How did the 20th century go so wrong?

November 10, 2007 4:24 PM

How did The 20th Century go so wrong?

The 20th century started with promise. Now, looking back, how did things go so wrong?

I saw a web page on this topic but can't find it again. Now the question is nagging me.

Please help me find the page, or other discussions of the topic. (For the generalist, please. I'm no historian or sociologist.)

posted by exphysicist345 to Society & Culture (28 answers total)

Depends on how you look at it really, some would say that the 20th century is going delightfully great!

In either case, this is pure chatfilter.
posted by baphomet at 4:28 PM on November 10, 2007

Spark Online has an essay on art as it related to the beginning and end of the 20th century.
posted by iconomy at 4:28 PM on November 10, 2007

Could you be a little more specific to avoid getting the question delted?
posted by Bookhouse at 4:31 PM on November 10, 2007

Same people, better weapons.
posted by lemuria at 4:32 PM on November 10, 2007 [6 favorites]

Wasn't this one, was it?

Granted, I maybe don't believe that all the things mentioned there are actually bad, but there's no accounting for taste.

Incidentally, baphomet, the 20th century is over.
posted by eritain at 4:34 PM on November 10, 2007 [2 favorites]

Princip?
posted by fire&wings at 4:37 PM on November 10, 2007

This seems to be a fairly common meme, one that has no suport other than inertia. I think it's a derivative of the old person's refrain: "things were better back in my day, men were men, etc.". Perhaps we can tie these two things together and lay the blame at the feet of the aging baby boomers. They're numerous and control large portions of society, and they're getting old and losing the last vestiges of their idealism, and can't take as many psychoactives as they used to. Thus, the constant refrain that we live in a particularly dismal nadir of human existence.

But you know what, as a non-boomer, I think things are going awesome. Not sure if you noticed this, but we're communicating over the internet, baby. The internet alone makes the latter parts of the 20th far superior to the beginning.

If you're looking for a webpage, do you want something that just confirms your thesis, or a discussion that contains many alternative viewpoints?
posted by breath at 4:44 PM on November 10, 2007

In either case, this is pure chatfilter.

The question is framed rather poorly and the OP is almost asking for deletion with those first two sentences, but "please help me find the page, or other discussions of the topic" is certainly not chatfilter.

Anyway, I found this, which might be along the lines of what you're looking for.
posted by dhammond at 4:44 PM on November 10, 2007

This gets my vote for oddest question ever. The 20th Century didn't get "started with promise." It started with a day: Jan 1, 1901. Maybe that day -- and the days/years that immediately followed (in some parts of the world) -- were good, but so what. Good times in one spacial/temporal area don't necessarily lead to good times in other times and places. Life is WAY to chaotic for that. There are so many events (new, influential people being born, currently influential people dying, natural disasters, events in other countries, invasions, etc.) "pouring" into history, it's impossible to predict what they'll lead to.

There might have been people back then who (foolishly) tried to predict the future and predicted it would be rosy. If so, it was their prediction that was wrong.

Maybe there are people now who look back on "the good old days." If so, they're looking back selectively. That's generally how nostalgia works. There were plenty of sucky things going on in the early 20th Century.

Also, remember that breaking history up into centuries is an arbitrary choice. Nothing started in 1901 except the ticking over of an arbitrary counting system. Why not say, things were so bad in 1861 -- why did things go so right?
posted by grumblebee at 4:47 PM on November 10, 2007 [2 favorites]

Depends on how you look at it really, some would say that the 20th century is going delightfully great!

You have your verb tense wrong.

I don't get it. What was wrong with the 20th century? We had a couple of awful wars and we did some serious ecological damage, but we discovered many wonderful medicines to save lives, started to move many of the planet's people into the modern age, ended the cold war, etc. Please explain your question better.
posted by caddis at 4:51 PM on November 10, 2007

Francis Bacon, the Enlightenment, the end of the Medieval, democracy, scientism, hatred, fear, drugs, German exceptionalism, American exceptionalism, existentialism, historicism, nihilism, the designated hitter, and beer in cans.

Next question.
posted by koeselitz at 4:52 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

Another thought, maybe exphysicist345 doesn't know which century we are in now.
posted by caddis at 4:52 PM on November 10, 2007

what was wrong with the 20th century?
jeez, typically the easy answer is that humanity destroyed itself, the planet and everything it touched.
at the beginning of the century, there was a lot of hope, at least for western thinkers, that scientific progress would actually solve some problems. and while it may have solved some problems, the great irony of humanity using technology to destroy whole groups of people, cities, and the planey has certainly left the hope of the early 1900s far behind.
i agree that questions like this are kinda silly, but clearly something went wrong in the last century. if we have another century like that, i don't think many people will be left to enjoy the 22nd century.
posted by alkupe at 4:56 PM on November 10, 2007

Walter Dorn has some thoughts on this.
posted by washburn at 5:04 PM on November 10, 2007

In trying to keep in spirit of the OP, I'll give a line of thought that you could travel down: take events of the (Western) 20th century history as a logical outcome of the Industrial Revolution, where the ability to mass produce everything and anything, leads to many, if not all, of the century's historical situations and preoccupations.

Which is to say that the 20th century is the result of the 19th, which in turn is the result of the 18th, and on and on. Very insightful stuff, I know.

It might be wise to clarify your question and consult a historian (we have got to have one laying around somewhere.)
posted by Weebot at 5:09 PM on November 10, 2007

Ack, should be mechanize and mass produce.
posted by Weebot at 5:13 PM on November 10, 2007

the 20th century was characterized by class warfare that had been brewing for 5,000 years and finally brought to a head.
posted by Mr_Crazyhorse at 5:34 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

The single biggest reason the 20th Century went wrong was the Russian Revolution. 70 years of the Communist Experiment, in Russia and elsewhere in the world, caused more death, destruction, and misery than any other single event in history.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:36 PM on November 10, 2007

how did things go wrong?

we survived, didn't we? - and don't think for a moment that our survival was a forgone conclusion
posted by pyramid termite at 5:40 PM on November 10, 2007

Brad DeLong (Google cache):

There are many sad books on my bookshelf: books that whenever I open them cause tears to gather in the corner of my eyes, and cause my nose to sniffle. This is not because I am allergic to dust from old books (which I am), but because many old books seem to me to be markers of a better future that did not come to be. Of these, I think the saddest is an old, old book from 1911: Norman Angell's The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage.

Angell, an economist, argued that war wasn't in anyone's economic interest. Angell went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly after The Great Illusion was published, World War I began.

As an economist, Angell neglected the importance of power. (A common mistake.)

Now, looking back, how did things go so wrong?

The short answer is: World War I. Millions died; this was followed shortly by World War II, in which even more people died; and the Cold War, with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. As Hannah Arendt wrote despairingly in 1951:

Two World Wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died.

Without World War I, neither Hitler nor Lenin would have been able to seize power.

Who was responsible for starting World War I? Imperial Germany.
posted by russilwvong at 5:55 PM on November 10, 2007

I dunno, sSeven- the Chinese revolution resulted in famines that were pretty close to Stalin's in terms of total deaths, they were at least complicit in the genoicide in Cambodia, and they are now adding ecological vandalism on an enormous scale. When they finally implode, it could be much worse than what happened in Russia.

Any discussion of the 20th century going wrong that ignores the events of 1914-1918, seems inane to me. It made it a whole 14 years out of the cradle before all of Europe was launching poison gas at their neighbors. The 20th century started out rotten, and, by any objective comparison, ended up great.
posted by jenkinsEar at 6:00 PM on November 10, 2007

I think the greatest achievement of the 20th century was humanity's survival of the 20th century. WWI and WWII were the largest catastrophes in the history of humanity. We invented weapons capable of rendering the Earth uninhabitable by humans in a space of seconds. Towards the end of the century, an apparently unkillable virus started making the rounds. Yet, through it all, we have survived, and have even managed to advance in the arts and sciences. I point toward the internet as one of the few inventions of our time to really live up to its promise.

I think the real question is whether or not the 21st will be as brutal as the last and whether or not we'll pull off the survival trip one more time.
posted by Afroblanco at 6:04 PM on November 10, 2007

I came here to say what russilwvong said. He's right.

I don't get it. What was wrong with the 20th century?

Are you joking, or do you just not know any history except for how cool computers and the internet are?

The 20th century started out rotten

Are you under the impression the century began in 1914?
posted by languagehat at 6:05 PM on November 10, 2007

JenkinsEar, the Chinese revolution was one of the consequences of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution was the beginning of the Communist flareup and ultimate flameout; the Chinese revolution was the biggest of the successive ones inspired by it.

If there had been no Lenin, there would have been no Mao.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:17 PM on November 10, 2007

The single biggest reason the 20th Century went wrong was the Russian Revolution. 70 years of the Communist Experiment, in Russia and elsewhere in the world, caused more death, destruction, and misery than any other single event in history.

That is seriously missing out on the problem of why the russian revolution happened to start with, though. There were problems brewing all over the world in the 20th c, and communism was just one of the ideologies people used to try to "solve" things.

My answer would be something like, it was exactly that "promise" from the beginning of the century that was the downfall. Too many people thought they'd be able to solve all of humanity's problems, and they made ill-conceived choices to try to "get rich quick", so to speak.

It's kinda reminiscent of Hegel's discussion of the French Revolution, actually - that overly rational approaches to things we don't understand the underlying psychology of ends up being worse than just letting nature take its course in a way that seems irrational on the surface (as I mentioned here). (Which is funny, because of course Marx was a Hegelian, and his philosophy is one of those that seems to get imposed rather than naturally unfolding, but that's kind of another discussion...)
posted by mdn at 6:19 PM on November 10, 2007

JFK blown away, what else do I have to say?
posted by klangklangston at 6:26 PM on November 10, 2007 [1 favorite]

There is a giant vortex of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean. We don't know the meaning of heartbreak yet.
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:27 PM on November 10, 2007

A historian a few hundred years from now will likely lump World Wars I and II together, much the way we do such conflations as the "Thirty Years War". Gulf War I and II will probably see the same analysis -- direct cause-and-effect wars.

Anyway, the notion the century started with promise ignores the Boer War, during which many of the worst features of 20th century war were implemented for the first time.
posted by Rumple at 6:27 PM on November 10, 2007