The Astonishing 20th Century

By Paul Gray

The 20th century began slowly, to the ticking of grandfather clocks and the stately rhythms of progress established by high Victorian seriousness. Thanks to science, industry and moral philosophy, mankind's steps had at last been guided unerringly up the right path. The century of steam was about to give way to the century of oil and electricity, new and transforming sources of power and light. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, only 41 years old in 1900, proposed a scientific basis for the notion that progress was gradual but inevitable, ordained by natural law.

And everything argued that such development would continue in the small, incremental steps that had marked the progress of much of the 19th century. Inventions like the railroad or the telegraph or the typewriter had enabled people to get on with their ordinary lives a little more conveniently. The news, in 1901, that an Italian physicist named Guglielmo Marconi had received wireless telegraphic messages sent from Cornwall to Newfoundland was hailed as a triumph, but few discerned its full meaning: the birth of a communications revolution. Rather, it was another welcome convenience.

No one could have guessed then that, in the century just dawning, new ideas would burst upon the world with a force and frequency that would turn this stately march of progress into a long-distance, free-for-all sprint. Thrust into this race, the children of the 20th century would witness more change in their daily existence and environment than anyone else who had ever walked the planet.

This high-velocity onslaught of new ideas and technologies seemed to ratify older dreams of a perfectible life on earth, of an existence in which the shocks of nature had been tamed. But the unleashing of unparalleled progress was also accompanied by something quite different: a massive regression toward savagery. If technology endowed humans with Promethean aspirations and powers, it also gave them the means to exterminate one another.

Those means did not for long remain unemployed. Assassinations in Sarajevo in 1914 lit a spark that set off an unprecedented explosion of destruction and death. The Great War did more than devastate a generation of Europeans. It set the tone -- the political, moral and intellectual temper -- for much that followed. Once the carnage (more than 8.5 million military deaths alone) had ended, the tectonic aftershocks began to reverberate around the world.

The war hastened the already simmering Russian Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union and, hence, that protracted standoff between vast swatches of the planet that came to be called the cold war. It foretold the beginning of the end of European overseas expansion. And the U.S., against many of its instincts, became a superpower.

Before long, the Great War received a new name: World War I. The roaring 1920s and the Depression years of the 1930s proved to be merely a lull in the fighting, a prelude to World War II. Largely hidden during that war was an awful truth that called into question progress and the notion of human nature itself. Even now, the Holocaust -- an industry set up for the purpose of slaughtering human beings -- remains incomprehensible.

But civilization was not crushed by the two great wars, and the rubble provided the impetus to build a way of life again -- and this time to try to build it better. To a degree previously unheard of and perhaps unimaginable, the citizens of the 20th century felt free, or even fated, to reinvent themselves. In that task they were assisted by two profound but unsettling developments, both of them conceived, oddly enough, before the Great War began. A Viennese physician named Sigmund Freud altered the way people would come to see themselves, their emotions, desires and dreams. And a gentle German-born patent examiner named Albert Einstein thought up an entirely new shape for reality itself -- and opened the door to the Bomb.

At the beginning of the century, people had inherited a world in which household electricity was a luxury, an automobile an object of curiosity, recreation a trip to a concert or vaudeville show. As the century progressed, these same people witnessed unparalleled explosions of technical advances. Recorded music began to proliferate. Silent films acquired plots and, later, became talkies. Radio took off in the 1920s and led to television, which transformed the American family's idea of leisure and entertainment. Cars ran off the assembly line by the tens of thousands, launching the great American love affair with the auto. It took scarcely 30 years from the Wright brothers' first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to the launching of the first large airliner for civilian traffic, and less than that until jet aircraft had made much of the globe less than a day away from most airports. The power and sophistication of computers enabled people to work and think in previously unexplored ways. And then there was space travel, interplanetary probes, geosynchronous communication satellites.

Relief from disease, the fearsome companion of centuries, arrived with the application of chemical research to healing and preventive medicine. The most impressive, far-reaching book of the 20th century is its pharmacopoeia, the list of wonder drugs that have changed the tenor of human existence. During the span of a single lifetime, science learned to cure or prevent through vaccination a staggering list of plagues, ranging from syphilis and gonorrhea to typhoid and polio.

Constant innovations and culture shocks had startling effects on the 20th century consciousness. The belief -- or faith -- that science can meet all challenges was coupled with the sense that science also creates plenty of problems. Constant change, for example, has had a deracinating effect. Traditional loyalties and ties have all been challenged or superseded by the allure of the new. As technology's blessings have spread, so have anxieties, the sense that some vital control over individual destiny has been ceded to impersonal forces.

The art of the 20th century, particularly in its first five decades, impressively reflected and helped shape the sensibilities of an age that saw itself as distinct, cut off from its past. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the poem that most typifies its age. A similar attitude prevailed among a number of revolutionary artists: Picasso in art, Stravinsky in music, Joyce in literature, Balanchine in ballet and Mies Van Der Rohe in architecture. Each of these men mastered the techniques of his trade and then saw fit to wrench old forms into previously unheard-of shapes.

In the wake of this movement, which came to be known as Modernism, an entirely different tendency arose. The Modernists had been elitist, scornful of mass values and tastes. Now their worst nightmares came true. Postwar culture after 1945 began to drown Modernism in a torrent of mass entertainment, facilitated by film, TV, records and a host of allied electronic innovations. At the same time, during the '50s and '60s, a form of institutionalized rebellion took hold among the world's youth as a cultural norm. The old, normal urge to flout authority was greatly magnified and aided by the ubiquity of mass culture.

As this flood of sensory stimuli grew, the very notion of "high" art began to be questioned. The new cultural icons, including pioneers like Elvis and the Beatles, were immediately accessible and understandable. Even while it splintered into different subgenres, rock music spread around the world, dominating record sales and the airwaves. Pop culture's frenzied quest for the new and the shocking continued to make traditionalists blanch, but the beat and the noise went on.

In one respect, at least, the century provided a complete, old-fashioned story, one with a beginning, a middle and an end. The collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 settled the cold war, that long, Manichaean, superpower struggle between two opposing philosophies of governance. The suppression of individual liberties in the service of a common good stood exposed as hollow, inefficient and, most damning of all, corrupt.

But the moral of this story remains untold. With their adamantine enemy suddenly broken, liberal democracies found themselves groping after the certainties that their peers of 100 years ago had taken for granted. The tools for engineering longer, more comfortable lives have increased exponentially, but the ends for which such improvements are intended are still unclear. More shopping malls? Ever greater material abundance ripped from a depleted earth? All of this has sharpened and brought into higher focus a question as old as the dawn of philosophy: What is life for and why are we here to lead it? Thanks to this amazing age, more people than ever before have the freedom to ask the question for themselves.