The year 2022 first month of January is at an end - and I'm sure you're just as weary about spending another few months locked in. Let me cheer you up. 2022 isn't just the third year of this damn pandemic, it's also the centennial anniversary of the modern world.
In a wonderful two-part episode of the podcast, The Rest is History, hosts and historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook traced the birth of modernism to 1922. It was the year when everything changed. Old institutions, old habits, old ways of thinking all gave way to uncertainty and chaos.
While the history they recall is admittedly eurocentric—the writing of Ulysses, Yeat's poetic visions, the end of the Great War, the spread of the Spanish Flu—what stayed with me was that a hundred years out, we're pretty much reliving similar times. A pandemic has caused great existential stress. Demagogues run the world and our politics reek with fundamentalism. There is no God or Truth in which we trust.
Except now, these events are global. The world isn't changing in fractions. Everything is happening to everyone in real-time. And most likely on TikTok. Wait, wait, I was supposed to cheer you up. It is joyful, I argue, to learn a lesson from the last 100 years.
Modernism broke everything but gave us a chance to reinvent the world. The same thing is happening again. Modernism was born to sow chaos. If we can embrace the chaos, we can reinvent what it is to be modern. Where do us writers, specks on a changing canvas, fit in? We try to embrace the chaos. The chaos of a founder being ousted because someone leaked an audiotape. The chaos of a Prime Minister partying too hard during Covid and then denying it. The utter, sad hilarity of a tennis star being held up in immigration jail because he can't follow the rules. And in this chaos, we try to make sense of all the modern and postmodern things happening in our world.
What is modernism if food doesn't lose its very meaning? The pandemic killed the restaurant business. To stay afloat they have to change the very chemistry of food—cook from larders of frozen sauces, veggies, and meat, changing the very definition of what "fresh" is.
In our daily newsletters section this week, we had written much the about how stump mics and haughty cricketing associations can cause an international cricketing upset. So if you have a bit of time this weekend, I invite you to reflect on the lessons of modernity and take from it everything we need to build a new world—as it makes sense to us. Have a nice and fine Sunday!