It was not to be long before the optimism that greeted the advent of the twentieth would be met with its first significant test. And the nature of this test could not have been more portentous. The ship that “even God could not sink”, the Titanic, collided with an inanimate object, an iceberg, on its first voyage, tragically sinking with it over 1500 people.
It was unsurprising that the ship would be named as such given the confidence in human brilliance typical of the times. This masterpiece of human ingenuity was until that point, unexcelled in technical sophistication and luxury. Such was the confidence of the shipbuilders that basic safety features like lifeboats were deprioritized. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, after all this was the ship that “even God could not sink”
Not unlike the Titanic, the unlimited optimism of the times founded on the supposed sovereignty of man was such that the venture into the unchartered sees of the twentieth century overlooked an obvious reality – man’s amply demonstrable capacity for self-destruction. A taste of the true state of the human heart was to be revealed during the Great War (WWI), a war considered at the time as one to “end all wars”.
It had been imagined that education had advanced man beyond his historically demonstrated capacity for self-destruction. It was soon to be discovered, on the contrary, that education and the technology it spawned, would merely become instruments of this very proclivity. This was portrayed in acts of such savagery during the twentieth century that man’s erstwhile swagger would suffer an enduring blow.
Reflecting on this rude reminder de la Croix writes: “Everything bears witness to the eternal and incorrigible barbarity of man”. Almost nine million people died during the First World War, a casualty rate of unprecedented proportions. The First World War thus brought with crushing humiliation the closure of the enlightenment and its boundless idealism.
The untested radical ideas of the late Karl Marx found a perfect opportunity in war weary Russia, one that his most committed disciple Vladimir Lenin was not going to miss. The social inequalities spawned an atmosphere of discontentment in Russia that were ideal for the launch of his version of Marxism, later to be called Marxist-Leninism, which sought to accelerate the so called dialectical process of history through violent revolution.
From its small beginnings it was to grow into perhaps the most influential political movement of the twentieth century. As impressive as this success was, the cost was astronomical. Estimates put the number of people who died under repressive communist government well in excess of 100million.
Following the roaring twenties, the Great Depression of the 1930s was to bring the juggernaut of the world economy to a screeching halt. All manner of State interventions failed to resolve this mysterious phenomenon. British economist John Maynard Keynes offered what seemed an elegant solution. Governments could stimulate their economies through debt-induced fiscal interventions. And thus began the idea of deficit spending, the consequences of which our generation is well familiar (let the Greeks tell you all about it!). When questioned about the long-term consequences of this indebtedness, he retorted with these (in) famous words “in the long-term we are all dead”.
While the rest of the world battled the Great Depression, a humiliated Germany was busy rising from the ashes of its WWI defeat, quietly growing from strength to strength. Its inspirational leader, Chancellor Adolf Hitler, seemingly could put no foot wrong. Having rescued the country’s economy from its post-war shambles and restoring the self-respect of Germany, he was not satisfied. He was now hungry for world conquest and revenge! The world was therefore plunged into an even bloodier world war, accounting this time for 60 million lives.
The first half of the 20th century was perhaps the darkest in all history. It seemed an eternity from the soaring euphoria of the enlightenment and the Renaissance, where man was thought capable of carving himself out of an allegorical rock with his own hands. To the discerning, the message was unequivocal, “left to himself man is capable of immeasurable destruction”, bringing to mind the biblical admonition, “the (human) heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” Fredrick Nietzsche’s words penned in 1882 in his famous Parable of the madman, pronouncing the consequences of the shadow that was to be cast on the world with the supposed ‘death of God’, were startling in their prescience:
Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?
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