Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
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Was the world better off in 2000 than it had been in 1900?
Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress
The World Science Built
◆ Atoms, Elements, and Germs: Science Reveals the Universe
A new scientific revolution easily kept pace with the technological advances of the age. Ever since the ancient Greeks, Europeans had assumed that all matter was made up of four “elements”: earth, air, fire, and water. Not until the 1780s, when Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), the father of modern chemistry, began to study the nature of fire was that notion finally abandoned. A lawyer, and also France’s chief tax collector, Lavoisier was an ardent scientist as well. Testing the properties of oxygen, only just isolated, Lavoisier showed that fire was not an element but a compound of more basic ingredients. His research led to the conclusion that in nature no matter was ever lost (the law of the conservation of matter). Lavoisier ended his distinguished career by drawing up a list of 32 known elements, preparing the way for advances by his successors. In 1808, John Dalton (1766–1844), an English physician who experimented with gases decided that each of Lavoisier’s elements was composed of identical atoms and that each element could be distinguished from another by its atomic weight. His calculation of the weights of various atoms led to a theory about how elements form compounds. When, in 1869, Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) put all known elements in order of atomic weight, he found they grouped themselves into several families sharing common properties. Since some families were missing some elements, he assumed (correctly) that these would subsequently be discovered, or even created, by humans. Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements, the foundation of physical chemistry, remains one of the greatest achievements of nineteenth-century science. Shortly after mid-century the German botanist Ferdinand J. Cohn (1828–1898) discovered microscopic plants he called bacteria, which he suggested were the causes of many diseases. Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister (1827–1912) created new antiseptic practices that helped fight infection by killing these bacteria. Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis (1818–1865) realized that childhood fever was caused by germs carried from patient to patient by doctors who saw no need to wash their hands or instruments. Semmelweis died of a wound infected during an operation long before the medical profession accepted his findings, but today’s antiseptic practices are based directly on his findings. This germ theory of disease was finally proven by Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) in France and Robert Koch (1843–1910) in Germany. A paper on “Germ Theory and its Application to Medicine and Surgery” read by Pasteur before the French Academy of Sciences on April 29, 1878, dealing with his experiments on the anthrax virus and septicemia bacterium is usually taken to mark the public debut of germ theory. A crude but occasional effective inoculation against smallpox, originally developed in China, had been known in Europe for centuries. But only during Pasteur’s fight against anthrax (a disease affecting sheep) in the 1870s did he begin to understand why vaccinations worked. Applying his insights to humans, Pasteur developed an effective smallpox vaccine using a mild form of the disease. Persons who received the vaccination escaped the more severe effects of the disease which killed a majority of its victims. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Pasteur always emphasized the practical applications of his theoretical experiments. We see this every time we pick up a container of pasteurized milk, although Pasteur first developed the process of boiling to kill bacteria to help France’s beer industry. So eager was Pasteur to further knowledge of science that he used his prestige to institute evening university classes for working men. In Germany, Robert Koch, who had been a field surgeon during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), pioneered research into other “germs,” eventually discovering the organisms that caused eleven different diseases, including cholera (1884) and tuberculosis (1882). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1905 for his development of the “scratch test” for exposure to tuberculosis, still in use today. He also developed many of the techniques still used to grow bacteria in a laboratory. These medical discoveries began to have an immediate impact on the lives of people in industrial societies as governments suddenly found themselves in the business of keeping things clean. Great Britain passed laws in 1875 requiring local authorities to maintain sewers, forbade the building of any new houses without a toilet, and outlawed selling foods colored or stained to look fresher than they were. Jacob Riis (1849–1916) emigrated from Denmark to the United States as a young man. Working as a police reporter for newspapers in New York, and then with his photograph-filled book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), he publicized the terrible living conditions in the slums that housed an ever-growing population of workers. Riis’s work inspired stronger public health and housing laws. The city even went so far as to buy up land in upstate New York to keep development from contaminating the source of the city’s water supply. Some historians of science believe the greatest advances of the century were made in physics. Many of these grew out of the process of industrialization. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Working to improve techniques for boring metal cannon in 1798–1799, the American Benjamin Thompson (1753–1814) demonstrated that the activity generated a limitless amount of heat. Since no material body could be produced in unlimited quantities, his experiments proved that heat was a kind of energy, not a material thing. Using these findings, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) of Germany was able to formulate the law of the conservation of energy (1847). A counterpart of Lavoisier’s law of the conservation of matter, Helmholtz’s Law held that, although energy could be converted from one form into another, there could be no addition to, nor subtraction from, the total amount of energy in the universe. Because this law applies not only to heat, but also to electricity, magnetism, and light, it was one of the most important scientific generalizations of the nineteenth century. But advances in physics were not limited to theory; many of them had an immediate impact on everyday life. In Great Britain, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) helped develop the dynamo, a machine that allowed the transmission of electric current over long distances. Faraday’s ingenuity made possible public lighting systems, telephone networks, and the development of the electric motor.
By the century’s end, however, physicists were challenging the accepted nature of the universe itself. Not only were atoms not the smallest units of matter in the universe, many of them were also structurally unstable. Physicists themselves were startled in 1895 when Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) of Germany reported a strange ray he detected while sending electric current through a glass tube from which most of the air had been removed. Röntgen named what he saw the “X-ray” because he was uncertain of the ray’s exact nature, although he believed it was a form of electromagnetic radiation like light but of a shorter wavelength. Future experiments proved his belief correct. For his discovery, Röntgen was later awarded the very first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901). In France, Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) discovered that uranium compounds also gave off a form of radiation; the papers he published in 1896 gave modern physics a new direction. Maria Skl⁄odowska-Curie (1867–1934) coined the term “radioactivity” in 1898 for the phenomenon first observed by Becquerel. Building on Becquerel’s work, she and her husband Pierre (1859–1906) demonstrated that radioactivity was an atomic property of uranium and isolated two more radioactive elements, radium and polonium. The Curies and Becquerel shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903. In Britain, Joseph John Thomson (1856–1940) built on Röntgen’s work to give humanity a glimpse inside the atom with his discovery of the electron in 1897 for which he was later knighted. At the same time Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) suggested that each atom had a central, positively charged nucleus, which was separate from its negatively charged electrons. Radioactivity was caused by electrons escaping from unstable atoms. X-rays, radioactivity, and the electron theory challenged one of the most dearly held beliefs of science, the idea that matter was indivisible and continuous. The work of Röntgen, Becquerel, the Curies, Thomson, and Rutherford cleared the way for a new understanding of the universe. The universe was neither solid nor stable, but composed of energy only precariously bound into atoms. The single, simple “theory of everything” the Scientific Revolution thought it had found in Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity receded further and further into the distance. The greatest challenge to that theory came from Albert Einstein (1879–1955). The son of a German Jewish electrical engineer in Switzerland, Einstein gave little evidence of genius during his school days. Unable to find a university post, this graduate of the Swiss Polytechnic Institute supported his family as a patent office clerk. Yet in 1905, at the age of 26, he published three articles in the same issue of the Annals of Physics that altered the history of the century (and won him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics). The third essay became the theory of special relativity. Science had already shown that light moved in a straight line and at a constant speed no matter the vantage point. But from this fact, Einstein drew seemingly outrageous conclusions. He demonstrated that, when observed, a moving clock ran more slowly than a stationary one and a moving object shrank in the direction of the motion of light. He used the example of two strokes
MARIA SKL⁄ ODOWSKA-CURIE (1867–1934)
Maria Skl⁄odowska was born on November 7, 1867, in Warsaw, while Poland was part of the Russian Empire. Her father taught mathematics and physics, and her mother ran a school for girls. But the death of her mother from tuberculosis when little Mania (as she was called) was only eleven marked a severe change in the family’s fortunes. Both Mania and her older sister Bronia (Bronisl⁄awa) had to go to work after graduating from the Russian lycée (secondary school). There was no university education for girls in Poland, but both Skl⁄odowska girls wanted to be scientists, so they worked out a plan to take turns paying for each other’s way to Paris. Mania tutored Polish working women as part of a nationalist “free university” and worked as a governess to pay Bronia’s way to medical school in Paris. Then, in 1891, with Bronia’s help, Mania followed her sister to Paris and took university degrees at the Sorbonne in physics (1893) and mathematics (1894). In 1894 she also met Pierre Curie (1859–1906) who had risen from laboratory assistant at the Sorbonne to supervisor at the School of Physics and Industrial Chemistry in Paris. In 1895, shortly after Pierre successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on magnetism (or Curie’s law: the magnetic coefficients of attraction of paramagnetic bodies vary in inverse proportion to the absolute temperature), and Pierre and Marie (as she was called in France) were wed on July 25. In 1896, while working with uranium ore, Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) discovered the phenomenon that Maria would later name radioactivity. Searching for a topic for her own doctoral dissertation, Maria looked to extend Becquerel’s discoveries to other substances. Maria and Pierre first worked with pitchblende (a major source of uranium) and together discovered two new elements in 1898: polonium (named by Maria for her homeland) and radium. Becquerel and the Curies shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on radioactivity. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
The Prize won Maria her doctorate, but Pierre got the job, a professorship at the Sorbonne in 1904. The Curies had two daughters—Irène (in 1897) and Ève (in 1904)—before Pierre was killed on April 19, 1906, when he was run over by a horsedrawn cart. Maria had been working as a lecturer in physics at a normal school for girls (a teacher’s college) since 1900, but on May 13, 1906, she was appointed to fill Pierre’s professorship, the first woman to be so honored. In 1911, she won a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her continuing work on radium. The Radium Institute at the University of Paris was opened under her direction in 1914. Throughout the First World War, assisted by her daughter Irène, Maria Skl⁄odowskaCurie worked on the medical uses of X-radiography. She set up x-ray units for military hospitals and herself braved the dangers of the trenches. Working for the League of Nations after the War, Maria publicized the practical and theoretical uses of radioactive materials. Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot continued to advance Maria’s work, and their discovery of artificial radioactivity also won a Nobel Prize. On July 4, 1934, just a few months after her daughter’s discovery, Maria died of leukemia probably caused by her years of exposure to radiation. of lightning hitting a railway embankment at two equidistant points, one in front of and one behind a train moving at a constant speed. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
An observer outside the train would see the two strokes strike the embankment at the same time, but for someone in the moving train, the front stroke would seem to hit the embankment first. Although such distinctions were important only for objects moving close to the speed of light, Einstein had shown time to be relative. Space, he concluded, was also relative, since the length of material bodies could not be objectively measured, being dependent on the speed at which they were moving in relation to the observer. Time and space were not separate entities but rather joined in a continuum, and both were relative to the position and speed of the measurer. Almost as an afterthought, Einstein added that energy and matter were not different things but different states of the same thing. Indeed, matter could be converted into energy as expressed in the famous formula E=MC2. Matter was stored (latent) energy. Since the energy contained in any object was enormous relative to its mass, a small object could potentially release a tremendous amount of energy. In this formulation the Atomic Age was born. Einstein now had no difficulty finding a professorial position. At the University of Prague in 1911, he began to assess the workings of gravity within such a world and soon proposed his general theory of relativity (1915). His theory can be approached by thinking of objects placed on a rubber sheet: the weight of the objects will cause the sheet to sag. This creates a “dimple,” or a curve within space/time. Other objects passing by this depression would then roll into it: hence, gravity. Einstein’s prediction that light waves were also subject to the force of gravity was proven correct in 1919 by measurements made during an eclipse of the sun. Suddenly Einstein was an international celebrity.
Living with the Modern World
◆ The Triumph of Technology Nineteenth-century society became ever more susceptible to materialism as industrialization continued to alter everyday life. At the beginning of the century sailing ships took weeks to cross the Atlantic, but steam-engine-powered ships measured the trip in days before the century’s end. Transportation overland also accelerated dramatically as networks of railroads spread across Europe, North America, India, and parts of South America. By 1905 the 5,542 miles of the TransSiberian Railroad, running from Moscow to Vladivostok, united Russia’s Asian lands with Europe. With each decade the products of far-flung areas were made ever more available to manufacturers and consumers. Communications across nations and empires were speeded up by the development of the commercial telegraph (1844) and the laying of the Atlantic Cable (1876) that allowed it to cross an ocean, by the telephone (1876), and the wireless (1895), the precursor of radio and television. By the end of the century a single inventor, Thomas Edison (1847–1931), a self-taught former telegraph operator, held over a thousand patents, and was responsible for such diverse changes as the lighting of cities, the phonograph (1877), and the motion picture (1896). London’s steam-powered railway opened in 1863. On October 27, 1904, New York’s first subway line, the IRT (Interboro Rapid Transit, better known today as the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 lines), opened after four years of tunneling; eventually there would be more than 700 miles of track in the world’s most extensive rapid transit system. The first internal combustion engines were powering cars, boats, and cycles by century’s end, and on a cold and windy December 17, 1903, Orville Wright (1871–1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867–1912), two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, ushered in the age of the airplane with their flights over the North Carolina coast. It was hardly surprising that most of Western society was confident technology would secure its control over the world’s riches and ensure its material well-being. ◆ Realism and the Middle Classes Realism and naturalism were the literary counterparts of the materialism that dominated the late nineteenth century. Realists scoffed at literature that showed a world peopled by demons, individuals laboring under curses, and medieval lords and maidens. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Instead, realist writers found the drama in the lives of ordinary people in everyday surroundings. They were as critical of modern society as were the romantics, but preferred to expose the harsh reality of modern life in the hope of improving it. Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850), whose ninety-one-volume Human Comedy appeared between 1827 and 1847, was the founder of French realism. A prodigious writer who put in fourteen- to sixteen-hour days fueled by endless pots of coffee, he spent his off hours in an equally extravagant social whirl that kept him in constant debt. The son of a peasant and a woman of middle-class background, he knew France from the bottom up. His novels threw a merciless light on the greed and jealousy within middle-class society. The heyday of realism was also the first great era of mass culture. As urban growth rates exceeded the growth rate of the population at large, the middle and working classes became prominent forces in the cultural life of their nations. Middle-class novels, often appearing in weekly installments in the popular press before being packaged as books, added a sentimental gloss to the harsh realist vision. In Britain, Charles Dickens (1812–1870), who was forced into factory work when his father was imprisoned for debt, combined realism with Victorian sentimentality. His Oliver Twist (1838) told the story of a young boy born into a workhouse who, after many misadventures among London’s criminal classes, ends up in the arms of his long-lost uppermiddle-class family. Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), the American river boat pilot and journalist who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain, was the most successful writer in the United States. He even set up his own publishing company to keep up with the demand for his works. Twain’s novels included warts-and-all depictions of the pre-Civil War South (Huckleberry Finn, 1884, and Tom Sawyer, 1876) that remain controversial classics to this day. The new middle classes were avid readers, but they preferred their literature discreet. Gustav Flaubert (1821–1880) turned to writing as a profession when a nervous condition (thought to be epilepsy) sidelined his legal career. His Madame Bovary (1857) was the story of a provincial middle-class wife who betrayed her husband out of boredom. The novel’s sympathetic description of her adultery so offended public sensibilities that Flaubert was tried—although not convicted— for scandal. At the same time, department stores began selling a seemingly endless variety of affordable machine-made goods. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Distinctions in dress between classes began to disappear when almost everyone had access to similar ready-made clothing. Advertising and mail-order marketing further eroded such differences by making the latest urban fashions available and desirable to people all over the country. Mass media brought the same ideas in the same newspapers and magazines to everyone. The latest installment of a new novel by Dickens crossed the Atlantic within weeks. Different forms of mass entertainment appeared one after the other. The United States had its first professional baseball league in 1871. By 1900 there were two leagues and by 1903 a World Series between them. College basketball was an organized sport by 1891 with a professional association taking root by 1898. The first professional football teams were organized in Britain in 1893, and the first automobile race was held in France in 1894. Store-front theaters began to spring up to show off the brand new invention of moving pictures. The new middle classes even had their own high art. Impressionism, which developed, primarily in France, as early as the 1860s, rejected the high finish of classical realism. The founders of the movement were fascinated by the role of light in determining the appearance of the physical world. They hoped to capture the fleeting and ever changing impression that objects made on the eye. The development of the camera in the 1840s had seemed to threaten the future of painting as a recorder of reality. But by the changing effects of light on objects, impressionists cast doubt on the whole notion of an “objective” visual reality. Their subject matter was revolutionary as well. Leaving aside the large-scale history paintings and subjects drawn from Greek mythology, impressionists painted picture after picture of Sunday boaters, the middle class out for dinner at a café, a picnic, or a night at the theater. Ballet dancers, café singers, acrobats—all appeared on impressionist canvases. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Originally shunned by the art establishment, the impressionists were eventually adopted by an increasingly confident middle class delighted to see itself depicted in the colorful canvases of such painters as Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). ◆ Alternate Visions But not everyone bought the picture of a sunny, modern world. Even in painting, the artists known as post-impressionists or expressionists rejected the middle class picnics and flower gardens that were common subjects of the Impressionists. Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) abandoned his family and a career in the stock exchange to explore the mysteries of primitive peoples by living and painting in the French colony of Tahiti. He asserted that “primitive” art still retained that sense of wonder at the world that Western Civilization had lost, and his paintings attempted to portray the mystical elements of Polynesian life. In France, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) rebelled against the legal career his well-to-do parents had laid out for him and pursued the artistic life of bohemian Paris. Eventually rejecting the representational painting of the Impressionists, Cézanne developed a style based on geometric forms that led to cubism in the twentieth century. Another forceful rejection of the age’s worship of everything modern came from the pen of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In works such as Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–1884), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887), and the Twilight of the Idols (1888), Nietzsche passionately criticized Western culture, Christianity, and human conformity. He believed Christianity was based on deep resentment of this world, the resentment of the powerless, lower classes in the ancient Roman Empire among whom it had first spread. It fostered a “slave morality” (only a slave would “turn the other cheek” when struck, according to Nietzsche) that must and would be overcome as the world came to accept that “God is dead.” In the future, a finer type of man, the Übermensch (superman), modeled on the masters of the ancient world, would emerge free of foolish illusion and capable of moving humanity to a higher level of existence, with a new, heroic world-view taking joy in whatever the universe threw at them and in their own irrational instincts, including violence, the desire for power, and the thirst for beauty. Characterized by their courage, intellectual energy and beauty of character, these new men were destined to become the “lords of creation.” Although he believed no moral viewpoint could be imposed on all individuals, Nietzsche believed in the future greatness of mankind and success for nations such as Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. In Nietzsche’s view, all that sprung from power was healthy, while all that sprung from weakness was evil.
While Nietzsche’s criticism of modern society as a mediocre hypocrisy was made more easy to ignore as a result of his eventual descent into insanity (as a result of untreated syphilis), Freud’s attack on modern society’s claim to rationality proved harder to dismiss. The nineteenth century had not only inherited a physics of certainty from the Enlightenment, it had also inherited a psychology of rationality. The philosophes had seen the human mind as a machine reacting to physical stimuli in a calculating and mechanical fashion. Adam Smith had written of the enlightened (educated) selfinterest that underpinned the social division of labor (and was best left unregulated by governments). Jeremy Bentham had written of a “calculus of pleasure” (or, utility). The romantic reaction of the nineteenth century had stressed the emotional side of human nature, but had never been able to displace that basic faith in rationality. Auguste Comte and the positivists placed their faith in a human intellectual evolution as guaranteed as that of the Social Darwinists. The work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) upset that presumption of certainty as completely as Einstein’s destroyed the notion of a fixed universe. Freud, a lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna, was deeply interested in aspects of the mind that seemed to operate outside the control of conscious thought. While using hypnosis to treat “hysteria” (a catchall term for symptoms without apparent physical causes), he found that hypnotic trances often brought out forgotten memories of youthful experiences in his subjects. These memories seemed connected to the hysterical symptoms. Freud speculated that there was an unconscious part of the mind that had a greater potential effect on waking behavior than did rational mentality. His first book, Studies in Hysteria (1895), suggested that doctors might be able to focus on the source of a patient’s ailment by a method of “free association” (the “talking cure”). Further research led Freud to conclude that dreams depicted, in symbolic form, the desires and conflicts of the unconscious elements of the mind. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud argued that there were no accidents in mental processes and that the struggle between the conscious and unconscious mind had to be interpreted by an expert analyst. Continuing his work, Freud gradually developed a picture of a human mind divided into three parts: the ego (the mediating center of reason), the superego (the internalized restraints of society), and the id (the “primitive” sexual and aggressive drives). Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud argued that the conflict between humanity’s unconscious animal drives and the constraints of society not only caused a vast number of neuroses in troubled people but also threatened civilization itself. He believed the id’s lust for violence explained why war was so endemic in human history Almost from the start, the psychoanalytic movement was divided into factions. Freud’s own students remained divided over which “animal” drives played the greatest role in shaping the human personality, the extent to which childhood repression was the key to adult behavior, and the extent to which humans exhibited a “collective” (ethnic, national, or racial) as well as an individual personality. Many of the conditions studied by Freud and his students have also been found to have chemical causes. The modern psychiatrist uses magnetic resonance imaging, psychotropic drugs, electromagnetic shock, and laser surgery as well as Freud’s “talking cure.” Today, when psychotherapy is used, it is as likely be the short-term behavioral approach as the classic Freudian variety. But the impact of Freud’s theories on the wider cultural consciousness remains; people still talk about “Freudian slips,” “repression,” and “sublimation.” As for Freud himself, his pessimistic view of human nature did not necessarily translate into an ability to recognize true evil when it appeared. On March 13, 1938, Hitler’s forces moved into Austria, but Freud, a Jew, believed his fame protected him from harm and refused to leave. Even after the Nazis ransacked his house, he held to his belief that Nazism was a fleeting excess. Only after his daughter Anna was arrested and briefly held by the Gestapo, did Freud agree to leave his home for exile in Britain. He was not allowed to take his sisters out of the country, and they eventually died in German concentration camps. He died in England on September 23, 1939, after deliberately taking a lethal dose of morphine to end the pain of inoperable cancer. Discuss the ways in which the 20th century may or may not have been a century of progress.
Perhaps the highest celebration of Europe’s self-confidence was the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889. Millions of tourists descended on Paris to visit the two-hundred-acre site of the largest world’s fair ever held. It celebrated the triumphs of modern technology, “the living connection between men and things.” Tourists gazed in awe at the Eiffel Tower, the tallest structure in the world, and felt sure that progress would continue indefinitely and that Europeans would lead it. The fair ushered in La Belle Époque, a time of peace and shared confidence in the future. It was easy for bourgeois society to believe that technology would harness nature to create ever greater wealth for modern nations. Social Darwinists reassured western Europeans that imperial possessions were rightfully theirs because they were the “fittest,” the highest product of human evolution. Any problems that remained were only material, and these would be ended as the technological revolution continued. Under the surface calm of La Belle Époque, however, the problems of the nineteenth century remained. European intellectual life was a battlefield of opposing opinions whose conflicts had not been resolved. Belief in science, progress, and positivism continued strong, but not everyone shared in middle-class prosperity. The capitalist world economy was thriving, the bourgeoisie reveled in the sanctity of private property, and Britain was still the center of world finance. But Marxist socialists in every nation, convinced of the illegitimacy of capitalism, sought a future of collective ownership, the elimination of states, and an economy of shared wealth. Liberals preached the virtues of constitutional government, individual freedoms, and parliamentary representation, while in Eastern Europe autocracy remained predominant. Half the human race was denied basic rights because it was female. Social Darwinists documented immutable differences between the human “races” and predicted a pitiless biological struggle that would end in the enslavement or extermination of some peoples. Democracy and imperialism, civil rights and racism, and capitalist economies and Marxist political parties co-existed uneasily. Despite its wealth and power, Europe was deeply uncertain of its future direction. The good life of La Belle Époque would soon end as the nations of Europe found themselves involved in the very kind of war they thought their civilization had rendered impossible.
The Twentieth-Century Legacy
The modern world was born in revolutions scientific, national, and industrial. The values those revolutions embodied were spread by the steam engine, the railroad, and the machine gun until there was almost no place in the world where they were not known, if not necessarily adopted. But the meaning of modern and the societies so labelled continue to change. What seemed modern in the nineteenth century may be antique today. The only constant seems to be the increasing pace of change. In the twentieth century, humanity added more to its accumulated knowledge than in any previous period of history. We split the atom, landed on the moon, and began deciphering the genetic code. We created vaccines against smallpox, polio, mumps, measles, chicken pox, diphtheria, and tetanus. Our surgeons routinely transplant corneas, livers, kidneys, bone marrow, and hearts. Lasers facilitate the most delicate brain surgery. Cochlear implants, pacemakers, and artificial valves and joints are turning us into bionic men and women. Our knowledge of genetics verges on the ability to create “designer” human babies. This chapter looks at the complex legacy—in science, human rights, population, and economic integration—that the twentieth century has left to the twenty-first.
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