Mass Effects and the Disenchantment of the World

Reflections on a 1925 Churchill’s Essay

During my stay in Stockholm last December, I stumbled upon a fantastic bookstore, Hedengrens, where I found many great philosophy/politics/economics books. Among them was Winston Churchill’s Thoughts and Adventures which I have been contemplating buying (online) for several weeks already.[1] It is a collection of short essays that Churchill published between 1921 and 1931 on a great variety of topics, ranging from Churchill’s love for cartoons and painting to his thoughts about how parliamentary government can deal with economic issues. Some of the essays stand for their relative philosophical depth, especially “Shall We All Commit Suicide?” (about the new paradigm of war set by the emergence of new weapons of mass destruction),[2] “Fifty Years Hence” (about the effects of modern science on our ways of life), and “Mass Effects in Modern Life.”[3] I want to discuss here this last essay more particularly, as it develops themes that echo contemporary worries about democratic capitalism and liberal democracy, though it was published a century ago.

In this essay, Churchill wonders about the role of (great) individuals in the march of history and whether this role is not going to be less and less secondary:

“Is the march of events ordered and guided by eminent men; or do our leaders merely fall into their places at the heads of the moving columns? Is human progress the result of the resolve and deeds of individuals, or are these resolves and deeds only the outcome of time and circumstance? Is history the chronicle of famous men and women, or only of their responses to the tides, tendencies, and opportunities of their age? Do we owe the ideals and wisdom that make our would to the glorious few, or to the patient anonymous innumerable many?”[4]

These are familiar questions that are part of a more general reflection about the nature of modernity, a reflection that one finds (formulated differently) in many philosophical and social theoretic traditions. In Churchill’s perspective, they are almost rhetorical, as we just have “to let the mind’s eye skim back over the story of nations, indeed to review the experience of our own small lives, to observe the decisive part which accident and chance play at every moment.” However, this is something recent that has to do with the nature of modern life, as Churchill ranges himself “with those who view the past history of the world mainly as the tale of exceptional beings, whose thoughts, actions, qualities, virtues, triumphs, weaknesses and crimes have dominated the fortunes of the race.” So, what has changed to put individuals in the background of historical processes?

In the domain of modern war, where this evolution is the most obvious, it is essentially due to the scientific and technological developments that Churchill contemplates in the other two essays I mentioned above. Already in Churchill’s times, war is no longer decided by the skills and judgments of great commanders leading their troops on the battlefield. Military leaders now operate from their offices, at a remote distance from where action occurs. War is no longer the matter of armies confronting each other at a definite point in time and space, but involves whole populations submitted to the systematic risk of being bombarded. Because of this, the figure of the Commander-in-Chief has irreversibly receded. He is no longer a hero, someone to admire or to despise. Insofar as this should have negative vocational effects on the attractivity of a career of a military leader, Churchill sees that as a welcome change.

Churchill’s appreciation of the growing importance of “mass effects” is, however, less positive as far as non-military aspects of human social life are concerned. “Can modern communities do without great men? Can they dispense with hero-worship? Can they provide a larger wisdom, a nobler sentiment, a more vigorous action, by collective processes, than we ever got from the Titans? Can nations remain healthy, can all nations draw together, in a world whose brightest stars are film stars and whose gods are sitting in the gallery? Can the spirit of man emit the vital spark by machinery?”[5] To these questions, Churchill gives an equivocal answer.

On the one hand, Churchill emphasizes the “immense economic and social advantages” that come with industrialization and mass production. The enlargement of the scale and mechanization of production processes as well as the constant increase of the division of labor have led to unprecedented gains in productivity making available to everyone goods that were reserved for some happy few. As in the military domain, a collateral effect has been to make the figure of the business leader less salient. More generally, industrialization has only made it more obvious that the individual is only a cog in the societal and economic machinery with few if any, ability to alter the process by their own agency. At least, this came with undisputable material advantages that have improved everyone’s quality of life.

On the other hand, the mass effects caused by the modernization of the economic and social life have induced a standardization of attitudes and behavior. Part of it comes from how information and knowledge are disseminated through education and the media. What we would call nowadays the “democratization” of education has had the effect of undermining “those conditions of personal stress and mental effort to which the masterpieces of the human mind are due.”[6] The rise of modern journalism and broadcasting has helped the emergence of so-called “public opinion.” While this has undoubtedly had a positive effect on the general level of information and – Churchill’s word – “intelligence,” this public opinion is in the meantime democratically inert and fairly limited in what it can really know, as argued by the American journalist Walter Lippmann in writings contemporaneous to Cthe hurchill’s essay.

While, according to Churchill, mass effects have not reached in the great democracies of the time (Great Britain, the U.S., France) the level they display in the communist Soviet Union yet,[7] their consequences have nonetheless been for individuals a loss in “forethought, in initiative, in contrivance, in freedom and in effective civic status.”[8] Churchill ends his essay noting that the economic and social improvements produced by the mass effects of modern life unavoidably come with a nostalgy for the times when the world seemed to be ruled by great figures. There is nothing wrong with that, but Churchill also warns against the cult of the leader and the pretense of those who claim to be able to stir democratic societies above the mediocrity of mass effects.

Let me add a few comments regarding the relevance of Churchill’s essay hundred years after having been written. I read this essay as a response to the general concern about the moral effects of the “disenchantment of the world.” The disenchantment of the world is more than just the “death of God” and the realization that natural and social phenomena have explanations that don’t appeal to mystical, religious, or other supernatural entities. It is also the result of the acceptance of the crude fact that human agency is not a substitute for God’s. Phenomena that affect all of us are no more the product of some supernatural entity’s will than the one of any one of us. They are, most of the time at least, the result of brute impersonal mechanisms under nobody’s control. The world is a machine that can be rationally explored, and whose functioning can be rationally explained, but it cannot be directly controlled. We are therefore vulnerable, but in a way that is particularly uncomfortable. We have no one to address, no one to ask, to change the state of affairs that is forced on us. Nor can we do anything about it ourselves. The depressing reality is that we are mostly powerless as isolated individuals to change the course of history.

This is not necessarily something to be viewed negatively. After all, for most of us, the alternative would be to be the subject of someone’s else will. While Churchill seems to think that mass effects are conducive to a loss of freedom, we can argue that this actually the contrary. This view is in particular at the core of Friedrich Hayek’s argument that an impersonal market system makes us freer:

“Even if the threat of starvation to me and perhaps to my family impels me to accept a distasteful job at a very low wage, even if I am “at the mercy” of the only man willing to employ me, I am not coerced by him or anybody else. So long as the act that has placed me in my predicament is not aimed at making me do or not do specific things, so long as the intent of the act that harms me is not to make me serve another person’s ends, its effect on my freedom is not different from that of any natural calamity – a fire or a flood that destroys my house or an accident that harms my health.”[9]

If natural events altering the opportunities that are opened to me cannot be said to make me “more or less free,” then the same applies to the impersonal effects of the market process. In a market system, I’m as free as I can be because the events that affect me are never the result of a particular will – they are caused by mass effects. Interestingly, this argument can be (and is) partially endorsed from a “republican” perspective that defines freedom in terms of non-domination, precisely because the mass effects of the impersonal market process don’t, at the bottom, reflect the will of anyone in particular.[10]

Now, we may of course disagree with Hayek if we consider that freedom not only entails being protected from the arbitrariness of someone’s will but also implies the more “positive” ability to act on and change the state of affairs, at least the part of it that directly affects me. If the advent of modern democracy came with the impersonal mass effects that Churchill discusses, it was also accompanied by a tacit promise well-captured by Alexis de Tocqueville:

“As social equality spreads, a greater number of individuals are no longer rich or powerful enough to exercise great influence upon the fate of their fellows, but have acquired or have preserved sufficient understanding and wealth to be able to satisfy their own needs. Such people owe nothing to anyone and, as it were, expect nothing from anyone. They are used to considering themselves in isolation and quite willingly imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands.”[11]

The promise, constitutive of what Tocqueville characterizes as the “individualism” that goes with democracy, is that each person would have the capacity to decide how to live and thus to have “their destiny… in their own hands.” The problem, of course, is that this promise was never to be realized. As I said above, the realization of this is part of the broader disenchantment of the world that characterizes modernity. Even more than ever, our fate depends on what others are deciding, including on the other side of the planet. We can eventually take comfort in the fact that most of the events that affect us are not the intentional product of someone else in particular. We therefore don’t have to feel indebted toward someone and, in principle at least, we should not resent anyone. It doesn’t change the fact however that, as an individual, we are powerless in the face of these events. Contrary to the promise of modern democracy, as individuals, we don’t have our destiny in our own hands, and we depend on others.

What is left then for the disenchanted individual? God is dead and “secular religions” are outmoded. What is left is the temptation that Churchill describes at the end of his essay, to go down in the “plains” and the “valleys” of those less advanced societies whose history is still run by some powerful individuals who promise a better life under their benevolent will. This temptation has never really disappeared. We continue to write History through the lens of great historical figures. Many of us are still fascinated by charismatic leaders who pretend, and in some cases really are, able to decide our fate. As modern societies grow more desperate about their inability to fulfill the expectations of their populations for still better conditions of living for them and their children, more equality, or a preserved planet, we can expect nothing but that it will become even stronger.

Going down in the plains and valleys is not without risk. Mass effects will not disappear because we decide to collectively believe that we can completely control our fate through the will of a Leader. There is no way back (or down) – not at least while keeping all the benefits that modern life has brought to us. That would be a huge sacrifice for a modicum of so-called “freedom.”

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[1] Winston S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures: Churchill Reflects on Spies, Cartoons, Flying, and the Future, ed. James W. Muller, Critical ed. edition (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1932 [2009]).

[2] This essay was published in 1925, so well before the advent of atomic/nuclear weapons.

[3] Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures, pp. 205-12.

[4] Ibid., p. 205.

[5] Ibid., p. 211.

[6] Ibid., p. 207.

[7] “So the Bolsheviks, having attempted by tyranny and by terror to establish the most complete form of mass life and collectivism of which history bears record, have not only lost the distinction of individuals, but have not even made the nationalization of life and industry pay. We have not much to learn from them, except what to avoid.” Ibid., p. 207.

[8] Ibid., p. 206.

[9] F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty: The Definitive Edition (Routledge, 1960 [2020]), p. 137.

[10] For a republican account of the relationship between markets and freedom non-domination that takes this shape, see Philip Pettit, On the People’s Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy (Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially pp. 35-49.

[11] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, ed. Isaac Kramnick, trans. Gerald Bevan (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), p. 589.