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September 01, 2009

A golden age of civilisational anxiety

It behooves those of us convinced the sky has come unhinged to entertain those of a Pollyanna-ish perspective; if only because they are always in the majority. Matthew Price reviews Richard Overy's The Morbid Age - Britain Between the Wars, a book one hopes is less Fiskable than the work of those who would lend it praise.

In his suggestive new book The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars, the distinguished historian Richard Overy looks back to the time of Spengler to explore how the paradox of progress and peril consumed almost every aspect of British society in the two decades between the First and Second World Wars. His subject matter, Overy writes, “is in no sense an insular history”. As America does today, Britain then considered itself the hub of western civilisation – and its putative crisis was cast by intellectuals, writers, artists, politicians and scientists as a “crisis of civilisation”, tout court. Fear and doubt, then as now, were pervasive – over the resilience of capitalism, the health of the population, the direction of society and, above all, about whether Europe would soon destroy itself in another violent conflagration. The discourse Overy surveys was widespread: “There were few areas of intellectual endeavour, artistic, literary, scientific, philosophical, that were not affected in some form or other by the prevailing paradigms of impending decline and collapse,” he writes. “The sense of crisis was not specific to any one generation... nor was it confined to one political or social outlook.”

Knowing the Western world - if such is synonymous with the fortune of the United States of America* - woud emerge stronger from the Second World War, Price believes he can rely on his readers to share his amusement at a society convinced it was on a course "headlong, blindly and almost eagerly towards a gigantic carnival of self-extermination."

For all that Price finds this sort of thing "unintentionally funny", as rhetoric goes, his sneering at doomsayers of the '20s and '30s is neither funny nor clever. Tens of millions were about to be slaughtered, many millions of whom were to lose their lives in a mechanical and administrative process without parallel or precedent in human history. Hindsight is with the Cassandras. It seems to me the overwrought rhetoric of calamity was, if anything, markedly underwrought.

I expect Pollyannas can be vexed by Cassandra's such as myself. For what it is worth, I am an optimist when it comes to one aspect of the declinism of the left; their eco-catastrophe is not happening. Not to worry I have gone soft, mind you. Their false declinism is itself a symptom of real decline. Much as Overy would attribute eugenics to the declinism of the day, I see eugenics - and today's pseudo-science equivalents - as symptomatic of the real problem: Superstitious, utterly amoral, authority driven and, in today's Luddite variant, bent on the destruction of the very machines that stand between us and the rising tide, an existential threat for all it is metaphorical. But then you can hardly expect the cheering section for the decline and fall of the West to have any patience for those of us who bother to point out the problem.

* It is. But.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at September 1, 2009 07:47 AM