Cohesion and Disintegration
from the Great War to Vietnam
© 2002 and 2023 Brian M Downing
W Somerset Maugham observed in The Razor’s Edge, “For men and women are not only themselves; they are the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in.” He went on to describe how the Great War shaped Americans and Europeans and how the confidence and faith of prewar years was undermined.
At a time when military service has little relevance for most except as the lore of grandparents, the idea of wars decisively changing America might sound implausible. Undaunted, I’ve argued that wars brought economic booms, dislocated populations, changed the social structure, altered norms and beliefs, affected nationalist sentiments, helped minorities and women, reduced formalism in life, and opened the doors to new thinking. More to the point, wars propelled America from a traditional past into a postmodern one of atomization, fragmentation, secularization, and normlessness (or anomie). Modernity, the object of so much study in the middle of the last century, was a brief way-station between an structured past and an incoherent present. Traditional beliefs and institutions can be deemed good or bad, fair or unjust, universal or particularistic. I hope to show them more complex than that and to note their vital integrative role. Nothing has emerged to take their place. They cannot be brought back.
Parts of this study might seem to sentimentalize the past. There’s only been an attempt to convey what most Americans felt for their country, as in the lore of grandparents. Any civilization deserves appreciation of its achievements, faults, and sources of decline. Independent thinking did not always sit well in traditional America. Once again Somerset Maugham is helpful. Later in The Razor’s Edge, a veteran of the Great War, dissociated from his world, looks wistfully to the past: “I’ve come too late into a world too old. I should have been born in the Middle Ages when faith was a matter of course; then my way would have been clear to me and I’d have sought to enter the order.” Somerset Maugham arches an eyebrow: “I think it’s just as well you weren’t born in the Middle Ages. You’d undoubtedly have perished at the stake.”
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Cohesion and Disintegration from the Great War to Vietnam
