Not often in history has a single event had the multifold and far reaching effect upon a whole civilization and, more poignantly, Western consciousness than the Great War. Prior to 1914, from at least the eighteenth century, in the West one of history’s great calms reigned, a calm made up of rationality, civility, of respect for the past, and a finite view of both man and the universe. It is the age of the Founding Fathers, of Queen Victoria, of Gibbon, Macaulay, Turgot, Goethe, Balzac, and Dickens. Among the intellectual lights and leading there was for the most part a spirit of hope buoyed up in the atmosphere of genuine hope. The Age of Great Hope, it has often been called.
1914 changed all of that; changed it powerfully and also lastingly. That wasn’t how it was expected to come out. No great war was ever entered into more joyously and hopefully than the First World War. Youth led the way. The war was seen by British, French, Germans, and Russians alike as a providential occasion for bravery, valor, crusade, and progress. At the start, indeed for better than a year, it was a singing war, a cheering war. When the somber English foreign secretary, Lord Grey, uttered his famous words on the evening of August 3, 1914—”The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”—his office visitor had difficulty in understanding Grey because the shouting and cheering in the street outside the Foreign Office were so loud. But by the end of 1915 the atmosphere of optimism and exhilaration had begun to disappear for good. The experience of the Great War was overpowering to both the Western front and the home front. Biographer Martin Gilbert cites the stark comment of Winston Churchill from a note written sometime in 1919-20:
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them…. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought would help them to win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals—often of a greater scale and longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of armies. The wounded died behind the lines; the dead mouldered in the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery…. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared bodies. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies…. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When it was all over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific Christian States had been able to deny themselves, and they were of doubtful utility.
It was not only the war itself—15 million killed, 25 million wounded, unimaginable devastation of property—that left a deep wound on European consciousness. There were the long-term consequences of the Great War, consequences which had become visible to the best minds by the mid-Twenties. I would like to set down here the consequences which in my opinion have been most deadly to the Western mind.
First, the Seventy-five Years War, still counting. At this moment it bids fair to become the West’s second Hundred Years War, both with their due punctuations of armistice from time to time.
Second, the totalitarian state, which Western scholars, especially in America, were so long in comprehending. It began in Leninist Russia, was carried to Mussolini in Italy, then to Hitler in Germany, one and all life-long socialists; also populists and nationalists. It has been the dominant political reality of the twentieth century and also the central cause of the Seventy-five Years War.
Third, also a child of totalitarianism, permanent, state-engendered terror; primarily as a tool of internal order but hardly less of external warfare and also against women, children, and other innocents.
Fourth, the Third World, or those large parts of it which are the disjecta membra of the ancient empires of Europe. It was not only the usual pains of disintegration but also the agonized, largely futile efforts of Western-educated native leaders to instill overnight the common law of values of England and the United States which marked, and still does, the impact of the Third World.
Fifth, the continuing fiscal crisis that emanated from the war reparations, debts, and other assaults upon property. What Schumpeter has so perceptively called the Evaporation of Property, Producer and Consumer property alike, and the relentless softening, liquidifying of property is a product of the orgy of financing of the Great War. Inflation and deflation, febrile prosperity and depression—the Great Depression is the lineal issue of the Great War—all can be seen in terms of the trauma of 1914.
The sixth and final consequence of the Great War, one to which I shall devote the remainder of my remarks here, is at once intellectual, spiritual, and moral. It is the general, ever-spreading sense of uncertainty, relativism, doubt and disbelief, Angst, and disillusionment which has been the dominant temper of Western writing since the Armistice of 1918. It is possible that other centuries in Western history have experienced this collapse of nerve and will. Sir Gilbert Murray characterized pre-Christian Mediterranean civilization in these terms. Lord Clark in his Civilization describes comparable states of mind in Western Europe in the years leading up to the end of the first millennium A.D. Some have described the fourteenth century with its first Hundred Years War as such a century. It is hard to know. There is so much we don’t know and cannot possibly discover at this late date about the earlier centuries. The twentieth century may well be unique in history.
Twentieth-century malaise in the West was quick to start. Spengler may be said to have anticipated it slightly. He spent the war in his home writing The Decline of the West. In its first form, it was published in Germany just in time to greet the returning German soldiers. The deluge was already falling by 1920 in the rest of Europe. There was Dada in Paris with its sculpture deliberately made of the contents of trash cans and its portrait of Mona Lisa with a mustache. Dadaism was a veritable orgy of trivializing, scatologizing, the Western tradition. It was accompanied and followed by weightier, often noble, expressions of disenchantment with the West.
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sasson, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, Mauriac’s Desert of Love, Barbusse’s Under Fire, Huxley’s Antic Hay and Point Counterpoint, and Freud’s Death of an Illusion, all were grim post mortems of an entire civilization which had been given its coup de grace by the most savage war in history. Although America scarcely suffered at all from its entrance in 1917 in the Great War, indeed prospered and underwent a very seizure of popular enthusiasm, the intellectual mind of the United States was somewhat close to that of Europe. The novels of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Hart Crane, and the greater American films about the war, led perhaps by All Quiet on the Western Front, along with the music of Gershwin and Ellington, portrayed a nation in which prewar innocence and optimism were gone or else vanishing quickly.
In his haunting The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has shown with rare artistry the effect of the war on European consciousness through not only the literature of the war and postwar but the letters written, diaries kept, and poetry written at Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun during the war. The traditionalist language of war, commemorated for hundreds of years in European ballad, epic, and tragedy was simply inadequate to the carnage, the “blood and mud” of death and destruction of the Great War.
In America, as though providing structural support for the loss of innocence and the onset of a new cynicism, the whole political character of the nation changed radically. Prior to the war the United States was first among major nations in its decentralization, its vigorous regionalism, its deep ties of localism—ties to family, church, and free private enterprise—and its impressive pluralism of allegiance, with the individual states counting for so much more in the lives of Americans than the national central state. So indistinct was the prewar national state that Lord Bryce even denied that America had a “theory of the state.” But President Wilson had supplied such a theory in his extraordinary centralization of state, society, and economy, his mobilization of the American national mind through such means as the Four Minute Men, the Neighborhood Watchers, and the Espionage and Sedition Act. We didn’t go all the way back to normality by any means when the war ended. The new, postwar America, the America of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover would contain processes of centralization, and also of desiccation of the old social and moral authorities which would never be reversed. Depression and World War II—far from the singing, cheering war of 1914—only intensified these processes.
The Twenties were the scene, too, of a new, very different kind of individualism. From the colonies down to the Great War, individualism had meant one thing: the individual’s protection from the state, especially the national state and central government. Tocqueville was struck by the meaning Americans gave this word; so different from its connotation in Europe where it referred to egoism, selfishness, weakened relations of human beings to their natural groups.
But ever since World War I, the meaning of individualism has steadily passed from its original state to a meaning far more in keeping with the European sense. I would mark the 1920s, the fabled Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the Age of the Flapper, as the clear watershed of the two dissimilar meanings. During the 70 years since the war, Americans have seen a constantly increasing emphasis placed upon the individual as separated from the social order, as in revolt against the ties of family, church, and in due time university, the living tradition of the classics, even objective reality itself. Not surprisingly, this separation from and revolt against family and social order carries with it ever-greater dependence upon the state, the central, national state of course, thus transforming the meaning of individualism.
The loose individual is, I would argue, the central reality of the present age, though sight must not be lost of the complementary role of the centralized state. For what the state takes is usually from society, especially from family, church and local community. Oftentimes the state gives to the individual, albeit in transformed fashion, what it has taken from the intermediate groups of the social order. A credulous people believe that with the onset of the New Deal human beings for the first time are being given “social security.” At bottom, what we the people are being given is the social security of yesteryear—rooted in family, church and community—remade into the bureaucratized function of the national state. But I suspect it is hopeless to think of persuading the average American that the care of one’s neighbor ever existed at all prior to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s creation of the New Deal.
It is from first to last the status of the concrete, individual human being that matters the most. All the while the state had been penetrating the social molecules of the intermediate groups, we have seen a constantly less secure, less stable, less disciplined individual on the scene. The loose individual is the hero, or anti-hero, of the twentieth century. Our fiction, our social science, our philosophy reveal this creature as more and more self-obsessed, more narcissistic, egocentric, and, in one of the favorite words of the century, more alienated. This is but another way of referring to the looseness of the human being’s attachment to the social groups and authorities whose prior existence is absolutely crucial to a free and democratic government.
It is this self-obsessed being that is the dominant reality of a great deal of contemporary literature, philosophy, and also art. Such a being is, has to be, the very premise of such widening movements as minimalism and deconstruction in literature and the arts. How I feel about the feelings I sense in the minds of others around me and how I feel is the simple—usually simple-minded—staple of a large number of the constipated, sweatless, bloodless little novels and short stories coming forth in ever larger volume, all dutifully reviewed in each Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.
Are we then, to return to the note on which this essay began, in the presence of crisis and decline in the late Western twentieth century, only twelve years away from the Second Millennium? Not, I believe, if we have the fundamental nature of man, the soul of man, in mind. Until the vast unknowable force that created this earth turns to its final destruction, all crises and declines are relative. But that doesn’t mean nonexistent. Any balanced view of human history has to recognize valleys as well as mountain peaks in the record: ages of diminution of creative energy followed often times by ages of renewal and achievement. Lord Clark in his Civilization writes of these phenomena. All during the whole century preceding the year 1000, Clark writes, the mind of Europe as evidenced by its art, architecture, engineering, tillage, craftsmanship, philosophy, epic, even theology, was at a very low ebb. People were frightened, at least apprehensive about the imminent millennium. But, Clark continues, within a decade of the year 1000, whole areas of Europe were revitalized. There began in the eleventh century one of the greatest ages of renascence in all human history, what we call the medieval age, at its height for close to three centuries before the agents of decline went to work.
I wish I could conclude this piece with a ringing declaration of faith, with torpedoes of rah-rah-rahs for No Decline, No Decadence, and for, at the same time, another miracle of the sort Lord Clark describes. But if I did it would be so patently insincere as to be recognized by the smallest child. What we know is that in divers respects—philosophy, literature, education, property, family, language, art, etc., the age that has followed the horrifying Great War has been one of visible decline of quality and of standards. Decline too, I believe, of patriotism, of pride in citizenship, even, it now appears, of strength, as opposed to mere corpulence of government.
What we do not know, cannot know, is when or even whether the approaching millennium, or anything else, will reverse decline.