How One Eclipse Photograph Confirmed Relativity — and Pushed Humanity Toward Nihilism

The world's most famous total solar eclipse happened a hundred years ago, on May 29, 1919.

Einstein was a real scientist: until every test condition had been met, he refused to call his theory of relativity valid. The eclipse photographed on May 29, 1919 was a crucial test of relativity, and it stirred worldwide interest in this entirely new view of the universe.

Paul Johnson, in Modern Times, pointed to what the whole affair meant:

"Einstein's emergence as a world celebrity in 1919 pointed up, dramatically, the dual impact that scientific innovators have on mankind. They change our perception of the material world, and increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas. The second effect is usually more radical than the first."

"In the early 1920s, the belief began to circulate at a popular level, for the first time, that there were no longer any absolutes in the world: not in time and space, not in good and evil, not in knowledge, and above all not in values. People confused relativity with relativism — mistakenly, and probably inevitably."

This article is published with permission from the Oracle imprint of Social Sciences Academic Press, excerpted from Modern Times.

The modern world began on May 29, 1919. That day, eclipse photographs taken from the island of Príncipe off West Africa and from Sobral in Brazil confirmed that a new cosmology was correct. Over the following half-century, one thing became obvious: Newton's cosmology, built on the straight lines of Euclidean geometry and Galileo's concept of absolute time, would have to be substantially revised. It had stood unshaken for more than two hundred years. It was the grand framework within which the European Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the vast expansion of human knowledge, freedom, and prosperity that marked the nineteenth century had all taken place. Yet ever more powerful telescopes were turning up anomalies. In particular, once a century the orbit of Mercury drifted 43 arc-seconds away from the position Newtonian physics predicted. Why?

In 1905, Albert Einstein, a 26-year-old German Jew then working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, published a paper titled On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, which set out the theory later known as special relativity. By Einstein's observations, under certain conditions length appeared to contract and clocks appeared to slow down — something like the effect of perspective in painting. In fact, measured by its impact on how we perceive the world, the discovery that time and space are relative rather than absolute measures was no less significant than the Greeks' first use of perspective in painting between 500 and 480 BC.

Einstein's originality was a mark of pure genius, and the strange, elegant path of his reasoning was compared by his peers to an art form; it drew steadily growing interest around the world. In 1907 he published a paper proving that all matter has energy, summed up in the formula E=mc², which would later be seen as the starting gun of the nuclear arms race. Not even the outbreak of the First World War stopped scientists from following Einstein's pursuit of an all-encompassing general theory of relativity, one that would cover gravitational fields and thoroughly revise Newtonian physics. In 1915, news that Einstein had finished the theory reached London. The following spring, just as the British were preparing their catastrophic mass offensive on the Somme, Einstein's crucial paper was smuggled to Cambridge by way of the Netherlands and received by Arthur Eddington, professor of astronomy and president of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In 1918, Eddington presented Einstein's results in a paper submitted to the Physical Society, titled Report on the Relativity Theory of Gravitation. But the essence of Einstein's method was this: he insisted that his equations had to be confirmed by experimental observation, and to that end he devised three specific tests himself. The critical one held that a beam of light grazing the surface of the sun must bend by 1.745 arc-seconds — twice the gravitational deflection classical Newtonian theory predicted. That test required photographing an eclipse, and the next one would not come until May 29, 1919. Before the war ended, the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, managed to extract a promise from an already cash-strapped government: it would put up £1,000 to fund observing expeditions to Príncipe and Sobral.

In early March 1919, on the night before the expedition set off, the astronomers talked late into the night in Sir Frank Dyson's study at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich — the observatory Sir Christopher Wren had designed in 1675–76, the very years Newton was working out his theory of universal gravitation. Eddington's assistant, E. T. Cottingham, who was to travel with him, asked an awkward question: what if the eclipse measurements showed both Newton and Einstein wrong, with a deflection twice what Einstein had calculated? Dyson said: "Then Eddington will go mad, and you will have to come home alone." According to Eddington's notes, on the morning of May 29 there was thunder, lightning, and torrential rain on Príncipe. In the afternoon the clouds broke and the sun came out, just in time for the 1:30 eclipse. Eddington had only eight minutes to work his equipment. "I had no time to look at the eclipse, being too busy changing plates... we took 16 photographs." Afterward, at a rate of two plates a night, he spent six nights developing them. On June 3 he spent the whole day measuring the developed photographs, and that evening he turned to his colleague and said: "Cottingham, you won't have to go home alone." Einstein was right.

The expedition satisfied two of Einstein's tests, and W. W. Campbell confirmed them again during the eclipse of September 1922. It was precisely Einstein's scientific rigor that made him refuse to call his theory valid unless the third test — the "redshift" — was satisfied too. On December 15, 1919, he wrote to Eddington: "If it is shown that this effect does not exist in nature, then the whole theory has to be abandoned." In fact the redshift was confirmed by the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1923, and since then experimental evidence for relativity has piled up steadily. One of the most striking instances was the discovery of the gravitational lensing of quasars in 1979–80. At the time, Einstein's professional courage was already being admired. To the young philosopher Karl Popper and his friends at the University of Vienna, "For us, that was a great experience, one that had a lasting effect on my intellectual development." He later wrote: "What impressed me most was Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as untenable if it failed certain tests... This attitude was utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, and Adler, let alone that of their followers. Einstein was searching for crucial experiments whose agreement with his predictions would in no way prove his theory tenable; as he was the first to stress, a single disagreement would be enough to show that his theory was untenable. I felt that this was the truly scientific attitude."

Einstein's theory, and the heavily publicized expedition Eddington made to test it, roused enormous interest around the world in 1919. Neither before nor since has any scientific verification claimed so many front-page headlines or become so widely discussed. From June onward the tension mounted steadily, until the theory was formally declared confirmed in September at a packed meeting of the Royal Society in London. To A. N. Whitehead, who was there, it felt like a Greek drama:

We were like a chorus, commenting on the verdict of destiny revealed in the unfolding of a supremely important event. The whole performance was charged with drama — the traditional ceremonial, and the portrait of Newton looking down upon us, reminded us that the greatest of scientific generalizations was, now, after more than two hundred years, to receive its first modification... A great adventure in thought had at last come to a successful termination.

From then on Einstein was a global hero. Every famous university in the world invited him to lecture, crowds pressed around him wherever he went, and his wistful, faraway expression — the classic look of the absent-minded natural philosopher — became familiar to thousands upon thousands of people. The impact of his theory was immediate, and grew ever harder to measure. Yet this was itself a perfect illustration of what Popper would later call the "law of unintended consequences." Countless books tried to explain plainly how general relativity had revised Newton's ideas and how it worked — ideas that, for ordinary people, made up their understanding of the world around them. Einstein himself summed it up this way: "In its broadest sense, 'relativity theory' can be captured in one sentence: all physical phenomena share the characteristic that they provide no basis for introducing the concept of 'absolute motion' — or, to put it more briefly but less precisely: there is no such thing as absolute motion." Years later, Buckminster Fuller sent the Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi a famous telegram explaining Einstein's key formula in 249 words, a masterpiece of concision.

But for most people Newtonian physics, built heavily on straight lines and right angles, was easy to grasp; relativity, by contrast, was at best a vague source of unease. As people understood it, absolute time and absolute length had been dethroned; motion was curved. Suddenly nothing in the movement of the heavens seemed certain. As Hamlet lamented, "The time is out of joint." It was as if the ceaselessly spinning earth had come off its axis and was drifting without aim through a universe that no longer obeyed the usual measures. In the early 1920s, the belief began to circulate at a popular level, for the first time, that there were no longer any absolutes in the world: not in time and space, not in good and evil, not in knowledge, and above all not in values. People confused relativity with relativism — mistakenly, and probably inevitably.

No one was more pained by the public's misunderstanding than Einstein himself. The endless publicity and misreading, all of it apparently set off by his own work, left him bewildered. On September 9, 1920, he wrote to his colleague Max Born: "Like the man in the fairy tale who turned everything he touched into gold, everything connected with me turns into a fuss in the newspapers." Einstein was not an observant Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong. His professional life was given to an unrelenting search — not just for truth, but for certainty. He insisted that the world could be divided into a subjective realm and an objective realm, and that the objective part must be capable of precise description. In the scientific sense, though not the philosophical one, he was a determinist. In the 1920s he found the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics not merely unacceptable but repugnant. For the rest of his life, until his death in 1955, he kept trying to fix physics within a unified field theory, hoping to refute quantum mechanics by that route. He wrote to Born: "You believe in a God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to grasp. I firmly believe this, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way, or a more solid basis, than it has been my lot to find." But Einstein never worked out a unified field theory, neither in the 1920s nor afterward. In his lifetime he watched moral relativism — which he regarded as a disease — become a social epidemic, just as he watched his fateful formula lead to nuclear war. Near the end of his life he said that sometimes he wished he had been a simple clockmaker.

Einstein's emergence as a world celebrity in 1919 pointed up, dramatically, the dual impact that scientific innovators have on mankind. They change our perception of the material world, and increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas. The second effect is usually more radical than the first. The influence of scientific genius on humanity, for good or ill, far exceeds that of any statesman or warlord. Galileo's empiricism created the seventeenth-century ferment in natural philosophy that was itself the prelude to the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Newton's physics formed the framework of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and helped bring about modern nationalism and revolutionary politics. Darwin's idea of the "survival of the fittest" was a key factor both in the Marxist notion of class struggle and in the racist philosophy that produced Hitlerism. Indeed, the political and social consequences of Darwin's ideas are shaping us still, as we shall see in this book. So it was with the public's response to relativity, which became one of the major forces shaping the course of twentieth-century history. It was a knife, wielded carelessly by its creator, that helped cut the cables mooring society to its traditional anchorage: the faith and morality of Judeo-Christian culture.

The impact of relativity was made especially forceful by the fact that it coincided almost exactly with the public's embrace of Freudian theory. By the time Eddington confirmed Einstein's relativity, Sigmund Freud was already in his fifties. Most of his truly original work had been done around the turn of the century. The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared as early as 1900. Within the professional circles of medicine and psychiatry he was a controversial celebrity; before the First World War he had founded his own school and had a sensational scholarly falling-out with his most important disciple, Carl Jung. But it was not until the war ended that his ideas began to circulate as common currency.

Freudian theory spread because the long trench war focused attention on cases of mental breakdown caused by stress, which people popularly called "shell-shock." Sons of distinguished military families who had volunteered, fought bravely, and won repeated honors would suddenly break down. They could not be cowards, and they were not madmen. Alongside the "heroic" methods of treating mental illness — drugs, intimidation, electroshock — Freud had long offered another option in psychoanalysis. Those older treatments went on being used heavily; as the war dragged on, the so-called "cures" grew ever shorter-lived and the doses ever larger. As the current was turned up, patients were either killed by the treatment or chose suicide rather than face it with the courage of a victim of the Inquisition. After the war, relatives were outraged at the brutal treatment patients had suffered in military hospitals, especially in the psychiatric ward of the Vienna General Hospital, and the Austrian government set up a commission of inquiry in 1920, which called in Freud. The resulting controversy ended inconclusively, but it won Freud the worldwide fame he needed. Professionally, 1920 was his breakthrough year: his first psychoanalytic clinic opened in Berlin, and his disciple and later biographer Ernest Jones founded the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.

But more striking, and in the long run more important, was that Freud's writings and ideas were suddenly discovered by intellectuals and artists. As Havelock Ellis put it at the time — to the master's considerable fury — Freud was not a scientist but a great artist. After eighty years of testing in practice, his methods of treatment have on the whole proved a costly failure, good only for soothing the mildly unhappy rather than curing the genuinely ill. We now know that the core ideas of psychoanalysis have no physiological basis. In fact, when Freud was working out these methods, Mendel's laws and the theory of chromosomal inheritance had not been discovered, congenital metabolic defects were unrecognized, and there was no understanding of hormonal and neural stimulation — all of which together show that his treatments were ineffective. As Sir Peter Medawar observed, psychoanalysis has something in common with hypnotism and phrenology: it contains isolated fragments of truth, but the theory as a whole is wrong. Moreover, as the young Karl Popper very rightly pointed out at the time, Freud's attitude toward scientific verification was nothing like Einstein's, and much more like Marx's. In setting out his theories he did not use specifics that could withstand experimental testing and refutation, but made them all-encompassing and nearly impossible to test. And, like Marx's followers, whenever evidence appeared that seemed to refute his theory, he revised the theory to accommodate it. As a result the body of Freudian belief had to keep expanding and infiltrating, like a religious system still taking shape. Predictably, internal critics like Jung were always treated as dissidents, and external critics like Havelock Ellis as heretics. Freud showed the worst signs of the twentieth-century ideological messiah — a persistent tendency to regard anyone who disagreed with him as mentally unstable and in need of treatment. Ellis's dismissal of psychoanalysis's scientific standing was denounced as "a highly sublimated form of resistance." Just before his break with Jung, Freud wrote to him: "My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance exactly as I would treat patients in the same situation." Twenty years later, treating dissent as a mental illness requiring forced hospitalization became widespread in the Soviet Union, a form of political persecution.

Still, even if there was not much real science in Freud's work, it had considerable literary quality and imaginative power. His German prose was highly compelling, and it won him the country's highest literary honor, the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt. His writing translated well. Turning Freud's existing body of work into English became something of an industry in the 1920s. But because Freud kept stretching his ideas to cover an ever-widening field of human activity and experience, new works kept coming. Freud was a kind of Gnostic. He believed there was a hidden structure of knowledge that could be perceived beneath the surface of things through techniques he had devised himself. Dreams were his starting point. He wrote: "The formation of dreams is no different from that of neurotic symptoms. Like the latter, dreams appear strange and meaningless, but when we examine them closely using a technique slightly different from the free association used in psychoanalysis, we can derive from their manifest content their latent meaning, or their underlying thought."

Gnosticism has always drawn intellectuals, and Freud offered a particularly fresh and interesting example of it. In an age when every educated person prided himself on his Greek and Latin, Freud had an extraordinary gift for classical allusion and imagery. He quickly grasped the importance that a new generation of social anthropologists, men like James Frazer, were attaching to classical mythology — Frazer's The Golden Bough had begun appearing in 1890. The meaning of dreams, the function of myth — into this potent brew Freud stirred the ubiquitous intoxicant of sex, which he found at the root of nearly all human behavior. The war had opened up talk of sex; in the postwar years people had grown used to seeing sex discussed in respectable media. Freud's moment had arrived. Beyond his literary gift, he also had some of the tricks of a sensationalist journalist. He could coin striking slogans. Like his slightly younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, Freud kept adding new words and phrases to the modern language: "the unconscious," "infantile sexuality," "the Oedipus complex," "the inferiority complex," "the guilt complex," "the ego, the id, and the superego," "sublimation," "depth psychology," and so on. Some of his most important ideas — the sexual interpretation of dreams, or what later came to be called the "Freudian slip" — had the appeal of a fresh intellectual game. Freud understood the value of topicality. In 1920, with the wave of suicides in Europe still fresh in memory, he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, introducing the concept of the "death instinct," soon popularized as the "death wish." The 1920s saw a further sharp decline in religious belief, especially among the educated, and during this period Freud spent much of his time dissecting religion, which he took to be a purely human construct. In The Future of an Illusion (1927) he discussed humanity's subconscious efforts to ease its own distress. He wrote: "A great many ordinary people try to protect themselves from suffering by remolding reality through delusion. Human religion must be classified as this kind of mass delusion. Needless to say, anyone who holds a delusion never recognizes it as such."

This seemed to be the voice of a new age. It was not the first time a prophet in his fifties, long neglected in the wilderness, had suddenly found a spellbound audience among a gilded younger generation. What was especially striking about Freudian theory was its versatility and its ubiquity. For every subject it seemed to offer a new, exciting explanation. And Freud had a particular knack: summing up, concisely, the new trends suddenly emerging across a wide range of academic disciplines, and by this means presenting, with extraordinary flair and domineering confidence, ideas that were already forming in the minds of the elite. In the early 1920s many intellectuals discovered that they had been Freudians for years without knowing it. The pull was strongest among novelists, from the young Aldous Huxley (whose dazzling Crome Yellow came out in 1921) to the melancholy, conservative Thomas Mann, for whom Freud was an oracle.

Einstein and Freud had an even greater influence on intellectuals and artists, who, with peace approaching, saw that a fundamental transformation had been under way, and still was, across the whole of culture — a transformation for which relativity and Freudian theory were both the herald and the echo. Its roots went deep, back before the war. It had begun as early as 1905, announced by a public speech, delivered with perfect appropriateness by Sergei Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes:

We are witnesses to the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without hesitation, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of beautiful palaces, and also to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. As an incorrigible sensualist, the only wish I can express is that the coming struggle will not damage the pleasures of life; that death will be as beautiful and as luminous as resurrection.

As Diaghilev had foretold, the first Fauvist exhibition would soon be held in Paris. In 1913 Diaghilev staged Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring; by then Schoenberg had already published his atonal Three Piano Pieces, and Alban Berg his String Quartet, Op. 3; Matisse had coined the term "Cubism." It was also in 1909 that the Futurists published their manifesto, and Kurt Hiller founded his "New Club" in Berlin, the seedbed of an art movement first called "Expressionism" in 1911. Almost every major artistic figure of the 1920s had already published, exhibited, or performed before 1914, so in this sense modernism can be called a pre-war phenomenon. But it took the violent upheaval of a vast struggle, and the collapse of the political order it brought about, to give modernism the radical political dimension it had so far lacked, and to make it feel a world that had already fallen apart — a world on whose ruins it would build a new one. So the elegiac, even uneasy note Diaghilev struck in 1905 reflected a strikingly sharp perception. The cultural and political sides of this transformation were as inseparable as those of the revolutionary and Romantic movements of 1790–1830. We might note that in 1916 James Joyce, Tristan Tzara, and Lenin were all living as exiles in Zurich, waiting for their moment.

With the end of the First World War, modernism stepped onto a stage that seemed suddenly empty, lit by the dazzling glare of publicity. On the night of November 9, 1918, a meeting of Expressionist intellectuals convened at the Reichstag in Berlin, demanding the nationalization of theaters, government subsidies for the arts, and the dissolution of all professional academies. Surrealism was, roughly speaking, meant to give visual expression to Freud's ideas — though its origins were entirely independent — and it had its own program of action, as did Futurism and Dada. But this was only froth on the surface. At a deeper level, it was the confusion of space and time brought about by relativity, and Freud's theory of sexuality, that were seen as the defining features of the new creative mode. On June 23, 1919, Marcel Proust published Within a Budding Grove (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), the start of a vast experiment whose territory was broken time and hidden sexual feeling — exactly where attention was now turning. Six months later, on December 10, Proust was awarded the Prix Goncourt, marking a decisive shift in the center of gravity of French literature, away from the surviving masters of the nineteenth century. Up to that point, of course, such work still circulated only among an influential few. Proust had to pay out of his own pocket to print the first volume, and sold it at a third of production cost (even as late as 1956, the full In Search of Lost Time [À la recherche du temps perdu] sold fewer than 10,000 sets a year). James Joyce was also in Paris; he had no chance of publishing in the British Isles at all. His Ulysses, finished in 1922, had to be printed by a private press and then smuggled across borders. But its significance did not go unnoticed. No novel shows more clearly how far Freud's ideas had entered the language of literature. Also in 1922 the poet T. S. Eliot — himself recently regarded as a prophet of the age — wrote that it had "destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century." Proust and Joyce, the two great pioneers who together shifted the center of gravity, had no place for each other in the view of the universe they unwittingly shared. On May 18, 1922, they met in Paris, at a party thrown for Diaghilev and the whole cast after the premiere of Stravinsky's Renard; the composer and his set designer, Pablo Picasso, were there too. Proust had already offended Stravinsky, and unwisely offered Joyce a lift home in his taxi. The drunken Irishman told Proust he had not read a single word of his work; an outraged Proust shot back that he had never read a word of Joyce's either, before setting off for the Ritz, where he had engagements at all hours of the night. Six months later Proust died — but not before the noted mathematician Camille Vettard had, in an article, hailed him as the literary interpreter of Einstein. Joyce dismissed him in Finnegans Wake with the pun "Prost bitte."

The claim that writers like Proust and Joyce (and, of course, the ideas of Einstein and Freud) "destroyed" the nineteenth century is not as far-fetched as it may seem. The nineteenth century saw the culmination of the philosophy of individual responsibility — the idea that each of us answers for his own actions — a shared inheritance of the Judeo-Christian and classical worlds. As Lionel Trilling observed in analyzing Eliot's verdict on Ulysses, in the nineteenth century a major aesthete like Walter Pater (in The Renaissance) could quite naturally classify the ability "to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame" as "success in life." "In the nineteenth century," Trilling wrote, even "so graceful and detached a person as Pater" could take it for granted that a life could be judged a success or a failure. Nineteenth-century novels were, in essence, all concerned with the moral or spiritual success of the individual. In Search of Lost Time and Ulysses marked not only the brilliant arrival of the anti-hero, but the destruction of personal heroism as a central element of imaginative creation, and a scornful abandonment of any concern with moral balance or moral judgment. The exercise of individual freedom would no longer be an especially interesting feature of human conduct.

This fit perfectly with the new forces shaping the age. Marxism, now cautiously mounting the throne of power for the first time, was another form of Gnosticism, claiming the ability to see, empirically, the truth hidden behind the surface appearance of things. Marx himself, in a passage that strikingly anticipates the Freud passage I have just quoted, wrote: "The final pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface... is very different from, and indeed the direct opposite of, their inner but concealed essential pattern." On the surface, people appear to be exercising free will, making judgments, and deciding events. But in reality, to those who know the methods of dialectical materialism, such individuals, however powerful, are nothing but flotsam, tossed about by the irresistible surging tide of economic forces. The surface behavior of individuals conceals only class patterns of which they are almost entirely unaware and against which they are powerless.

Similarly, in Freud's analysis, individual conscience — the core of Judeo-Christian ethics, and the main engine of successful individualism — was seen as nothing more than a safety mechanism, collectively created to protect the order of civilization from the terrible aggressions inherent in human existence. Freudianism contains many things, but if it has one essence, it is its account of guilt. In 1920 Freud wrote: "There is a tension between the harsh, unforgiving super-ego and the ego that submits to it, which we call 'the sense of guilt'; civilization has controlled the dangerous human desire to aggress against others by weakening and neutralizing this sense of guilt, setting up within the individual an agency to watch over it — like a garrison stationed in a conquered city." Guilt, then, is not a sign of a lack of virtue but a sign of virtue. The super-ego, or conscience, is the heavy price the individual pays to preserve civilization, and the cost of that suffering will rise unstoppably as civilization advances: "a foreboding external misfortune... is converted into a permanent internal misfortune, into the tension of the sense of guilt." Freud said his aim was to show people that a sense of guilt no human weakness can explain is "the most important problem in the development of civilization." As sociologists have already suggested, society may well be complicit in creating the conditions that make crime and vice inevitable. But an individual's sense of guilt is a delusion that ought to be dispelled. None of us is guilty individually; we are all guilty together.

Marx, Freud, and Einstein delivered the same message to the 1920s: the world is not what it appears to be. Our empirical perception of consciousness shapes many of our ideas — of time and distance, right and wrong, law and justice, and the nature of human conduct in society. But consciousness cannot be trusted. Moreover, the analyses of Marx and Freud, each in its own way, together eroded a highly developed sense of individual responsibility and the foundations of a fixed, objectively valid moral law — precisely what stood at the core of nineteenth-century civilization. People took from Einstein the impression that in this universe every measure of value is relative, and that impression helped confirm their vision of moral chaos — a vision at once appalling and exhilarating.

As W. B. Yeats wrote, was it not "mere anarchy" that was "loosed upon the world"? To many, the First World War seemed the greatest calamity since the fall of Rome. Germany, out of fear and ambition, and Austria, out of submission and despair, wanted this war in a way none of the other belligerents did. It marked the peak of the wave of pessimism in German philosophy, the most conspicuous feature of the prewar period. German pessimism stood in sharp contrast to the optimism, grounded in political change, of the United States, Britain, France, and even Russia in the decade before 1914; it was not the property of intellectuals alone but could be found at every level of German society, especially at the very top. Before the great decisive battle broke out, Bethmann Hollweg's secretary and confidant Kurt Riezler struck a gloomy note — and it was with exactly this attitude that his master led Germany and Europe into the abyss. Riezler said: "The chancellor expects that the war — whatever its outcome — will uproot everything that now exists. This present world is already thoroughly obsolete, without ideas." On July 27 he wrote: "The inescapable doom hanging over Europe and over our nation is greater than the power of men." Bethmann Hollweg was born the same year as Freud, and he seemed almost the embodiment of the "death instinct," the very term Freud would coin at the end of that terrible decade. Like most educated Germans, Hollweg had read Max Nordau's Degeneration, published in 1895, and knew the degeneration theory of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. War or no war, humanity was degenerating inevitably; civilization was marching toward destruction. Such ideas had long been commonplace in Central Europe, and they paved the way for the acceptance of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, which happened to be published in 1918, just as that prophesied suicide was being carried out.

Further west, in Britain, Joseph Conrad (himself an Eastern European) was the one major writer to reflect this pessimism, and he built a striking series of novels around it: Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915). These despairing political sermons, dressed as fiction, preached a prophecy that Thomas Mann would announce to Central Europe in 1924 with The Magic Mountain — as Mann himself acknowledged two years later in his preface to the German translation of The Secret Agent. To Conrad, the war merely confirmed that the human predicament was incurable. Looking back sixty years later, someone is bound to say that Conrad was the only major writer of that era whose vision remains clear and true in every detail. He denounced Marxism as vicious nonsense certain to produce a terrifying tyranny, and dismissed Freud's ideas as nothing but a "magic show." The war proved human weakness, but otherwise it would solve nothing and produce nothing. Vast reform programs, cure-all remedies, every kind of "solution," were illusions. On October 23, 1922, Conrad wrote to Bertrand Russell (who had recently proposed some solutions in his new book The Problem of China), insisting: "I have never found in anybody's book or anybody's talk anything to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world... The only remedy for the Chinese and for the rest of us is a change of heart, but looking at the history of the last 2000 years there is not much reason to expect that thing, even if man has taken to flying... he doesn't fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle."

At the outbreak of the war, Conrad's skepticism was rare in the Anglo-Saxon world. Some regarded the war itself as a form of progress. H. G. Wells announced this view in a book titled The War That Will End War. But by the time of the armistice, progress in the sense the Victorians had understood it — as something continuous and almost unstoppable — had died completely too. In 1920 the great classicist J. B. Bury announced its death in The Idea of Progress: "A new idea will usurp the place of the idea of progress as the directing idea of humanity... Does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a doctrine is only relative, relative to a stage of civilization not very far advanced?"

Cover image and header image from Unsplash.