those who watch enough history channel are condemned to repeat it. not only that, i'm afraid i might miss something. after all, history is a form of temporal real estate: they aren't making any more of it, at least as far as we're concerned. history for us ends with the present, and stops altogether at our death. so it really is all about yesterday's current events.

i've been reading a cultural history of the birth of the modern age, ann douglas' "terrible honesty: mongrel manhattan in the 1920s". great stuff, i originally saw the twenties as the start of modern times, but i saw it as primarily a technological milestone, or boundary in time. i did a little research on google to see if i could find some detailed social research on the period and stumbled onto this book, and picked it up at the library.

douglas approaches it as a cultural historian, not ignoring the technological breakthroughs of the era, but putting them in perspective with art, literature, sociology and psychology, media, popular culture, immigration (internal and external), politics, economics and other aspects, even fashion (women got the vote and bared their calves in public for the first time in the 20s). after all, most of the purely technological influences that made the twenties what they were were already in place by the turn of the century. she not only sees the modern age starting at the same time as i suspected, but she pins it down spatially as well. douglas sees the modern world beginning in new york city, its where victorian/edwardian times, and the gilded age, finally ended and the modern world as we know it began. from there it propagated outward on the new electric media. the nineteenth century ended with the great war in europe, the 20th began in america with its assumption of great power status. and douglas argues her case very well.

of course, this sort of study, like literary criticism, is necessarily highly subjective, but so is the subject matter. but it does give you the advantage of watching a good mind looking at the same data as you and arriving at different, sometimes unexpected, conclusions, an unsettling but valuable experience. that alone is a worthwhile exercise. but the fact that we both arrived at many of the same places, although for different reasons, i find intriguing.

i got the same feeling when i read simon schama's "citizens" a history of the french revolution as seen from a politically and socially conservative (perhaps even reactionary!) pov,last year. i found it fascinating. i disagreed with many of his conclusions, but had to concede many of his points were very well thought out and thoroughly supported by a vast knowledge of the times. his insights are valid, and must be included and considered, even if you cannot accept them in their entirety. again, other minds faced with the same data see different patterns. we can disagree, but to dismiss them out of hand is utter arrogance. history is not chemistry or physics. it's more like cooking, except you're only an observer in the kitchen and you're not allowed to taste anything.

we are stuck in the middle of our times, supposedly a little distance gives you "perspective", and things make more sense when seen in context, from afar. many years later after consequences have had a chance to work out, events leading up to the period in question can be fully factored in. but stepping back to get the big picture also isolates you from the details, and from the immediacy of actually being there. surely that must count for something. it's the old telescope vs microscope problem. understanding the past, especially if you expect to apply its lessons to the future, is at best a risky business. you just don't develop a hypothesis and verify it by experiment until you have a useful theory. hell, even in physics that methodology has to be occasionally thrown on its head and one must start over. in history there are no experiments, only observations which never repeat themselves in quite the same way. the lessons of history are undeniable, but hard to quantify, and always open to interpretation.

so if the 20th century actually began in 1920, will the the 21st begin soon, or has it already started? does that kind of question actually mean anything? perhaps it reveals more about how our mind sees patterns than it does about any alleged historical process. history may be as much a pure artifact of our mind as i suspect sociology, anthropology and psychology all are. but that doesn't mean we should abandon trying to understand it, or them. the events of the past may have been real, but our understanding of them is hopelessly subjective. we arrogantly assume we can explain why the american civil war was fought, even though our explanations would have sounded absurd to the combatants. even today, there are many conflicting schools of thought, often highly correlated to modern ideological positions. surely, the opinions of those who lived the events should carry some weight. the tragic consequences of the first world war are obvious to everyone, except those who started it. a century from now, when will the world around our descendants have become inevitable?

in any case, i am convinced, even when i factor in the acceleration of technological change, the social world of 1920 is much more like 2010 than it was like, say, 1900. but i can't prove it. things happen in history, and some, like dates, places and events, can be precisely catalogued and placed. but motivations, reasons, causes and effects... we haven't a clue, really. and when we come to believe we fully understand the past, that is when we are condemned to repeat its mistakes. modernity began in the twenties, but so did fascism and communism.