MUCH OF what exists originated as an inkling in the human mind. That enslaving other people is acceptable; that it is utterly heinous. That a royal despot is the norm; that freedom, rights and self-governance is better. Conservative or left-leaning, capitalist or Marxists, sushi-lover or vegan—they’re all products of thinking.

A history of these synaptic outputs is the subject of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest book, “Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think It” (Oneworld, 2019). It covers the range of human ideas, from prehistoric man’s preoccupations to artificial intelligence. But the focus is on topics like the emergence of scientific truth and democracy—themes that seem under threat today, with talk of “fake news” and authoritarians on the march. 

By K.N.C. — THE ECONOMIST

His description of the bubbling intellectual cauldron of post-first-world-war society also has echoes now. “The politics of the megaphone—the appeal of shrill rhetoric, oversimplification, prophetic fantasy, and facile name-calling—appealed to constituencies hungry for solutions,” writes Mr Fernández-Armesto, a British historian who teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

As part of The Economist’s Open Future initiative, we are publishing an excerpt from the book, on the ideas behind futurism and the rise of fascism. Following that is an interview with the author on parallels with today and what worries him most.

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Glorifying war, power, chaos and destruction

Excerpted from “Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think It” by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Oneworld, 2019)

Reaction was predictable. Frenzied change menaces everyone with anything to lose. After the seismic thinking of the early twentieth century, the big question in disrupted minds was how to dispel chaos and retrieve reassurance. An early and effective response came from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti – Italian dandy, méchant, and intellectual tease. In 1909 he published a manifesto for fellow artists. At the time, most artists professed ‘modernism’: the doctrine that the new excels the old. Marinetti wanted to go further. He thought, as it were, that the next must exceed the now. He therefore proclaimed ‘futurism’. He believed that it was not enough to surpass the legacy of the past. Futurists must repudiate tradition, obliterate its residue, trample its tracks. ‘The future has begun’, Marinetti announced. It sounds like nonsense or, if not nonsense, a platitude, but, in a way, he was right. He had devised a telling metaphor for the pace of the changes that went on accelerating for the rest of the century.

Marinetti rejected all the obvious sources of comfort that people might normally crave in a disrupted environment: coherence, harmony, freedom, received morals, and conventional language. To him comfort was artistically sterile. Instead, Futurism glorified war, power, chaos, and destruction – ways of forcing humankind into novelty. Futurists celebrated the beauty of machines, the morals of might, and the syntax of babble. Old-fashioned values, including sensitivity, kindness, and fragility, they dismissed in favour of ruthlessness, candour, strength. They painted ‘lines of force’ – symbols of coercion – and machines in madcap motion. Earlier artists had tried and failed to capture the speed and rhythm of industrial energy: Turner’s steam engine is a blur, Van Gogh’s depressingly static. But the Futurists excelled them by breaking motion into its constituent elements, like physicists splitting atoms, and copying the way cinema reflected movement in split-second sequences of successive frames. The excitement of speed – attained by the new-fangled internal combustion engine – represented the spirit of the age, speeding away from the past.

Futurism united adherents of the most radical politics of the twentieth century: fascists, for whom the state should serve the strong, and communists, who hoped to incinerate tradition in revolution. Fascists and communists hated each other and relished their battles, first in the streets and later, when they took over states, in wars bigger and more terrible than any the world had ever seen. But they agreed that the function of progress was to destroy the past. It is often said that leaders ‘foundered’ or blundered into the First World War. That is so. But the surprising, shocking feature of the descent into war is how passionately the apostles of destruction worshipped and welcomed it.

Wars nearly always urge events in the direction in which they are already heading. Accordingly, the First World War quickened technologies and undermined elites. The better part of a generation of the natural leaders of Europe perished. Disruption and discontinuity in European history were therefore guaranteed. Destruction and despair leave citizens stakeless, with no investment in tranquillity and no allegiance amid wreckage; so the terrible expenditure of money and mortality bought not peace but political revolutions. Twelve new sovereign, or virtually sovereign, states emerged in Europe or on its borders. Superstates tumbled. Frontiers shifted. Overseas colonies were swivelled and swapped.

The war felled Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires at a stroke. Even the United Kingdom lost a limb: the revolt and civil war that broke out in Ireland in 1916 ended with independence, in effect, for most of the island six years later. Huge migrations redistributed peoples. After the war, more than one million Turks and Greeks shunted to safety across frantically redrawn borders. Excited by the discomfiture of their masters, the peoples of European empires elsewhere in the world licked their lips and awaited the next European war. ‘Then is our time’, are the last words of the hero of A Passage to India. ‘We shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea.’

Postwar poverty favoured extremisms. The financial disasters of Europe and the Americas in the 1920s and 1930s seemed to show that the West was wormwood. The rot went deeper than the corrosive politics that caused wars and blighted peace. An age of fault finding with Western civilization began. Anti-Semites blamed Jews for the world’s hard times, on the mythic grounds that ‘international Jewry’ controlled the world’s economies and exploited Gentiles for their own enrichment. Advocates of eugenics alleged that unscientific breeding was responsible for the woes of the world: it weakened society by encouraging ‘inferior’ classes and races and ‘feeble’ or ‘mentally defective’ individuals to spawn children as weak and useless as their parents.

Anticlericals blamed the Church for supposedly subverting science, emasculating the masses, and encouraging the weak. Communists blamed capitalists. Capitalists blamed communists. Some of the things people blamed were so fantastic as to be rationally incredible – but rabble-rousers were noisy enough to drown out reason. Impoverished and miserable millions were ready to believe their claims. The politics of the megaphone – the appeal of shrill rhetoric, oversimplification, prophetic fantasy, and facile name-calling – appealed to constituencies hungry for solutions, however simplistic, strident, or supposedly ‘final’. Revenge is the easiest form of righteousness and a scapegoat is a welcome substitute for self-sacrifice.

According to the most widespread analysis, the right place to lay blame was with what people called ‘the system’. Marx’s predictions seemed to be coming true. The poor were getting poorer. The failures of capitalism would drive them to revolution. Democracy was a disaster. Authoritarian leaders were needed to force people to collaborate for the common good. Perhaps only totalitarian governments could deliver justice, extending their responsibility over every department of life, including the production and distribution of goods. Cometh the hour, cometh the ideology.

Fascism was a political bias in favour of might, order, the state, and war, with a system of values that put the group before the individual, authority before freedom, cohesion before diversity, revenge before reconciliation, retribution before compassion, the supremacy of the strong before the defence of the weak. Fascism justified revocation of the rights of dissenters, dissidents, misfits, and subversives. Inasmuch as it was intellectual at all, it was a heap of ideas crushed into coherence like scrap iron in a junkyard compressor: an ideological fabrication, knocked together out of many insecurely interlocking bits of corporate, authoritarian, and totalitarian traditions. 

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From “Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think It” by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Copyright © 2019 by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Published by Oneworld. All rights reserved.

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The Economist: How similar is Europe’s interwar period of dark ideologies with today’s politics of polarization, fake-news and populism?

Mr Fernández-Armesto: The parallels are tempting. But I notice differences. The bien-pensants mistook Hitler for a clown; but the likes of Trump and Boris really are Pagliacci: they’re tragically risible. As for racism—a literally nonsensical ideology—it is surprisingly robust, but has shorter, blunter fangs than it used to. Secularism and the pseudo-liberal tyranny of political correctness are almost as censoriousness as 20th-century totalitarianisms.

What we’re experiencing now reminds me more of 19th-century nationalisms. Then, states strove to overcome “particularism”; now the perceived enemy is multiculturalism. Yet the message is the same: integrate or leave. As for fake news, it has always been with us. But people are perhaps easier than ever to con, because critical intelligence has dropped out of our educational value-system.

The Economist: Are there any lessons from the interwar year’s ideological ferment that gave rise to fascism that we can apply to prevent intolerant views from taking over today?

Mr Fernández-Armesto: No. The only lessons you get from the 1930s are about then, not now. We can’t prevent intolerance: it’s here. We don’t need mere tolerance, but rather critically-stimulating education that enables people to tell—as Harold Macmillan put it—”when a man is talking rot”. Minds open but critically informed. We won’t get it, because all most people now want from schools is quantifiable return on investment.

The Economist: Periods of intellectual experimentation can produce novel and beneficial ways of seeing the world, not just dangerous ones. How can we try to encourage and support these positive and productive visions of the future?

Mr Fernández-Armesto: In freedom. If powerful states or bosses rip freedom from citizens and workers, creativity shrivels. The sovereignty of individual conscience and the freedom of one’s imagination are everyone’s most precious possessions. I’d call those rights. The freedoms to follow one’s conscience and to realise one’s imaginings are our most precious privileges.

In the professional intellectual world, most great breakthroughs are the work of unfettered brilliance; peer review is a form of tyranny. (I’d severely limit it, and break the deadly link between funding and outcomes.) In the arts, I’d use tax policy to require that lucrative works and sports be used to subsidise whatever is traditional or classical, or experimental and genuinely novel. You’re right to anticipate dangers.

The Economist: As the late-20th-century order of liberalism, internationalism, capitalism and democracy face challenges from within the West and outside it, does your reading of intellectual history suggest that it's just a temporary setback? Or is the bedrock of our societies breaking, and new ideologies of freedom, rights, interconnections and governance will need to be created?

Mr Fernández-Armesto: “Yes,” to the first part of the question—but my idea of what’s temporary can last for thousands of years. As for the second part of the question, human nature is a tissue of paradoxes: we’ll never have a coherent or enduring system that’s entirely compatible with it. I’d like to think we could do better than capitalism and democracy: “the worst systems, except for all the others”. 

A third-way fudge is conceivable, but it’s obvious that we haven’t got “enterprise” balanced with “regulation”, or private with public ownership, mainly because the rich won’t forego any of their advantages, and, in authoritarian states, because incumbent parties and elites won’t share power. Marx, who was wrong about most things, was surely right to think that growing inequalities are unsustainable and provoke revolutions. 

We may have to go through a lot of destructiveness before we can recraft society along rational lines. Meanwhile, I recommend individual responsibility: the more people behave humanely, the better the world—for all its structural defects—will be.

The Economist: People once accepted slavery and then agreed it was wrong. Societies regarded women as inferior to men, and that is almost eradicated. What does it take to get a vile idea repudiated? In other words, how can humans get better via our thinking?

Mr Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Ideas aren’t usually vile to those who have them. Slavery and sexual inequality seem vile to me, but I try to understand why most people, in most cultures, have approved them—and generally, it was because they worked for women, who got trade-offs in security and informal power, and even for slaves, who, in most slave-owning societies, were war captives faced with bleak options. 

To challenge such ideas effectively, paradigm shifts were needed. And paradigm shifts aren’t like ideas: they don’t start in people’s heads, but in the social, economic and environmental contexts. Sexual inequality ends when societies need to exploit women’s labour in the same way as men’s, and slavery when it ceases to be economically recommendable.

The Economist: As artificial intelligence matures, it will take on more of the tasks that human minds do. Where will that leave people? Is there anything mentally that we bring that machines can't do?

Mr Felipe Fernández-Armesto: I don’t like to use the term “artificial intelligence,” except in inverted commas, not because I have contempt for machines (which are, at least, morally neutral) or respect for humans (who tend to be horrid), but because intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. I’m good at IQ tests, for example, and lousy at almost everything else. I know of no objective measure of intelligence. 

If there is a property I think machines can’t attain, I call it imagination: the power of exceeding knowledge and experience. If there is a programme for which I see no possible algorithm, it is morality: a genuinely selfless machine would break down. A robot-ruled world is imaginable, of course, but probably only as a result of a human programming error. Meanwhile, the danger AI poses is rather of human tyranny, with machines enfeebling most people, physically and intellectually, so as to leave them at the mercy of a master-class.

The Economist: You note in your book that “pluralism has to accommodate anti-pluralism” but argue that “it promises the only practical future for a divisive world” and ”is the one doctrine that can unite us.” May I accuse you of letting your sentiments overrule your analysis? The trend around the world is definitely against pluralism. What can the pluralists do to win?

Mr Felipe Fernández-Armesto: You may so accuse me. I may in turn accuse you of not taking a sufficiently long-term view. It may take a wave of nasty populism, a recrudescence of intercommunal hatreds, and quite a bit of bloodshed, but in a world where you can’t keep cultures apart, they will have to find ways of co-existing. Keeping pluralism at bay today is like keeping apartheid going in South Africa in the late 20th century, where white supremacists were driven to ever-more extreme and desperate expedients. The most effective strategy for their opponents, as Nelson Mandela realised, was to wait, and, meanwhile, to be unceasing in advocacy.

The Economist: At the beginning of the 22nd century, what do you think people are going to be spending most of their time thinking about, that we're barely thinking about today?

Mr Felipe Fernández-Armesto: God! And I don’t mean that merely as an exclamation.

https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/07/19/the-radical-politics-of-futurists-and-fascists-and-us-here-today

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GusNote: God does not exist..... We are fumbling alone on this little pebble we call Earth, as we mostly ignore the other passengers — the flora and the fauna — and destroy the evolutionary system that made us.....