Modern Mind : An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

Rating:
Summary: Brief, but not too bad
Review: Peter Watson's "The Modern Mind" (also published as "A Terrible Beauty") is one of several recent books providing a grab-bag of ideas from science, philosophy or history in one sweeping overview. Not all of these books (also including some fiction, like Sophies World by Jostein Gaader) are successful. They attempt a kind of summing up of Things in General, which in some cases is useful, but may do more harm than good. Second-hand erudition can be worse than no erudition at all. I wonder if they are a syndrome of the Millennium, popular illustrations of Fukuyamas End of History thesis.
Anyway, this book isn't bad. Three, or perhaps three and a half stars for this one, but really the subject matter of this book is beyond anyones ability to compress into 900 pages. Watson has done a reasonable job and filled a gap in the market of popular non-fiction; it is a descriptive rather than analytic book (as it has to be, given its brevity) and the history of Twentieth Century thought really requires several volumes. "The Modern Mind" casts its net very wide, including an array of topics, which is a good way for Watson to capture those notoriously brief post-modern attention spans. After all, to actually delve into some of the texts he writes about would tax the brain of many of us beyond endurance. (And I'm sure he hasn't read them all either). I suspect Derrida's "Writing and Difference" is one of those impenetrable codices more often quoted than read, more often read than understood, and the same would probably go for many other of Watson's references, Wittgenstein's philosophical works for example. This highlights one of our current problems - as the author points out, the C 20th saw some fundamental, "building block" discoveries .... but to understand them you need to actually BE a mathematician, physicist, cosmologist or what have you. The most recent cosmology is beyond even the ability of metaphors to clarify, and can only be appreciated by understanding all the equations. Never before has the accessibility of truly important knowledge been such an issue. If us plebs have to take these basic core realities about the universe and our place in it on trust, where does that leave science? Thus in its own way, this book is every bit as disturbing as the more conventional histories of the last century with their catalogues of atrocities and mass slaughters.
I found the discussions of Freudianism most interesting. Freud was unlucky enough to live during a transition phase in the history of thought. Religion was dying, but many of the previously mentioned fundamental scientific facts had not yet been discovered. At the turn of the last century, absolute reductionist thinking, particularly about the mind, (such as neo-Darwinists advocate) would have been an unusual position even among the most avante-garde intellectuals, since the arts and metaphysical speculations of one sort or another were still alive and kicking. Peter Watson's book illustrates well the decline of a whole set of ideas that depend on unprovable assertions rather than empiricism or logical derivation - Bergson's "elan vital" and similar concepts. Freud, a scientist/shaman, was an eclectic blend of both types of philosophy, so like many fence-sitters has ended by being rejected by both camps. Today, thinkers like Quine and the Logical Positivists hold the field, the irrational dummy-spits of postmodern deconstruction et al have had an impact but are not likely to last because they don't address the challenge of science strongly enough. At least, that's Watsons view, and he makes a strong argument. The author goes on to express his opinion that science can provide an over-arching metanarrative which may hold some ethical force, alerting all of us to our common origins, and to our shared concerns and issues in a globalised society. I'm not so sure. Pure science, as advocated by Dawkins and others, may end up unleashing a battalion of inconvenient facts against any peaceful and utilitarian ideals, even assuming those ideals are honest "facts" themselves! How "The Selfish Gene" could contribute to the building of Equality, Tolerance and the other New Jerusalems of our age is beyond me.
"The Modern Mind", refreshingly, includes snippets about various novels, plays, artistic and musical works. Watson is much more comfortable writing about science than he is discussing the arts. (Indeed, he makes a few mistakes with regard to some works. It's obviously a long time since he has read or seen a performance of "Waiting for Godot".) Again, the brevity of the descriptions makes for a certain amount of shallowness, but Watson is obviously not suggesting we can get any proper appreciation of Joyce's "Ulysses" (for example) without actually reading the book. Rather he is setting the works in context. For myself I would vote Joyce and Kafka as the most influential writers of the century, the true prophets of the age (more so than Orwell and Huxley who are usually assigned that role). The idea that artists are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" is frequently mocked but I think there is truth in it - we are ALL Joyceans now (just as we are still massively influenced by Shakespeare, and the post - Shakespeare novelists). Watson would disagree, for him culture is regional (a curious view for someone with a clear aversion to post-modern relativism), and only science truly universal.
At the very least, this book provides an entrance into the rabbit-warren of the ideas of some great thinkers .... now, where is my copy of "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"?

Rating:
Summary: An "A" for effort, but a "C" for execution.
Review: Any attempt to describe all of the intellectual trends and progress of the twentieth cantury must be lauded for its audacity in tackling such a breadth of ideas. The task undertaken by Peter Watson was truly herculean. And Watson's style of writing was fairly congenial, although the American publishers failed to correct the archaic, British spellings used by the author. In view of the effort required to research a work such as this, it seems a bit picky to wish it had been done better.
Yet that is one's feeling after reading this book. The author is a journalist, and while he clearly makes an effort to be objective, he displays the usual left-wing prejudices of most journalists, as well journalists' consistent inability to reason quantitatively. He routinely overstates the contributions of British citizens in intellectual advances. His ideas of what is important are very questionable; he drones on about such things as dance and painting, as well as pseudosciences such as sociology and social anthropology. Margaret Mead's fiction about growing up in American Samoa is praised unendingly, and the evidence that it was a figment of her imagination is presented hundreds of pages later and represented as the ravings of a single jealous colleague. Watson is fixated with alleged racism in America, but does not even mention the most comprehensive and authoritative book on the subject, Dinesh D'Souza's "The End of Racism". There are multiple factual errors in the book, becoming almost routine on the rare occasions when Watson writes about medical matters.
The idea behind writing an intellectual history of the twentieth century was a very good one; it is hoped that the challenge is taken up by someone who can do it justice.

Rating:
Summary: The Positive Hour
Review: Any work that tries to collect, and to some extent explain, a whole century's worth of intellectual history in just 800 pages is more than ambitious. However, I do beleive the author has written a book that is a worthwhile read, and is at worst only a nearly comprehensive reference material of important thinkers. And while the body of his work contains a tremendous amount of detail, I believe the final chapter, with all of it's implications is the real jewel.

Watson's final chapter, "The Positive Hour" is as stimulating as anything I have read within the past year, and that includes various works by Thomas Sowell, Richard Feynman and Umberto Eco. It is the sort of grandiose, over-arching type of thinking befitting a book that tries t encapsulate a whole century. Watson believes scientists, especially physicists and biologists, are the best people to explain man's place in the world. I believe Watson is correct, we are in the beginnings of a great revisionism of thought. One in which science (real actual trial and error, scientific method science) and not ideology (with its built in biased and predisposed view) will be applied to the humanities. (Note the paraphrasing in italics are my own, but, I do believe this is essence of his thinking)

In other words I recommend this book

Rating:
Summary: Ideas and our World
Review: As others have said, Peter Watson has tackled a huge task in writing about ideas in the 20th century in his book, THE MODERN MIND. In my opinion he has done a commendable job in a comprehensive way. Those of us whose lives cover most of that century will find it very useful in providing our lives a context to reflect upon. Those of us who will probably spend most of our lives in the current century will undoubtedly have a firm foundation on which to understand new ideas as they come along. Mr. Watson's conclusion that the "century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science" is right on target. This conclusion provides much needed insight into our current intellectual, political, and cultural environment in our post 9/11 world.

Rating:
Summary: Ideas and our World
Review: As others have said, Peter Watson has tackled a huge task in writing about ideas in the 20th century in his book, THE MODERN MIND. In my opinion he has done a commendable job in a comprehensive way. Those of us whose lives cover most of that century will find it very useful in providing our lives a context to reflect upon. Those of us who will probably spend most of our lives in the current century will undoubtedly have a firm foundation on which to understand new ideas as they come along. Mr. Watson's conclusion that the "century has been dominated intellectually by a coming to terms with science" is right on target. This conclusion provides much needed insight into our current intellectual, political, and cultural environment in our post 9/11 world.

Rating:
Summary: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Everything
Review: At 800 pages the heft of the book makes you quite aware that you should think of it as a reference book. But then, you open it up and start reading, and suddenly, you're hooked. You're hooked because Mr. Watson is telling you the great, scary, tragic story of the 20th century, moving from the nearly unbridled optimism at the beginning of the century through the despair and disenchantment and dark days of WWI, Stalinism, WWII, into Vietnam and the rejection of liberalism and modernism in the last decades of the 20th Century, and he's telling it in an inherently fascinating way: through the leading lights in the arts, sciences and humanities -- a kind of meta-biography. Because he moves chronologically, you begin to anticipate the next raft of intellectuals, the next slew of scientific achievements. Then, later, you get the next iteration of certain theories and ideas in the hands of greater and lesser minds. Or, you start to fear how certain misguided ideas -- eugenics and defective Darwinism, for instance -- will be transmogrified into the rationale for evil. What's most valuable is that Mr. Watson also puts various schools of thought -- the Vienna Circle, the Frankfurt School for instance -- into their proper relation in terms of intellectual history. Mr. Watson's grasp of what's important and what's not, of whom to speak at length and of whom simply to mention, is for the most part nearly faultless. But that is another of the lures of the book -- seeing if you agree with his characterizations and the amount of space he dedicates to each one! For those who crave the long view, who weren't alive in Vienna in the 1900s, or Paris in the 1910s, New York in the 20s, Berlin in the 30s, Paris after WWII, New York in the 50s, who have tried to grasp the overlapping histories of the fine arts, music, literature and science in some kind of systematic way, this book is the answer. An awesome achievment!

Rating:
Summary: Measured, thoughtful and learned
Review: I have reasonable knowledge of a number of the subject areas that Peter Watson covers and in-depth knowledge of perhaps two or three. I find his summaries of areas I know well extraordinarily balanced and thoughtful. The areas which are less familiar are clearly summarised and a great motivation for further exploration. Above all else the intense curiosity underlying his huge effort is both obvious and infectious. I have sensed an almost organic or perhaps oceanic quality to the century he describes with its moods and tidal shifts. He is almost the biographer of the century's consciousness. The shock with which the old certainties have died away initially seems so vertigo inducing, and you want to shout to the despairing first generation of the century..get over it, but then you realise the seriousness of where we are headed....so most of all , a book to make you think that doesn't try to do your thinking for you. Excellent. No doubt to be endlessly reconsulted.

Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: I rarely write reviews -- the fact that I enjoyed this book enough to write one should indicate the value I place on this book. As other reviewers pointed out it is not only a great read but also a great reference book. If you want to look up Bertrand Russell's contributions to mathematical logic, or Milton Friedman's ideas about markets and freedom, or read something about David Mamet just go to the table of contents or index and find it. What I found especially good is the ability of the author to put these intellectual achievments and ideas into context. Anyway, buy this book -- don't be scared by the size because you don't need to read it all at once.

Rating:
Summary: Good book, but may be too much in it
Review: I really liked the subject of this book, it gives you a great overview of the main developments in every major science in the last 100 years. This gives you absolutely an incentive to read further about interesting people or ideas. However, because the book discusses so much, it is sometimes hard to follow or understand certain things. I don't think you can explain Einstein's theory of relativety in just a few sentences. But, overall, it's a great reference book and way to start exploring important ideas of the 20th century.

Rating:
Summary: So Much Information
Review: In writing The Modern Mind, Peter Watson has attempted the impossible. He tries to give us a look at the entirety of twentieth century thought. Still, though there are bound to be omissions and inaccuracies in such a book, Watson succeeds admirably in giving us a taste of the intellectual achievements of the past 100 years.

There is so much I like about this book. I like the fact that he sticks to his purpose. He stays away from the wars and politics that dominate most histories and focuses on scientific, literary, artistic and other intellectual achievements. Not that I have no interest in our political history but it is nice to be able to give some consideration to what is often best in humankind--the achievements of the mind.

Also, this is a very well-written book. It is long, but broken up into easily digestible segments with important names and concepts highlighted. Reading too much at one sitting can lead to information overload but in short gulps this book can really educate. I am amazed at the breadth of knowledge Watson displays in this book. I, for one, felt that I gained a lot of insight into things of which I already had some knowledge and, in addition, picked up many new things.

Of course, a book like this with such a large scope can be by no means complete. On the other hand, it achieved something that is rare and that I enjoy very much while reading--it lead me to new people, new ideas and new books to read. I was encouraged to track down and read a handful of titles that I might never have come across without reading this book.

A final warning: if you are a fan of Freud and psychoanalysis, you will not like this book. Watson does discuss the subject quite a lot (as he should, considering the influence Freud and his successors have had); however, he is not a fan and comes down rather hard on the field. Fortunately, I feel much the same way as Watson and was glad to read such a well-articulated position on the subject.

Not that such a position matters much to me anyway. Everyone has a right to a well-argued position and, agree or disagree, it is worth learning. All in all, anyone with a desire to broaden the range of his or her thinking will find some enjoyment in this book. I might not always agree with Watson's conclusions but it really got the wheels in my mind turning.