Back to the Future

"Maison tournante aerienne," 1883: a 19th century view of life in the 20th century.

There is a small but growing subculture among the lowbrow and neglected fans of speculative fiction and illustrated novels (aka comic books), called "steampunk." Steampunk is about setting stories in an imaginary future based on a posited direct logical and aesthetic extension from the Victorian past. A future replete with dirigibles, brass, gears and pulleys, and Meccano-like constructions.

This may seem odd to some; and it is a small subculture of a subculture still, for now.

But personally, I expect it to take over Western civilization.

The whole thing just feels right the minute you see a manifestation of if--go rent the Japanese animated movie "Howl's Moving Castle" to see it for yourself.

Here's why.

"Globalization" has become the watchword in speaking of our shared future; generally meaning, naysayers say, the world "hegemony" of English-speaking "pop" culture. Yet globalization is hardly new; the development of worldwide trade networks has been ongoing since at least 1492, and the Anglicization of the world was at least as obvious at the end of the 19th century as it is today: with Britain controlling a quarter of the world's population and land mass, and the US dominating a second huge chunk from Monrovia to Nome to Manila to Tierra del Fuego. Were you to draw a direct line from 1900 to now, on an imaginary graph of globalization and cultural homogenization, with only these two points for reference, it would look as though the whole process had flatlined.

It has not. Growth has resumed after a long bear market. More or less the entire 20th century can be understood as a retrograde motion in the progress of mankind: an extended universal fit in which the inevitable march of human progress, material and social, which was the standard world view of Victorian, "Whig" history, has been taking staggering jolts. It was a century-long pandemic depression, of lost confidence in ourselves and our goals, during which "Western" or "Modern" civilization almost succeeded in committing suicide in the midst of self-doubt. "Postmodernism" is almost depression to the point of suicide expressed as philosophy.

There may have been earlier troubling trends, harbingers, in the intellectual realm: Marxism, Darwinism, the suffragettes. But things really came unglued, chronologically, at about the time of and probably because of the First World War. Before this, and despite massive conflagrations in the US and China during the 19th century, Europeans had come to think that we were, if slowly, turning into angels. War was fading as a part of human experience; slavery was dead; civilization was inexorably advancing to cover the earth.

...All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned,
And a great army but a showy thing;
What matter that no cannon had been turned
Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king
thought that unless a little powder burned
The trumpeteers might burst with trumpeting (Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen)

Then, suddenly, a system of grand alliances intended to preserve the "balance of power," and so the peace, of Europe, instead led to a general war, which in turn was far bloodier than anyone anticipated.

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldierly
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thought into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole...

That was probably the moment it all shook loose; and Yeats, the great poet, saw it and captured it.

Civilization seemed, instead of conquering, to be dying. As Yeats was writing, the Bolsheviks were also taking Russia, and the Austrian Empire--the Holy Roman Empire--had disappeared in a puff of smoke.
That was the blow that did it; but we also were not given any respite after it. Other blows followed. Next came the apparent failure of social progress and the progressive "social gospel" with the collapse of prohibition and the introduction of "Jim Crow" in the reconstructed South. Next came the Great Depression, throwing into chaos our faith in material progress, and our fundamental economic assumptions. Then came a new, rabid form of nationalism seeking to block globalization and deny the value of civilization itself, in Fascism, Nazism, and the various other nativist movements across the globe--continuing today as "anti-colonialism." Al Qaeda and "Islamism" are only the latest entrants in this bomb-tossing competition. Then came the second and greater holocaust of WWII, which, among other things, showed that under the veneer of a modern civilization, the most barbaric things conceivable could be done.

How could this not all shake the confidence of our civilization? It all began to look like an inexorable trend--downwards. Well before this time, in reaction, the general depression it all caused led to attempts at suicide, which in turn exacerbated the problem. Marxism, Fascism, feminism, psychiatry, the culture of youth, postmodernism, and environmentalism, wrought worse havoc, portraying all civilization as we knew it as evil, ripping down any established values, cultural memories or ideals they could find.

In a way, al Qaeda and Islamism may have done us a favour, snapping us out of this funk, by presenting a genuine, genuinely external, threat. Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia, were still eruptions from within the Western civilizational tent, not external enemies. Imperial Japan may have been an external threat, but it was subsumed under the much more menacing German umbrella. Al Qaeda and 9/11 may be the first attack on the heart of the West that is both genuinely external and genuinely painful since the Turks left the gates of Vienna in 1683. While not really much of a danger to the civilization as a whole, it may have been just the sort of slap in the face we Euros and Anglos needed to pull ourselves together and see things as they are. All the better that it came from Europe's great ancestral enemy, the great rival against which European civilization was largely defined at its birth: the Saracens. The Moors.

We in the West may in the end all owe a great deal to Osama bin Laden.

Steampunk, with its nostalgia for Victorianism, for the Victorian view of the world, and Victorian optimism--there are few dystopias in steampunk lit--may be an early sign that the fever is breaking. Western Civ may soon be back in business. If civilization as we know it does revive, something like "Steampunk" is its inevitable form: too much of the Twentieth Century is tainted with the general rot. We are going to have to reach back to a time before the shock that threw us off track, and try to work our way forward from there. A point before 1919; roughly, late Victorian times.

It is certainly time for a new Universal and International Exhibition on the subject. London might be the perfect site. I envision a Crystal Palace, like a great gleaming city on a hill...

Queen Victoria opens the great 1851 exhibition.