Modern Mind

modernist response to science per se, rather than to the technology and the social consequences it spawned. Many aspects of twentieth-century science – relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, symbolic logic, stochastic processes, hormones, accessory food factors (vitamins) – are, or were at the time they were discovered, quite difficult. I believe that the difficulty of much of modern science has been detrimental to the arts. Put simply, artists have avoided engagement with most (I emphasise
most)
sciences. One of the consequences of this, as will become clearer towards the end of the book, is the rise of what John Brockman calls ‘the third culture,’ a reference to C. P. Snow’s idea of the Two Cultures – literary culture and science – at odds with one another. 10 For Brockman the third culture consists of a new kind of philosophy, a natural philosophy of man’s place in the world, in the universe, written predominantly by physicists and biologists, people best placed now tomake such assessments. This, for me at any rate, is one measure of the evolution in knowledge forms. It is a central message of the book.
    I repeat here what I touched on in the preface:
The Modern Mind
is but one person’s version of twentieth-century thought. Even so, the scope of the book is ambitious, and I have had to be extremely selective in my use of material. There are some issues I have had to leave out more or less entirely. I would dearly have loved to have included an entire chapter on the intellectual consequences of the Holocaust. It certainly deserves something like the treatment Paul Fussell and Jay Winter have given to the intellectual consequences of World War I (see chapter 9). It would have fitted in well at the point where Hannah Arendt covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1963. A case could be made for including the achievements of Henry Ford, and the moving assembly line, so influential in all our lives, or of Charlie Chaplin, one of the first great stars of the art form born at the turn of the century. But strictly speaking these were cultural advances, rather than intellectual, and so were reluctantly omitted. The subject of statistics has, mainly through the technical design of experiments, led to many conclusions and inferences that would otherwise have been impossible. Daniel Bell kindly alerted me to this fact, and it is not his fault that I didn’t follow it up. At one stage I planned a section on the universities, not just the great institutions like Cambridge, Harvard, Göttingen, or the Imperial Five in Japan, but the great specialist installations like Woods Hole, Scripps, Cern, or Akademgorodok, Russia’s science city. And I initially planned to visit the offices of
Nature, Science,
the
New York Review of Books,
the Nobel Foundation, some of the great university presses, to report on the excitement of such enterprises. Then there are the great mosque-libraries of the Arab world, in Tunisia Egypt, Yemen. All fascinating, but the book would have doubled in length, and weight.
    One of the pleasures in writing this book, in addition to having an excuse to read all the works one should have read years ago, and rereading so many others, was the tours I did make of universities, meeting with writers, scientists, philosophers, filmmakers, academics, and others whose works feature in these pages. In all cases my methodology was similar. During the course of conversations that on occasion lasted for three hours or more, I would ask my interlocutor what in his/her opinion were the three most important ideas in his/her field in the twentieth century. Some people provided five ideas, while others plumped for just one. In economics three experts, two of them Nobel Prize winners, overlapped to the point where they suggested just four ideas between them, when they could have given nine.
    The book is a narrative. One way of looking at the achievement of twentieth-century thought is to view it as the uncovering of the greatest narrative there is. Accordingly, most of the chapters move forward in time: I think of these as longitudinal or ‘vertical’ chapters. A few, however, are ‘horizontal’ or latitudinal. They are chapter I, on the year 1900; chapter 2, on Vienna at the turn of the century and the ‘halfway house’ character of its thought; chapter 8, on themiraculous year of 1913; chapter 9, on the intellectual consequences of World War I; chapter 23, on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Paris. Here,