Modern Mind

the forward march of ideas is slowed down, and simultaneous developments, sometimes in the same place, are considered in detail. This is partly because that is what happened; but I hope readers will also find the change of pace welcome. I hope too that readers will find helpful the printing of key names and concepts in bold type. In a big book like this one, chapter titles may not be enough of a guide.
    The four parts into which the text is divided do seem to reflect definite changes in sensibility. In part 1 I have reversed the argument in Frank Kermode’s
The Sense of an Ending
(1967). 11 In fiction particularly, says Kermode, the way plots end – and the concordance they show with the events that precede them – constitutes a fundamental aspect of human nature, a way of making sense of the world. First we had angels – myths – going on forever; then tragedy; most recently perpetual crisis. Part I, on the contrary, reflects my belief that in all areas of life – physics, biology, painting, music, philosophy, film, architecture, transport – the beginning of the century heralded a feeling of new ground being broken, new stories to be told, and therefore new endings to be imagined. Not everyone was optimistic about the changes taking place, but sheer newness is very much a defining idea of this epoch. This belief continued until World War I.
    Although chapter 9 specifically considers the intellectual consequences of World War I, there is a sense in which all of part 2, ‘Spengler to Animal Farm: Civilisations and Their Discontents’, might also be regarded in the same way. One does not have to agree with the arguments of Freud’s 1931 book, which bore the title
Civilisation and Its Discontents,
to accept that his phrase summed up the mood of an entire generation.
    Part 3 reflects a quite different sensibility, at once more optimistic than the prewar period, perhaps the most positive moment of the positive hour, when in the West – or rather the non-Communist world – liberal social engineering seemed possible. One of the more curious aspects of twentieth-century history is that World War I sparked so much pessimism, whereas World War II had the opposite effect.
    It is too soon to tell whether the sensibility that determines part 4 and is known as post-modernism represents as much of a break as some say. There are those who see it as simply an addendum to modernism, but in the sense in which it promises an era of post-Western thought, and even post-scientific thought (see pages 755–56), it may yet prove to be a far more radical break with the past. This is still to be resolved. If we
are
entering a postscientific age (and I for one am sceptical), then the new millennium will see as radical a break as any that has occurred since Darwin produced ‘the greatest idea, ever.’

PART ONE
FREUD TO WITTGENSTEIN

The Sense of a Beginning
     

PART TWO
SPENGLER TO
ANIMAL FARM

Civilisations and Their Discontents
     

11
THE ACQUISITIVE WASTELAND
     
    Much of the thought of the 1920s, and almost all of the important literature, may be seen, unsurprisingly perhaps, as a response to World War I. Not so predictable was that so many authors should respond in the same way – by emphasising their break with the past through new
forms
of literature: novels, plays, and poems in which the way the story was told was as important as the story itself. It took a while for authors to digest what had happened in the war, to grasp what it signified, and what they felt about it. But then, in 1922, a year to rival 1913 as an annus mirabilis in thought, there was a flood of works that broke new ground: James Joyce’s
Ulysses;
T. S. Eliot’s
Waste Land;
Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt
; Marcel Proust’s ninth volume of
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Sodome et Gomorrhe II;
Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel,
Jacob’s Room;
Rainer Maria Rilke’s
Duino Elegies;
and Pirandello’s
Henry IV,
all foundation stones for the architecture of the literature of the century.
    What Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, and the others were criticising, among other things, was the society – and not only the war society – which capitalism had brought about, a society where value was placed on possessions, where life had become a race to acquire things, as opposed to knowledge, understanding, or virtue. In short, they were attacking the acquisitive society. This was in fact a new phrase, coined the year before by R. H. Tawney in a book that was too