Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (136 page)

The attacks on America during the 1970s were so venomous and for the most part so irrational as to merit the description of an international witch-hunt. One might say that the most ubiquitous form of racism during this decade was anti-Americanism. The adage, ‘to know all is to forgive all’, does not work in international affairs. One reason why America was attacked so much was because so much was known about her, chiefly thanks to the American media and academia, which poured forth a ceaseless torrent of self-critical material.
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But a more fundamental reason was that America as a great power and still more Americanism as a concept stood for the principle of individualism as opposed to collectivism, for free will as opposed to determinism. The spirit of the late Sixties, and still more of the early and mid-Seventies, was strongly collectivist and deterministic.

Much of this was again due to intellectual trends in Paris, which France’s new-found economic dynamism helped to project forcefully onto the world stage. In the Forties and Fifties, Sartre had at least believed in free will. It was indeed the essence of his philosophy, which made it fundamentally incompatible with Marxism, however much he might league himself with Marxists at a purely political level. Sartre lived on until 1980, but he was already an intellectual antique by the time of the student revolt of 1968. The mandarins who took his place were all, in varying degrees, influenced by Marxist determinism, which denies any importance to the individual
or to free will or to moral conscience in shaping the world. Unlike the orthodox Marxists, they did not see economic forces, operating through classes, as the sole dynamic of human history. Each advanced alternative or complementary explanations. But all accepted Marx’s starting-point that events were determined not by human will, as had been traditionally supposed, but by the hidden structures of society. As Marx put it: ‘the
final pattern
of economic relatives as seen on the surface … is very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their
inner but concealed essential pattern
and the
conception corresponding
to it.’
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Man was imprisoned in structures: twentieth-century man in bourgeois structures. In
Structural Anthropology
, first widely read and translated in 1963, Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted that, though social structures were not visible to the eye or even detectable by empirical observations, they were present, just as molecular structures existed though undiscoverable by all but the electron microscope. These structures determined the cast of mind, so what appeared to be acts of human will were merely concordance with the structure. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Marx, history was not a succession of events but a discernible pattern working according to discoverable laws. A variation of this argument was provided by the French historians of the
Annales
school, especially by Fernand Braudel, whose
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(1949) proved by far the most influential historical work published since the Second World War. They dismissed narrative as superficial and individuals as unimportant and preached a doctrine of geographical and economic determinism in history, whose long-term course was decided wholly by such structures. In psychology, Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud (hitherto largely ignored in France) to provide a new determinism of human behaviour, based on signs, signals, codes and conventions which, when analysed, left little room for human choice. In literature Roland Barthes argued that a novelist did not create by an act of imaginative will so much as in response to the social structures from which he derived his impulses, expressed in the symbols he used, which could be codified by the new science of semiology. In linguistics, the American scholar Noam Chomsky dismissed the physical characteristics of speech and language as superficial, determined by the so-called deep structures of linguistic rules.

What all the structuralists had in common was the Marxist assumption that human attributes and activities were governed by laws in a way analogous to the way scientific laws governed inanimate nature. Hence it was the function of the social sciences to discover such laws, and then for society to act upon their discoveries. The emergence of this new form of intellectual Utopianism, with its
strong suggestion of compulsory social engineering at the end of the road, coincided exactly with the rapid expansion of higher education, especially of the social science disciplines, in the late Fifties and throughout the Sixties. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, the average annual increase in expenditure on higher education was nearly 10 per cent in Britain, over 11 per cent in America, Spain and Japan, 13.3 per cent in France, over 15 per cent in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, and over 16 per cent in Canada and West Germany. University enrolments rose by an annual average of over 12 per cent in this period.
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By a historical accident, which had nothing to do with structures, deep or otherwise, the Structuralists thus had an influence quite disproportionate to the intrinsic plausibility of their theories, and they attained their maximum impact on society during the Seventies, when millions of new graduates poured out of the universities.

The heyday of Structuralism coincided with the demoralization of America and with the steady expansion of Soviet power and influence. It reinforced both tendencies, for Structuralism, like the Marxism from which it sprang, was anti-empirical, denying the real world in favour of the theoretical world, discounting facts in favour of ‘explanations’. Communists had always been infuriated by the tendency of facts to get in the way of Marxist theses. One might say that the whole of Stalin’s dictatorship had been a campaign against facts, or rather a superhuman attempt to transform the awkward facts of humanity into new ‘deep structures’, under six feet of earth. To Structuralists, facts were by definition on the surface, and therefore misleading. To attempt to marshal them in the form of argument was, obviously, nothing more than a shameless defence of the status quo.
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Structuralism fitted well into the Potemkin world of the United Nations, where facts were unimportant, where North was South, and vice-versa, where wealth created poverty, where Zionism was racism and sin was the White Man’s monopoly. The multinational, that sinister infrastructure of international injustice, was a quintessentially structuralist concept. Structuralism, like Marxism, was a form of gnosticism, that is an arcane system of knowledge, revealed to the élite
.
Both expanded rapidly in the Sixties and, in conjunction, were intellectually predominant in the Seventies. But reality cannot for long be banished from history. Facts have a way of making their presence felt. The pattern of the Seventies, so dismaying to the few democratic societies which remained under the rule of law, was beginning to break up before the decade ended.

TWENTY
The Recovery of Freedom

From the initial tragedy of the First World War, 1914–18, the twentieth century had appeared to many a relentless succession of moral and physical disasters. These had occurred despite the rapid increase in wealth, notably in the advanced countries, and the steady forward march of scientific discovery. As early as 1945 H. G. Wells, once the prophet of ever-accelerating human progress, had given up in despair, publishing his gloomy testament,
Mind at the End of Its Tether.
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Thereafter a further declension appeared to have taken place, the 1970s being a decade of exceptional anxiety and disillusionment when concern about the environment and the exhaustion of raw materials were added to the spread of Cold War competition throughout the world and the ravages of collectivism in Eastern Europe, most of Africa and large parts of Asia and Latin America. Everywhere, democracy and the rule of law that gave it meaning appeared on the defensive, even in its heartlands. In 1979 President Carter referred publicly to the ‘crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will … The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.’
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Yet, with the 1980s, there came a great wind of change in the affairs of mankind which, gathering momentum throughout the decade and beyond into the 1990s, swept all before it and left the global landscape transformed beyond recognition. The 1980s formed one of the watersheds of modern history. The spirit of democracy recovered its self-confidence and spread. The rule of law was re-established in large parts of the globe and international predation checked and punished. The United Nations, and especially its Security Council, began for the first time to function as its founders intended. Capitalist economies flourished mightily and, almost everywhere, there was growing recognition that the market
system was not merely the surest but the only way to increase wealth and raise living standards. As an intellectual creed, collectivism collapsed and the process of abandoning it got under way even in its strongholds. Stalin’s empire, the last of the colonial conglomerates, disintegrated. The Soviet system itself came under increasing strain, and Russia’s multiplying problems undermined both its status as a superpower and its rulers’ will to continue the Cold War. By the early 1990s, the nightmare vision of thermonuclear conflict faded and the world seemed safer, more stable and, above all, more hopeful. How did this dramatic counter-revolution come about?

It was essentially the work of outstanding popular leaders, who mirrored the thoughts, desires and faith of ordinary men and women. It was certainly not the work of the intelligentsia, of philosophers, economists and political theorists, or of academics generally. The universities had little or nothing to do with it, just as they had played virtually no part in the first Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century.
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Indeed while Marxism was being progressively abandoned by the governments which had once ardently propagated it, it continued to be upheld and taught only in that traditional home of lost causes, the university campus.

It is important to look in a little detail at the failure of intellectual leadership in the twentieth century, or rather at its apparent inability to offer clear and firm guidance to a perplexed humanity, because this failure or inability lay at the root of the tragedies of the age. In the seven decades which followed the First World War, knowledge itself expanded more rapidly than ever. Yet in many ways an educated man in the 1990s was less equipped with certitudes than an ancient Egyptian in 2500
BC
. At least the Egyptian of the Old Kingdom had a clear cosmology. In 1915 Einstein had undermined the Newtonian universe, and the cosmology substituted for it was merely speculative, since the General Theory of Relativity was a classical explanation and could not be used to describe a singularity such as the conditions at the moment of creation. The mathematical model of the Big Bang, in which matter expanded from zero some 6,000–10,000 million years ago, with everything essential occurring in the first twenty minutes, was no more demonstrable than the Judeo-Christian hypothesis first crudely described in Chapter One of the Book of Genesis, which it strikingly resembled. During the next three-quarters of the century, empirical knowledge of the universe accumulated at impressive speed, above all in the 1970s and 1980s, when data from space probes began to reach the earth in prodigious quantities. The measurement of microwave background radiation which fills the universe indicated
the near-certainty of a Big Bang.
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But one cosmologist laconically observed: ‘Our universe is simply one of thousands which happen from time to time.’
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A clear picture of primal events was as elusive as ever.

Indeed the historian of the modern world is sometimes tempted to reach the depressing conclusion that progress is destructive of certitude. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Western élites were confident that men and progress were governed by reason. A prime discovery of modern times is that reason plays little part in our affairs. Even scientists are not moved by it. As Max Planck sorrowfully observed: ‘A new scientific truth is not usually presented in a way to convince its opponents. Rather, they die off, and a rising generation is familiarized with the truth from the start.’
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Three years after Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was verified by Eddington, ending belief in fixed space and time, Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the key figures of our period, published his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
, which cumulatively over the decades tended to destroy confidence in philosophy as a guide to human reason. For half a century Wittgenstein’s influence on academic philosophy was immense. By the early 1990s doubts were raised about his sanity: was he a genius, or simply a madman?
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But by then much damage had been done. A leading Logical Positivist like Sir A.J.Ayer, who at the time of his death in 1989 was widely regarded as the world’s leading philosopher, remarked with some complacency that philosophy demonstrated that man was ignorant rather than knowledgeable: ‘[It] tends to show that we can’t really know lots of things which we think we know.’ Empirical popular knowledge, usually termed ‘common sense’, had been dismissed contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as ‘the metaphysics of savages’.
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But if academic philosophers thought the world was peopled by fools, most made little or no attempt to enlighten them on the great issues of the day, and even Russell, who wrote on such matters, drew an absolute distinction between his popular journalism and his ‘serious’ work.
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The negative and destructive nature of twentieth-century philosophy, its obsession with the inadequacies and failures of language, above all its failure to address itself to the immense problems confronting humanity, was a source of shame to the few who tried to grapple with them, notably Karl Popper: ‘I cannot say that I am proud of being called a philosopher,’ he wrote.
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