Stranger Than We Can Imagine Making Sense of the Twentieth Century
Ratings2
Average rating4
“An illuminating work of massive insight” on the complex ideas and events that initiated the historical shift between the 19th and 20th centuries (Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen). “An always-provocative view of an era that many people would just as soon forget . . . an absorbing tour of the 20th century.” —Kirkus Reviews In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism. In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives. Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Stranger Than We Can Imagine bills itself as “an alternative history of the 20th century.” Which raises the question: an alternative to what about the 20th century, exactly? John Higgs asked this very question when he found himself in his local bookshop watching a video of Barrack Obama. He was talking about whether the hacking of Sony Entertainment by the North Korean regime should be regarded as an act of war, on a thin slice of glass and metal he'd pulled from his pocket.
Looking over at the history section of the bookshop, Higgs couldn't find anything that explained exactly how the world ended up the way it is today. A world with all its peculiarities and contradictions, so he decided to take on the task of explaining it himself. But this isn't just a book about events, its also about the way we make sense of it. The fact that people of different eras have related to their world in different ways is hardly news. But the 20th Century is a special case, marking probably the greatest shift in perspective ever experienced. So much so that even their immediate predecessors, the Victorians, would have found the inhabitants of the 20th Century strange and baffling creatures.
Higgs is interested in occasions when canons of knowledge and authority were upturned, when the 20th century chipped away at the idea of there being one grand unifying perspective, and instead privileged multiple perspectives, points of reference and ways of understanding the world.
Pre–20th century, we lived in an age when large parts of the world were carved up by colonialism—where you were in the hierarchy was more important than who you were as a person. If you were a serf or peasant, then that's who you were, regardless of whether you were a good person. It seems appalling to us now, but it was how people understood themselves. It was extremely harsh on the majority of people, but it was stable, and it was the only model of society that we had. It was something that was so integral to all of history, so when it all disappeared almost in the blink of an eye when WWI ended, it was a really big deal.
This was the period where we tried to come to terms with different perspectives and with not having a fixed point of society, or omphalos [an object of world centrality]. This deletion of the arbitrary omphalos happened in many areas, including art, politics, and psychology, during this period. Einstein's theories set the precedent right from the off; indeed, what could be a more convincing arena for the demonstration of the subjectivity of viewpoints than the supposed bastion of objectivity, the physical sciences? And this is the common thread which unites the various unconnected developments: relativity. Freud's presence in Stranger Than We Can Imagine is audaciously low-key, and Marx doesn't even make the index. It's Einstein who is the father of the era. His discovery that there were no absolutes in physics, only how things appeared relative to the observer, was quickly matched in art, philosophy and politics. Jasper Johns spoke of Duchamp's “persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference”, and that's the prevailing theme of the early 20th Century, expressing itself in Cubism, atonal music, The Waste Land, even the cinematic development of montage. And along with it came the rise of individualism. Higgs notes how the end of World War I also marked the end, virtually overnight, of the age of emperors. With the fixed certainties of the imperial age gone, the door was open for the “multiple perspectives” of democracy. This, inevitably, had its dark side. Mussolini was a self-declared relativist who concluded that, since there was no one true ideology, it was the luxury of the most powerful to be able to impose their own ideology by force. Hitler, Stalin and every murderous dictator who followed in their wake, couldn't have agreed more.
Higgs follows these currents through modernism, existentialism and nihilism, but finds towards the end of his journey the Internet introducing “feedback loops” into our lives which seem to be pointing our collective consciousness in a new, more cooperative direction.
Stranger Than We Can Imagine is a thought-provoking read. Its memorable anecdotes and signposts to further reading make it an enjoyable introductory text on twentieth century history, as well as an accessible guide to many of its more murky aspects.
