Page 2 - summer 22

MODERN PARADISE

SESSION ONE

Introduction: Shape of the century, wars and rebirth

Last year I asked members for their suggestions on what they’d like included in this
year’s topic, and I’ve tried to incorporate these. They included “the century of two
halves” (wars and rebirth), social class and labour relations, the bomb, women, the

sixties, culture and the arts, popular culture (Hollywood, television, popular music
and jazz), sport, medicine and health.

I’ve grouped these under three broad themes: culture, war and revolutions. I
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proposed to start with culture because I’ll suggest that the 20 century was above all
“a century of culture”. It opened with a big cultural bang: the birth of Modernism.
Alongside this artistic revolution, mass popular culture emerged as new media like

photography, film, radio, records and later television were invented. These triggered
huge debates as to what culture and art actually meant. There was also a cultural
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revolution in politics. Marx was a towering figure, but the 20 century did not bear
out his predictions. This led to a major re-think of his theories, resulting in a new
form of “cultural politics” which was profoundly influential and still resonates today
in areas like populism, identity politics, anti-racism, feminism, and even ideas like
political correctness, and “woke”.

War is clearly a major theme. The “shape” of the century is often seen as two halves,
the first half dominated by wars, the second by recovery, rebirth and prosperity. We
will focus on the Second World War, the policy of appeasement leading up to it, the
moral dilemmas that the war threw up, the atom bombs which ended it, and the Cold
War that grew out of it. The Cold War dominated the pattern of world politics for so
long, including the decades in which we grew up, that no one was sure what might
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replace it; maybe we still aren’t. Eric Hobsbawm called the 20 century “The Age of
Extremes”, by which he meant the extreme contrast between horrors like the
trenches, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the unprecedented progress and
prosperity of the post-war decades. Edwin Brook wrote a rather bitter poem about
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the “mid-20 century crisis” called Five Ways to Kill a Man in 1990:

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.

To do this properly you require a crowd of people