A Review of Modern Times by Paul Johnson

Mimetic Rivalry Between Nazis and Communists, The Age of Social Engineering, and Surprising Takes

I’ve often wondered why there can be many different histories of the same period or topic. There are literally thousands on any historical topic that all give, or claim to give, different, new, or revisionist accounts. But it seems impossible for all of these to be “true” accounts at once. Either one of the stories is true, and the others are false, or all are false, and all history is subjective and nothing really matters because, perhaps, there is no such thing as history, just one event after another after another. One reconciliation I’ve been thinking of that allows there to be such a thing as history, as I in the Herodotus-inspired sense define it, a unified account of the great deeds/events done by men and the causes of each, is that each great deed and event has multiple, conflicting causes and that each history has a unique perspective and unique account through differing weight and importance granted to each cause. There can be multiple histories of each event that read differently and even appear to contradict each other because human motivations are conflicted and confusing, with all kinds of factors bearing upon the will of each man. Historians look into events of the past and write different stories that all have some bearing and approximation to the truth even as the truth remains beyond any one account because the ultimate mystery of the human heart, what was really the most fundamental cause of any action, remains hidden to all external observers. This view, like my broader theory that any “world model” will be partly true and partly false, is similar to the postmodern skepticism about all meta-narratives, but in my not yet-named view, truth is at least approximated, and meta-narratives, while often contradictory, are reconcilable at some higher level.¹

The last century of history is no exception to having multiple interpretations. Even as all agree that it was a century of chaos and disaster, different historians disagree on what exactly caused the chaos. Often, too, the meaning of a story is determined by where you start it and where you end it.

And into the mix of histories on the 20th century thus enters Modern Times by Paul Johnson, focused specifically on the period 1920-1980 with one provocative and described in online reviews as conservative interpretation. Johnson, a British Catholic academic, begins and ends his history of modern times with accounts of scientific discoveries and progress that happened at the beginning and end of the era. But this is not a history of science in the 20th century properly speaking, but serves his framing interpretation, that the chaos, wars, genocide, and cultural change of the 20th century had its roots in the uncertainties and loss of old absolutes in science. Attempts to rebuild societies upon new roots after the First World War led to the totalitarianisms that sprouted in and followed the Second whilst the errors at the root of this approach were only being understood by new exact sciences that, in the 1980s, Johnson hoped could rebuild a new ground of intellectual stability and a cohesive basis for constructive worldviews in the future. The period 1920-1980 is in the view of Johnson’s chosen Biblical epigraph, an aberration where all has been dashed to pieces.

This was a period of emptiness seeking to be filled, potential seeking after form, any form. Old views having been ground by the devastation of the First World War and the new uncertainties of science, Christianity declined in the west, and the decline of Christianity thus produced the space for the political zealotry and false utopianisms that followed. If you are empty, if anything is empty, something will come to fill you up. The modernist trends in art, culture, morality, and more predated World War I in the background, but it was only the vacuum in the human spirit caused by the war, Johnson believes, that brought them to the foreground.

While a vacuum of morality and culture was present in almost everyone after the First World War, there was a particular power vacuum of legitimacy and authority in political affairs in Weimar Germany and the fledgling Soviet Union after the war that ended up being filled in far more closely related ways, Johnson describes, than other accounts of the period typically give. For Johnson, Weimar and the Soviet Union saw themselves as outlaw powers snubbed by the powers that be, like two groups of competing but sometimes collaborating gangsters, an enlightening comparison that he also later applies to the relationship between and interrelated development of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Johnson’s view of human actions is, refreshingly, open to human free will and action in history even against the deterministic view of impersonal trends and forces. While Johnson's view has a lot to say about the latter, he believes that these trends are accelerated or slowed by the actions of great individuals who serve as either catalysts or counter-catalysts, launching or ending historical trends. History is trends plus individuals, and individuals, as Johnson evidences with the case of Vladimir Lenin, who can by brute force of will, accomplish what no one else could expect or see as possible. Lenin, whom Johnson, in an analogy that I could imagine no other history book ever making, compares to John Calvin, at once responded to the forces of a time but also accelerated them, his vision of motivated disciplined cadres led by a dictator serving also as a lesson to Hitler, who rose to a power through a similar path of “surfing” or riding along historical trends while also sometimes using a small cadre of loyalists to direct and initiate them.

The 1930s had a lot of such ideologically motivated yet practical and opportunistic movements which meant that men such as Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were not just working out their ideological programs in a practical environment driven by a static background but were instead reacting to and feeding off of the programs—and opportunistic actions—of each other. Mussolini’s fascism, Johnson argues, is but a variant or heresy of Marxist socialism, one that has made practical concessions to the world as it is, proposing to exploit and control capitalism by the state, but not to overthrow it completely. Communism in the U.S.S.R, similarly, makes a few practical concessions for the sake of some smidgen of realism, and forgoes its impossible idealistic dreams of communist utopia for the sake of the harsh realities of industrialization and ends up looking—absent different names for the details of the ruling ideology, and different job titles for all the government staff, not too dissimilar from Mussolini’s project. Hitler’s Nazism, modeled after Mussolini’s movement, is thus also, even in reacting to socialism and communism, a movement that exists in a Marxist context, heavily influenced by and heavily influencing Italian fascism and the U.S.S.R. Rather than diametrically opposed movements by nature, fascism, Nazism, and communism, were mimetically related tango partners to each other in behavior, tactics, appeals, and relationship to the outside world. Regardless of the differences in external ideological branding, Italy, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and to some extent Japan, had become, Johnson argues, very much alike² internally by the mid-1930s as state-administered and controlled command economies run by terror and economically modeled after the pattern set by Imperial German economy under the effective control of Ludendorff and Hindenburg in World War I. Externally, they were also alike, all converging to feel and behave as outlaws or gangsters toward the international world order of the time, beginning to even ally in a conspiracy of crime as wolf-like states aiming to destroy the international order of “law” to replace it with one of force that they could benefit from.

This convergence is not something I had really ever considered before but seems to make a lot of sense through Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Even if two movements start with diametrically opposed goals, one aiming to react to the other’s ideology, their desires will overlap on the basis of natural human tendencies toward envy and rivalry. Overlapping desires will lead to overlapping ends, while even the movement reacting to the other will have to frame itself and its goals in the terms and worldview given by what it is reacting against. Frame yourself the same way as someone while desiring some of the same things that they possess (Eastern Europe for the Nazis and the Soviets) while lacking the stabilizing buttress of a cohesive world—and moral—framework and there will be a convergence in tactics, appeals, and ends amidst the ensuing chaos.

For Johnson, this mimetic pattern or sharing of trends went, if generalized beyond just the Axis powers and Soviets to include many of the Western powers in this era leading up to World War II. While the fascists and communists took this general trend far further, the worldwide trend of the 1920s and 30s was one of social engineering and of overdoing it. Everywhere, he argues the trend was to use a growing centralization of national government power to overcome problems and tensions of the past by “rationally” remaking mankind. Utopian social engineering, not yet discredited, and some of it, even as of today, still not yet, had broad appeal in the 1930s, from the initially aligned KMT and CCP revolutionary movements in China to Prohibition and the actions that led to the various attempts to fight the Great Depression in the United States, to the Weimar (West/Civilizational as opposed to traditional East/Culture) influences in Germany. All aimed to oppose an irrational disorderly past with a master-planned, centrally governed system with a people united in will. While we all know where this sort of thinking went with the Axis powers and the Soviets, Johnson’s point is that the trend was worldwide, and as he argues throughout the book, persisted throughout the century, and to him was the defining characteristic of modern times.

Johnson’s account of World War II adds some interesting tidbits I haven’t seen in my reading elsewhere. For one, he characterizes Nazi Germany as highly disordered and confused in its military and party command structures with incoherent and constantly shifting strategies and much dissension on this part amidst the leaders around Hitler. While the Nazi party put extensive effort into putting legal forms around everything they did, the outcomes were rushed, confused, and often at odds with their long-term strategic goals. This perhaps stemmed from the rather disheveled and personally unorganized Hitler, as Johnson paints him, but is perhaps also rooted in an eschatological haste for the Nazis, feeling that they had to act now to rush forward his long-term four-stage grand strategy, which forced them into many opportunistic moves that backfired. The Soviet Union’s grand strategy under Stalin had little such time pressure, and as Johnson notes ultimately gained most of what it had initially sought territorially in Eastern Europe from Stalin’s earlier opportunistic alliance with Hitler under its later alliance with the U.S. and Britain. Evidencing the Soviet brand of opportunism, Johnson notes that Stalin offered Hitler a ceasefire and truce in 1942 as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union was beginning to be an obvious failure, while Hitler refused it under his more eschatological, now-or-never mindset. At the end of his life near the end of the war, however, Johnson notes that Hitler bemoaned not being more revolutionary and socialist with the social engineering the Nazis had performed in Germany, evidencing both the tensions and cross purposes remained within Germany and the Nazi movement itself as well bringing up again the age-old debate over whether the Nazis were really left or right wing. Johnson doesn’t fully answer that question, leaving it with saying that Hitler was an eccentric socialist but I have a unique and probably controversial answer with regard about the Nazis and the Soviets that I’ll write about soon.³

World War II exemplifies Johnson’s thesis about the 20th century being the century of extreme social engineering as a case of evil driving out good, even in the good.⁴ The necessity to defeat an evil enemy leads to mimetic responses. One often becomes like the enemy to defeat him, and, with World War II this meant socially engineering the vast populations conscripted onto every side into willingly performing atrocities. Even the winners, the mythical and proverbial “good guys”, were all somehow fine with aerial bombing and hundreds of thousands of deaths in a single raid by the end of the war even as they had criticized far smaller attacks as unthinkably inhuman and barbaric just five years earlier. Stretching Johnson’s arguments only a little, World War II eliminated the moral and ideological moderate, and was by no means the clean victory by upright moral men, the “Good War” as to which it is often now portrayed. The world that came after the war and the atomic bomb was governed by people extremely changed by the conflict, calloused to the death of millions by the social engineering and propaganda used by the victors to win it.

The beginning of the Cold War, marked by the Soviet Union taking over the territories it had been seeking all along and the U.S taking over influence over and defense of British and French colonies and commitments in Europe and Asia occurred in this new moral paradigm of normalized mass violence between two new empires. While kinetic hot war was avoided directly between these two powers, the world backdrop and the conflicts that did arise came on the basis of more utopian social engineering, both in the view of the new United Nations organization itself as well as by many rising political stars in the 1950s and 60s in the former colonies of the earlier European empires, which were slowly gaining their independence throughout this period.

Johnson has a negative view of all these movements throughout the book. Ghandi’s movement of nonviolent resistance to achieve Indian independence from Britain only worked, he believes, because the British empire was weak and soft and not inclined to violence. Even as it succeeded in gaining independence, India became weak, socialist, and dysfunctional, with little improvement in people’s lives to show for any of its national collectivization efforts. Similar decolonization efforts throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America deteriorated into warlordism, violence, and poverty, the only successes Johnson posits being the creation of lots of slogans while active efforts were made, such as in the Algerian independence movement, to eliminate political moderates. This reached its peak with the Bandung “non-aligned” movement under such figures as Sukarno in Indonesia and Nasser in Egypt, and a U.N. soon under the elected control of such states actively supporting such utopian political efforts under the hope of expanding its influence even as atrocities mounted under the new regimes it was supporting. The utopian dreams and visions were more important than reality to the U.N., a reality starkest in numbers at least in China, when the Communists under Mao succeeded in taking control of the country, dreamed that they could just by sure fiat become a steel producing superpower, and, predictably, results were a little worse than expected. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, in particular, launched by Mao’s wife, showed that utopian movements, even if evidently destructive, can carry on a life of their own, and are incredibly difficult, once started, for even those who started them to stop them. In its mimetic spiral into insanity, it was the prelude to wokeness and current similar movements of mimetic, self-sustaining frenzy.⁵

While such utopianism played out in the Communist world writ large and the soon-to-be-named “Third World”, an at least slightly less immediately deadly version of technocratic, bureaucratic utopianism was at work in Europe and America. Behind a facade of simpletoness, Johnson tells us, Eisenhower and the growing tools of the intelligence agencies invoked a future of U.S. power through clandestine actions rather than overt wars. A U.S. government greatly enlarged by World War II, and growing larger too to face threats from the Soviet bloc, would manage the situation technocratically, separate from the direct influence of the people. Meanwhile, France and West Germany under Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman, both from the much-fought-over region of Alsace-Lorraine, began to lay the foundation for the European Union and a technocratic solution to inter-European conflicts and trade.

Collectivization and steps toward socialism were evident even in these Western powers in the 1960s and 70s, Johnson argues, greatly prompted by U.S. stumbling under Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he believes was a U.S. defeat, as the Soviet Union, taking a large gamble, still ended up ahead afterward, with Castro’s Soviet satellite state free to continue to spread its ideological influence and armies throughout the Americas, and a distracted and fearful America feeling forced to respond elsewhere. The Vietnam War, termed by Johnson the “Indo-China War” due to its broader scope beyond just Vietnam, was launched by the U.S. in a climate of fear of Communist worldwide ascendency, while the U.S. response ratcheted up in intensity and involvement under a technocratically controlled and greatly expanded U.S. security apparatus, the “military-industrial complex” warned about by Eisenhower (even though he had contributed greatly to it). Unlike other authors such as Barbara Tuchman, Paul Johnson believes that the war could have been won by the United States, and was lost at home due to irresoluteness in presidential leadership, a desire to raise government spending domestically on social problems, and media pressure. The war could have won on a practical basis had Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon been firm and resolute from the beginning, and not diverted American attention and spending elsewhere. Instead, the U.S. was just involved and resolute enough to make these presidents and the U.S. defense establishment unwilling to cut losses and leave but not involved enough to take the decisive action necessary to win. Paul Johnson specifically suggests that a ground invasion of North Vietnam somewhere around 1965 rather than a half decade of escalating bombing attacks micromanaged by then President Johnson could have been far more successful—and he believes, have forestalled the media pressure which took out first Johnson and then Nixon.

As the U.S. ultimately “lost” in Vietnam in the 1970s, or pulled out if you prefer softer language—Johnson in this book calls the whole situation “America’s suicide attempt,” the West seemed ever more to have lost its way. Sudden massive hikes in the price of oil from outside and ever more burdening regulations on the inside crushed the U.S. economy in particular, while terrorist movements grew both domestically in the U.S. and in Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Soviet navy grew in prominence and strength and the Marxist-derived utopian theory of structuralism, that human nature was controlled by laws that could be discovered and utilized to rework man to perfection grew in prominence in Western intellectual circles. Utopian social engineering whether Communist in the Communist bloc or Communist Light, that is socialist and government control centered again seemed on the ascendent throughout the 1970s.

At least it did until it didn’t. Paul Johnson wrote Modern Times in 1983, before the full downfall of the Soviet Union, but his final chapter traces the beginnings of utopianism’s discrediting in the massive deaths that seemed to somehow accompany every attempt to perfect human nature, the failure of such movements to achieve their promised material results, and, more fundamentally, discreditation of the “inexact sciences” that were the bedrock for each utopian movement. The rise of “exact sciences” such as sociobiology and better understanding of DNA in the 1980s, knowledge that provided a cohesive, but not utopian view of human nature began, he says, to discredit the economic, psychological, and sociological theories grown out of Marx, Darwin, and Freud upon which the social experiments of the 20th century had rested. This, along with a recovery in religious faith, especially linked to the influence of Pope John Paul II, began to put an end, Johnson believes to the tempestuous age that had begun with World War I, with glimmers of ordered reason in man’s understanding of the world and a recovery of proper respect for human freedom, that only the individual man can actually choose to perfect himself on the horizon. 

Looking back across forty years at Johnson’s rosy conclusion, that the modern times were simply a crazy aberration of the period 1920-1980 from the rest of history, where man lost his grounding in a reasoned and realistic understanding of the world, fell for crazy experiments for sixty years, and then was quickly on a road to recovery, seems a little too rosy, given all that has happened since and continues to happen in society, morality, and intellectual thought. I think it's clear that a unified and ordered worldview accepted by everyone that offers the intellectual basis for a well-ordered and reasonable society is not yet here. Arguably it was gone long before World War I, whilst many continue to fall for utopian and irrational promises in the U.S. and abroad. Under Johnson’s definition of “modern times,” I believe that we’re still in them, and will be until a consensus world model, an accepted understanding of the world like Dante’s vision emerges. Until then we’re stuck in wild times of converging mimetic behavior between governments, societies, and movements like that profiled by Johnson between the Nazis and the Soviets. While the age of the utopian state in the ways in which it manifested throughout the 20th century might be weaning, and I only say might, ungrounded and runaway social movements as seen with wokeness or whatever the “current thing” is each year show that there is still no grounding system that allows for the fullest expression of free will in individual behavior. Mimetic tendencies toward what really amounts to cult-like actions instead rule most human behavior and show little sign of abating, even if utopianism is less in the picture.

In some ways this seems like a worse state than when Johnson published Modern Times, as the mimetic, conformist behaviors of most people are as cynical and hopeless as The Dark Knight’s Joker, but perhaps this could, should reason and the praxis of reasoned free will be restored, the contrast against the present situation could lead to a far fuller discrediting of the wayward thinking that led to the last century than the lesser practical discreditng Johnson held as happening. Or mankind could just die out as the mimetic crowds seem to want.⁶

A restoration requires far more than merely this, but as a former professor of mine mouthed again and again to me several nights ago, the beginning of hope could be one word: “Space…, Space…, and Space.”

A new age to follow and finally end the modern times?

1. Jordan Peterson is adamant that this has nothing whatsoever to do with post-modernism, but seems to agree that we need, and in some sense, live in a story, and that they can differ from person to person.

2.  Ideological tensions remained of course, but ideology having brought out revolutions for social engineering in these countries, and having basically accomplished this convergence toward authoritarian command and control ideology was no longer very important internally to any of these countries, especially after the tensions in Nazism had been mostly resolved by Hitler’s internal party purge of Roehm’s S.A. paramilitary.

3.  My take which I’ll explain elsewhere is that Stalin and the Soviet Union were to the right of Hitler’s Germany and that both were right-wing once entrenched in power though Hitler bemoaned and wished (though half-heartedly) that he had been more to the left. Both were left-wing during their attempts to gain power, however.

4. A moral application of the economic consideration known as Gresham’s Law.

5. A purity spiral.

6. Both the anti-natal left and a certain doomerist right, that I will write about soon as well.