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John Higgs: I came to writing quite late in my life; it doesn't come naturally to me. I'm not a historian; I don't have a degree in English. My background is entirely wrong to be writing a history of the 20th century [laughs].So where did the idea come from?
The idea behind the book is that we're very comfortable with all the innovations and discoveries up until the end of the 19th century; photography, electricity, agriculture, democracy—as a whole, we're fairly happy with these and understand how they work. Then we get to the turn of 20th century and we get relativity, existentialism, modernism, quantum mechanics, and all these things that are fairly terrifying for many of us, so we back away from them. Which results in some of us in the 21st century looking at the world through 19th century eyes and not fully making sense of it all. We need to take on board everything we learned from the 20th century and not shy away from it all.
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The story I wanted to tell was of the rise of the individual, so I was looking for characters that best encapsulated this main theme. They're the people that are right on the edge, the people that are so far out there that nobody understands them. These characters are often perfectly in tune with the direction that we're going. [The artist and poet] Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, for example, was one of the people that was truly surfing the change; I just had to write about her.Yeah, in the book you write that the end of the 19th century marked the end of the hierarchical age of empires, and the 20th century was the age of the individual. Can you expand on that?
Pre–20th century, we lived in an age when large parts of the world were carved up by colonialism—where you were in the hierarchy was more important than who you were as a person. If you were a serf or peasant, then that's who you were, regardless of whether you were a good person. It seems appalling to us now, but it was how people understood themselves. It was extremely harsh on the majority of people, but it was stable, and it was the only model of society that we had. It was something that was so integral to all of history, so when it all disappeared almost in the blink of an eye when WWI ended, it was a really big deal.
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In the East, it's slightly different. The Islamic world still has that fixed point in society. Mecca is the omphalos, and some elements of that pre-20th-century hierarchical age still exist in that part of the world. These places have now been plunged into the modern digital age, where they're connected to people from all over the world that see the world in different ways and have different beliefs. It's sad, but it's no surprise to me that there's so much violence because of it.
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In the book you write of how we're just at the beginning of the Network Age.TRENDING ON NOISEY: Here's Every Annoying Person You'll Meet at a Festival
Yeah, we've gone from the "know your place" pre-20th-century structure to the individualistic "no such thing as society" Thatcherite structure, but it doesn't have to end there. Thinking of ourselves as individuals isn't enough to make sense of who we are.For example, people born and raised in the 20th century, the age of the individual, see somebody taking a selfie and they immediately think of vanity and narcissism, but that's a dated perspective. The millennial generation would just see it as something to be shared in that person's networks, and the photo can only be understood—and only really exists—in that wider context. To them, it's just somebody smiling at their friends.
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Of course there are horrible, nasty people out there and people can get publicly shamed, but it's only because it's all so new. I can't help but think that all these feedback loops—this getting used to what other people think, and becoming responsible for your own actions, thoughts, and words—has got to be positive at the heart of it. The age is in its infancy, and the teething pains can be quite terrifying.There are still huge unsustainable imbalances in wider society; the global economy, climate change, these things can't go on as they are. We can't hide away and pretend we don't know about these things any more—we're much more aware. We won't be skipping into a utopian future just yet, but the network seems to be our greatest hope for overcoming the problems that we've built up for ourselves.What do you think the future of capitalism might be?
I do fear that because neoliberal capitalism funnels wealth and therefore power upward to an increasing minority, the people that have the power to change things have no desire to do so. They are just so heavily invested in the status quo. That's a very difficult problem to understand. The hope is that between where we are now and where we need to be, it doesn't turn violent. I can't see it continuing indefinitely on its current path peacefully. If the inequality continues at the same rate it has been, then I don't think CEOs will make it out alive.In the book, you cover what you describe as "genuinely new, unexpected and radical" developments, like relativity, cubism, and quantum mechanics. Do you think there's room for innovations and events of that caliber in our immediate future?
I think the book shows that genuinely new, unexpected, and radical things keep coming, and that gives me hope. Things are changing in a different way. It used to be that a great individual would appear and put forward an idea. A figure like John Lennon, Sid Vicious, or Bob Marley would crystallize a movement. We don't seem to have these great individuals any more, but we have these huge movements. It's no longer about leaders.Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century will be released on August 27. If you're in London, there's a book launch party on August 28 at the Social on Little Portland Street.Follow Jak Hutchcraft on Twitter.