On the History of Worldviews: Part 1

I doubt anyone reading this blog post at the time it's being published would disagree that the political stage is rather... fraught, at the moment. There's not a lot of places in the world where that's not the case, really. I've been slowly coalescing some observations about that over the past few years that I'm not quite ready to put to page, but one aspect of it could perhaps be identified as the political right having fully embraced postmodernism in a way that is rather notable, historically speaking.

That's really only a tentative and vague diagnosis, though. The reason I bring it up here is that it's spurred me to think more about the history of postmodernism itself in particular, and of worldviews more broadly.

In trying to put those thoughts to page, I wound up writing about 20% of what ballooned to a planned eight-part series of essays on the topic. That's ridiculous, both to read and to write. This essay is my effort to condense that down into a two- or maybe three-part series that is more likely to be worth the effort it will take to read.

In that spirit of brevity, I'll set aside a great deal of context and runup by jumping right in with the development of "modernism" in the 19th century.

The First Fruit of the Enlightenment: Modernism

Most definitions of modernism today generally describe it as something like the idea that the world can be improved and understood by way of artifice and investigation. Scientific advancement pushing back on the obscurantism of the past in all fields, building an infinitely perfectible world. The worldview of the Enlightenment, ultimately, or perhaps just the worldview of the embrace thereof.

It's not a bad definition, really - certainly the proponents of it at the time wouldn't have much disputed it.

What's more, the modernists proceeded to deliver on what really were incredibly lofty promises. For all the faults of the industrial revolutions, by the turn of the 20th century broad swathes of people could observe the direct and positive impacts that large-scale human effort had on the lives of humans.

Wide swathes relative to the groups that one could say that about one or two hundred years prior, it should be noted, but in that context massively so. Especially when the darker sides of those advancements could land on those that could be considered 'other'. I hope readers of this can take such hedging as a given the rest of the way through, so as to cut down on what would doubtless become a great deal of bloat.

Regardless, it really was the case that people of the time took as a lesson that when working together people can change the world around them for the better.

Which is true, of course. Even obviously so today, but it was somewhat less obvious to, say, a European peasant in 1826 than it would be to an internet-surfing netizen of 2026.

The point of painting this rosy picture is to try and communicate the zeitgeist of the modernist public at the turn of the 20th century, right before the complete and catastrophic collapse and discrediting of modernism in the fires and agony of the First World War.

The Catastrophic Annihilation of Modernism: WWI

As the truly excellent Extra History series on the leadup to WWI put it:

For a hundred years, Europe has been at peace. There have been wars, sure, but they were minor wars, wars on the periphery, wars without many of the Great Powers involved.

Not since Napoleon did the great states of Europe vie in bloody battle. For after the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars, the statesmen of Europe had come together to try to stop such a catastrophe from ever happening again.

They created a system called the Concert of Europe so that whenever war seemed perilously close, the nations of Europe would come together in a congress, a conference, and instead come to a settlement that all parties would abide by.

It's perhaps hard to imagine, today, 80+ years from the end of the last truly catastrophic Europe-wide war, what that meant to the people of the time. As far as someone in 1900 might have been concerned, it was conceivable that humanity had managed to "solve war"! Modulo, of course, those who one could dismiss as "barbarians" or "colonials" or whatever other ways one could conceive of to exclude whatever out-group.

From the perspective of a well-to-do European who is "of the right sort" (etc.), though? In one of the Great Powers of Europe? Why, the possibilities of the future might well be endless, if only "we" could work together to grab them. After all, the preceding decades of history showed a pretty undeniable trend upwards for "us", that will surely continue forever. If "we" just work together.

I could write an extra few thousand words here about the emergence of nationalism as a binding force for that "we" over the course of the 19th century. About how it was originally a decidedly liberalizing force, opposed by the conservatives and reactionaries of the time. About Metternich and 1848 and the whole lot.

But I expect most people who have read this far understand what I mean when I say that the collectivization of identity that occurred hand-in-hand with the growing cultural and philosophical embrace of the human capacity for mass-scale action was part and parcel of the emergence of nationalism as a driving political force throughout the 19th century. For those who want to read more, the wiki page on the modernization theory of nationalism provides a pretty decent introduction to the topic. I'm not without quibbles regarding the precise mechanisms at play, but the relevant foundations for all this are definitely there.

And, ultimately, we all know where that wound up. Turn-of-the-century modernism strode confidently and patriotically into a glorious little war where everyone would be "home by Christmas", which "somehow" seamlessly became The Great War.

This made one thing extremely clear: that modernism was broken.

The context that raised this question was one where the rulers of Europe throughout the post-Napoleonic era had reliably been capable of riding out the rising waves of modernity that threatened to wash them away. Until, suddenly, they weren't. Which was actually quite surprising, at the time.

Leading up to the turn of the 20th century, there was a relatively sudden generational turnover in power. Seats that once held people who had either maintained their rule and adapted to those waves of modernity or dedicated themselves to replicating the success of those who had were increasingly filled by those who had never known a world before modernism and were often themselves dedicated modernists. By every tenant of modernism this should have resulted in yet further success.

As a microcosm of this: Otto von Bismark was absolutely not a modernist in any sense. But he was someone who knew how to rule modernists. Wilhelm II, by contrast, absolutely was the former but not the latter.

Wilhelm's famous failure to heed Bismark's warnings emerged directly from this contrast. After all, how can a nation so obviously on the rise fail to secure its "place in the sun" so long as it doesn't fail to try?

From all this, I would provide a somewhat different definition of modernism than the more conventional one I described above. I would instead describe it as an embrace of the power of narrative. Not consciously, perhaps, but certainly in effect: a worldview that encourages one to consider the world around them in terms of what parts of one's environment can be made better than they were in the past, and to always conclude that those changes both can and should be made. A narrative, in other words, where the next chapter always builds upon the one before it in an ongoing chain of progress. The protagonist of such a tale cannot help but continually ascend to ever greater glories. And, most importantly, this worldview also held that these narratives we weave for ourselves are fundamentally true.

And it's a truism that one is always the protagonist of their own story.

I'm sure there are plenty scholars of the subject who would disagree with me in the details of this definition, and certainly for some purposes a more conventional definition is more useful. But this definition highlights an extremely important facet: that the very real deficiencies of modernism were a large part of why WWI was such a hammer blow to it, and that they fundamentally shaped the competing successors to it that emerged in the interwar period.

Emergence of the Post-Modernisms: The Interwar Period

To wit: the clear and obvious failure and discrediting of modernism as a worldview in the popular zeitgeist over the course of WWI resulted in a cultural "power vacuum", for lack of a better term. All manner of new movements emerged to try and fill this vacuum by answering a question that was on everyone's mind at some level: why was it that modernism failed?

Of those movements, the three to highlight here are postmodernism, futurism, and realism:

Postmodernism held that there's never such a thing as a "true narrative", and that trying to construct such narratives is where modernism went wrong.

Futurism held that narratives connecting the future to the past were meaningless, and should only exist to serve the needs of the now. Thus whether or not a narrative is "true" is irrelevant, as destruction of the past is fundamental to enabling the achievement of the future.

Realism (specifically "Soviet realism" or "socialist realism") held that the purpose of grand narratives was to unite people behind a common cause, which wound up cementing into the inevitable march of society towards a predetermined future state of flourishing at the direction of the Party.

Not coincidentally, the three of these largely mapped onto the three major factions that participated in the Second World War: postmodernism from the liberal democracies, futurism from the fascist regimes, and realism from the communist blocs.

Also not coincidentally, of the three it was futurism that didn't survive the war and it was the other two that spent the rest of the century battling it out... only for postmodernism to "win", in some sense or another, in the 1990s. At which point successors to it began to emerge in earnest.

Postfix

The details and especially resolution of that "battling" are worthy topics to explore, but in the interest of wrapping this up by returning it to the impetuous for all these words it's incredibly interesting to me that postmodernism has truly become just about universal only as replacements begin to emerge. That says something about the ways in which human society has a tendency to develop, I think.

This really has been quite satisfying to condense in this way, though. I think I'll crunch through those other essays I mentioned and get the next part out sooner rather than later.