8.10 - 20th-Century Cultural, Intellectual, and Artistic Developments

Cultural and Intellectual Developments in the 20th Century

• Early 20th Century Optimism: When World War I began, most Europeans were still confident that science and technology could solve human problems. Railroads, electricity, vaccines, and rising living standards seemed to prove that progress would continue, a belief rooted in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.

• Cracks Before the War: But the 19th-century faith in progress and reason had already begun to break down before 1914. Nietzsche attacked reason and Christian morality, Freud argued that people are driven by unconscious desires (see 7.5), and new physics, from Max Planck's quantum theory (1900) to Einstein's theory of relativity (1905), showed that the universe did not work the way Newton's laws suggested. At first, these ideas mostly unsettled educated elites.

• Disillusionment After World War I: However, the horrors of World War I shattered this optimism. Scientific advancements that had once been seen as progress were now viewed with skepticism, as they had contributed to devastating weapons like chlorine gas and machine guns.

• Widespread Disillusionment: The belief in inevitable human progress faded, and disillusionment spread beyond elite circles to the general population, marking a significant cultural shift.

• Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: The early and mid-20th century saw new scientific discoveries that further challenged established understandings of reality. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity demonstrated that time and space are not fixed but relative to the observer.

• Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: In 1927, Werner Heisenberg showed that it is impossible to know both the exact position and the exact speed (momentum) of a subatomic particle at the same time. Along with the work of Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger, quantum mechanics described the atomic world in terms of probabilities rather than certainties, casting doubt on the idea that the physical world is fully predictable.

• Challenge to Objective Knowledge: Newton's universe had been orderly and predictable, with absolute space and time that were the same for everyone. Relativity and quantum mechanics replaced that certainty with a universe where measurements depend on the observer and the smallest events can only be predicted as probabilities. Many people outside science took this as a sign that there might be no single objective truth, which encouraged relativism in philosophy, art, and morals.

• From Physics to Fission: Einstein's equation $E = mc^2$ (1905) showed that a tiny amount of mass could be turned into enormous energy. In 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann split uranium atoms, and Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explained this nuclear fission. Many leading physicists, including Einstein and Fermi, had fled fascist Europe, and in 1939 Einstein signed a letter warning President Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb.

• Atomic Bomb and Its Consequences: Scientists like Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr contributed to the development of the atomic bomb by harnessing the power of splitting atoms. The use of atomic bombs at the end of World War II, particularly in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulted in massive casualties and ushered in a new era of global tension during the Cold War.

• Nuclear Power: The same knowledge made peaceful uses possible. Fermi built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago (1942), and in the 1950s the USSR (1954) and Britain (1956) opened the first nuclear power stations to make electricity.

• Freud’s Impact on Psychology: Sigmund Freud revolutionized the understanding of human behavior by suggesting that much of it is driven by unconscious impulses rather than rational thought.

• Challenging Rationality: Freud’s ideas challenged the prevailing belief that humans are primarily rational beings who make decisions based on reason, further unsettling long-held views of human nature.

• The Lost Generation: The disillusionment of the post-war period was especially clear in the "Lost Generation," a name made famous by the writer Gertrude Stein (and by Ernest Hemingway, who quoted her) for those who came of age during World War I. Millions of young men had died, and many survivors came home physically or emotionally scarred and cynical about the patriotic ideals that had sent them to war.

• Literary Reflections: Writers like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the sense of aimlessness and disillusionment that characterized this generation, reflecting broader societal changes.

• European Voices: The German veteran Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) showed the war's senseless slaughter, British poets like Wilfred Owen mocked the idea that dying for one's country is sweet and fitting, and the Dada artists (from 1916) made deliberately absurd "anti-art" to show that a civilization that produced the war made no sense.

• Women’s Changing Roles: The 20th century also saw significant changes for women. During both World Wars, women took on roles traditionally held by men, including working in factories and serving in auxiliary military positions.

• World War I: Nearly a million British women worked in munitions factories, and women across Europe ran farms, drove trams, worked in offices, and served as nurses near the front. Britain created women's auxiliary military services, and Russia even formed all-female combat battalions in 1917.

• World War II: Women's roles grew even larger. In December 1941, Britain began drafting unmarried women in their twenties into war work or the auxiliary services, and roughly 800,000 Soviet women served in the military, including as pilots, snipers, and tank drivers. Women also joined resistance movements across occupied Europe.

• Advancements in Women's Rights: Women's war work helped win them the vote in many countries soon after World War I, including Soviet Russia (1917), Britain (1918, for women over 30), Germany (1918), Austria, and Poland. Others waited much longer, like France (1944) and Italy (1945) (see 9.8 for more dates).

• Democratizing Societies: The war also made European societies more democratic. Britain's 1918 reform gave the vote to all men over 21 for the first time, the old monarchies of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia fell, and millions of working-class soldiers expected a greater voice in return for their sacrifice. Wartime governments also had to bargain with labor unions and took on new roles in the economy.