|
A FEW weeks ago, the British government’s chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, made a bloodcurdling speech about the horrors lying in wait for us. By 2030, he said, the world will be facing a perfect storm of food, energy and water shortages caused by population growth and exacerbated by climate change. James Lovelock, the creator of the Gaia theory, receives extensive, largely uncritical, coverage when he predicts that global warming will have wiped out 80% of humankind by the end of the century. In the meantime, we are living through what many people believe (and some hope) to be the final collapse of capitalism, while attempting with only limited success to fight a “global war on terror” against an enemy that threatens to destroy “our way of life”.
There is nothing new in society being gripped by anxiety about the present and pessimism about the future. In his latest book, Richard Overy, a distinguished British historian of the second world war, has turned his attention to the period between the wars when, he argues, the presentiment of impending disaster was even more deeply felt (and perhaps with better reason) than it is today. Indeed, Mr Overy sets out to show that it was a uniquely gloomy and fearful era, a morbid age that saw the future of civilisation in terms of disease, decay and death.
The author concentrates on Britain. This is partly because it saw itself (and was seen by others) as the most powerful expression of modern Western civilisation and partly because it was a liberal, open society in which ideas flowed freely and reached an ever-larger audience of concerned and educated citizens. Although Britain was relatively fortunate compared with other developed countries—its economy suffered less during the Great Depression and it escaped the intense social upheaval, political extremism and civil war that blighted lives elsewhere in Europe—the sense of doom was as strong there as anywhere. Nor did Britons think of themselves as being in any way isolated from the many violent intellectual currents of the time.
If the cataclysm of the first world war had destroyed any belief in the immutability of a civilisation based on liberal, progressive British values, the origins of the morbid age can also be found in developments in the natural and social sciences that occurred well before 1914. Marx had foretold that capitalism would eventually be destroyed by its own contradictions. Darwin’s theories of natural selection and genetic inheritance had spawned fears about racial decline. Freud and psychoanalysis had exposed unconscious, primitive impulses lurking deep within all of us. Similarly, advances in chemistry, physics and mechanical engineering had produced weapons that made possible slaughter on a scale never before experienced.
By the 1920s, with the advent of mass media and the associated rise of the public intellectual—figures such as Arnold Toynbee, Julian Huxley, Cyril Burt, John Maynard Keynes and Marie Stopes—these and other ideas began to exercise a powerful grip on the popular imagination. Making extensive use of primary sources, Mr Overy examines each in turn: the loss of faith in the free-market system caused by rising unemployment and the belief among a generation of British socialists influenced by an outspoken couple, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, that the answer was an ameliorated form of Soviet-style planning; the growing fashion for psychoanalysis, its apparent challenge to reason and its effect on the artistic imagination; and, perhaps most shockingly for readers today, the corrupted Darwinism that led to the rise of the eugenics movement and attempts by apparently respectable people to pass legislation to allow the forcible sterilisation of “mental defectives”.
The second half of “The Morbid Age” concentrates on the British reaction to political turmoil in Europe and the arrival on the scene of Hitler. Mr Overy charts the growth of the hugely popular pacifist and anti-war movements, such as the League of Nations Union, which in 1935 through an unofficial plebiscite attracted the support of 12m adult voters. Whereas many were attracted to the idea of a benign world government as an alternative to the staleness and cynicism of conventional politics, Britain was fortunate that only a few saw salvation in the perverted Utopianism of Soviet communism and fewer still in fascism, particularly after the brutalities of the Spanish civil war. Mr Overy observes: “In this great melodrama Hitler’s Germany was the villain; democratic civilisation the menaced heroine; the many forces of progressive thinking the simple-minded but courageous hero; the Soviet Union the hero’s bold but not altogether trustworthy accomplice.”
During this period something strange happened. After the horrors of the first world war, many people were convinced that another global conflict would unleash forces of barbarism that decaying liberalism would be powerless to resist and that the inevitable result would be the dawning of a new dark age.
But as the prospect of war drew closer, pessimism and defeatism were replaced with a grim determination to confront the manifest evil of Nazism. In the three years between the crises in Spain and central Europe, Mr Overy writes, “the balance between saving civilisation through peace and saving civilisation by war swung decisively in favour of the latter.” When war eventually came, it was for many people almost a relief—a climax in the patient’s condition after which would come either death or recovery.
“The Morbid Age” is history at its best. It tells us not just what people did, but what were the social and intellectual influences that caused them to do what they did. With elegance and erudition, Mr Overy opens a window into the mind of a generation—a generation with anxieties both very different from and yet surprisingly similar to those of our own today.
|
