Chapter 10 - Men of Letters Revolt against the Numbers 1870 - 1940
Chapter 10 1870 - 1940 Men of Letters Revolt Against the Numbers
Anti-Science and Anti-Technology Currents in Literature and the Humanities, 1870–1940: From Romantic Reaction to Modern Times
Between 1870 and 1940, Western literature and the humanities repeatedly returned to waves of scepticism—often outright hostility—towards science and technology. These were not mere outbursts of nostalgia but complex intellectual movements shaped by rapid industrialisation, war, and shifting philosophical currents. This era saw a convergence of Romantic residues, fin-de-siècle pessimism, interwar disillusionment, and ideological critique, challenging both the authority of science and the moral legitimacy of technological progress.
Romantic Echoes and Industrial Fatigue
In the aftermath of the Second Industrial Revolution (1870–1914), the humanities bore the legacy of Romanticism’s suspicion of mechanisation. William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement rejected industrial uniformity in favour of artisanal craftsmanship, while John Ruskin’s social criticism lamented the moral degradation he believed industrial capitalism wrought. In France, Émile Zola’s naturalist novels (Germinal, 1885) depicted the brutality of coal mining, questioning whether technology brought liberation or deeper exploitation.
Symbolist and Decadent writers—Oscar Wilde, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans—elevated subjective aesthetic experience over utilitarian science. This mirrored a broader fin-de-siècle disillusionment with Enlightenment rationalism, visible in the essays of George Bernard Shaw and the cultural criticism of Matthew Arnold, both of whom warned of a civilisation dominated by mechanical efficiency.
Philosophy and the Challenge to Positivism
By the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche was dismantling the positivist faith in science as the inevitable path to truth, cautioning against the “will to truth” as an idol. Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) offered an alternative to mechanistic biology, emphasising intuition and élan vital over deterministic explanations. In literature, Henry James’s nuanced psychological realism rejected reductive scientific accounts of human behaviour.
The rise of sociology brought its own critique. Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) dissected technological progress as often serving conspicuous consumption rather than genuine advancement. Max Weber warned of the “iron cage” of rationalisation—bureaucratic and technological systems trapping individuals in dehumanising routines.
Literary Reactions to the Machine Age
H.G. Wells embodied the ambivalence of the scientifically trained author. Trained in biology, he celebrated science’s imaginative potential in works like The Time Machine (1895) but warned of its horrors in The Island of Doctor Moreau(1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898). E.M. Forster’s novella The Machine Stops(1909) portrayed a world where technology’s totalising control leads to spiritual and physical atrophy.
Russian literature also engaged the critique. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864) anticipated resentment against the deterministic rationalism of “scientific” social planning. Later, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) offered a dystopian vision of a mathematically regimented society—a direct forerunner to Orwell’s 1984.
War, Technology, and Disillusionment
World War I crystallised anti-technology sentiment. The unprecedented slaughter via machine guns, tanks, and poison gas demolished faith in linear progress. Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Siegfried Sassoon’s war poems juxtaposed pastoral innocence with mechanised carnage. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) presented war as the logical endpoint of industrial rationality.
In postwar Germany, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) staged a microcosm of Europe’s malaise, where medical science and political ideology alike failed to offer moral clarity. D.H. Lawrence railed against the mechanisation of life in novels like Women in Love (1920), seeing industrialism as an assault on human vitality.
The Interwar Avant-Garde
Dada and Surrealism oscillated between satirising technology and incorporating it into their art. While Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” mocked industrial replication, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto embraced speed and machinery, revealing the ambivalence within modernist movements. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) imagined a future of bioengineered passivity, while Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934) traced the historical roots of the machine, warning against its unchecked cultural dominance.
Chaplin’s “Modern Times” and the Visual Satire of Mechanisation
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) distilled half a century of anxiety into visual satire. The iconic image of the Tramp caught in the gears literalised Karl Marx’s theory of alienation and echoed literary metaphors from Zola to Lawrence. Chaplin lampooned Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” in the feeding machine sequence, portraying efficiency as absurd and dehumanising.
The film’s refusal of a neat resolution—ending with the Tramp and companion walking into an uncertain horizon—aligned with the scepticism of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the Frankfurt School’s early critiques of “instrumental reason.”
Academic Echoes and Cultural Critique
In the 1930s, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno began formulating their critique of the “culture industry,” arguing that mass media and industrial production shaped consciousness to serve systems of domination. Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930) saw technological society enabling mediocrity, eroding cultural excellence.
Visual artists like Diego Rivera alternated between celebrating industrial workers and warning of labour’s alienation. George Orwell’s early novels (A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying) dissected interwar Britain’s shallow consumerism. Virginia Woolf, in Three Guineas (1938), linked the machinery of war to patriarchal and industrial systems.
Conclusion: A Continuum of Suspicion
From Morris’s craft idealism to Chaplin’s cinematic satire, the period from 1870 to 1940 mapped an evolving suspicion of science and technology’s moral trajectory. While few rejected scientific endeavour outright, these thinkers and artists persistently questioned the human cost of subordinating culture and individuality to the imperatives of efficiency and production. By the time Modern Times reached audiences, the anti-science sentiment of the humanities had been refined into a multifaceted critique—one that would continue to inform debates on technology’s place in human life well into the 20th century.
Honest injun, this chapter was written by Chatty. But it is itself a mechanistic recounting of a mechanistic process - the rise of literature and philosophy's resistance to the deterministic mechanicalism of Science.
ReplyDeleteLots of familiar names here, quoting a lot of books I haven't read and a number I have, thereby sketching this growing sense of alienation and anomie.
There is an argument in human evolution, btw, that the size and complexity of the human brain did not evolve in order to take down woolly mammoths. Nor to invent fire, Nor to invent tools. Nor even to develop civilisation itself - for each of these inventions, given communication, had to be invented only once.
No - I'm afraid the reason our brains are so big, and the reason the favourite pastime of humans is gossip, is that it takes a lot of brainpower to successfully negotiate one's life in constant presence of the greatest threat any one of us ever faces: *other humans*.
One might then speculate: western philosophy had answers for storms and sun and cold, floods and fires, youth and age and death itself ... but found itself intimidated and threatened in the 20th century by its most potent foe: the intelligent skeptical scientist.
And so here we have it - a non-exhaustive but a convincing parade of authors academics and commentators evidencing a growing sense of unease among the "literati" at the success of scientific enterprise.
Doubtless much of their concerns were well founded. World war: say no more. But even in war, the leaders and instigators and belligerents of such wars sought humanity-relevant ends, with science providing only the means.
Still, why would there *not* be some measure of jealous resentment among the science-fearing writers and wordsmiths?
I should also say here - this chapter overlaps somewhat with Chapter 5. I may yet integrate this one with 5, or otherwise combine them ....... what do *you* advise?