Wait for It

I'm waiting until I write my Mail on Sunday column to deal with a number of current subjects, so you'll have to wait too. In the meantime, a few more general remarks, as the country gradually returns to its normal course and speed after Heathmas (my rude name for the spurious, pointless New Year holiday, introduced into England by that worst of all modern prime ministers).

Our religious obsessives, meanwhile, might be amused by a small controversy on a weblog site called 'Big Think' , or perhaps 'Daylight Atheism' , or perhaps both. This began after a Mr Adam Lee criticised something I wrote in my book 'The Rage Against God'. I have now said all I wish to say there, having been reminded once again of the teeth-grindingly frustrating nature of such discussion. But I will pause for a moment to mention that Mr 'Bunker' in an unusually obtuse contribution, misunderstands the importance of the argument about the precision engineering of the universe.

This doesn't, of course, prove anything. But  I have heard otherwise confident unbelievers, asked what their biggest worry is about their own point of view, cite the extraordinarily fine tolerances ( so fine that tiny deviations either way would render the whole thing unworkable)  necessary for so many of the functions of the universe as rather disturbing. Of course, we all know that nothing would shake or disturb the certainties of Mr 'Bunker', who – if I recall rightly – underwent some kind of mystical (or anti-mystical) experience which he won't discuss,  which convinced him that it was 'impossible' to believe in God.  This sort of stuff tends to impress engineers more than it impresses other people.  Then again, I have a high regard for engineers.

Now, I thought I'd like to discuss a book I have just finished , 'The World of Yesterday' by Stefan Zweig. Zweig, once one of the most famous authors in the world, has now almost entirely vanished from view. He was never very popular in Britain  but was for many years enormously successful in continental Europe, South and North America. His disappearance, once again, shows how current fame can dissolve into obscurity in no time at all.

His novel 'Beware of Pity' was recently dramatized on BBC radio, and there is a mild revival of his works under way. But the point of ' The World of Yesterday' is its detailed description of life in pre-1914 Europe, mainly Zweig's own home city of Vienna.

Zweig, whose political and social sympathies were very much of the Left,  is anxious to portray this world as stuffy and stifling, sexually repressed and hypocritical. He describes his own education as mechanical and dull.  No doubt much of this is true, though his dull education equipped him to make his living as a writer,. And seems to have started him on the way to becoming a great linguist, able to speak most major European languages, and to translate works of literature.

But in doing so he also manages to describe the calmness, general honesty and integrity, the extraordinary freedom of travel and the untroubled privacy of that time. When it all falls to pieces, thanks to the First world War, it is clear even to the radical Zweig that something irreplaceable has gone. His description of the departure from Austria of the deposed Emperor Karl, which he witnessed, is filled with a sense of loss, close to bereavement. And who would now say that the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was not a far better master than those who succeeded it?

If I could travel in time, it is pre-1914 Europe I should most wish to see.  It is the difference in the actual human condition that would be just as interesting as the lost buildings and works of art, the majestic railways and the almost total absence of horrible motor cars.


People were, I think, calmer, more self-possessed, more easily shocked.  The First World War ended that and left us as we are now, far more frantic and intemperate than we used to be.  Zweig makes much of his view that the sexual repression of the era caused large-scale prostitution and stimulated smutty pornography. I think there is some truth in part of this. A society which is prudish and which insists on lifelong marriage is likely to have a secret underside where these rules are transgressed.

But what then happened –the obscenity of war in which all modesty and restraint were thrown aside, and then the Babylon of inflation which debauched the lives of millions especially  in the German lands (his description of the moral corruption of Berlin thanks to the great inflation is startling) – did not in fact end prostitution or pornography. On the contrary, bot continue to boom despite the virtual abolition of all forms of 'repression' and sexual hypocrisy, and the licensing of of almost all types of pornography, with one notable exception.

And would the various reform movements of the pre-1914 era, for healthier lives, more exercise, less constricting, not have continued towards their goals without a war, perhaps attaining them without anything like as much collateral damage being done?

I think one of the most interesting might-have-beens in history is the fate of Europe if the 1914 war had never taken place. It's fashionable now to say that Britain, at least was on the brink of revolution anyway, thanks to Ireland and the labour unrest. But I'm not convinced. Could any resolution of the Irish conflict have been worse than the Easter Rising of 1916 (impossible without the war) and what followed? Couldn't Britain have reformed herself in many important ways without war, and done it better because the national wealth wasn't squandered on war?

And what about all the people – the talented, the dutiful, the best-educated, the healthiest, who went off to die between 1914 and 1916 in the original volunteer army? Don't we still miss them?

It's clear from Zweig's book that continental civilisation before 1914 had, in many ways, reached a level that it has yet to regain nearly a century later. The approved version these days is that war brought huge technological and social advance (the then French Ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, said after 1918 that Britain had undergone an actual revolution during the war, and this was certainly just as true in the 1939-45 war). But aren't we inclined to see the 'liberation' of women from 'domestic drudgery' 9and their transfer to industrial and commercial drudgery)) as an unalloyed good, just as we tend to view universal suffrage as automatically wonderful, and the much-increased level of state intervention in daily life as broadly beneficial.

But were they? Did we take the right turning? Few blessings are unmixed, most come with curses. And the price we paid, in lives and health, for these revolutions, was colossal. Was it worth it?