Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes is a book about modern history. The narrative spans from 1914 to 1991 – and by the end, the reader feels like they are reading more of an indictment of a present than a judgement of the past. This is the most obviously unique thing about Hobsbawm’s work – he is attempting a retrospective analysis of a long and complex period that has barely finished. To do so, Hobsbawm imagines he is flying high above the present, distanced from its modes of analysis, ignoring its conceptual and linguistic tools, cutting through the noise like he’s a historian of the future looking back on the present.
Hobsbawm achieves this by bringing the whole period into one big structural frame. Capitalism is the thread that connects the broad tectonic shifts that occur within the period. Crisis, chaos, complexification, community collapse and quality of life increases are all framed as the product of one hungry, merciless beast – capitalism, or the need for the global economy to constantly expand.
Two results of this process, complexification and chaos bring their own challenges. The idea is that the reordering and restructuring of our world by capital to meet its needs reaches the point that it extends beyond the understanding of humans, who are limited beings with limited time, non-rational patterns of thought and limited brain-capacity. As it does, humans start to lose track. They become disorientated and find it hard to understand more than a bit-part of the greater whole. Humans struggle against the limits of linguistics to articulate what’s wrong. The example of physics is given. Instead of reaching a convergence, further abstraction and interrogation has led to the discovery of more and more sub-atomic particles that work in ways that aren’t observable and in patterns that aren’t discernible. The smallest particles seem to be made of smaller particles and its not even obvious where these exist or if they exist at all. Human understandings of the world slowly dissipate into a loose hinterland between abstraction and confused certainty, where progress is incremental and no longer an obviously clarifying force.
It’s not the only example. The global economy, something supposedly understood by abstract economists’ theories is increasingly nonsensical and obstruse. The slosh of dosh on what are effectively short-term bets on market performance are not obviously helpful or useful to anyone, but they exist and people make billions of dollars on them. The increasingly interdependent systems rely on each other in deeper, more complex and fundamental ways. Hard to separate or defend from the global morass, nation states’ defence of their national economic performance and social standards is becoming an increasingly thankless yet difficult task.
The relentless desire to improve our ability to control the material world is eating away at the capacity for humans to defend anything else that might matter. Increasingly, an impersonal spirit works only for its own benefit, using humans only as tools for self-preservation. This impersonal force works in ways incomprehensible to any individual – the individual is confined only to a part of the larger system, and only knows how his little corner works. He doesn’t have to think about whether the whole system works for him, because he imagines the only zone of his control is his little corner of activity. Human perspective becomes fractured – and blame, responsibility and control become confused. Things begin to fail, but the forces people blame are not those responsible for this failure. Hobsbawm’s world is one which humans neither control nor understand.
Hobsbawm nevertheless tries to draw meaning out of the muddle. And this seems to be where a problem begins. If things are so complex that its increasingly difficult to understand the broader picture, how can Hobsbawm prove his history says anything meaningful?
The answer is with great difficulty. Think of it this way - modern historians are desperate to innovate, desperate to say something new, and are often surprisingly successful when doing so. Proof is that debates from the 1960s are radically different to those in modern historiography. The question of whether the French revolution was a “Bourgeois Revolution” is no longer seen as either useful or relevant. A constant process of re-evaluation makes the historian uncertain in even his most basic duties – as fact and focus become difficult to clearly establish. Looking at the same information and seeing two completely different things is the speciality of the modern historian.
This is the source of considerable confusion. The ground beneath the modern historian is always moving, and so to say anything risks overlooking something. To synthesise multiple complex, moving events into a broader narrative risks each part of this story becoming loose and so, risks saying nothing at all as specialists eat away at the consensus required to make an overarching analysis. The paradox of the world Hobsbawm presents, one that is rapidly spinning out of control, is that his analysis falls victim to this very uncertainty. Complexity eats away at simple, linguistically bounded truths.
Hobsbawm’s work is so complex in itself that its hard to draw out what a commentator needs to focus on. Despite this, the reader would be hard pressed to find anything as significant to Hobsbawm’s narrative than the decline of community.
For Hobsbawm, the decline of community is necessarily double edged as this disintegration results from things that are definitively and obviously revolutionarily transformative in a positive sense. In the 20th century, humans could increasingly satisfy a desire to feel independent. The century brought the majority of western citizens a significant rise in incomes and living standard – height, health and life expectancy shot up, and luxury spending became a reality for increasing proportion of the population. People brought bigger houses and gained the capacity to feign a sense of relative independence. The family or the individual became the standard unit of political and social relevance as personal choice proliferated at the expense that cooperation out of necessity. This is a world people have chosen – they choose to experience leisure from the TV sets and not at the pub, the church or the footie match. No one has forced the hand of developed society – rather, we collectively chose to make the relatively well informed decision to fulfil a desire not to be poor, hungry and suffering.
Yet, a world of individuals is bound to be in some way unfulfilling. When we do not perceive ourselves to be dependent on one another, commitment to others relies on consent, rather than necessity. We only enter into association because we want to, because it brings us pleasure, rather than because of a deep need that results from either danger or interdependence. Such a world is one devoid of obvious direction and meaning - we no longer have burning needs that are recognised as obviously just or right by others, but instead have flippant desires. We become mechanical – with inputs and outputs that can be mapped and met by consumption.
What this means on a personal level is quite difficult to tell. Obviously, we have rising suicide rates, drug death overdoses, crime rates and mental illness, and this in some way may have originated from the processes Hobsbawm draws out, but the line of causality is not a clear one. An individual in the modern capitalist era has plenty ability to find their way around the broad trends Hobsbawm provides. The same thrill and sense of community is not obviously absent in various clubs, activities and communities that are provided by capital. Video games or club sports activities are still possible and feasible in the modern world – in fact, potentially more so. The ability to travel further afield, or have access to the virtual world, in some way seems like a benefit directly provided by late-stage capitalism.
More basically, Hobsbawm’s claims have to fight it out with human ingenuity. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning show humans as creative when it comes to fulfilling their various meaning-related requirements. When humans are near other humans, they will find ways to act like apes, they’ll screw, makes friends and enemies, exclude and include. In other words, pop humans into the world, and they’ll probably fulfil their non-material needs relatively well. What’s so different now?
The answer seems twofold. First, that as mentioned previously, we no longer see each other as part of an interdependent framework. We choose those we want to share our life with, rather than it being forced upon us. This means we have the ability to better access our preferences, because less holds us in place. At the same time, as less holds us in place, we are able to make worse decisions and have less protection from our social safety net if something goes wrong. Previously, we could not go wrong, because, we’d have people that shared in our plight, who had little but connections with others, and so could support an important set of needs somewhat unconditionally. This has definitively changed. Now, there is what Hobsbawm terms an ‘underclass’ that has been unlucky in its die roll. People choose not to associate with it or give it recognition or support - and so its members suffer.
Second, where we get our recognition has also shifted. The breakdown of local communities has created an abstract wider community that’s increasingly important for fulfilling human needs. Instead of getting our recognition from people that we know well, and have always known on an intimate level, we look towards society to get our fix of recognition. Capitalism, or society, implants a similar judgement of what success looks like into the minds of human individuals. We want to be judged well by a community of individuals that doesn’t exist, against ideas and expectations of an abstraction – namely, media and culture. Such an abstraction is hard to reason with and hard to escape, because it literally can’t be confronted – and even though it only half-exists, it is ever present as everyone you meet believes the validity of its judgements.
Importantly, as Michael Sandel points out, you can fail against these heavy expectations, and even if you don’t, rising to the challenge can make your life miserable. Entering into meritocracy involves risking failure, and the need to avoid such failure often means extraordinary pressure and mental strain. The death of local community might not mean the death of all community, but the new impersonal communities which have replaced local ones lack the ability to easily reciprocate what we put into them.
Hobsbawm’s world is a highly pessimistic one. The lodestar of the new breed of Marxist, Hobsbawm lionises revolution but no longer believes it is possible. State forces and capitalism more generally are so strong as to mean that revolution is not really conceivable where it is deeply entrenched. The result: a system in freefall, one that comes as a package or not at all, where problems are obvious and multiplying, yet impossible to resolve. Like Marx, Hobsbawm believes there are forces more significant than human agency in forming the broad thrust of history, steering it away from humans’ best interests, yet unlike Marx, he believes humans can’t see over the various hillcrests that lie ahead. For Hobsbawm, history is a story of walking blind into an uncertain, uncontrolled nightmare. Where the human story has direction, the cumulative impact of competing chaotic human impulse makes the moral unclear until things have already happened.