It’s no accident that the writers of the hit British TV show, Downton Abbey, a family saga that chronicles the changes brought about by the decline of the British Empire, begins its first episode referencing the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred 106 years ago, on April 15, 1912.
While visiting Prince Edward Island some time back, Linda and I stood on its east coast, the very spot, in fact, where the Titanic’s first distress signal was received. On a cloudy late summer afternoon, I thought about all those helpless souls plunging into the icy waters of the North Atlantic. It gave me chills.
In any event, the Downton Abbey writers chose well. The Titanic is indeed a piquant metaphor. In some ways like the British Empire itself, the ocean liner was thought indestructible, unassailable, the product of the best modern, technological advancements. Of course, in the end, it was old-fashioned human arrogance that caused the demise of the ship, if not the state.
The Titanic metaphor betrays an overconfident optimism, not just of fin de siècle British culture, but of the West in general. For the writers, the sinking of the Titanic symbolically marks the beginning of the end of the West’s hard-earned civilizational ascendancy. Two short years later, in July 1914, the jig was finally up, as Europe plunged into the calamitous “Great War” (World War I) along with an ensuing, disaggregative cultural collapse.
In the United States there existed a different, though related, trajectory. Following the Civil War, the impetus toward a new, social consolidation of the public sphere had been building, culminating in Progressive Modernism, as well as, in the mainline Protestant churches, the Social Gospel. These tandem movements exhibited an unprecedented sense of moral and intellectual idealism, one that promised to solve society’s most pressing problems.
Increasingly unmoored from the once-durable assurances of the past, with its social, historical, and religious traditions, the Modernist Age sought to recreate society and world through the proper application of object scientific insight, along with its “universal” laws and truths.
In the interwar years, however, this became increasingly a hard-sell. The war had seriously compromised all such speculative optimism. Even those who had earlier advocated for the war (in the hopes that it would be “the war to end all wars”), were left disillusioned after the war’s savagery and the tenuous peace achieved by the Versailles Treaty.
From the ashes of WWI, a time of profound dislocation and uncertainty, prominent American thinkers such as Herbert Croly, editor of the New Republic, and John Dewey tried to salvage the progressivist project, despite growing disillusionment.
For a time, the incipient theoretical outlines of Mussolini’s Italian fascism held promise. Some thought it might be the wave of the future. At a time when tradition was on the wane, and with progressivism in apparent ruins, fascism seemed to offer the architectural model for bringing together a world broken apart by war and societal convulsion. It would consolidate (“bind or bundle together”) society’s various moving parts into an effective, forward-thinking, unified whole.
With a new, centralized government managed by enlightened intellectuals and experts, and employing the latest insights from the emerging social sciences, a new world could be built. After Mussolini’s murderous pathologies were finally revealed, however, the project found itself on the ideological ropes.
Croly and Dewey also found themselves up against a growing chorus of domestic critics who rejected what they believed was the false optimism of progressive thought. One was Walter Lippmann, who argued that the progressive project had failed to account sufficiently for human self-interest. Progressivism, it must be remembered, had always assumed the best motives of its leaders, as well as the superiority of their insights.
In the 1930’s, Reinhold Niebuhr, the American pastor and academician, joined the chorus. He too brought a sense of skepticism to progressivism’s naive idealism. Original Sin, he staunchly maintained, was not only an undeniable fact of human existence, but it was even more problematic when applied to any attempt at social ordering.
As both Lippmann and Niebuhr knew, the progressivist project was founded on “disinterested” thought and action. Just as the scientist observes the “facts” in a ruthlessly unbiased fashion, so too the social scientist.
They argued, each in his own way, that all human thought and action, individual and corporate, is by its nature limited, biased, if not self-serving. It only masquerades as objective or scientific, regardless of the actor’s intent. Any societal project, therefore, based on the presumption of disinterestedness, objectivity, and unimpeachable truth was doomed to self-delusion and failure.
For Niebuhr, this meant approaching political and social reform from a “pragmatic” perspective. Knowing that no human thought or action can approach God’s perfect justice, all such efforts must be undertaken as relative attempts at best, acknowledging the reality of human limitation.
Niebuhr’s ironic and intrinsically American pragmatism was overtaken, however, by an unexpected source – the sudden influx of some of the world’s “best and brightest” émigrés fleeing persecution in Hitler’s Germany.
This was a “brain-drain” of unprecedented proportion, depositing some of the world’s most accomplished thinkers, in virtually every field, onto these American shores. Among them were writers, artists, scientists, and social scientists. They brought enormous intellectual heft, coming as they did from what was the most advanced university system the world had ever known.
Because these émigrés had escaped the unconscionable depravities of Nazi Germany, they were eager to identify its root causes, to insure it would never happen again.
The “Frankfurt School,” a group of German intellectuals, newly encamped on Morningside Heights, near Columbia University, churned out learned treatises focusing mostly on totalitarianism and the “authoritarian personality.”
Their approach delved deeply into the insights and theoretic musings of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. The dark pessimism of these theories, it must be said, was distinct from Niebuhr’s far more optimistic sense of irony as it relates to both human nature and society.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the émigrés ended up projecting their acute despair and bleak alienation onto the American psyche, a pessimism not native to the American experience. Yet it found a place in academic circles.
A whole cottage industry developed around studies in totalitarianism, particularly after the conclusion of World War II, as the American public became aware of the full extent of Hitler’s evil regime (think Auschwitz and Buchenwald).
Fearing the potential for totalitarianism here in America, a new and curious sort of radical individualism developed in response, noted for its generalized alienation from society. The earlier hope-filled consolidationist impulse was ebbing away.
One example of this societal deconsolidation could be seen by the emergence of the 50’s rebel, the lone, isolated, alienated individual seeking freedom and escape from a soul-denying and oppressive society.
America had moved 180 degrees from the idealistic societal cohesion begun after the Civil War. The sinking of the Titanic and the Great War were only but the beginning of its perhaps inevitable dissolution.