By Jack Butler
Sunday, September 03, 2023
One of the great debates in history centers on so-called great men: whether figures of sufficient import — good or ill — can alter the course of events, or whether they are merely swept along by them. In Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, published in 1983 (and updated since), the late historian and journalist Paul Johnson comes down decidedly on the side of human agency. A gigantic and “hugely rewarding” (in William F. Buckley’s judgment) work of history that lives up to its plain yet ambitious title, Modern Times is essential reading for those looking for origin stories about modernity, those hoping to fill gaps in their knowledge of 20th-century history, and anyone looking to resolve the age-old historical debate about human agency.
Modern Times begins by summarizing the nature and proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and then proceeds to elaborate a paradox: This theory, proven only after being subjected to objective, applied scientific rigor, permeated society by overthrowing moral fixity and certitude. Whereas in the 19th century, “the philosophy of personal responsibility — the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our actions — which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the classical world” held sway, the relativistic character of the 20th opened up a huge vacuum into which all sorts of evils would rush. “The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons” for such evils, which soon made their debut. They tended to have one thing in common: an overabundant faith in politics, and in the state, to achieve greatness, typically through what Johnson labels “social engineering”: the “notion that human beings can be shovelled around like concrete.”
It’s common for historians to view the 20th century’s most loathsome state-driven terrors, Communism and fascism, as enemies. This is a simplistic view, as Johnson shows. In fact, they were deeply implicated in one another, and had much in common. “Any authoritarian system which abandons constitutional procedures and the rule of law is bound to contain an element of anarchy,” he observes as one of the key features of each. Yes, events could put them at odds; their totalizing philosophies would, ultimately, not permit the other to stand. But that is more the characterization of rivals than of true foes. And occasionally, they worked together, if not in outright collaboration (as was not infrequently the case) then at least in a kind of barbaric reciprocity. “Each system acted as a spur to the most reprehensible characteristics of the other,” Johnson writes.
The end result was a destruction of the forms of governance that preceded them, as well as of the morals attendant to them. Johnson shows this in the bizarre narrative progression of inspiration in which Germany’s World War I “war socialism” inspired Lenin, with Lenin’s state-terror apparatus in turn inspiring the Nazis. It appears most strikingly in a single anecdote: “a gruesome junket at the Kremlin” that solidified the (ultimately temporary) Nazi–Soviet nonaggression pact, with visiting Nazis hosted by Communists who greatly enjoyed their company. That these two forces would soon turn on each other does not make it any less true, as Johnson puts it, that “Communism and fascism were the hammer and the anvil on which liberalism was broken to pieces.”
This is only one of the plethora of huge-picture currents ably surveyed by Johnson in Modern Times. Also covered in the work are: the origin and causes of the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the development of Japan and China into roughly their modern incarnations, the end of colonialism and its aftermath, the beginning of the Cold War, the post-war recovery of Western Europe, the surprising emergence of Israel as a state and the unsurprising emergence of America as a global superpower, and cultural and social developments throughout the world. Each item could be — and has been — the subject of countless books in its own right; to have covered them all in one is an incredible achievement. Johnson’s unforced yet erudite prose masks the nigh-Jupiterian perspective he takes on to accomplish the feat, and it’s more than enough to make one forgive the occasional over-assumption of background knowledge or, even more rarely, the unfortunate error.
A typical historian might lack either the authority or the audacity to make such sweeping (and often droll) statements as, “The notion that the student body is in some way a depository of humanitarian idealism will not survive a study of the Weimar period.” Or, of Britain’s failure in the Suez crisis: “A country which cannot invade a small Arab state in less than six weeks is not a great power and had better devise other ways of pursuing its interests.” Or, of the notion of the “third world”: “Like many clever but misleading ideas, it came from France.” But Johnson earns them. At times, he almost glories in showing off, as when he manages to summarize offhandedly the entirety of Habsburg history: “a millennium of judicious marriages and inspired juggling.”
To this magisterial sweep, Modern Times adds a daunting command of detail. In service of his more general claims, Johnson consults reams of statistics, such as the growth in the number of cars in America and of horse-carriages in Paris, foreign-exchange reserves, and oil-import figures, and he dives into other sources of the historical record, such as letters, diaries, and scholarly journals. The grand sweep and the minutiae frequently combine to bring some of the larger-than-life figures studied in the period down to earth. Gandhi was “obsessed by the bodily functions and the ingress and egress of food.” Mao was preoccupied with farts. Stalin, in his last days, couldn’t stop thinking about wolves; Lenin, in his, of electricity. A reader comes away from the book with dozens of more-than-serviceable biographical portraits of the era’s heroes and villains.
And Johnson, having earned the reader’s trust, does not sit on it. Rather, he uses it to attack certain popular historical misconceptions. Academic consensus now typically regards colonialism as an unvarnished blemish on its perpetrators, who benefited greatly from it and conspired to maintain it. Nonsense, Johnson argues. “It is impossible to make any truthful generalization about colonialism,” he says. It was mostly a hapless endeavor, began, conducted, and ended half-heartedly and haphazardly much of the time, and many former colonies suffered greatly after their liberation. Concerning World War II, Johnson cannot accept the Allied triumph as untainted: He is rightly disturbed by how the Soviets perverted it, bending events in their favor. “The confusion of moral issues by the end of the war was fundamentally compounded by the presence, among the ranks of the righteous, of the Soviet totalitarian power.” Johnson even finds time to puncture some historians’ myths about America, such as the uprightness of JFK and, conversely, the inferiority of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge; he argues, convincingly, that the academic consensus of the latter “amounts to a systematic misrepresentation of public policy over a whole era.”
Johnson’s survey, apart from providing invaluable knowledge of the period studied, furnishes in itself a moral toolkit by which to assess reality itself. Indeed, in the period since the book’s writing, some of its grand takeaways have already been vindicated to an even greater extent. The same man who matter-of-factly declares that “there is no logic or justice to history. It is all a matter of chronology,” nonetheless finds it within himself to admit, after freedom’s many setbacks in the 1970s, that “reality cannot for long be banished from history” because
facts have a way of making their presence felt. The pattern of the Seventies, so dismaying to the few democratic societies which remained under the rule of law, was beginning to break up before the decade ended.
Only mentioned once in Modern Times is a key figure in the breakup of this pattern: Ronald Reagan, whose election is amusingly described merely as a “symptom” of “the emergence of a South-West coalition wedded to the free market.” Less than a decade later, Johnson’s many hints that further historical inquiry about the Soviet Union would have to await its fall would appear prescient, as would his casual observation that “any erosion of the Communist Party’s absolute monopoly of power threatened the very existence of Soviet-type regimes.” And 20 years later, Johnson’s remark that “the Bolsheviks had attached little weight to the Islamic problem” would take on greater significance. Subsequent editions of Modern Times cover later events in more detail. But I’ve chosen not to read them, deriving a kind of enjoyment from the historical Chekhov’s guns left in Johnson’s account, a product not of supernatural oracular powers but of his close study of history and human nature.
But the most striking stance Johnson takes in Modern Times is in favor of human will to influence events. A double-edged sword, of course: He writes of “the watershed year 1941, from which mankind has descended into its present predicament, the historian cannot but be astounded by the decisive role of individual will” — in that particular instance, that of Hitler and Stalin, who subsequently determined the course of world events. The maladies that have afflicted the 20th century — an excessive faith in politics and in the state, an abandonment of the individual as the defining moral unit in favor of groups, the weakening of moral certitude — have at their root a contempt for the person as such, and for his dignity. Johnson devoted Modern Times, as well as many of the other facets of his career, to a recovery of those elite-disfavored ideals.
It is all more than enough to take Johnson’s side in the human-agency debate. And to submit, as his longtime friend and fellow historian Andrew Roberts did earlier this year upon his death, Johnson himself as one such figure capable of altering history.
For the good, of course.
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