Worlds, Wars, and Comparisons
What does, and doesn't change in a century
The following piece is one in a series of letters to my newborn granddaughter.
Dear Leila,
For a decade now, I’ve been trying to explore the structure of feeling in the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I’ve spent stretches of time on this, off and on, while completing other projects, because while it’s something that feels, has always felt, palpable to me as long as I’ve been conscious, it’s also something that been elusive in terms of trying to capture it as words on a page (more accurately, words on a screen, though I came of age at a time when writing was entirely on paper). I’ve written books that have tried to capture aspects of this, or to embed it in discussions of something more specific. But now I am, once again, returning to this knotty aspirational project, an attempt prompted by your birth. I’m hoping that having you as an audience, admittedly imaginary in some sense, may help me crystallize what I’m trying to do—for you, for me, and for the also imagined audience of people who inhabit a world we share (“world” and “share” as words with more than one meaning).
In a way, you have already had an impact, because it was in trying to figure out how to proceed with you in mind that the First World War popped into my head—again. The comparison was always there on the periphery of my consciousness, but it was one I resisted.
Why? Basically because the contrasts between that world and this one so are so sharp. For one thing, the world of 1914 was organized around the dominance of a multipolar set of European empires dominating the world, while the one of my lifetime has been bipolar (first the United States and the Soviet Union, then the United States and China) in an era of decolonization. But we don’t need to get into geopolitics; indeed, it can be a distraction amid subtler, but more elemental, differences. For example, life expectancy in the Western world was about sixty years old at the time of World War I. Now it’s eighty—the typical life is 25 percent longer, with significant consequences in terms of how youth and retirement are structured. The average woman bore just over three children back then. Now it’s under two. These are facts of great consequence in terms of aggregate conditions of everyday life.
Of course there are similarities, too. Some of this is a matter of trajectory: the birthrates of 1914 were part of a steadily decline going back to the eighteenth century; 1914 is a closer to 2014 than 1814—about seven births per woman—in that regard. Other similarities are generational perennials. For instance, old people repeatedly worry about the shallow values in the amusements of young people, which corrode their morality and work ethic. In 1814 it was novels. In 1914 it was movies. In 2014 it was smartphones.
Not all such concerns are misguided or misplaced. All these examples are rooted in technology, which has been the great engine of change in modern societies in recent centuries, not all of it positive. The Industrial Revolution, which began before 1814 and ended after 1914, destroyed livelihoods and ways of life as well as created them. In 1914, people were fascinated by the emerging technology of aviation—and correctly afraid that it would have ominous military implications (the 1940 Battle of Britain, the most serious and uniquely destructive invasion of England in almost 900 years, was conducted exclusively through the air). A comparable dread accompanies the excitement surrounding Artificial Intelligence today.
Dread. It’s this, more than anything else, that leads me to start this conversation about 2025 in 1914. I’ll have more to say about this. Soon.