Some things are beyond salvaging, and the Twentieth Century is one of them. All of it. It would be better just to erase the entire show and pretend it didn’t happen. It is certainly difficult to think of anything worth saving. If the Twentieth Century was a burning house, what would you rush back in to save? Your priceless Jackson Pollock?
There is really not much to be said for it – the Twentieth Century – and the further we pull away from it the more obvious this becomes. As soon as you step back and take a long view, the Twentieth Century appears like a pustular aberration, an impasse during which everything went pear-shaped. Humanity basked in a long normality but then in the Twentieth Century:
Note how the twentieth Century self-identifies as the ‘Century of Change’. Once you get over the shock, though, it really is a bit underwhelming. Take a long view of architecture, for example. Tell me the Twentieth Century isn’t undistinguished. Show me a notable building you didn’t select for its peculiar departure from all the norms of the architecture before it and little else.
A former Australian Prime Minister once
opined that the greatest building of the Twentieth Century was the Sydney Opera
House:
I’ve been there. It’s a bit shabby, but a better building, in its presence, than I hoped. Although its acoustics are shitful, which – for an opera house – is no small thing. In terms of its purpose, it’s an iconic failure. I’ve been in 15th C. stone mosques in rural Pakistan with better acoustics. And in terms of design, it’s well ... corny. The architect was sitting by Sydney Harbor one day, looking for inspiration. There were some sail boats. “I know,” he thought, “A building shaped like the sails of yachts!” Architects did a lot of this in the twentieth century, buildings made to look like oversized non-architectural objects. It was widely regarded as very clever.
There’s a great episode of the Brady Bunch
where Mike – a ghey architect playing father to a blended family, if you
haven’t seen it – is hired by a flamboyant cosmetic heiress to build her new
company HQ, but she wants it in the shape of a giant powder-puff. To his
credit, Mike just can’t do it. It’s a job for a better architect than him.
Sculpture is worse:
In fact, I am at a total loss to name a
single piece of sculpture in the Twentieth Century that is worth saving. Not if
you look at it beyond the titillations of its immediate context. It might have
raised a giggle and a gasp in the 1970s, but by the 2020s it just looks like a
pile of junk.
But what about the polio vaccine? you cry!
Well, that’s true. You might rush back into a burning house to save the polio
vaccine. I have seen children with polio. In India. You don’t want to get
polio.
And, and, and what about space travel?
That was pretty spectacular. Would you rush back in to save your autographed
photo of Buzz Aldrin in his space suit?
And what about airplanes? Automobiles? Microwave ovens? And this computer? And this internet?
Gee, there was a lot of technological
progress in the Twentieth Century, wasn’t there?
But what of it? All of that is what Roger Sworder once called “an ecstasy for mugs”, and once you get bored with technological advances you start to reach a more sober assessment of the gains and losses of each innovation. I remember my first computer. Thralldom! These days I’m not so enthralled.
The Twentieth Century was all about thralldom; whole families staring into television screens. Would you rush back in to save your TV? In the 1950s you might have. There was a time when the television seemed a wondrous thing. When I was a boy my mum and dad put us all in the car and we drove into town to seen a colour television. I remember. I was in my pyjamas and a dressing gown and slippers. There was an electric goods store in the main street and they had a colour TV in the window. The only one in a hundred mile radius. No one had ever seen a colour TV. There was a crowd of people standing at the window ooing and aahing. It would be years before they could afford one.
So, ok, machines. The Twentieth Century had some machines. But with every advance there was a price to be paid, although it’s hard to see the price when you’re in a state of thralldom. Let’s split the atom! Endless cheap power! But there was a cost, wasn’t there? A hidden cost not included in the promise of endless cheap power. When they sold you endless cheap power did they show you the fine print about Hiroshima?
Show me a technology that wasn’t both a blessing and a curse. Do some real accountancy and include all the hidden costs.
Every technology devours some people. Television certainly did. I think my grandmother was one of them. When she bought a TV she disappeared into it and stayed there for twenty or more years and wasted away until she died. That Elvis documentary brought her great joy, but all I remember is an old lady glued to a television screen, first a black and white one, then a coloured one. In the end her legs atrophied. Her mind gave out long before that.
Cars too. I had friends who were devoured by cars. I mean, I grew up in Australia. Cars? The technology took over their lives. They became obsessed with it. Genuinely obsessed. Obsession is a pathology. (Just ask your shrink. You’ve probably got one.) The Twentieth Century was obsessive/compulsive to the core. Planetary autism. Rather than being dazzled by horsepower, buzzers and buttons, I’m more concerned about technology vis-à-vis human beings, and in the twentieth Century all I see is the Wizard of Oz, a shrunken creature in a big machine:
Years ago one of my neighbours was a shrunken creature in a big machine. He was a little bald guy with a sqeaky voice and dog shit for brains. He was a retired school principal. He bought a farm and big machines. I remember talking to him in the paddock one day. He was propped up in a seat atop a HUGE tractor. It was a lovely sunny day. I was struck by the might of the machine and the pathetically diminished being lost in its glamour of power. Glamour. There’s a word useful for seeing through the Twentieth Century.
Technology, that is, is a smokescreen. What it hides is societal, political, cultural, artistic and spiritual – existential - decay.
But what about all this longevity? Well,
that’s Achilles’ problem, isn’t it? You can have a short meaningful life, or a
long one as a consumer-slug doing your bit to rape the earth in pursuit of new
flavors and cheap thrills. If you’re over 55 you should be taking statins.In the Twentieth Century the human race went from one billion people to six, but without the slightest improvement in the specimens.
I’m not buying the old line: “Imagine a world without anaesthetics.” Opium wasn’t invented in the Twentieth Century. God invented opium. Opium is an argument for the existence of God.
It’s the smug triumphalism of it all that
is really irksome. If you remove the machines from the equation, what have you
got? There was democracy and human rights and equality. There was the Beatles.
Would you rush back into a burning house to save your vinyl copy of John’s
Lennon’s Imagine, that great anthem of the age? Lennon puts the whole edifice all in one song.
If you think John & Yoko were deep, you’re a Twentieth Century Man. That’s one of the most startling things about backpacking around Asia, by the way. Wherever you go you’ll find people singing Imagine. It’s a karaoke evergreen. Enormously popular. I’d hazard a wager that it’s the singlemost popular song in the whole of South East Asia, the Philippines and the entirety of the Indonesian archipelago.
I just prefer – all things considered – Nineteenth Century man. Or Fourteenth Century man, or Ancient man. I can handle almost any century, except the Twentieth. The Twenty-First isn’t looking too good, but that remains to be seen.
At least now stale things have started to look stale and different perspectives open up. It’s like you had a mad fling
with a strange woman in a bad motel and it’s only as you’re driving away alone,
looking in the rear view mirror, that you come to appreciate just how fucked up
the whole thing was.
* * *
The particular interest of these pages, though, is the Twentieth Century as a post-colonial nightmare. If you’ve ever been in some Third-world, corrupt, crowded, polluted, concocted polity on their Independence Day you’ll know what I mean. But you won’t be allowed to say it.
I had this awakening in Darjeeling. I discovered that the British had strict conservation policies for tea-growers in them hills. It was after the British left that the landscape was trashed. But then – more important perhaps – there was the second part of the awakening: you’re NOT allowed to say so. Which tells you it is a sham.
By the Twentieth Century I really mean the Twentieth Century Mindset. We should dispense with that altogether. I don’t care to replace it with a Bronze Age Mindset, or a Stone Age Mindset, to be frank, but the Twentieth Century Mindset has got to go.
This is why I am very inclined to read old books and look at old paintings, and generally give Twentieth Century books and paintings a miss. This Internet thing gives you the ability to plough into any century you want. Why would you bother with the Twentieth? It is wholesome, these days, to be looking for something else.
Roger Sworder’s view of the internet was apocalyptic. “It’s Judgment Day,” he’d say. We all thought we were going to be judged on Judgment Day. This was wrong. Rather, the entire contents of the entire history of the human race in all its splendor is laid out before us, digitally, without the slightest hierarchy of values. A parody of the Akashic Record. What do you choose, without any further guidance? A PDF of Boethius or a video doc on the sex life of Michel Foucault? You’re saved or damned accordingly. I saw the best minds of my generation spend 72 hours a week playing Warcraft III.
I’d explain Twentieth Century Mindset further but I shouldn’t get started about the whole ‘One World’ trope. You know, that whole twaddle about how the astronaut’s view from orbit had at last united humanity in a single vision and soon we will all live in harmony in a technological paradise under a One World government. I actually did a subject in this at school. Got an A. I was raised on this stuff. The teacher was Mr Gunther. A young bloke. He was passionate. I reckon he could sing John Lennon’s Imagine. He taught Environmental Studies – part of the Geography stream – and it was new and exciting, and a flash new epoch was dawning, inexorably, if only we could defeat the evil dinosaurs of the Establishment standing in the way.
You know the patter. You were probably raised on this stuff too. So by now you’ll know what I mean by underwhelming.
I’m really not a fan of space, either. Outer
space. That will put you outside the Twentieth Century mindset as quick as lightning. You realize
that anything even reasonably resembling a human being cannot, physically or
mentally, survive in outer space? It’s not an option. The gnostic space-lust of
the Twentieth Century is a self-corrosive transhumanist wetdream. Not into
it. But that turns you into an ex-pat in Costa Rica. What do you do if the great enthusiasms of the age strike you as unbounded folly?
* * *
Students would sometimes get stuck into Sworder
for being “negative.” To be fair, Sworder’s view of the Twentieth Century could
be bleak. He figured undergrads fresh out of High School could do with a big
dose of it. “You’re so pessimistic, Roger!” students would complain.
“Modernity’s not that bad! What about antibiotics?!” He would retort: “I’m not
pessimistic. I’m optimistic. Unlike you, I believe we can do a whole lot better
than this.” That is the most dangerous of all thought crimes.
He taught me that there is a Platonic Mindset. There are Mindsets not attached to a particular era, you see. The Platonic Mindset is not the same as the Ancient Athens Mindset. You can have a Mindset that transcends eras altogether. And indeed, it’s not good to be stuck in your own era, except by all the accidents of birth. TS Eliot said felicitous words about this. But he was a Twentieth Century Man. Or was he? Do you make exceptions for Twentieth Century entities born in the Nineteenth? Would you rush back into a burning house to save your copy of Four Quartets & Other Poems?
The premise of this current blog, in any case, is that you can be out of phase. So, given that, I concede that there might be souls incarnated in the Wasteland of the Twentieth Century who don’t belong there and who might be considered worthy despite the misfortune of their birth. But then, being born in that century myself I’m sort of bound to hold such a view, aren’t I? Sovereign is the exception, or the other way around.
As someone nefarious noted recently, we used to call the Overtone Window Plato’s Cave. There are many things you can do. Go to your bookshelves. How many works do you have written before 1900, or let’s say, the First World War? When was the last time you decided to read Keats instead of Bukowski? Any books written after 1918 go to the compost bin. Worm food. Most likely the printing and binding was crap anyway. How many well-made books do you have?
What a marvel it is, though, you might say, that in the Twentieth Century – for the first time in history – our beloved everyman has a copy of the classics in his hot little hand, even if in a tatty paperback. The factory worker can read Herodotus on his lunch break. Radio promised Shakespeare for the masses. It didn’t turn out that way. Not at all. Not in the least. Radio was the first wave of mass trivia. My secondhand bookstore trades in the ruins of those Twentieth Century Education-for-the-masses publishing enterprises. None of them amounted to much. As a pedagogical crusade, it was a huge failure.
I don’t think I even need talk here about wars and Nazis and genocides and Mao and Stalin and Hilary Clinton and the whole dans macabre. Leaders? Mr Lee was a clever chap. The cosmic-scale failure of the century in this department is defined by a vulgar vegetarian lance corporal with a silly mustache, but he was hardly the only pretender. I was brought up to believe Hitler only had one testicle. But they all had only one testicle. There was not a philosopher-king among them.
This is to say nothing of religion and
spirituality. This was about as good as the sculpture. Some fundamental things
slipped in the Twentieth Century, did they not? This was the first century in the entire history of the human race when people stopped praying. There's the true divide between traditional and modern man.
The question becomes: where do you go once the Wizard of Oz has been exposed? Wake up in Kansas? Take out a gym subscription? You could follow Solon to Egypt to see the bigger picture. That’s what I’m inclined to do. Remember the yuga. Cycles of flood and fire. Plato sets his Ideal Polity – his whole treatment of political constitutions - in that vast setting. That’s a feature of the Platonic Mindset. There is always the quest for the clear, objective, long, long, sunny view beyond the claustrophobic limitations of the Cave.
The Twentieth Century, by and large, was a mistake. We just have to accept it, put it aside, and get back to work. It was a century of ephemera. It is time to reengage with older currents of thought and things and modes of lasting value. Reacquire a different intellectual frame. You have to be rigorous about it though. Don't negotiate with cancer. You need a heritage, a platform, for the times and tasks ahead. You are very unlikely to find one in the Twentieth Century. Skip it.
Harper McAlpine Black
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