Stranger Than We Can Imagine - John Higgs

'Our plan is to look at what was genuinely new, unexpected and radical. We are not concerned by the fallout from those ideas, so take it as read that everywhere we visit caused scandal, anger and furious denouncements by the status quo'

Compared to the grand narratives of conventional history books, dominated by wars, revolutions and discoveries, the history of ideas can be deeply challenging. If we were asked to explain the defining moments of the twentieth century, most of us could manage to put together a timeline of the World Wars, Great Depression, Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But what about the ideas that defined the century? This account would have to take in the work of Einstein, Freud, James Joyce, Ayn Rand, Sartre, Jung, Timothy Leary, postmodernism, chaos theory, quantum mechanics and more. This raises an unsettling question: how much do we understand the ideas which shape our world? In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs acts as a guide to the ‘dark woods’ of history. Here, you will read more about Super Mario than Joseph Stalin, and more about Modernism than monetarism; we will see the links between the artistic and scientific breakthroughs which defined Twentieth Century thought, and discover hidden details which lie behind some of humanity’s great achievements.

Higgs characterises the twentieth century as a period in which conventional theories were confounded, when people were presented with bewildering, often incomprehensible new explanations of how the world worked. The central pillars of our worldview – Newtonian physics, empire, our place in the universe – were overturned. Higgs lines up nineteenth century experts who assured the public that there was nothing new to be discovered in physics or astronomy, to show us just how intellectually jarring the twentieth century was, and also to demontstrate that our own inevitabilities can and will change. The book’s title comes from the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who described the universe as not just 'stranger than we imagine, it was stranger than we can imagine' - as many twentieth century developments were beyond the range of what could possibly be imagined at the end of the nineteenth.

Stranger Than We Can Imagine begins with a visit to the Gaugin retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2010. Higgs recalls the jarring effect of moving from a room filled with the light and innocence of his work to the 'alien landscapes, incomprehensible structures and troubled dreams' of Dali, Picasso and Max Ernst which dominated the gallery’s twentieth century collection. The question for Higgs is, ‘what the hell happened, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the human psyche’? To answer this question, we have to look at the political, scientific and artistic ideas which transformed a world of certainties into one of doubt and chaos.

In The Cosmic Trigger Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson talks about the speed at which the level of knowledge available to humanity doubles. According to his calculations, it took 1500 years for the level of human knowledge to double from the level available in 1AD (the Elizabethan mystic Francis Bacon is considered to be the last human who knew everything; the last person to know all mathematics was Alexander Ostrowski, who died in 1915). The rate of growth is exponential, so by the mid twentieth century, the sum total of human knowledge was doubled in the space of a decade. Not even the most learned expert can hope to keep up with such rapid shifts, so no wonder the world can seem a confusing and often scary place.

The theme which runs through Stranger Than We Can Imagine is the realisation of the relationship between observer and observed, and the consequent move away from the idea of a single, fixed viewpoint. From here, we move onto the failure of Bertrand Russell’s attempt to impose a logical set of rules on mathematics, which foundered in 1930 with Godel's Incompleteness Theorum. As Higgs notes, already 'common sense and certainty were not faring well in the twentieth century'. Quantum mechanics comes next, at which point even the experts were beginning to feel disorientated. Schrodinger said 'I do not like [quantum mechanics] and I am sorry I ever had anything to do with it', whilst the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman summed up the general confusion when he admitted 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics'.

The move away from the idea of a single, objective reality influenced the rise of the individual, which Higgs explores through the lives of Ayn Rand, Alistair Crowley and The Rolling Stones, as well as the development of modern Paganism as a form of spiritualism which privileged personal experience. This increased sense of personal agency and responsibility influenced everything from politics to art, and the rise of the ‘hero’ as portrayed in Hollywood films.

Higgs is excellent at identifying the quirks which often drove the innovators of the twentieth century. For example, there is the discomforting oddness of the pioneers of the space race – from Marvel Parsons, the inventor of jet assisted take-off, a Crowley devotee who chanted black magick invocations before rocket tests, to Werner von Braun, whose career trajectory involved a 'journey from the SS to the Disney Channel'.

Appropriately for a work which has to take into account the postmodernist movement, Higgs fuses high and low culture with a clear understanding of the achievements and limitations of both. Early on, he argues that there is a common thread between Ulysses and Grand Theft Auto V, in that both were meant to serve as complete, immersive recreations of a particular city. Later, he is able to provide a path through the knotty undergrowth of postmodernist theory by using the example of Super Mario Brothers: 'a combination of elements that don't fit together under any system of categorisation, other than the game's own logic… a collision of unrelated forms that are put together and expected to work on their own terms'. This feeds back into the concept of individualism: 'the idea that an outside opinion or authority can declare that some elements belong together while others don't has been firmly rejected'. The user affects the game being played by their decisions, creating a feedback loop in which we see the observer affecting what is observed once more.

If Stranger Than We Can Imagine presents the twentieth century as a confusing landscape, the territory of the id, it does also hold out some hope for the future. The rise of social networking causes problems for believers in hierarchical structures, who struggle to control it and fear transparency, and libertarians, who fear scrutiny. After the wild uncertainties of the previous century, early twenty-first century thinkers crave certainty, an objective view of reality rather than a multi-perspective viewpoint. This belief system is under pressure from a new generation of digital natives, and it is the synthesis between these two contrasting world-views which will come to dominate the next hundred years. This might not be such a bad thing. As Higgs says, 'the digital native generation do not see themselves using just the straightjacket of individualism. They know that model is too limited. They are more than isolated selves. Seeing themselves differently will cause them to act differently. Those of us born before the 1990s should, perhaps, get out of their way and wish them luck'

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You can read my review of John Higgs' previous book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band That Burned a Million Pounds here, and an interview with the author here.