Stranger Than We Can Imagine: An Alternative History of the 20th Century by John Higgs

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Profound beyond the limit and ingeniously eye opening.

This book is a scholarly trip through an electrically charged revolutionary century of innovative developments, political turmoil, war mongering psychopathy, corporate power supremacy, out of control climate calamity, and the greatest economic disparity since the three hundred years of the Russian Czar.


Excerpts:
A journey through the twentieth century can seem like an epic quest. The gallant adventurers who embark on it first wrestle with three giants, known by the single names of Einstein, Freud and Joyce. They must pass through the forest of quantum indeterminacy and the castle of conceptual art. They avoid the gorgons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand whose glance can turn them to stone, emotionally if not physically, and they must solve the riddles of the Sphinxes of Carl Jung and Timothy Leary. Then things get difficult. The final challenge is to somehow make it through the swamp of postmodernism. It is not, if we are honest, an appealing journey.


The twenty-first century is not going to make any sense at all seen through nineteenth-century eyes.


A century is an arbitrary time period. Historians talk about the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) or the short twentieth century (1914-91), because these periods contain clear beginnings and endings. But for our purposes “the twentieth century” will do fine, because we’re taking a journey from when things stopped making sense to where we are now.


Ideology beat science
Even Margaret Thatcher had to amend her views after it became clear how much they offended her political allies. While her 1980 talks displayed clear scientific understanding of the situation, her 2003 book, Statecraft, fell back on the political talking points that cause climate scientists to bang their heads on their desks in despair. Curbing climate change was a front for a political viewpoint that she disagreed with, and for that reason no efforts to curb climate change should be made. Ideology beat science. Individualism beat environmentalism. So carbon continued to be emitted, topsoil continued to decrease and the ice sheets on the poles continued to melt. The debt which funded the consumer activity that caused all this continued to grow. As a result, the window when runaway climate change could have been prevented now appears to have closed.



W. C. Fields was the putative author of “I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”