Watson, Peter. The Modern Mind. An Intellectual History of the 20th Century. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2000. pp. 847. ISBN 0-06-019413-8

Summary

This book traces the evolution of Western thought using what the author calls "narrative history." His basic thesis is that the dominant intellectual trend during the past 100 years has been "a coming to terms with science" (p. 2). This trend influenced the form and content of art, literature, music, philosophy and even science itself. This trend also explains, in part, the political and social horrors of the 20th century.

By taking a "narrative" approach to history, the author actually tells a "story." Each chapter has a theme in which various works of literature, art, music or books about economics, politics or philosophy become the actors and the plot at the same time. They are described and sometimes summarized in detail. The focus is upon the impact of world events upon intellectuals. Indeed, because of their historiography, the stories told are as much about the intellectuals as about their work: what they were trying to accomplish, how ideas influenced their own intellectual output and the relationships among the intellectuals. They are generally in temporal sequence, but there is some tracking of subjects or people back and forth. The chapters are grouped into four parts:

Part One: Freud to Wittgenstein: The Sense of a Beginning
Part Two: Spengler to Animal Farm: Civilisations and their Discontents
Part Three:  Satre to the Sea of Tranquility: The New Human Condition and the Great Society
Part Four: The Counter-culture to Kosovo: The View from Nowhere, The View from Everywhere

A book of the sweeping scope of this one, with 800 pages packed with details about hundreds of  books, art and music cannot be summarized in a page or two. I offer a summary of his primary conclusions and a few notes on his more significant observations.

Science in the closing decades of the 19th century was making rapid discoveries. At the turn of the century, discoveries began to be significant and revolutionary: medicine, chemistry astronomy and physics were providing answers to basic questions. Society in general began to perceive science (and technology created from science) as providing answers to man's basic needs and problems. World War I was shocking in that it caused thoughtful persons to question whether science could truly fulfill the expectations that people had of it. The rise of  mass media and culture caused many, like T.S. Elliot, to lament the fall of "high culture," and in response articulate a "canon" of the essential or core intellectual tradition of Western culture.  In the 1960s there arose a "counter-culture" which reacted to the "established" cultural canon as well as the idea that science could provide answers to human needs and problems. This reaction eventually came to be called "post-modernism," which is skeptical of science's claims to authoratative explanations of "Everything." Although Watson does not express it this way, his story is about how science forced the arts and humanities to intellectual and spiritual bankrupcy. So, although science (in its arch-reductionist form) has failed to cure all of mankind's ills and has yet to provide satisfying answers to the meaning of life questions, nevertheless, at the end of the 20th century science is still mankind's best hope for the future. And there are signs that science will eventually "explain" the arts and humanities in scientific terms: art, the humanities and science all become "one story" (p. 771).

According to Watson, the great and most influential ideas of the 20th century are Darwinism and evolution, Marxism, Freudiansim, capitalism, which have had a deep impact upon the development of mass media, democracy, free-market economics and science.  And of these forces, Marxism and Freudianism have been shown to be intellectual failures with little or no empirical basis or support (p. 765). The abuse of the mass media and the extravagances of free-market economics, while undoubedly successful, are used in the cause of oppression. Our hope for the future is that science will focus upon the study of groups, individuals, human consciousness, psychology and sociology, so that we will understand the etiology of racism, sex offenses and drug abuse. Watson believes that eventually the arts and humanities will be subsumed into the sciences, that is, science will explain the arts and humanities, and provide the direction of those disciplines.

Some quotes:

And crucially, 1930, when Ash Wednesday [a poem by T. S. Elliot] appeared, was perhaps the earliest date at which all the three great intellectual forces of the twentieth century became appearent. These three forces were: science; free-market economics; and the mass media. (p. 751-52)

In the Reformation, religion and politics became divorced; in the twentieth century political liberation has been replaced by personal liberation. (p.754)

In the twentieth century, what we may characterise as scientific/analytic reason has been a great success, by and large; political, partisan and rhetorical reason, on the other hand, has been a catastrophe. The very strengths of analytic, positive/passive reason have lent political rhetorical reason an authority it does not deserve. George Orwell, above and before everyone, saw this and sought to bring home the point. (p. 768)

I refer to the relative dearth of non-Western thinkers....I was shocked (and that is not too strong a word) to find that they [scholars of non-Western cultures] all (I am not exaggerating, there were no exceptions) came up with the same answer, that in the twentieth century, the non-Western cultures have produced no body of work that can compare with the ideas of the West. In view of the references throughout the book to racism, I should make it clear that a good proportion of these scholars were themselves members of those very non-Western cultures. More than one made the point that the chief intellectual effort of his or her own (non-Western) culture in the twentieth century has been a coming to terms with modernity, learning how to cope with or respond to Western ways and Western patterns of thought, chiefly democracy and science. (p. 761)

We should know by now — it is one of the implicit messages of this book — that in a crowded world, the world of mass society (a twentieth-century phenomenon), every advance is match by a corresponding drawback or problem. (p. 765)

Critique

Wow. What a wonderful book! It is, first and foremost, a reference book: my list of "required reading" was multiplied several times over. It is encyclopaedic in scope, and, most important of all, The Modern Mind places all that reading in a context, both historical and intellectual.  While the early part of the century was educational, pointing me to books and ideas that I was unaware of before, as we moved into the 1950s and 1960s — my childhood and adolescence — the narrative actually became exciting. Growing up, one does not have an adult perspective. I was often unaware of the context of the ideas I studied, the books I read, the media I watched. Reading about those years was like returning to my youth, but with an adult point of view. I re-experienced my education and my reading as a youth, and this was personally a very valuable experience. I now understand myself and my times in a way I did not before reading this book.

It would be easy — and unfair — to criticise the choice of subjects, books or ideas discussed. The scope of the book is great and no one can be a specialist in all subjects and disciplines. Watson's willingness to attempt this synthesis is courageous. By definition, a storyteller selects events and details to accomplish his purpose, and of necessity excludes things which do not serve his purpose. It is true here as well. Watson's biases are clear and to his credit, obvious and sometimes even explicit. Watson rejects Marxism and Freudianism, and embraces both science — especially evolution — and a classic liberal value set. His treatment of racism in America was perhaps the most propagandistic: he ignored racism in Europe and portrays the accomplishments in America to be inadequate. Only in America, it seems, is there racism or any controversy about it.

If there is a failure of The Modern Mind, it is in its treatment of religion and belief. Watson clearly has no contact with people of faith and no understanding the the intellectual life of the believer. Like most modernists, religion has nothing to say to him. He quotes Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), with approval:

Not being religious myself, yet believing that most of reality is likely to be permanently unknowable to human beings, I [Magee] see a compelling need for the demystification of the unknowable. It seems to me that most people tend either to believe that all reality is in principle knowable or to believe that there is a religious dimension to things. A third alternative — that we can know very little but have equally little ground for religious belief — receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies (p. 767).

What is this but "aggressive agnosticism," which admits it does not have the answers to the Big Questions, but denys any other worldview or epistemology the possibility that they might have knowledge that the modernist will not see? For Watson, the "real world" is the world of secular art, science and humanities. That believers might have an intellectual conversation does not occur to him. No religion has any compelling thing to say about the human condition. He apparently has not read Augustine, Aquinas, or even (keeping within the limits of the twentieth century) Frances Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis or Cornelius van Til. Believers are engaged in conversation with the intellectual winds and Zeitgeist of our age. But Watson doesn't know this.

Conclusion

Evangelicals are often as isolated from the intellectual trends of our time as Watson is from our conversations. The Modern Mind is essential reading for thoughtful evangelicals, and required reading for seminary professors and evanglical writers. I know of no other single source that can bring one up to speed with what the world is thinking about and why.

Although long, this book is very engaging and readable. I read this book chapter by chapter with a friend, meeting weekly to discuss it. This helped us both greatly in assimilating the content. One word of warning: this book will tempt you to stop reading it and read the works that it describes!