Modernism

The Modernist Era begins around 1914 and ends around 1950.  Main influences include

·        James Hutton, who is influential in forming our current idea on scientific geology

·        Charles Darwin, who formed basis of modern biology

·        Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, who gave us interesting new ways to think about economic systems

·        Freud

·        the Industrial Revolution; and most importantly

·        WWI

James Hutton

James Hutton, a Scottish geologist, is the first to provide evidence that the world cannot possibly be only 6000 years old (the age worked out by Biblical Scholars of the 18^th Century).  His predications, based on his observations of sedimentary rock in Scotland and his calculations of the age of those rocks, say that the world is more likely to be billions than thousands of years old.

Hutton also formulated the theory that rocks are continually being formed and reformed – he formed the theory of igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rock still in use today, which superseded the belief that all rocks had been formed at once, either during creation or during a massive flood.  

Hutton speaks of “deep time” in the paper he writes for the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1785 in which he presents his findings.

In another paper, he postulated a theory of natural selection which would influence Charles Darwin, who took the book Charles Lyell wrote about James Hutton along with him when he went on his famous three year Voyage of the Beagle.

Charles Darwin, who we are all familiar with, published On the Origin of Species, and many people are just still not over this, although nothing he said was all that radical to those who had been paying attention to science at the time. 

The main importance of the book was the preponderance of evidence Darwin provided to support his theory, and the clarity of statement of the theory itself, as well as the addition of the theory of natural selection, which is admittedly essential.

(Natural selection, part of the theory of evolution, it is important to note, is not a teleological theory.  Nature does not select for the “most fit,” or the “superior” genetic set.  Nature only selects for whatever genetic set fits the environment at one particular time in the world.  Thus, when white moths are a fit to the environment, they are “most fit”; when black moths become “most fit,” their genetic set is the one that survives.  Neither is superior, or the “best” genetic set.  Each just happens to have the genes needed at a certain point in time.)

Darwin is important to Modernism because his text (and the scientific explanation for the origin of life it describes) disturbs many people – if humanity is not necessarily divinely created (and Darwin’s explanation gives a clear explanation for a way we could have come to exist without the help of any divinity or miracle) then how are we different from dogs or rats or amoebas?  ß This bothers some people a great deal.

Marx and Engels write The Conditions of the Working Class In England, studying the working poor in Manchester, England, and elsewhere, formulated a theory of class struggle (contained in the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere) in which ideas such as commodity fetishism and false consciousness operate. 

Marx and Engels discuss in their work the ideological control of the workers, ways in which workers are misled by social forces to believe certain things about the capitalist system – for instance, most workers in a capitalist system believe their chances of upward mobility are much greater than those chances actually are. Again, these ideas upset a lot of people, especially those who have been heavily invested in the current system.

Freud teaches us a new theory of the mind, one which changed the way the modern world looked at consciousness, which is that we cannot trust what our own mind tells us we are thinking. He starts out as a neurologist, but comes to believe (when he sees that neurology in his time is useless) that most diseases have psychological causes*.  Thus, he begins to work on discovering these causes. 

Though he was wrong about many particulars of the mechanisms of his psychological causes – he thinks, for instance, that women have penis envy, and that all little boys want to have sex with their mothers and are afraid their fathers will castrate them if they learn of their son’s desire to sleep with their wives, and a number of other bizarre things – so some of his notions are odd; but though he gets stuff wrong, he’s nonetheless right essentially, in that our minds do lie to us; there is a subconscious; we do mislead ourselves. 

That’s an essential discovery, and it was Freud who made it.  And that is another point that upsets us, as we enter the modern world.

*He’s wrong about this, but remember how useless medicine was then.

The Industrial Revolution (or The Rise of the Machines) while bringing progress, cheap goods, medical and technological advances, also brings immediate apparent evils to many people, in the form of pollution and destruction of the landscape; the creation of horrible working conditions for the workers – who are often, remember, women and children -- and a growing inequality between the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor.

And then: World War I. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the machine age, the face of War changes drastically. 

In America, this change is seen as early as the Civil War; the rest of the world does not see the new kind of war until World War I.

·        Machine guns

·        Large-scale bombing

·        Better, more accurate, more abundant guns

·        Gas warfare

·        Because of railroads, the War of Attrition becomes possible: that is, due to our ability to move people and supplies rapidly and easily, now we can wage war not for a few weeks or months, but for years and years and years; we can kill not hundreds of people, but hundreds of thousands; millions and millions

Death on an unforeseen scale and wars that will last decades are now not just possible but soon to be commonplace.  Our notion of what mankind is, and war is, changes forever.

WWI  was the first war of its kind to be fought as a war of attrition, a war fought with deadly technology and deadly machines. 

·        Over 9 million people were killed in battle

·        17 million were injured/disabled, often in truly horrific ways, due to the terrible new weapons

·        Famine killed about 10 million more

·        A flu epidemic (probably caused by the war) in 1918 killed about 50 million people worldwide

·        Other diseases (typhus, cholera, TB) related to the war killed 4-5 million

·        The conditions in the war and surrounding the war (that is, in the cities supporting and in the path of the war) were horrible beyond anything most people had ever encountered

·        Importantly, these conditions and this war were experienced (via mass communications) by more people than ever: photographs were possible, and mass communication is now also possible.  Swift transition is possible.  A soldier can be at the front for breakfast, and home in London for tea.  This abrupt disjunction, and the contrast between what he is experiencing on the battlefield, and the attitude of the people at home toward the war, informs the work of more than one WWI poet.

·        As casualties rise, soldiers especially, but civilians as well begin to feel that those in charge of the war (both generals and the government) have no idea what they are doing.

All of this led to the period called Modernist era in writing, starting (traditionally) in 1914, with the start of the war; though in fact it really gets going somewhere around 1917 or 1918.

Modernism

·        rejects form and

·        rejects convention

·        uses ordinary diction and

·        uses stream of consciousness

·        rejects the notion that any sort of meaning can exist, outside the meaning the artist brings to the work

·        Will often strive to create its own meaning

·        Will often seem deliberate obscure: this is part of the point. The artist believes that any attempt to provide clarity is an attempt to explain, and explanations are (always) lies.