Age Of Anxiety And European Culture

29 Pages 7189 Words

d -- liberation would result from more technology. What World War One showed was how quickly this new technology could be put to use. In the end, it was the European idea of progress which became the victim of "improved technology." The rules of warfare had changed -- and with this change the 20th century plunged into what one historian has called, "the age of total war."
Immediately following the end of the war, one of France's literary giants called attention to the very clear fact that a crisis had now overtaken the European mind in the 20th century. Paul Valéry (1871-1945) brooded on both the greatness and decline of Europe in his essay THE CRISIS OF THE MIND (1919). Of the greatness of Europe, Valéry had no doubt. Europe was "the elect portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body." Europe's superiority, according to Valéry, rested on a combination of various qualities -- imagination and rigorous logic, skepticism and mysticism, and above all, curiosity. "Everything came to Europe," he wrote, "and...