[MD] Intellectuals will tell you

[david buchanan]

"Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue" ever was."  (Lila, 22)


Krimel replied:
Seriously?  A secret loneliness?  There was a decade that began with 40 million people dying of the flu after 15 million had been killed in battle the decade before. It ended in the collapse of the entire world economy. Secret loneliness? You mean like people were sad and dare I say, depressed? Holy shit! Maybe that's why it was call the Great Depression. Wait is that a secret, too?


dmb says:

Richard Overy calls this period "the morbid age". In fact, that's the title of his book from last year. Freud's CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS was published in 1930 and Spengler published THE DECLINE OF THE WEST in 1918 and 1923. One could list such items all day long but here is a synopsis of Overy's book that gets the general idea across.

"British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The combination of a liberal, uncensored society and a large educated audience for new ideas made Britain a laboratory for novel ways to understand the world. The Morbid Age opens a window onto this creative but anxious era, the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was facing a possibly terminal crisis of civilization.
The modern era promised progress of a kind, but it was overshadowed by a growing fear of decay and death, an end to the civilized world and the arrival of a new Dark Age - even though the country had suffered no occupation, no civil war and none of the bitter ideological rivalries of inter-war Europe, and had an economy that survived better than most. The Morbid Age explores how this strange paradox came about. Ultimately, Overy shows, the coming of war was almost welcomed as a way to resolve the contradictions and anxieties of this period, a war in which it was believed civilization would be either saved or utterly destroyed."

More specifically, the terrible secret loneliness is otherwise known as "Alienation" in the existential sense of the word. This summarizes it:

"One source considers alienation to be "Estrangement from other people, society, or work... a blocking or dissociation of a person's feelings, causing the individual to become less effective. The focus here is on the person's problems in adjusting to society. However, some philosophers believe that alienation is inevitably produced by a shallow and depersonalised society." Also, from a sociological viewpoint: "Émile Durkheim's anomie, or rootlessness, stemmed from loss of societal and religious tradition..." "...according to Heidegger, mankind has fallen into crisis by taking a narrow, technological approach to the world and by ignoring the larger question of existence."

Alienation has also been described as: - "estrangement; mental or emotional detachment; the state of not being involved; the critical detachment with which, according to Bertolt Brecht, audience and actors should regard a play, considering action and dialogue and the ideas in the drama without emotional involvement."

The Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say: "Alienation, in social sciences, the state of feeling estranged or separated from one's milieu, work, products of work, or self," encompassing such variants as "...powerlessness, the feeling that one's destiny is not under one's control but is determined by external agents, fate, luck, or institutional arrangements, meaninglessness, a generalised sense of purposelessness in life... cultural estrangement, the sense of removal from established values in society, and ... self-estrangement, perhaps the most difficult to define, and in a sense the master theme, the understanding that in one way or another the individual is out of touch with himself."