The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  The Vienna–Budapest (and Prague) axis did not disappear completely after World War I. The Vienna Circle of philosophers, led by Moritz Schlick, flourished in the 1920s, and Franz Kafka and Robert Musil produced their most important works. The society still produced thinkers such as Michael Polanyi, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Karl Popper, and Ernst Gombrich – but they came to prominence only after the rise of the Nazis caused them to flee to the West. Vienna as a buzzing intellectual centre did not survive the end of empire.

  Between 1914 and 1918 all direct links between Great Britain and Germany had been cut off, as Wittgenstein discovered when he was unable to return to Cambridge after his holiday. But Holland, like Switzerland, remained neutral, and at the University of Leiden, in 1915, W. de Sitter was sent a copy of Einstein’s paper on the general theory of relativity. An accomplished physicist, de Sitter was well connected and realised that as a Dutch neutral he was an important go-between. He therefore passed on a copy of Einstein’s paper to Arthur Eddington in London.54 Eddington was already a central figure in the British scientific establishment, despite having a ‘mystical bent,’ according to one of his biographers.55 Born in Kendal in the Lake District in 1882, into a Quaker family of farmers, he was educated first at home and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler and came into contact with J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. Fascinated by astronomy since he was a boy, he took up an appointment at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich from 1906, and in 1912 became secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society. His first important work was a massive and ambitious survey of the structure of the universe. This survey, combined with the work of other researchers and the development of more powerful telescopes, had revealed a great deal about the size, structure, and age of the heavens. Its main discovery, made in 1912, was that the brightness of so-called Cepheid stars pulsated in a regular way associated with their sizes. This helped establish real distances in the heavens and showed that our own galaxy has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years and that the sun, which had been thought to be at its centre, is in fact about 30,000 light-years excentric. The second important result of Cepheid research was the discovery that the spiral nebulae were in fact extragalactic objects, entire galaxies themselves, and very far away (the nearest, the Great Nebula in Andromeda, being 750,000 light-years away). This eventually provided a figure for the distance of the farthest objects, 500 million light-years away, and an age for the universe of between 10 and 20 billion years.56

  Eddington had also been involved in ideas about the evolution of stars, based on work that showed them to consist of giants and dwarves. Giants are in general less dense than dwarves, which, according to Eddington’s calculations, could be up to 20 million degrees Kelvin at their centre, with a density of one ton per cubic inch. But Eddington was also a keen traveller and had visited Brazil and Malta to study eclipses. His work and his academic standing thus made him the obvious choice when the Physical Society of London, during wartime, wanted someone to prepare a Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation.57 This, which appeared in 1918, was the first complete account of general relativity to be published in English. Eddington had already received a copy of Einstein’s 1915 paper from Holland, so he was well prepared, and his report attracted widespread attention, so much so that Sir Frank Dyson, the Astronomer Royal, offered an unusual opportunity to test Einstein’s theory. On 29 May 1919, there was to be a total eclipse. This offered the chance to assess if, as Einstein predicted, light rays were bent as they passed near the sun. It says something for the Astronomer Royal’s influence that, during the last full year of the war, Dyson obtained from the government a grant of £1,000 to mount not one but two expeditions, to Principe off the coast of West Africa and to Sobral, across the Atlantic, in Brazil.58

  Eddington was given Principe, together with E. T. Cottingham. In the Astronomer Royal’s study on the night before they left, Eddington, Cottingham, and Dyson sat up late calculating how far light would have to be deflected for Einstein’s theory to be confirmed. At one point, Cottingham asked rhetorically what would happen if they found twice the expected value. Drily, Dyson replied, ‘Then Eddington will go mad and you will have to come home alone!’59 Eddington’s own notebooks continue the account: ‘We sailed early in March to Lisbon. At Funchal we saw [the other two astronomers] off to Brazil on March 16, but we had to remain until April 9 … and got our first sight of Principe in the morning of April 23…. We soon found we were in clover, everyone anxious to give every help we needed … about May 16 we had no difficulty in getting the check photographs on three different nights. I had a good deal of work measuring these.’ Then the weather changed. On the morning of 29 May, the day of the eclipse, the heavens opened, the downpour lasted for hours, and Eddington began to fear that their arduous journey was a waste of time. However, at one-thirty in the afternoon, by which time the partial phase of the eclipse had already begun, the clouds at last began to clear. ‘I did not see the eclipse,’ Eddington wrote later, ‘being too busy changing plates, except for one glance to make sure it had begun and another half-way through to see how much cloud there was. We took sixteen photographs. They are all good of the sun, showing a very remarkable prominence; but the cloud has interfered with the star images. The last six photographs show a few images which I hope will give us what we need…. June 3. We developed the photographs, 2 each night for 6 nights after the eclipse, and I spent the whole day measuring. The cloudy weather upset my plans…. But the one plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein.’ Eddington turned to his companion. ‘Cottingham,’ he said, ‘you won’t have to go home alone.’60

  Eddington later described the experiment off West Africa as ‘the greatest moment of my life.’61 Einstein had set three tests for relativity, and now two of them had supported his ideas. Eddington wrote to Einstein immediately, giving him a complete account and a copy of his calculations. Einstein wrote back from Berlin on 15 December 1919, ‘Lieber Herr Eddington, Above all I should like to congratulate you on the success of your difficult expedition. Considering the great interest you have taken in the theory of relativity even in earlier days I think I can assume that we are indebted primarily to your initiative for the fact that these expeditions could take place. I am amazed at the interest which my English colleagues have taken in the theory in spite of its difficulty.’62

  Einstein was being disingenuous. The publicity given to Eddington’s confirmation of relativity made Einstein the most famous scientist in the world. ‘EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS’ blazed the headline in the New York Times, and many other newspapers around the world treated the episode in the same way. The Royal Society convened a special session in London at which Frank Dyson gave a full account of the expeditions to Sobral and Principe.63 Alfred North Whitehead was there, and in his book Science and the Modern World, though reluctant to commit himself to print, he relayed some of the excitement: ‘The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging: – the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalisations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.’64

  Relativity theory had not found universal acceptance when Einstein had first proposed it. Eddington’s Principe observations were therefore the point at which many scientists were forced to concede that this exceedingly uncommon idea about the physical world was, in fact, true. Thought would never be the same again. Common sense very definitely had its limitations. And Eddington’s, or rather Dyson’s, timing was perfect. In more ways than one, the old world had been eclipsed.

  11

  THE ACQUISITIVE WASTELAND

  Much of the thought of the 1920s, and almost al
l 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 angry and too blunt to be considered great literature. Tawney was typical of a certain kind of figure in British society at the time (William Beveridge and George Orwell were others). Like them, Tawney came from an upper-class family and was educated at a public school (Rugby) and Balliol College, Oxford; but he was interested all his life in poverty and especially in inequality. After university, he decided, instead of going into the City, as many of his background would have done, to work at Toynbee Hall in London’s East End (Beveridge, the founder of Britain’s welfare state, was also there). The idea behind Toynbee Hall was to bring a university atmosphere and lifestyle to the working classes, and in general it had a profound effect on all who experienced it. It helped turn Tawney into the British socialist intellectual best in touch with the unions.1 But it was the miners’ strike in February 1919 that was to shape Tawney’s subsequent career. Seeking to head off confrontation, the government established a Royal Commission on the Coal Mines, and Tawney was one of six men representing the labour side (another was Sidney Webb).2 Millions of words of evidence were put before the commission, and Tawney read all of them. He was so moved by the accounts of danger, ill-health, and poverty that he wrote the first of the three books for which he is chiefly known. These were The Acquisitive Society (1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and Equality (1931).

  Tawney, a mild man whose bushy moustache made him appear avuncular, hated the brutalism of unbridled capitalism, particularly the waste and inequalities it produced. He served in the trenches in the war as an ordinary soldier, refusing a commission. He expected capitalism to break down afterward: he thought that it misjudged human nature, elevating production and the making of profit, which ought to be a means to certain ends, into ends in themselves. This had the effect, he argued, of encouraging the wrong instincts in people, by which he meant acquisitiveness. A very religious man, Tawney felt that acquisitiveness went against the grain – in particular, it sabotaged ‘the instinct for service and solidarity’ that is the basis for traditional civil society.3 He thought that in the long run capitalism was incompatible with culture. Under capitalism, he wrote, culture became more private, less was shared, and this trend went against the common life of men – individuality inevitably promoted inequality. The very concept of culture therefore changed, becoming less and less an inner state of mind and more a function of one’s possessions.4 On top of that, Tawney also felt that capitalism was, at bottom, incompatible with democracy. He suspected that the inequalities endemic in capitalism – inequalities made more visible than ever by the acquisitive accumulation of consumer products – would ultimately threaten social cohesion. He saw his role, therefore, as helping to provide an important moral counterattack against capitalism for the many like himself who felt it had been at least partly responsible for war.5

  But this wasn’t Tawney’s only role. He was an historian, and in his second book he looked at capitalism historically. The thesis of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was that ‘economic man,’ the creature of classical economics, was by no means the universal figure in history he was supposed to be, that human nature was not necessarily shaped as classical liberals said it was. Tawney argued that the advent of capitalism was not inevitable, that its successes were relatively recent, and that in the process it had rendered extinct a whole range of behaviours and experiences and replaced them with its own. In particular capitalism had extinguished religion, though the church had to take some share of the blame insofar as it had abdicated its role as a moral leader.6

  In retrospect, not all of Tawney’s criticisms of capitalism ring true anymore.7 Most obviously, and importantly, capitalism has not proved incompatible with democracy. But he was not wholly wrong; capitalism probably is inimical to what Tawney meant by culture – indeed, as we shall see, capitalism has changed what we all mean by culture; and it is arguable that capitalism has aided the change in morality we have seen during the century, though there have been other reasons as well.

  *

  Tawney’s vision was bitter and specific. Not everyone was as savage about capitalism as he was, but as the 1920s wore on and reflection about World War I matured, an unease persisted. What characterised this unease, however, was that it concerned more than capitalism, extending to Western civilisation as a whole, in some senses an equivalent of Oswald Spengler’s thesis that there was decay and ruin everywhere in the West. Without question the man who caught this mood best was both a banker – the archsymbol of capitalism – and a poet, the licensed saboteur.

  T. S. Eliot was born in 1888, into a very religious Puritan family. He studied at Harvard, took a year off to study poetry in Paris, then returned to Harvard as a member of the faculty, teaching philosophy. Always interested in Indian philosophy and the links between philosophy and religion, he was infuriated when Harvard tried to separate the one from the other as different disciplines. In 1914 he transferred to Oxford, where he hoped to continue his philosophical studies. Shortly after, war broke out. In Europe, Eliot met two people who had an immense effect on him: Ezra Pound and Vivien Haigh-Wood. At the time they met, Pound was a much more worldly figure than Eliot, a good teacher and at that time a better poet. Vivien Haigh-Wood became Eliot’s first wife. Initially happy, the marriage had turned into a disaster by the early 1920s: Vivien descended steadily into madness, and Eliot found the circumstances so trying that he himself sought psychiatric treatment in Switzerland.8

  The puritanical world Eliot grew up in had been fiercely rational. In such a world science had been dominant in that it offered the promise of relief from injustice. Beatrice Webb had shared Eliot’s early hopes when, in 1870, she said, ‘It was by science, and by science alone, that all human misery would be ultimately swept away.’9 And yet by 1918 the world insofar as Eliot was concerned was in ruins. For him, as for others, science had helped produce a war in which the weapons were more terrible than ever, in which the vast nineteenth-century cities were characterised as much by squalor as by the beauty the impressionists painted, where in fact the grinding narratives of Zola told a grimmer truth. Then there was the new physics that had helped remove more fundamental layers of certainty; there was Darwin undermining religion, and Freud sabotaging reason itself. A consolidated edition of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough was also published in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land, and this too hit hard at Eliot’s world. It showed that the religions of so-called savages around the world were no less developed, complex, or sophisticated than Christianity. At a stroke the simple social Darwinian idea that Eliot’s world was the current endpoint in the long evolutionary struggle, the ‘highest’ stage of man’s development, was removed. Also subverted was the idea that there was anything spec
ial about Christianity itself. Harvard had been right after all to divorce philosophy and religion. In Max Weber’s term, the West had entered a phase of Entzauberung, ‘unmagicking’ or disenchantment. At a material, intellectual, and spiritual level – in all senses – Eliot’s world was laid waste.10

  Eliot’s response was a series of verses originally called He Do the Police in Different Voices, taken from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Eliot was at the time working in the colonial and foreign branch of Lloyds Bank, ‘fascinated by the science of money’ and helping with the prewar debt position between Lloyds and Germany. He got up at five every morning to write before going into the bank, a routine so exhausting that in the autumn of 1921 he took a prolonged leave.11 Pound’s poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, published the year before, had a not dissimilar theme to The Waste Land. It explored the sterility, intellectual, artistic, and sexual, of the old world afflicted by war. In Mauberly, 1920, Pound described Britain as ‘an old bitch, gone in the teeth.’12 But Mauberly did not have either the vividly savage images of He Do the Police, nor its shockingly original form, and Pound, to his credit, immediately recognised this. We now know that he worked hard on Eliot’s verses, pulling them into shape, making them coherent, and giving them the tide The Waste Land (one of the criteria he used was whether the lines read well out loud).13 Eliot dedicated the work to Pound, as il miglior fabbro, ‘the better maker.’14 His concern in this great poem is the sterility that he regards as the central fact of life in the postwar world, a dual sterility in both the spiritual and sexual spheres. But Eliot is not content just to pin down that sterility; he contrasts the postwar world with other worlds, other possibilities, in other places and at other times, which were fecund and creative and not at all doomed. And this is what gave The Waste Land its singular poetic architecture. As in Virginia Woolf’s novels, Joyce’s Ulysses, and Proust’s roman fleuve, the form of Eliot’s poem, though revolutionary, was integral to its message. According to Eliot’s wife, the poem – partly autobiographical – was also partly inspired by Bertrand Russell.15 Eliot juxtaposed images of dead trees, dead rats, and dead men – conjuring up the horrors of Verdun and the Somme – with references to ancient legends; scenes of sordid sex run into classical poetry; the demeaning anonymity of modern life is mingled with religious sentiments. It is this collision of different ideas that was so startling and original. Eliot was trying to show how far we have fallen, how far evolution is a process of descent.