The way is lost
Christopher Booker
In the past few weeks I have been discussing, in the fairly narrow context of architecture and the 'great mania for conservation presently sweeping the world,' the remarkable collapse of self-confidence which has recently taken place in our culture. It is time now to widen the context, and to look at those underlying ebbs and flows of confidence of which our attitudes to buildings are merely expressions. This week I would like to begin by looking in headline form at, as it were, the biography of cultural selfconfidence in our civilisation over the past five hundred years.
In the Middle Ages men had plenty of confidence (they would scarcely have been able to build the great cathedrals otherwise), but curiously little in themselves. 'We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants,' said John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, in a celebrated phrase, only a few years before the building of the cathedral which we still look on today as one of the supreme achievements of our civilisation. In another sense, when Dante found himself 'in the middle of a dark wood where the way was lost,' it was not through himself that he found the way out—or rather, it was, but not by his own efforts.
But a hundred years later of course an entirely new spirit was beginning to show itself, in the Florence of Alberti and Brunellesco. Man had found a new source of confidence, himself. And that great bursting forth from the mediaeval frame that we call the 'renaissance' and 'reformation'—the emergence' of painting from portrayal of the transcendent to that of nature; the discovery of the 'new world' of America, Luther's 'here I stand, [can do no other'— was obviously a time of supreme confidence.
Indeed, by 1550 we come to perhaps the most sublimely self-confident statement of cultural assurance ever written, in Vasari's preface to his Lives of the Artists. Vasari looks back over the whole dark picture of the collapse of the arts, in the closing centuries of the classical world, from their 'former great heights' to 'the most degraded status.' He complacently explains that 'once human affairs start to deteriorate, improvement is impossible until the nadir has been reached.' He goes on to describe the first signs of the long, painful climb back. And then finally he is able to describe how 'in our own times,' the age of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Titian (and the new St Peter's), 'art had been reborn and reached perfection.'
Scarcely were Vasari's hubristic words published than Europe embarked on that tortured century of self-doubt and darkness that was to culminate in the Thirty Years War, and the great political upheavals of the 1640s. Once again 'the way was lost,' symbolised, perhaps, by the deeply `decentering' psychological shock of the discovery of the heliocentric universe. As Donne summed up, in the famous lines from 'The First Anniversarie' in 1611: 'The Sun is lost and th'earth and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it And freely men confesse that this world's spent When in the Planets and the Firmament They seeke so many anew; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomics.
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone,..'
But just when all seemed darkest, the first seed was sown of the next great wave of self-confidence. Right amid the battlegrounds and chaos of the Thirty Years War, sitting in his stove, a young member of the Bavarian army conceived the incredible idea '[think therefore I am.' The spiritual centre of gravity of Europe had once again shifted. And forty years later came the dawn of that long sunlit age of confidence that is variously summed up for us by the development of post-Cartesian science and philosophy, by Newton, by the earthly grandiloquence of Louis XIV's Versailles, by 'the Augustan Age,' by the Residenz of Wurzburg and the terraces of Bath, and above all by 'the Age of Enlightenment' and the emergence of that exquisitely comforting myth that the present age is merely the culmination of a long upward struggle from darkness into light. As Huizinga asks, 'is it by nature impossible for us to give up placing the earth and man at the centre of things?' Once heliocentricity had replaced the old frame of things, was it perhaps inevitable that sooner or later comfort would be restored by 'the teleological view of creation as a wise system for the education and benefit of man' ?
In this context, the rise and fall of that particular burst of cultural confidence that was associated with the French Revolution ('bliss was it in that dawn') and Napoleon, with the belief that all the world was being made anew (and which accounted for the extraordinary popularity at the turn of the century of Haydn's Creation, with its foreshadowing of the myth of evolution and the emergence of the world from chaos to its culmination in Adam and Eve, with no Fall in view), was merely a punctuation mark.
In the nineteenth century, the confidenceinspiring myth that the present is better than the past, and that the future will be even better still (not even Vasari, with his belief that perfection had arrived, was as confident as that!) was of course under-pinned and reinforced in every way—by the Macaulay an-Whig view of history as a steady upward progress towards ever greater liberty, bY Darwinian evolutionism, and above all per' haps by the ever-forward march of experimental science and technology, which decade by decade, brought steamships and railways and machine-made cloth and an ever greater abundance of material blessings to an ever greater number of people. Eventually the confidence of the Victorian age became stultifying, breeding all sorts of antitheses, from Arnold's `melancholY, long, withdrawing roar' of the 'Sea of Faith ('the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams. . hath really neither joy. nor love, nor light') to William Morris's evocation of the lost Paradise that existed before the Fall of industrialism. But it was in fact directly out of this reaction to the cos, claustrophobic, respectable, academic, caPitalistic and gradualistic climate of stultified Victorianism that was to come much of the energy behind the latest and last of the three great waves of self-confidence which have carried our civilisation 'forward.' The 'dream' which came to birth around the early years of this century had three mai° ingredients. The first we may call the 'dream of salvation by technology' (on a scale of which even the nineteenth century never dreamed)—the belief that through science and technology we had the power to Pro" duce a society ever more comfortable, healthy, efficient at gratifying our material desires, and therefore able to make us happy. The second ingredient we may Ca!I the 'dream of salvation by libertarian inch' vidualism'—the belief that, if only we could throw off the repressive shackles of social hierarchy, 'traditional' morality, and a hoSt of other 'outmoded' conventions and disciplines, we should have a society in which each person (or artist) was finally free to find fulfilment in 'expressing his own individual
ity.' The third ingredient was political and social Utopianism, again on an unprecedented scale—the belief that we could
reshape society de novo, eliminating the, messy old evils of individual enterprise an,° thought, and finding collective salvation in some entirely new kind of society, run in the name of the community as a whole. Of course these three beliefs have found, myriad expressions in our century (and, severally or together provided a source or almost limitless cultural self-confidence). They have underlain almost all the most unportant developments of the past sevel years, whether in politics or morals, socia change or the arts. But curiously enough there was no form in which all three asPecths of the twentieth-century dream foundsue perfect and unified expression as the moderon movement in architecture. Next week, t carry the argument further, I woUld discuss the work, ideology and influence 0! the man who represented that unity rn.°re completely than any other—and the eclipse of whose reputation has not yet sufficien.tlY been seen as perhaps the most revealintig_ portent of the collapse of the twentiet century dream in each of its aspects.
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