We tend to think of it as the century of extraordinary progress: the century of science, technology, mass education, longer lives, women’s rights, antibiotics, aviation, space exploration, computing, and unprecedented economic growth. All of that is true. But it is only part of the story.
The twentieth century was also a period of extraordinary violence, social upheaval, ideological conflict, consumerism, mass communication, financial transformation, and an increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate information. It may therefore acquire a very different collection of names from those we would instinctively choose today.
Not just the west but the world itself witnessed an extraordinary expansion of wealth, but it also saw the increasing elevation of material accumulation as a measure of success. Economic growth became not merely a means of improving human welfare but, increasingly, an objective in itself.Consumerism transformed societies. Advertising encouraged people to define themselves through what they purchased, while financial systems became increasingly sophisticated at converting almost every aspect of human activity into something that could be bought, sold, or speculated upon.
Future historians may look back and conclude that we became extraordinarily good at creating wealth—and extraordinarily poor at deciding when enough was enough.
However Two world wars, genocide, totalitarian regimes, nuclear weapons, and industrialized mass killing all emerged from societies that simultaneously regarded themselves as increasingly rational and civilized. That contradiction could be one of the century's defining characteristics.
We developed the ability to send humans into space while perfecting ways of destroying millions of people on Earth. We expanded our understanding of psychology while creating political systems capable of manipulating entire populations.
Future generations may reasonably wonder whether the twentieth century was an age of rationality—or an age in which rationality became extraordinarily effective at serving irrational purposes.
For much of human history, geography imposed powerful limitations on human interaction. The twentieth century began to dismantle those barriers.Steamships, railways, aircraft, telephones, radio, television, and eventually digital communications compressed the world. Political borders remained, but their ability to isolate populations weakened. The century therefore began the transformation of humanity from a collection of relatively isolated societies into something resembling a single, interconnected system.
Mass production created something historically unusual: enormous numbers of people with access to goods and entertainment that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Popular culture became a global force. Music, cinema, sport, fashion, celebrity, advertising, and eventually television occupied an increasing proportion of everyday life.
Newspapers reached enormous audiences. Radio brought voices into people's homes. Cinema created shared visual experiences. Television eventually placed moving images into virtually every living room. For the first time, governments, corporations, political movements, and individuals could communicate simultaneously with millions of people. This transformed politics and culture—but it also transformed persuasion.
The First and Second World Wars transformed warfare from conflicts largely fought between armies into struggles in which entire populations became targets and participants. Industrial production, science, transportation, communications, and bureaucratic organization were all harnessed to the machinery of war.
The ultimate expression of this development was the atomic bomb. Humanity acquired, for the first time, the technological ability to destroy civilization on a global scale.
The twentieth century therefore became the century in which war ceased to be merely a contest between nations and became a potential threat to the survival of humanity itself.
It was also an age of resistance.Workers, women, racial minorities, students, colonial populations, political dissidents, and countless other groups challenged established authorities and social structures. Civil rights movements, anti-war demonstrations, independence movements, feminism, environmentalism, and student rebellions all contributed to a growing rejection of inherited authority.
For centuries, wealth had been closely associated with physical things: land, livestock, precious metals, buildings, and tangible goods. During the twentieth century, however, an increasing proportion of wealth became abstract. Money increasingly became numbers recorded in ledgers rather than objects that could be physically possessed. Credit, stocks, bonds, derivatives, electronic transfers, and increasingly complex financial instruments created enormous quantities of what might be called virtual wealth.
The twenty-first century would take this process even further, but its foundations were laid during the twentieth. Future historians may therefore see the period as the beginning of the age in which wealth became increasingly detached from anything tangible.
Governments measured progress through production, income, consumption, employment, and gross domestic product. Growth became synonymous with prosperity, and prosperity became one of the principal measures of successful government. The century dramatically expanded humanity's ability to extract resources, transform landscapes, consume energy, and produce goods. It also began to reveal the environmental consequences of doing so.
Future historians may therefore see the twentieth century as the period when humanity became obsessed with the idea that tomorrow must always be larger than today.
So, What Should We Call It?
No single name will ever adequately describe the twentieth century.
It was an Age of Greed and an Age of Insanity. It was the Era of Total War and the Era of Protest. In addition it was the beginning of mass media, global interconnectedness, virtual wealth and rapid economic growth,
We learned how to split the atom, leave the planet, communicate across oceans, manipulate genes, and build machines capable of extraordinary computation.
However we never quite solved the older problem of What should we do with all of these gains? We may never.
This may be what the twentieth century was really about—the century in which humanity acquired extraordinary power without acquiring an equally extraordinary understanding of how to use it.
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