Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  According to the most widespread analysis, the right place to lay blame was with what people called ‘the system’. Marx’s predictions seemed to be coming true. The poor were getting poorer. The failures of capitalism would drive them to revolution. Democracy was a disaster. Authoritarian leaders were needed to force people to collaborate for the common good. Perhaps only totalitarian governments could deliver justice, extending their responsibility over every department of life, including the production and distribution of goods. Cometh the hour, cometh the ideology.

  Fascism was a political bias in favour of might, order, the state, and war, with a system of values that put the group before the individual, authority before freedom, cohesion before diversity, revenge before reconciliation, retribution before compassion, the supremacy of the strong before the defence of the weak. Fascism justified revocation of the rights of dissenters, dissidents, misfits, and subversives. Inasmuch as it was intellectual at all, it was a heap of ideas crushed into coherence like scrap iron in a junkyard compressor: an ideological fabrication, knocked together out of many insecurely interlocking bits of corporate, authoritarian, and totalitarian traditions. Whether fascists were splinters of socialism has been a matter of passionate debate. They mobilized proletarians and petty bourgeois by advocating policies that one might crudely summarize as ‘socialism without expropriation’. Their creed could be classified as an independently evolved doctrine, or as a state of mind in search of an ideology, or merely as a slick name for unprincipled opportunism. In ancient Rome, a fasces was a bundle of sticks with an axe in the middle of it, carried before magistrates as a symbol of their power to scourge and behead people. Benito Mussolini adopted this icon of bloodstained law enforcement as what would now be called the ‘logo’ of his party, to express the essence of fascism: the weal of the rod and the gash of the axe. The colours of its street-troopers’ shirtings might change or fade; the forms of its rites and the angles of its salutes might be altered or dropped. But you could tell it by effects you could feel: the sweat of the fear of it, the stamp of its heel. The magical lilt of fascist mumbo-jumbo could beguile even people who hated or feared it. ‘Fascism is not a new order’, said Aneurin Bevan, the British socialist leader, who was notorious for wrapping utterances in gnomic obscurity, like Sam Goldwyn or Yogi Berra without the humour, ‘it is the future refusing to be born.’27

  Nazism shared all these characteristics but was something more than fascism. Whereas fascists were routinely anticlerical, Nazis actively imitated religion. They replaced providence with history. For Nazis, history was an impersonal, powerful, thrusting force with a ‘course’ no one could dam. Human lives were playthings, like snakes to a mongoose or rats to a cat. History demanded human sacrifices, like a hungry goddess, strengthening herself by devouring profane races. The framework and language of millenarianism (see here) suited Nazis. The fulfilment of history would be a ‘thousand-year Reich’. Well-orchestrated ceremonial, shrines and sanctuaries, icons and saints, processions and ecstasies, hymns and chants completed the cult-life and liturgy of the quasi-religion. Like every irrational dogma, Nazism demanded unthinking assent from its followers: submission to the infallibility of the Führer. Nazis fantasized about replacing Christianity by restoring ancient folk-paganism. Some of them turned Heimatschutz – ‘the homeland quest’ – into a mystic trail that led through stone circles to Wewelsburg Castle, where, Heinrich Himmler believed, ley lines met at the centre of Germany and the world.28

  Ideologies of order, at the sacrifice of humanity and pity, summed up the contradictions of modernity: technology progressed; morality regressed or, at best, seemed to stagnate. Sometimes, where bourgeois intellectuals like me gather, at dinner parties or academic conferences, I am surprised to hear expressions of confidence in moral progress: fluctuations in reported violence in developed countries, for instance, are often mistaken for evidence that educators’ efforts yield dividends. Really, however, they just show that violence has been displaced to evidential black holes that don’t show up in the statistics – to state coercion, for instance, and ‘terminating’ the elderly or unborn. Or the bien-pensants take comfort in the tolerance we properly accord to an ever wider range of traditionally proscribed behaviours – especially in matters of taste and dress; but the sum total of intolerance, and of the rage it nurtures, probably does not diminish. The noisy little men failed in the Second World War, but the allure of final solutions has not entirely faded. As the chaos and complexities of society get more intractable, the pace of change more threatening, electorates are reverting to authoritarian options: tougher policing, tighter gaols, torture for terrorists, walls and expulsions and exclusions, and national self-seclusion outside international organizations. In some ways, authoritarianism has become an ideology capable of transcending traditional rivalries. As I write, Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB boss, seems to have become the idol of backwoods republicans in the United States and the darling of Donald Trump. Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma. Totalitarianism may not have exhausted its appeal.

  ‌Chapter 10

  The Age of Uncertainty

  Twentieth-Century Hesitancies

  What happens inside minds reflects what happens outside them. The acceleration of change in the external world since the end of the nineteenth century has had convulsive effects on thinking: unrealistic hopes in some minds, intimidating fears in others, and puzzle and perplexity everywhere. We used to count in aeons, millennia, centuries, or generations when measuring change. A week is now a long time, not just in politics (as Harold Wilson supposedly said), but in every kind of culture. As change hurtles, the past seems less trackable, the future more unpredictable, the present less intelligible. Uncertainty unsettles. Voters turn in despair to demagogues with Twitter-adapted fixes, and snake-oil statesmen with slick and simplistic placebos for social problems.

  The context of change is unavoidable for anyone who wants to understand the ideas that arose in response. First, for the biggest single indicator of acceleration in the recent past, look at global consumption. It increased nearly twentyfold in the course of the twentieth century. Population meanwhile merely quadrupled. Industrialization and urbanization made consumption hurtle uncontrollably, perhaps unsustainably. It is worth pausing to reflect on the facts: increased consumption per capita, not increase of population, is overwhelmingly responsible for humanly induced stresses in the environment. Madcap consumption is mainly the fault of the rich; recent population growth has been mainly among the poor. Production, meanwhile, inescapably, has risen in line with consumption; the range of products at rich consumers’ disposal has multiplied bewilderingly, especially in pursuit of technological innovations, medical services and remedies, and financial and commercial instruments. World population growth has reignited Malthusian apprehensions and prompted, at intervals, in some countries, intrusive programmes of population control.1 But the numbers – especially of the poor – are not to blame for most of the problems laid to their account. We could accommodate more people if we gave up some of our greed.2

  In regions suitably equipped with physically unstrenuous means of livelihood and death-defying medical technology, lives lengthened unprecedentedly in the twentieth century. (We should not expect the lengthening to last – much less to lengthen further: the survivors of the century’s wars were toughened in adversity; their children and grandchildren may turn out to be less durable.) Unlike most long-drawn-out experiences, lengthened life did not seem to slow down. To the ageing, events zoomed by, like hedgerows blurred into indistinguishability through the window of a bullet train. When I was a boy, sci-fi’s favourite voyagers struggled to adjust in unfamiliar worlds far removed in time, and therefore in customs, from their own. By the time I was old, the BBC was featuring a hero projected back only about four decades. For young viewers early in the twenty-first century the 1970s were depicted as an almost unmanageably primitive era, without such apparently indis
pensable gadgets as home computers, video game consoles, or mobile phones. The show made me feel like a time traveller myself. Now, everyone resembles Rip Van Winkle, except that we need hardly go to sleep for more than a night to share his experience. We wake almost daily to unrecognizably changed manners, fashions, attitudes, surroundings, values, and even morals.

  In a volatile world, victims of instability suffer from ‘future shock’.3 Fear, bewilderment, and resentment erode their security, well-being, and confidence in the future. When people feel the threat of change, they reach for the familiar, like a child clenching a comforter. When they do not understand what befalls them, they panic. The locus classicus was rural France in the summer of 1789, when peasants, convulsed by grande peur, turned their pitchforks and brands on suspected grain-hoarders. The contemporary equivalent is to turn on refugees, migrants, and minorities, or to clutch at the delusive reassurance of religious fanaticism or political extremism. Intellectuals, meanwhile, take refuge in ‘postmodern’ strategies: indifference, anomie, moral relativism and scientific indeterminacy, the embrace of chaos, je-m’en-foutisme.

  This chapter is like a pioneering explorer’s voyage through uncertain seas. It starts with the thoughts that – further or additional to pre-First World War relativisms – undermined traditional certainties. We then turn to twentieth-century philosophies and outlooks expressive of the new hesitancy, or representative of a search for alternatives – malleable but serviceable – to the discarded, hard-edged worldviews of the past. We unfold them – existentialism and postmodernism – along with a surprising companion or consequence: the increasing receptivity of Western minds to influences from Asia. After looking at the political and economic thinking of minds unable to persevere in ideological certainty, we shall end the chapter with a review of some largely unsuccessful but still-unextinguished attempts to reassert dogma and recover former assuredness in the company of surprising bedfellows: scientism and religious fundamentalism.

  ‌The Undeterminable World

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, every measurable kind of change leapt off the graph paper. Contemporaries noticed. Franz Boas’s student, Alexander Goldenweiser, who studied totems and feared robots, suggested that cultural change ‘comes with a spurt’ in surges between inert phases – rather as Stephen Jay Gould thought evolution happens, ‘punctuating’ long periods of equilibrium. Boas himself noted that ‘the rapidity of change has grown at an ever-increasing rate’.4 ‘The nature of our epoch’, commented the fashionable poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1905, ‘is multiplicity and indeterminacy … Foundations that other generations thought firm are really just sliding.’5 In 1917 another of Boas’s pupils, Robert Lowie, postulated a ‘threshold’, beyond which, after ‘exceedingly slow growth’, culture ‘darts forward, gathering momentum’.6 By 1919 ‘the spirit of unrest’ – the New York Times could say – had ‘invaded science’.7

  Further contradictions piled up in the world of quanta. Electron-spotters noticed that subatomic particles moved between positions seemingly irreconcilable with their momentum, at rates apparently different from their measurable speed, to end up where it was impossible for them to be. Working in collaborative tension, Niels Bohr and his German colleague Werner Heisenberg coined a term for the phenomenon: ‘uncertainty’ or ‘indeterminacy’. The debate they started provoked a revolution in thought. Scientists who thought about it realized that, because the world of big objects is continuous with the subatomic world, indeterminacy vitiates experiments in both spheres. The observer is part of every experiment and there is no level of observation at which his findings are objective. Scientists were back on par with their predecessors, the alchemists, who, working with impractically complex distillations under the wavering influence of the stars, could never repeat the conditions of an experiment and, therefore, never foresee its results.

  When scientists acknowledged their uncertainty, they inspired practitioners of other disciplines to do the same. Academics in humanities and social studies look up to science, which gets more attention, commands more prestige, and mobilizes more research money. Science is a benchmark of the objectivity others crave as a guarantee of the truthfulness of their work. In the twentieth century philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, economists, linguists, and even some students of literature and theology proclaimed their intention to escape their status as subjects. They began to call themselves scientists in affectation of objectivity. The project turned out to be delusive. What they had in common with scientists, strictly so-called, was the opposite of what they had hoped: they were all implicated in their own findings. Objectivity was a chimera.

  We usually strive to retrieve or replace lost confidence. Surely, people said in the twenties, there must still be reliable signposts to help us avoid the pits we have dug in the graveyard of certainty. Logic, for instance: was that not still an infallible guide? What about mathematics? Numbers, surely, were beyond corruption by change, and unaffected by quantum contradictions. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead thought so. Before the First World War, they demonstrated to their own satisfaction, and that of almost everyone else who thought about it, that logic and mathematics were essentially similar and perfectly commensurable systems.

  In 1931, however, Kurt Gödel proved them wrong when he proposed the theorem that bears his name. Maths and logic may be complete, or they may be consistent, but they cannot be both. They include, inescapably, unprovable claims. To illustrate Gödel’s thinking, the brilliant enthusiast for artificial intelligence, Douglas R. Hofstadter, has pointed to drawings by the ingenious graphic designer, M. C. Escher, who, in search of ways of representing complex dimensions on flat surfaces, began to read mathematical works in the 1930s. The subjects in which he came to specialize were self-entangled structures, in which he veiled – to use his own word – impossible systems: stairways that led only to themselves; waterfalls that were their own sources; pairs of hands drawing each other.8

  Gödel believed in mathematics, but the effect of his work was to undermine the faith of others. He felt certain – as certain as Plato or Pythagoras – that numbers exist as objective entities, independent of thought. They would still be there, even if there were no one to count them. Gödel’s theorem, however, reinforced the opposite belief. He accepted Kant’s view that numbers were known by apprehension, but he helped inspire others to doubt it. He excited doubts as to whether numbers were known at all, rather than just assumed. A wonderful skit by George Boolos purports to summarize Gödel’s arguments ‘in words of one syllable’, concluding that ‘it can’t be proved that it can’t be proved that two plus two is five’. This elusive computation showed that ‘math is not a lot of bunk’.9 Some readers concluded that it was.

  As well as undermining Russell’s and Whitehead’s traditional way of understanding the mutual mappability of arithmetic and logic, Gödel provoked a final, unintended effect: philosophers of mathematics began to devise new arithmetics in defiance of logic – rather as non-Euclidean geometries had been devised in defiance of traditional physics. Intuitionist mathematics came close, at the extremes, to saying that every man has his own mathematics. To one mind or group of minds a proof may be momentarily satisfactory but permanently insecure. Paradigms or assumptions change.

  Poincaré had already made such new departures imaginable by pointing out the transience of agreement about all kinds of knowledge. But he left most readers’ convictions about the reality of number intact. One of the earliest and most influential intuitionists, for instance, L. E. J. Brouwer of Amsterdam, thought he could intuit the existence of numbers from the passage of time: each successive moment added to the tally. If, as we have seen, Bergson’s re-interpretation of time as a mental construct was irreconcilable with Brouwer’s insight, Gödel’s work was even more subversive. It challenged Plato’s confidence that the study of numbers ‘obviously compels the mind to use pure thought in order to get at the truth’. Now neither the purity nor the truth of arit
hmetic could be assumed; ‘that which puts its trust in measurement and reckoning’, Plato continued, ‘must be the best part of the soul’,10 but that trust now seemed misplaced. To lose the trust and forgo the compulsion was a terrible forfeiture. The effect of Gödel’s demonstrations on the way the world thinks was comparable to that of termites in a vessel formerly treated as watertight by those aboard it: the shock of the obvious. If maths and logic were leaky, the world was a ship of fools. Infuriatingly, for him, he was ‘admired because misunderstood’. Self-styled followers ignored his deepest convictions and embraced his licence for chaos.11