Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [154]
As long as man thought himself the son of God, containing the divine spark and created by the finger of God as in that wonderful gesture pictured by Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling, he had respect and even a little awe for himself; he could feel there was a purpose in his being here and even a concealed purpose in the evil that befell him or in the evil that he wrought; that, come what may, he was a part of the divine plan. Without wishing to offend individual beliefs, I would say that as a historical factor determining man’s image of himself, this view no longer holds. We are on our own now, “a poor bare forked animal,” in King Lear’s words, and it is very uncomfortable.
Until the twentieth century opened, the idea of progress was the most firmly held conviction of the nineteenth century. Man believed himself both improvable and improving. He had acquired the enormous help of science—especially medical science—and of the machine, doubling or, rather, infinitely multiplying his work capacity, his health, comfort, and freedom of movement. Household plumbing and running water, the steam engine, electric light, refrigeration, sanitation, anesthesia and antisepsis, typewriters and lawnmowers, telegraph and telephone—the world was running over with new benefits. Material betterment was expected to bring moral progress. Living in better conditions, man was expected to become a better person. This was the credo of that energetic, optimistic age.
The terrible gulf between that expectation and current reality is at the bottom, I believe, of the malaise of today. Since the new century began, humans have been living better and behaving worse—see the welfare state and the Third Reich—than ever before in history. Subconsciously, or even consciously in some cases, we have become frightened by our own record. Let us look at the record.
The new century was born brawling with three wars under way at once in 1900: British fighting Boers in South Africa, Americans fighting Filipinos, and a mixed bag of foreigners fighting Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion. These were all small affairs on the periphery, but still not a happy omen.
At about the same time, we acquired a new way of looking at ourselves that stripped off the protection of Victorian draperies. In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, beginning the process called the Freudian revolution that over the next decades was to display before man the dark dimensions of his soul. As Macbeth was shown his murderous instincts in the witches’ caldron, modern man has been shown what his unconscious holds—and this too has not been reassuring. Actions he had allowed himself to think were noble and generous turned out to be ignoble or selfish. Devotion to his mother was not admirable but Oedipal. If the unconscious could lead us into all these perverse and wicked ways independently of will, then man was not the captain of his soul that he thought he was. Confidence in our capacity to control our own destiny has been consequently undermined. Further, we have lost that convenient scapegoat, the Devil, as we have lost God. Formerly, when a person behaved badly or oddly he was said to be possessed by the Devil. Not any more. That divestment of responsibility is now denied us; the source is inside ourselves.
Applied to political behavior—that is, to man in the mass—the new knowledge of human nature destroyed confidence in a favorite concept of democracy: the ultimate common sense of the common people. Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according