1908
TheStar.com | Ideas | 1908: The year of living dangerously
Three books from a century ago suggest that then– as now – fear, paranoia and concern over new technology ruled the day
Aug 03, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer
The
launch of centuries may be marked by dates with a couple of zeroes, but
this is, strictly speaking, just a matter of mathematical convention.
At
least in the West, those dates scarcely ever mark a real shift in the
course of human history, what we think of as "defining" centuries. That
tends to come later, long after the double zeroes have passed.
What
we now view as recognizably 19th-century – in society, politics and
economics – didn't really get under way until after the Napoleonic Wars
and the 1815 Treaty of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe and
established, at least in relative terms, a long period of peace.
The last century was similarly slow to reveal itself. The Edwardians
certainly knew that change was afoot, but they still had far more in
common with late Victorian society than the kind of world that
developed after the First World War – one truly dominated by
mass-produced automobiles and passenger airplanes, arguably the two
defining technologies of 20th-century life.
So it's tempting,
especially in the wake of dire pronouncements from the Bush
administration, to view 9/11 as the similar launch of a new era. But in
light of history, that may be premature. Chances are we've yet to see,
or at least recognize, the real defining moment of the coming century.
There
are, after all, just too many parallels between today and 1908 –
another threatening time of apprehension, paranoia and new technology –
especially for the superpowers of the day, Britain then and the United
States now.
As it happens, that mood of bewildering uncertainty
and fear looms in the background of three British novels published
almost exactly a century ago: Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), coming on the heels of Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), one of whose characters just happens to have been the inspiration for the Unabomber of our times.
And
yet, the novels respond to the public mood in different fashion,
offering a spectrum of emotional reaction that also seems present
today: escapism and longing for a simpler life (Grahame), dark gloom
about the inevitability of horrors to come (Conrad), and a sort of
qualified optimism (Chesterton).
The parallels between Great
Britain at the turn of the last century and the United States today are
broad – superpowers coming to terms with, if not their frailty, then at
least their vulnerability, the passing of any easy sense of
invincibility.
Britain had just emerged from the Boer War, in
which it took three years and a total of 450,000 troops (including
Canadians) to quell a band of rebellious farmers turned guerrillas.
This
was not auspicious. Even such a committed imperialist as Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain likened the British Empire to a "weary
Titan staggering under the too vast orb of its own fate."
With so
many troops abroad, Britain entered the 20th century gripped by fears
of an imminent French invasion and tales (real and imagined) of German
spies, much of it fomented by pulp fiction and Fleet Street.
Such
was the perceived lack of intelligence about the spying and military
designs of its enemies that by 1909, Britain was creating the Secret
Service Bureau, ancestor of today's MI5 and MI6.
In similar
fashion, the United States now finds itself (and 140,000 troops) mired
in Iraq, overstretched militarily at huge cost ($530 billion U.S. so
far in Iraq alone) and feeling – at least in the public imagination –
more or less alone against the world.
(A recent map of the
planet circulating on the Internet shows the United States as
"AMERICA!!!!" accompanied by "WE R #111111." Less fortunate, at least
in labelling, is the rest of the world: "uninhabited" (Canada),
"pussies" (Europe) and "evil-doers!!" (The Middle East), with the
additional instruction, via arrow, that "bombs go here.")
Having been attacked on its own soil, the United States is still, understandably, awash in fear and paranoia post-9/11.
Nor
is that sense of being potentially vulnerable and unprepared reserved
for the great unwashed. Last month, the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation launched a recruiting drive to attract Arab-speakers, of
which it apparently still has shockingly few.
For most Americans,
in fact, the motives and goals of Muslim extremists are probably
perplexing beyond the basic fact that there are people out there who
hate them and their way of life. That scarcely allays trepidation. What
are terrorists really after, and what might they do to get it?
The
British of 1908 were equally beset, not by Muslim terrorists but by
bomb-wielding anarchists hoping to wipe the slate clean. Anarchists
had, after all, already made an attempt to blow up the Greenwich
Observatory in London, then as much a symbol of the modern world order
as the World Trade Center.
How to react to all this was, at heart, what propelled Grahame, Conrad and Chesterton into print a century ago.
Near the beginning of The Wind in the Willows
– Grahame's great lament for the passing of a cozy pastoral life – the
Water Rat exults to the visiting Mole: "Believe me, my young friend,
there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."
Grahame's
is a world full of simple riverside pleasures and the glory of nature –
an Arcadian, organic society where everyone has a place and feels a
responsibility to look out for his neighbour (women, alas, don't figure
prominently). It's a kind of pastoral escapism, but the threats to it
are ever-present, whether in the form of technological advances (the
then-new motor cars so adored by Toad) or those who inhabit the Wild
Wood.
Ratty, in a wonderful bit of English understatement, says
of the weasels, stoats and foxes: "They're all right in a way – I'm
very good friends with them – pass the time of day when we meet, and
all that – but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and
then – well, you can't really trust them, and that's a fact."
This is, of course, because weasels & co. have a noted tendency to, well, eat rats.
Grahame's book may not have been intended as an overt allegory in the way that George Orwell's Animal Farm clearly
was, but Grahame's biographer, Peter Green, writes that the Wild Wood
is "like the urban mob anarchists of every Edwardian upper-middle-class
nightmare."
The whole "messing about in boats" business and even
Toad's caravan and motor-car adventures also comes out of a sturdy
Victorian line of English literature, one that celebrates the
"fun-loving boy" as a kind of ideal person, notes Roger Sale in Fairy Tales and After. (Peter Pan, from the same era, says that he wants "always to be a little boy and have fun.")
They
live in charmed little circles, small spaces away from the horrors of
urban life and industrialization, where "animal etiquette" forbids
anyone from dwelling on "possible trouble ahead," as Mole remarks.
(It's a model that tightly gripped the English imagination until the
boy, as Sale puts it, "gained his apotheosis as a young victim in
Flanders.")
Such longing for escape, to turn the clock back on
such modern worries as global warming, seems increasingly with us
today. It shows in such books about decamping the city as Michael
Korda's Country Matters or Jim Mullen's It Takes a Village Idiot.
But
it may be most present in matters of food. At one point, Ratty sends a
couple of field mice off to the shops to fetch provisions, instructing
them to insist on "fresh, mind" and "only the best," which he defines
as "home-made, no tinned stuff."
In other words, intensely local
food (locavores take note) and likely what we would now call organic,
with an uplifting back-story about its production.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma,
calls today's version "Supermarket Pastoral" – in which the labelling
on "natural" and "organic" foods often makes it seem as if they come
from some idyllic countryside where cows are invariably contented,
wandering free and freely giving. An illusion, in short, we seem to
crave.
Joseph Conrad, the weathered seafarer, has seen too much to believe any escape possible. In The Secret Agent, modelled directly on the anarchist attack in Greenwich, he has no illusions about anything.
Anarchists and spies are running amok in London. There are plots and counterplots, and no one can be sure whom to trust.
The
central character, Adolf Verloc, is a porn-shop owner and double agent,
spying on behalf of an unnamed European embassy, but also feeding
information to the police who, as a result, have a decent track record
preventing anarchist plots from succeeding.
This, however, will
no longer suffice for Verloc's cruel embassy boss, a Mr. Vladimir, who
wants a real explosion, one that will help bring about a pan-European
crackdown on all manner of anarchists and reds.
Vladimir settles
on an attack against science, in the form of Greenwich, and his
reasoning is a chilling peek into the rationale of any terrorist, then
or now:
"What is one to say to an act of destructive ferocity so
absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in
fact, mad."
Verloc sets to his task, and nothing but unrelenting
tragedy ensues, as Verloc has, Conrad tells us, "one single amiable
weakness: the idealistic belief in being loved for himself."
He
eventually dies at the hands of his wife, who runs off with another
anarchist, Ossipon, and then commits suicide when Ossipon abandons her,
fearing for his own life.
Conrad's world is all gloom and weary resignation to the realpolitik
horrors of the planet. It's a mindset seemingly not far removed from
many Americans today, when a presumptive Republican nominee, John
McCain, can openly talk about a cruel world in which the U.S. might
have to remain in Iraq for the next 100 years.
For a glimmer of
hope, you have to turn to Chesterton, who similarly weaves a tale of
anarchists – these ones led by a revolutionary council whose members
are all named after days of the week, with the hulking figure of Sunday
at the helm.
Their planned outrage is the assassination of the
Russian czar and the French president, and a kind of frightening farce
ensues when our hero, Thursday, sets out to prevent it from happening.
Here,
too, it's hard to know just who can be trusted: The other members of
the council turn out to be, like Thursday, police officers.
Author and critic Jonathan Lethem likens Chesterton's book to a kind of "perfect midpoint" between Conrad and Grahame.
Thursday
and company endure an anarchist hell, but they also arrive at a country
estate where, fleetingly, "they all agreed that in some unaccountable
way the place reminded them of their boyhood," writes Chesterton.
There is a degree of reassurance.
His tale is subtitled A Nightmare, which suggests it's a horror imagined as much as real, and it has, by definition, already passed.
Yes,
the book is littered with references to the duality of people, good
twinned with evil within them. But there is also a qualified hope. Even
in the face of contrary evidence, Chesterton's characters mostly
believe that the mass of people will, when pressed, do the right and
decent thing.
And there is always a hint of hope in small things,
as when one character remarks: "God forbid that madness should in any
way interrupt friendship."
A measure of that guarded optimism, or
a willingness to be optimistic in the face of much contrary evidence,
also seems at play in the United States today. You can see it in the
emotional response of many Americans (and lately, Europeans) to Barrack
Obama's "Yes, we can" message of hope.
At last report, McCain and
Obama remained virtually tied in the polls, which could serve as a
loose proxy for America's conflicted mood about the future – Grahame's
riverside escape not being on the ballot.
So we're still left
wondering which approach and apparent world view will emerge
triumphant, which man will be the one to face what could be our next
century-defining moment, whenever and whatever that may be.
Yet a canny handicapper could probably do worse than to think, this time around, that event will involve not Europe, but Asia.
August 3, 2008 at 01:54 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
| Top of page
| Blog Home
