History of Civilization

Pop sculpture featured plaster casts of real people surrounded by actual pieces of furniture in a three-dimensional comic strip of devitalized, defeated humanity. At the other extreme, sculpture in the grand manner experienced a rebirth, in good measure due to the work of two British artists.

Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) made classically fashioned standing abstract forms of great beauty. Henry Moore (1898-1986) came to be widely considered the ranking sculptor of the century. His powerful renditions of monumental human figures, simplified and reduced to essentials, created an effect like that of a cubist or expressionist painting.

In sculpture as in painting, the variety and vitality of innovations were remarkable—from the highly polished rhythmic abstractions of the Romanian Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), to the disturbing, emaciated figures of the Swiss Alberto Giacornetti (1901-1966), to the abstract or whimsical mobiles of the American Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and his larger, sometimes menacing, stabiles.

In architecture the twentieth century produced the first truly original style since the end of the eighteenth century. This functional style was no revival of the past, no living museum of eclecticism like many nineteenth-century buildings. It prided itself on honest use of modern materials and on adaptation to the site and to the demands of twentieth-century living, combined with avoidance of waste space and needless display.

One of its pioneers was the American Frank Lloyd Wright (1869— 1959), who spent his apprenticeship with the designers of early Chicago skyscrapers and then developed the “prairie” style of house, emphasizing the planes and the uncluttered simplicity that Wright admired in Japanese houses.

Toward the end of his life Wright made a radical experiment in the designing of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, which consisted mainly of one vast, open space through which visitors descend along a ramp that permits them to see the works displayed both close at hand and at several different removes of distance.

Modern music, like modern art, moved away from what the general public could comprehend into atonal and experimental music, often based on electronics. Popular music became a vast branch of the entertainment industry, represented by country and Western, modern jazz, and various forms of rock and roll.

All had their innovators who sought to develop fresh ideas and sounds, and jazz in particular was often both intellectually and emotionally creative in ways that broke with the essentially derivative modes of much popular romantic music. Music for the millions reached them through radio and television and by traveling groups such as the Beatles.

The words and sounds of popular music came to dominate the sensory world of young western Europeans, Americans, and Japanese, representing an internationalization of tastes as pervasive as the Sony Walkman on which the music was played. All art distorts perspective in order to heighten concentration, and music, in distorting sounds, commanded intense attention.

Distortion in art and music and hyperbole in literature, cinema, and consumer advertising were a response to the competition for public attention in a world of ever-increasing stimuli, with decibels, vulgarity, and “flash” adding adornments of a kind to the very real talent that popular culture displayed.

No painter could better serve as a representative of the endless variety and experimentation of twentieth-century painting than the versatile and immensely productive Pablo Picasso (1881-1973).

A native Spaniard and adopted Frenchman, Picasso painted in many styles and periods. For example, the paintings of his “blue period” in the early 1900s, with their exhausted and defeated people, had a melancholy, lyrical quality that reflected the

struggling young artist’s own poverty. These pictures are said to have been influenced by the work of El Greco, the sixteenth-century Spanish master; certainly both artists conveyed a sense of concentrated emotion by exaggerating and distorting human proportions.

Around 1905-1906 Picasso turned to more daring innovations, much influenced by exhibitions of masks from black Africa and of large-eyed archaic sculptures newly discovered in the Mediterranean world. Picasso strove to capture in the two dimensions of a picture the three dimensions of the real world. Sometimes he used the
techniques of abstractionism—the reduction of figures to a kind of plane geometry, all angles and lines; sometimes those of cubism—a kind of solid geometry, all cubes, spheres, and cones; and sometimes collage (paste-up), in which he glued onto a picture fragments of real objects.

Picasso often returned to more traditional representational painting, as in the almost classical portraits of his “white period” after World War I. Yet he also persisted in his more radical vein of showing the human or animal figure from two or more angles simultaneously; hence the misplaced eyes and other anatomical rearrangements that he employed with such telling effect in Guernica (1937), which depicted the havoc wrought by an aerial attack upon a defenseless town during the Spanish Civil War. At his death Picasso was the most widely known artist in the world.

Art, like life, remained idiosyncratic, diverse, unwilling to be regimented. Some viewers denounced such art as decadent; this was Hitler’s position. Others wished art to contribute in a direct way to the state; this was Stalin’s position. Many found art simply irrelevant. The more it moved away from representing objective and visual reality, the less they could understand it. But many were fascinated by the new freedom, the new themes, and the new techniques. In varying ways this art sought to capture the courage and the anguish of modern humanity.

From early in the century, art had proven to be explosive, expressive, highly innovative, breaking away from the settled canons of earlier representational art. The expressionists declared that they must represent things not as they saw them but as they felt them, and such art took on a magical, poetic, even visionary quality.

The fauves, artists who used pure color, and among whom Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was a central figure, worked with bold, flexible lines to convey an intensity of expression that went beyond the normal range of human emotions. Surrealism was linked to Freudianism, for it sought to express subconscious mental processes. The giant Picasso was the transition figure; Salvador Dali (1904-1989) and Yves Tanguy (1900-1955) enjoyed large financial success, in part because of the popularity of surrealist techniques.

For a brief time after World War I a protest movement in art known as Dada scandalized critics. This group protested the slaughter of millions in war, not only through their work but in their chosen name, for Dada sounded like a non-word representing the verbal nonsense that the artists felt the makers of war used in order to destroy sanity and security.

Although it has been argued that Dadaist protest was more political and social than aesthetic, most of the artists associated with it made distinguished contributions to the arts. Jean Arp (1887-1966), who fled his native Alsace for Switzerland to avoid service in the German army, was a pioneer in abstractionist painting and sculpture.

George Grosz (1893-1959) made bitter sketches satirizing the foibles of German society between the two world wars. Marcel Duchamp (1887— 1968) created a sensation at the New York Armory show of 1913, which introduced avant-garde art to the American public, by exhibiting his Nude Descending a Staircase, a cubist attempt to depict the human figure in a rapid motion.

Artists like Duchamp and Grosz eventually moved from Europe to the United States as part of the wave of artistic emigration that reached its peak in the late 1930s and early 1940s and ended the old dominance of Paris as the center of the avant-garde. In the 1940s and 1950s New York became the capital of abstract expressionism, which communicated ideas or moods by entirely nonrepresentational means through color, form, and a sense of movement or action.

The American Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) dripped or hurled automobile enamel on huge canvases, which he laid out on his studio floor, creating an arresting effect of ordered chaos. In the 1960s the New York spotlight shifted to pop art, a neo-Dadaist reaction to mass-produced and mass-marketed commodities.

Pop artists depicted boxes of Brillo, cans of Campbell’s soup, road signs, soap operas, comic strips, and blurred pictures of movie stars from magazines or the television screen. Pop artists like Andy Warhol (1928-1987), together with the Americans Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and the British Francis Bacon (1909-1986), took up dominating positions.

Twentieth-century writers surprised the prophets of doom. Poetry remained, for the most part, what it had become in the late nineteenth century: difficult, cerebral, and addressed to a small audience.

An occasional poet broke from the privacy of limited editions to wide popularity; representative was the attention given to T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). His difficult yet moving symbolic poem, “The Waste Land,” or his invocation to “The Hollow Men,” which closed with the lines

This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper

captured for a whole generation its sense of quiet despair, its anguish hidden in boredom, and its expectation of a cleansing flame to purge society.

However, the novel remained the most important form of contemporary imaginative writing. Although no one could predict which novelists of our century would be read in the twenty-first century, the American William Faulkner (1897-1962), the German Thomas Mann (1875– 1955), and the Frenchman Albert Camus (1913-1960) were already enshrined as classics.

Mann, who began with a traditionally realistic novel of life in his birthplace, the old Hanseatic town of Laibeck, never really belonged to the avant-garde. He was typical of the sensitive, worried, class-conscious artist of the age of psychology. Camus, too, was sensitive and worried, but with an existentialist concern in his novels and plays over human isolation and the need to engage oneself in life.

The most innovative novelist of the twentieth century surely was the Irishman James Joyce (1882-1941). Joyce began with a subtle, outspoken, but conventional series of sketches of life in the Dublin of his youth, Dubliners (1914), and an undisguised autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Then, in exile on the Continent, he wrote a classic experimental novel, Ulysses (1922), an account of twenty-four hours in the life of Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Jew. Ulysses is full of difficult allusions, parallels with Homer, puns, rapidly shifting scenes and episodes, and it is written without regard for the conventional notions of plot and orderly development. Above all, it makes full use of the recently developed psychology of the unconscious, as displayed in the stream of consciousness.

The last chapter, printed entirely without punctuation marks, is the record of what went on in the mind of Bloom’s wife, Molly, as she lay in bed waiting for him to come home. What went on in her mind was too shocking for most contemporaries, and Ulysses, published in Paris, had to be smuggled into English-speaking countries. The later widespread popularity of Joyce indicated the extent to which sexual mores and attitudes toward explicit language changed after World War II.

Postwar literature was explosive, diverse, and ever-growing. World War II released non-Western writers to publish widely in Europe and the Americas, so that figures previously known only in their own countries gained world renown. A growing permissiveness led to more and more realistic, as well as increasingly vulgar, forms of expression.

The novel, and in particular novels consciously written to be best sellers, came to dominate the marketplace. Vastly increased literacy led to vastly increased sales, to the point that a popular writer like the English mystery novelist Agatha Christie (1890-1976) came to outsell all but the Bible and to be translated into eighty languages. Fictional heroes such as Sherlock Holmes, the creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), came to be treated by millions as though they were real figures.

The rise of a vast reading public that found writers like Eliot and Joyce too difficult, or simply not sufficiently entertaining, would have profound effects on education, literature, and society as a whole. Further, by the 1980s English had clearly replaced French as the language of diplomacy, German as the language of science, and all others as the major world language of commerce.

As societies became more and more literate, reading matter changed, becoming both simpler and much cheaper and also more complex and symbolic in its more elite expressions.

This was true of painting and the other arts as well. A wider gulf opened between those who read, or viewed, for entertainment and those who sought information, analyses, or complexity of emotional expressions.

Chemistry, which made possible plastics, synthetic fibers, and many other innovations, also greatly affected daily life by its impact on food, clothing, and most material objects. Chemistry assisted the very great gains made by the biological sciences and their application to medicine and public health.

In the United States and elsewhere, infant mortality fell and many contagious diseases were conquered so successfully that the average expectancy of life at birth increased by more than twenty years since 1900. More children were being born and living longer worldwide, so that the problem of feeding an expanding population remained acute. Some relief resulted from the new technologies of irrigated farming, chemical fertilizers, and highly productive new hybrid strains of wheat and corn.

The advance of science created problems as well as solved them. Some of the problems were of the first magnitude, notably the prospect that modern military technology could destroy humanity. Pesticides, detergents, and plastics, which were originally thought to be purely beneficial to the quality of life, also threatened life by their harmful effects on ecology. Scientists and technicians came under attack as cold, inhuman, and unable to control the awesome gadgets they created.

Though every field of science grew exponentially in the years after World War II, the world’s demand for practical applications of science to technology inevitably meant disproportionate growth in certain areas. At the same time, widely accepted scientific principles came under review, and physicists and geologists alike admitted that much of their most basic work was, at root, fundamentally philosophical.

Indicative areas of growth and change included the technology of weaponry, medicine and the treatment of injury and disease, genetics, challenges to the theory of evolution, concern for population control, and matters of the environment, from worry about global warming to political responses to extensive and damaging oil spills.

Perhaps most immediately noticeable to the general public, and most open to democratic influence, was the rise of the environmental movement. The “father of ecology,” the American George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), published Man and Nature, with the cogent subtitle Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, in 1864.

Called “the Bible of the environmental movement,” Marsh’s work showed how each action in nature is followed by another. Noting that Greece, now dry and with sparse forest cover, was heavily forested until goats were introduced to the landscape, Marsh argued that every human act had a consequence in nature.

To this point, perhaps the culmination of such awareness is shown by the heated debate over global warming. Early in 1991 scientists reported that 1990 was the warmest year on the meteorological record. Historians and scientists had long been aware of climatic change across great periods of time, but growing concern over the “greenhouse effect,” over how pollution in the upper atmosphere might well lead to a global warming so extensive and catastrophic that agriculturally productive areas would be turned into wastelands, that glaciers would melt and the seas rise, successfully dramatized the fact that the entire globe faced daunting problems in common.

Of course such problems are not simply scientific or managerial: They are political as well. No issue showed this so clearly in the 1980s and early 1990s as the intense struggle over population limitation, birth control, and— especially in the United States—abortion. By 1990 nearly ninety acres of tropical forests were being destroyed daily to create land for crops and cattle and to provide timber for fuel and construction.

Every hour in 1990, 16,400 human beings were born around the globe. To many observers such statistics seemed inevitably linked. The industrial, or postindustrial societies, especially in western Europe, were virtually at a steady-state birth rate, with births and deaths canceling each other out, but in Africa, much of Asia, and Latin America the post–World War II population explosion remained essentially unabated. By 1990 the world’s population stood at 5.3 billion.

The population in less developed countries was doubling every 29 years. Science could provide contraceptive pills and medicine could make safe abortions possible, but such interference with life’s processes was the focus of much moral anguish, political debate, and protest. While limiting family size came to be widely accepted in Japan, Singapore, the PRC, and much of Europe, the profound issue of whether abortion was murder rocked the New World democracies and many Roman Catholic countries.

Both weaponry and medical research benefited from World War II and the many wars of the last forty years. But war, and the upheavals of economic and social change, also opened the door to new ethnic tensions, to new diseases, and to a vast and growing international illegal drug trade.

By 1989 the United States, Britain, and other Western democracies had announced a war on drugs; entire nations, most particularly Colombia, appeared to be at the mercy of drug barons, with hundreds of judges and politicians killed, their children held as hostages, entire police forces and armies corrupted. Drugs destabilized families and societies, adding yet one more force for change.

With rising taxes, inflation, and housing costs that made the dream of home ownership less and less realistic, more and more families had two parents who went off to work daily. Schools, already staggering from budget cuts, faced declining standards in most of the democracies at the same time they were being expected to provide substitutes for traditional family services.

By 1991, only one child in four in the United States lived in the kind of household that was customary at the outbreak of World War II: with two married parents, both living at home, and only one at work. In such changes lay challenges and opportunities, as well as pressing problems, for the findings of scientists, economists, philosophers, and historians.

Perhaps the great scientific event of the twentieth century was the revolution in physics symbolized for the public by Albert Einstein (1879-1955). This revolution centered on radical revisions made in the Newtonian world-machine, the mechanistic model of the universe that had been accepted for more than two centuries.

Many nineteenth-century scientists were convinced that light moved in waves and was transmitted through the ether, which supposedly filled outer space. In the 1880s, however, experiments demonstrated that there was no ether. If the ether did exist, then it would itself be moved by the motion of the earth, and a beam of light directed against its current would travel with a velocity less than that of a beam directed with its current. But experiments showed that light traveled at 186,284 miles per second, whether it was moving with or against the hypothetical current.

In 1905 Einstein, who was then twenty-six years old, published a paper asserting that since the speed of light is a constant unaffected by the earth’s motion, it must also be unaffected by all the other bodies in the universe. This unvarying velocity of light is a law of nature, Einstein continued, and other laws of nature are the same for all uniformly moving systems.

This was Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which had many disconcerting corollaries. In particular, it undermined the idea of absolute space and absolute time, and made both space and time relative to the velocity of the system in which they were moving. Thus space and time are not absolutes but are relative to the observer.

Einstein maintained that space and time, therefore, are inseparably linked; time is a “fourth dimension.” An air-traffic controller needs to know the position of an airplane not only in longitude, latitude, and altitude, but also in time, and the total flight path of a plane must be plotted on what Einstein called a four-dimensional space-time continuum—a term he also applied to the universe.

Einstein equated not only space and time but also mass and energy. His famous formula E = mc2 means that the energy in an object is equal to its mass, multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. It means also that a very small object may contain tremendous potential energy. Such an object, for example, can emit radiation for thousands of years or discharge it all in one explosion, as happened with the atom bomb in 1945, when a way was found to unlock the potential energy in uranium.

The problem of mass also involved Einstein in a review of the Newtonian concept of a universe held together by the force of gravity—the attraction of bodies to other bodies over vast distances. Einstein soon concluded that gravity—that is, the weight—of an object had nothing to do with its attraction to other objects. Galileo had demonstrated that both light and heavy bodies fell from the leaning tower in Pisa at the same speed.

Einstein proposed that it would be more useful to extend the concept of the magnetic field, in which certain bodies behaved in a certain pattern, and speak of a gravitational field, in which bodies also behaved in a certain pattern. Einstein did not penetrate the mystery of what holds the universe together, but he did suggest a more convincing way of looking at it. This was the essence of his general theory of relativity (1916), which stated that the laws of nature are the same for all systems, regardless of their state of motion.

One of these laws of nature had been formulated in 1900 by Max Planck (1858-1947), a German physicist, who expressed mathematically the amount of energy emitted in the radiation of heat. He discovered that the amount of energy divided by the frequency of the radiation always yielded the same very tiny number, which scientists call Planck’s constant. The implication of this discovery was that objects emit energy not in an unbroken flow, but in a series of separate minute units, each of which Planck called a quantum.

Quantum physics suggested a basic discontinuity in the universe by assuming that a quantum could appear at two different locations without having traversed the intervening space. Other physicists soon made discoveries reinforcing the idea of continuity, with all physical phenomena behaving like waves. The old dilemma of whether light consisted of particles or of waves was therefore greatly extended.

During the 1920s it became evident that scientists might never be able to answer the ultimate questions about the universe. They could not fully understand the behavior of the electron, the basic component of the atom, because in the act of trying to observe the electron, they created effects that altered its behavior.

Study of the electron led Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), a German physicist, to propose the principle of indeterminacy or uncertainty, which concludes that the scientist will have to be content with probabilities rather than absolutes. Although the universe is no longer the world machine of Newton, its activity is by no means random, and it can still be expressed in the mathematical language of probabilities.

Indeed, the new sciences of probability theory, molecular biology and biochemistry, and plasma physics, together with the discovery by Murray GellMann (1929– ) of the quark, which is any of three types of elementary particles believed to form the basis for all matter in the universe, have nonetheless led scientists once again to feel that they may be on the verge of a unifying theory by which creation, matter, and even life may at last be explained.

The development of twentieth-century astronomy has been closely linked to that of physics. To the non-scientist, such astronomical concepts as the finite but expanding universe, curved space, and the almost inconceivable distances and quantities of light years and galaxies have made astronomy the most romantic science. A light year is the distance traversed by light in one year, or roughly 5,880,000,000,000 miles.

The Milky Way galaxy, of which our universe is a part, has some 30,000 million stars and nebulae, in the form of a disk with a diameter of about 100,000 light years. To humanize these dimensions, and to make them comprehensible, Western writers produced works of science fiction and created television series and motion picture films that attempted to make sense at the level of popular culture of such abstract concepts as the light year.

One such program, originally to be called Wagon Train to the Stars, became one of the most popular television programs of all time as Star Trek. It posed moral dilemmas in outer space to a generation of young people for whom the customary means of presenting moral issues, whether in church or through literature, seemed ineffective, and for whom the romance of outer space had replaced the romance of the old frontier.

Politicians, too, were caught up in the popular fascination with space, referring to their policies as New Frontiers and using metaphors in their speeches derived from the new language of space travel and space conquest.

In the twentieth century each science, and each branch of each science, continued its ever more intense specialization. Cooperation among pure scientists, applied scientists, engineers, bankers, business people, and government officials produced exponential increases.

The rate of travel is an example: In 1820 the fastest rate was still 12 to 15 miles an hour; railroads made it 100 miles or so by 1880; piston-engined airplanes made it 300 miles or so by 1940; jet planes broke the sound barrier in 1947, making speeds of close to 1,000 miles per hour possible; and starting in 1969 rockets propelled men to the moon at speeds exceeding 20,000 miles an hour.

Scientific respect for nature and natural laws, and scientific skepticism toward the supernatural, have added powerfully to the modern drive toward rationalism, positivism, materialism. Science continued to promote the world view that arose in early modern times and culminated in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Thus the hopeful views once attributed to Voltaire or other philosophers or social scientists became increasingly, though not unfailingly, the preserve of science.

Probably the most widespread philosophical movement of the century developed on the margin of formal philosophy and the social sciences. This movement is called historicism—the attempt to find in history an answer to those ultimate questions of the structure of the universe and of human fate that the philosopher has always asked.

Once Judaeo-Christian concepts of a single creation in time and of a God above nature were widely abandoned along with the rest of the traditional world view, people looking for answers to questions about these ultimates had to fall back on the historical record. Humans are not made by God but by nature, the historicists said, which amounts to saying that humanity makes itself in the course of history. Humanity gets its only clues about its capacities here on earth, from the record of the past.

But many of the thinkers who appealed to history found much more than the always tentative, never dogmatic or absolute “theories” the scientist produces. Many of these philosophers of history found in the course of history a substitute for the concepts of God or Providence. Of these historicisms, the most important was Marxism. For God, absolute and omnipotent, the Marxist substituted the absolutely determined course of dialectical materialism.

Another type of historicism was put forward by the German Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in The Decline of the West, published at the end of World War I. Spengler argued from the historical record that societies or civilizations had an average life span, a thousand years or so for a civilization being the equivalent of seventy years or so for a human being.

He traced three Western civilizations: a Hellenic from 1000 B.C. to about the birth of Christ; a Levantine or Middle Eastern from then to about A.D. 1000; and a modern Western, which began (according to him) about A.D. 1000 and was, therefore, due to end about A.D. 2000. This type of history became highly popular between the two world wars, when many commentators spoke widely of the decline of the West, by which they often meant the collapse of all civilization.

Paralleling The Decline of the West but written by a trained historian was the enormously influential, multi-volume Study of History (1934-1954) by the Englishman Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975). Toynbee was a classicist with a Christian background and a strong family tradition of humanitarian social service. World War I aroused in Tovnbee a hatred for war and a conviction that nationalism was evil. His work was an attempt to trace the causes of the rise and fall of dozens of societies in the past.

Concluding his history at the height of the cold war, he argued that Western society was facing a very serious challenge, that in terms of the cyclical rise and fall of societies, it looked as if the West was stagnating. Societies grew, he said, when challenged and able to respond; if not challenged or incapable of a sufficient response, they declined. This dialectic of challenge and response proved attractive to western Europe and the United States, which felt challenged by the Soviet Union and improved by their competitive response.

More intriguing, perhaps, was the work of historians who asked questions not previously asked. French, British, and American historians in particular developed new fields of inquiry. Perhaps most representative was the enormous growth of interest in the history of slavery. In the United States the study of slavery had been seen as a branch of the history of the South.

American scholars as a whole had favored the “consensus” view of certain progressive historians, especially Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) and the relatively radical views of Charles A. Beard (1874-1948). Most maintained that American development was marked far more by cooperation than by conflict, and that slavery was peripheral to an understanding of the rise of American civilization.

From the 1950s, however, many scholars challenged the consensus argument, pointing to the centrality of the problem of finding and retaining a predictable supply of labor in a rapidly growing agricultural and industrial nation, thus moving the issue of slavery into the center of American inquiry.

In this and many other examples, historians in the West roundly condemned the conventional wisdom by which British or American history was viewed as a compilation of unalloyed success stories.

A philosophy known as existentialism developed from such nineteenth-century sources as Nietzsche and the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), who assailed the dehumanizing effects of the increasingly materialistic society of his day. In such works as Fear and Trembling (1843) and Either/Or (also 1843), he argued that Christian truth was not to be found in churches but in experiencing extreme human conditions through the act of existence.

The central theme of existentialism emerged after World War II in the work of the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who in 1946 argued that “existence is prior to essence.” Sartre meant that subjectivity was essential to philosophy; that unchanging moral rules by which one may organize one’s life without further thought do not exist; and that Christianity had long departed from its historical tenets to the point of lacking intellectual or metaphysical integrity. One chooses values, they are not given: Everything is done as a result of choice and thus there is absolute freedom. Such freedom is, of course, full of dread—and absolute freedom is virtually intolerable.

Existentialism provided a negative view of the human condition. Sartre and a second major figure in the development of this form of analysis, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), showed how humankind escapes responsibility, hides the fact of having real choice, through shifts and evasions (called variously God, the church, the state, duty and so on) which provide order and thus make life tolerable. Heidegger did not see this view of life as unrelievably gloomy, however, since life was possible through the honest and constant confrontation of death: Death was a creative force which lay at the center of Being.

The most original and most typical philosophic movement of the twentieth century is variously called logical analysis, logical positivism, linguistic philosophy, or, in some of its phases, symbolic logic. The movement accepted most of the new psychology and went ahead to insist that, although only a tiny bit of human experience could be defined as rational thought, that tiny bit should be protected and explored carefully.

The movement’s basic position held that when, applying the methods of scientific practice, a problem can be answered by an “operation” and the answer validated by logical and empirical tests or observations, knowledge can be achieved. But when no such “operation” is possible, as in such problems as whether democracy is the best form of government, whether a lie is ever justifiable, or whether a given poem is good or bad then the problem is “meaningless” for the logician. To be without meaning does not signify that the problem should be dismissed, however, as most of humanity must still discover “operable truths” by which to make decisions.

Logical positivists concluded that human beings are at present incapable of thorough, persistent, successful logical thinking. Rather, they are open to manipulation. This conclusion was chilling to those who believed in human progress or in an enlightened and educated electorate making well-informed and carefully calculated decisions at the polls.

The succession of wars in the 1950s to the 1990s led some to abandon hope for democracy. While some followed the path of pessimism, concluding that democratic thought was consistently being degraded through media manipulation, others concluded that it was possible for humankind to learn from the mistakes of the past, to change economic and social patterns to the benefit of the greater number and that, for all their faults, democracy and the free market offered the best hope for an optimistic future.

If formal philosophy seemed increasingly irrelevant to many, since it did not appear to grapple directly with daily concerns in a language that could be understood by the average person, so, too, by the 1980s had literature, especially at the formal and elite level, removed itself from general discussion.

The impact of structuralism, a wide-ranging philosophical position centered in France, was especially great in literary criticism, anthropology, linguistics, and history. Its leading advocates, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Claude-Gustave Levi-Strauss (19081994), were widely studied throughout the Western world.

Barthes was a key creator of semiology, which viewed cultural phenomena as a series of signs with meanings that existed apart from their content. Systems, or structures, revealed such meaning as there was.

Structuralism tended to be seen as in alignment with Marxism, since a practical application of its arguments would lead to concerns for systemic change rather than for the process of reform customary to most democracies.