As
we mark the hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, it is
clear that the moral wounds it inflicted on Western culture have not healed.
Recent incidents, such as the rejection of Remembrance Day poppies by Cambridge
University Students’ Union (CUSU), or Southampton University Students’ Union’s
(SUSU) threat to paint
over a mural dedicated to war heroes, are symptomatic of the sense of malaise
and confusion regarding the memorialisation of the First World War.
In a sense, however, this hostility
towards the memorialisation of the war, as an expression of antagonism towards
a cultural legacy, has its roots in the First World War itself. Because
although it was principally a military conflict, it also served as a catalyst
for the emergence of a powerful mood of alienation from the values and cultural
practices of the past.
This should not be underestimated. The
Great War, as it was then called, fundamentally undermined the cultural
continuity of the West. Disconnected from the past, Western societies found it
difficult to develop a compelling narrative with which to socialise young
people. As a result, the phenomenon known today as the ‘generation gap’
acquired a powerful significance — precisely because it was not simply a
generational gap. Rather, it was a cultural gap that opened up between the
post- and pre-war eras which, in the decades to follow, was experienced through
generational tensions as the problem of identity.
Bad
memories
It is worth noting that both the
Cambridge and Southampton student activists invoked contemporary identity
politics to justify their distaste for remembering those who sacrificed their
lives on the battlefield of Europe. Embracing the anti-white affectations of
contemporary identitarians, Emily Dawes, the SUSU president, took exception to
a mural that depicted an ex-soldier receiving a degree on graduation day. Dawes
declared that this ‘mural of white men’ should be taken down or daubed over.
In today’s political landscape, where the
obsession with identity is so prominent, it is easy to forget that the politics
of identity is a fairly recent development. Concern with identity first emerged
in response to the cultural confusions that took shape during the increasingly
bloody but apparently pointless slaughter on the battlefield of the Great War.
The traumatic upheavals unleashed during the course of this four-year-long
conflict called into question the moral and intellectual premises of Western
culture and civilisation. For many, the war served as the ultimate symbol of
moral exhaustion and Western decline. In the immediate aftermath of the war,
writes a contemporary historian, we can see the ‘gradual disintegration of
Christian confidence in Western cultural values’ (1).
Moreover,
assumptions of white superiority were dealt a deathblow on the battlefields of
the Great War. In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler warned
that the ‘unassailable privileges of the white races have been thrown away,
squandered and betrayed’. Spengler added that ‘the exploited world is beginning
to take its revenge on its lords’. Spengler’s views resonated with a wider mood
of cultural pessimism. Those who had previously taken the superiority of the
white race for granted now talked of the war as an exercise in racial suicide.
Of
course, from the vantage point of military history, the Great War can be
interpreted through the battlefield narrative of winners and losers. Yet the
devastating impact of the conflict on the self-consciousness and authority of
the different national elites involved meant that all felt something important
had been lost. German sociologist Max Weber, in his pessimistic 1918 lecture
‘Politics as Vocation’, grappled with a new world bereft, as he saw it, of
authoritative leadership. ‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us’, he lamented,
‘but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group
may triumph externally now’, he lamented (2). In projecting a future without
hope, Weber expressed the existential insecurity and anxiety of Europe’s
elites.
As society began to doubt itself, people began to feel uneasy
about their place in the world and started asking questions about who they were
One of the most momentous and durable
legacies of the Great War was that it disrupted and disorganised the prevailing
web of meaning through which Western societies made sense of the world.
Suddenly the key values and ideals into which the early 20th-century elites
were socialised appeared meaningless. As the psychiatrist Patrick Bracken
writes, they experienced a ‘dread brought on by a struggle with meaning’. In
circumstances when the ‘meaningfulness of our lives is called into question’,
he continues, people become painfully aware that they lack the moral and
intellectual resources to give direction to their lives (3). ‘Europe was
exhausted, not just physically, but also morally’, writes a contemporary
historian of the ‘crisis of confidence among European elites after the war’
(4).
The existential and moral crisis that
unfolded after the war ruptured any continuity with the pre-war past. The
taken-for-granted assumptions about civilisation, progress and the nature of
change lost their capacity to illuminate human experience. As the prominent
English historian Herbert Fisher acknowledged in 1934, it was no longer
possible to discern in history the ‘plot’ or the ‘rhythm and ‘predetermined
pattern’ that had, until 1914, appeared so obvious to observers (5). The
cultural historian Paul Fussell claimed that after the First World War, it is
difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the future as the continuation of the
past: ‘The Great War was perhaps the last to be conceived as taking place
within a seamless, purposeful “history” involving a coherent stream of time
running from past to future.’ (6)
The disruption of the sense of historical
continuity had a confusing and disorienting impact on people’s sense of self.
As society began to doubt itself, people began to feel uneasy about their place
in the world and started asking questions about who they were. It was to this
moment, then, that we can trace the origins of the modern ‘problem of
identity’.
This sense of rupture and the loss of a
meaningful self, was most forcefully and eloquently expressed by artists and
imaginative writers. According to a study of the history of the idea of
identity, avant-garde European writers ‘came to doubt [the] benefice and
viability of the identities connected with those corrupted ideals: the moral
bourgeois, the cultivated person, the patriotic nationalist’ (7).
Yet,
the interwar cultural elite was far better at discrediting received roles and
identities than developing new ones through which they could endow their
personal experience with meaning. Roles and values associated with the past
were hastily rejected as redundant. At this point, confusion about identity was
sublimated through a one-dimensional renunciation of the values and cultural
practices of the pre-war world.
An awareness of its absence is what turns identity into
something that has to be self-consciously developed
Rites
of Spring, Modris
Eksteins’ fascinating study of the cultural and aesthetic impact of the Great
War, highlights the war’s disruptive, indeed destructive, effect on the
prevailing system of meaning. The radical loss of cultural continuity called
into question the prevailing system of values without offering any plausible
alternatives. ‘Old authority and traditional values no longer had credibility’,
yet ‘no new authority and no new values had emerged in their stead’, asserts
Eckstein (8). In this sense, the Great War called into question everything and
solved nothing.
Disenchantment with what was seen as a
system of bourgeois values was widespread, according to one of its defenders,
and ‘novelists, humorists and low comedians helped to bring it into contempt’.
The poet and literary critic Michael Roberts described the corrosion of
traditional norms in Britain in the following terms:
‘Because
some old loyalties were false, the idea of loyalty itself was discredited: and
attacks on the British Empire which began as generous movements on behalf of
subject peoples merged in a general subversiveness that included everything
from the English Public Schools to marriage, parenthood, and family life.’ (9)
Frequently, the years after the Great War
were labelled an ‘age of disillusionment’. Although rarely elaborated, the term
disillusionment referred to the transformation of pre-war norms and values into
mere illusions. It suggested that the pre-war outlook was at best a product of
self-deception, and at worse of cynicism and dishonesty. Once this system of
values lost meaning, everything, from democracy to the sanctity of the family,
could be interpreted as illusory. Over the decades to come, the rejection of
such apparently illusory or false norms would gain significant cultural
support. By the 21st century, many of these values and norms came to be rejected,
not so much because they were illusions but because they were deemed to be
repressive and wrong.
The
silent culture war
For most historians the interwar era is
best understood as an age of ideologies, where new totalitarian regimes
threatened to overturn the global order. However, while this hideous drama
unfolded, leading to the Second World War and the Cold War, many of the values
and traditions associated with Western culture had become targets of an
unthinking form of uncritical criticism. This was because, behind the scenes,
cultural authority was now a source of constant contestation.
In
his memoir, My Early Life (1930), Winston Churchill drew
attention to the estrangement of his society from the legacy and the values of
the past. He observed:
‘I
wonder often whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions
of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything,
material or established, which I was brought up to believe was permanent and
vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure, or was taught to be sure, was
impossible has happened.’
Lord Eustace Perry echoed Churchill, when
he wrote in 1934 that there was ‘no natural idea in which we any longer
believe’. He added: ‘We have lost the easy self-confidence which distinguished
our Victorian grandfathers.’ (10)
That the values into which Churchill was
socialised in the late 19th century had lost much of their cultural influence
was echoed by a significant portion of the teaching profession. Like many
sections of the cultural establishment, teachers felt reluctant and
uncomfortable about educating young people to embrace the values of the pre-war
world. Confusions about the normative foundation of authority were internalised
by educators, many of whom believed that the traditional modes of classroom
interaction needed to be revised. As Geoffrey Bantock, a philosopher of
education, recalled in the early 1950s, ‘the widespread revolt against
authority came after the First World War, partly as a reaction against the supposed
bungling of the “old men” and partly in general depreciation of “public
spiritedness” fostered by the intellectuals of the day’. Bantock’s main concern
was with the ‘downgrading of the teacher’s “authority”’, which, he claimed, was
‘symptomatic of a waning confidence in adult values among the liberal
“enlightened”’ (11).
The
clearest expression of the waning of confidence in adult values, therefore, was
a perceptible hesitancy and reluctance to take responsibility for the
socialisation of younger generations – a reluctance especially pronounced among
progressive educators in the interwar era. As RJW Selleck noted in his
study English Primary Education and the Progressives: 1914-1939,
this group of educators was ‘distressed by and alienated’ from the values that
prevailed at the time, and ‘they shied away from imprinting the future
generation with the marks of the present’. This sentiment was forcefully
articulated by JH Nicholson, a professor of education at the University of
Newcastle. He lamented that ‘we are an uneasy generation, most of us to some
extent ill-adjusted to present conditions’, before adding, ‘we should therefore
beware of passing on our own prejudices and maladjustments to those we educate’
(12).
Once adult society has lost the capacity
to recognise itself through the values in which it was itself socialised, its
capacity to educate children into a new system of meaning becomes compromised.
Yet instead of confronting the problem, many in Britain evaded it.
A similar pattern of adult irresponsibility
was evident in the United States. Writing in 1943, during the Second World War,
the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead highlighted the reluctance
of the interwar generation of parents to give clear moral guidance to their
children. She noted that millions of young Americans were the first generation
to be reared by parents who ‘did not present themselves as moral role models’
(13).
In subsequent decades, the failure to
take responsibility for providing the young with a sense of continuity and
meaning would crystallise into a phenomenon that would be diagnosed as an
identity crisis. Erik Erikson, who formulated the concept, noted that, ‘true
identity… depends on the support which the young individual receives from the
collective sense of identity characterising the social groups significant to
him: his class, his nation, his culture’ (14).
The failure to provide young people with
a ‘collective sense’ of where they belonged deprived them of a narrative
through which they could confidently develop their identity. An awareness of
its absence is what turns identity into something that has to be
self-consciously developed. In many instances, the young actually embark on a
quest for identity, a quest that, in recent decades, has merged with wider
conflicts over cultural authority. In such circumstances, identity is not only
problematised, but also politicised.
No
end in sight
The moral crisis that emerged in the
aftermath of the Great War called into question the prevailing cultural
consensus in Western societies. During the interwar era, the implications of
this loss of cultural authority were obscured by the more dramatic ideological
conflicts that dominated the world. Differences and conflicts over values
appeared to be far less significant than where one stood in relation to the
ideological struggles that divided the globe.
It was not until the 1960s that the
convergence between the quest for identity and the rise of a new
countercultural movement would create the conditions in which eventually
identity politics could compete on equal terms with ideology. The current
conflicts over culture indicate that the Armistice signed in 1918 was only a
temporary ceasefire.
Frank
Furedi is the
author of First World War: Still No End in Sight,
published by Bloomsbury.His latest book, How Fear Works: the Culture of
Fear in the 21st Century, is published by Bloomsbury Press.
(1) The
Bible and the Flag, by B Stanley, Apollos, 1990, p135.
(2)
‘Politics as a Vocation’, by M Weber, in From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, edited by HH Gerth & CW Mills, Galaxy Books, 1990
(3) Trauma:
Culture, Meaning and Philosophy, by P Bracken, Whurr Publishers, 2002, pp14
& 207
(4)
‘The triumph of what (if anything)? Rethinking political ideologies and
political institutions in twentieth-century Europe’, by JW Muller, Journal
of Political Ideologies, vol14, no2, p24
(5)
Cited in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age,
by Eksteins, Houghton Mifflin, 1989, p291
(6) The
Great War and Modern Memory, by P Fussell, Oxford University Press, 1975,
p21
(7) Identity:
The Necessity of a Modern Idea, by Gerlad Izenverg, University of
Pennysylvania Press, 2016
(8) Rites
of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, by Eksteins,
Houghton Mifflin, 1989, p256
(9) The
Recovery of the West, by M Roberts, Faber and Faber, 1941
p46
p46
(10)
Cited in ‘Imperial Decline and the resurgence of British national identity’, by
P Rich, in Traditions of Intolerance, edited by T Kushner and K
Lunn, 1989
(11) Freedom
And Authority In Education: A Criticism of Modern Cultural and Educational
Assumptions, by GH Bantock, Faber & Faber, 1952, p184
(12)
See English Primary Education And The Progressives: 1914-1939, by
RJW Selleck, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, p94 and pp118-119
(13) And
Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America, by M Mead,
Berghahn Books, 2000, p74
(14)
‘Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time’, by
EH Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, Faber and Faber, 1964, p93
EH Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, Faber and Faber, 1964, p93
