Jim’s Reviews > The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 > Status Update

No period in history has been more penetrated by and more dependent on the natural sciences than the twentieth century. Yet no period, since Galileo's recantation, has been less at ease with it.

The technological inferiority of China which became only too evident in the 19th century, because it was translated into military inferiority, was not due to technical or educational incapacity, but in the very sense of self-sufficiency and self-confidence of traditional Chinese civilization.

Whatever the economic arguments, there were things in life that had to be protected. Would any government seriously consider tearing down Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal if it could be shown that building a luxury hotel, shopping mall and conference center on the site ... would make a greater net addition to the country's GNP than could be yielded by the existing tourist traffic?

Conditions for military intervention in the Third World were far more inviting, especially in new, feeble and often tiny states where a few hundred armed men, reinforced or sometimes even replaced by foreigners, could carry decisive weight, and where inexperienced or incompetent governments were quite likely to produce recurrent states of chaos, corruption and confusion.

The role of the Cold War is thus not to be underestimated, even if the long-term economic effect of the vast diversion of resources by states into competitive armaments was damaging. In the extreme case of the USSR it was probably fatal. However, even the USA traded off military strength against growing economic weakness.

It is now evident that the USSR was neither expansionist—still less aggressive—nor counting on any further extension of the communist advance beyond what is assumed had been agreed at the summits of 1943-45.

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system.

It is not necessary to go into the details of interwar history to see that the Versailles settlement could not possibly be the basis of a stable peace. It was doomed from the start, and another war was therefore practically certain.