 7-2521 but who later calls himself Prometheus, vows to fight this collectivist tyranny. ‘I am done with the monster of “We,” the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame,’ he says. ‘And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride. This god, this one word: “I”.’ Equality 7-2521 makes this declaration fully aware of the isolating nature of individualism: ‘I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire. For in the temple of his spirit, each man is alone.’