The New Oxford ReviewWith the recent death of British historian Paul Johnson (1928-2023), the second Age of Johnson has ended. The first Age of Johnson is an honorific for Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century man of letters. As impressive and influential as he was, his world was confined largely to Europe, whereas the world Paul Johnson leaves behind is, like his massive output, enormous and interconnected.Hyperbole? I don’t think so.
A review of Paul Johnson’s work makes the point, as he was a peerless historian and commentator on modernity and its roots in the past.
The prime example of his abilities is his magisterial Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1983), a plenary counterattack on the prevailing progressivism of the previous hundred years. Though a handful of historians have discredited the progressive views of the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War, colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vietnam, none offers such penetrating insights into the events and ideas of the secular religion of modernity as Johnson’s page-turner, which is full of wit and elegant writing. Furthermore, lest one think the book is merely a polemic, a brief for conservatism, it resounds with the views of progressives fairly put.
Modern Times opens with a description of the jarring influence of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, both of whom knocked out the props of convention by saying that nothing permanent exists; reality is in flux. As Johnson indicates, this was a misunderstanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had to do with the relationships among physical objects and was not meant as a construct for determining “values,” itself a loaded word that institutionalizes this modern form of relativism. Nonetheless, Johnson ties together a diverse group of modernists, ranging from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to French painter Henri Matisse, from Irish novelist James Joyce to Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, as well as such artistic movements as atonal music to surrealism, all of which are capsulized in Johnson’s description of the writing of French novelist Marcel Proust as “a vast experiment in disjointed time and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new preoccupations.” The profound consequence of this rootlessness was “to destroy the highly developed sense of personal responsibility” the West had enjoyed for 2,000 years.
This theme sweeps across a writing career of over 70 years, in which Johnson published more than 50 books and a seemingly endless stream of newspaper columns and lengthy journal articles. Included in this enormous output are lesser-known tomes on American history, Egyptian art, and British castles and cathedrals.
Johnson attended the Jesuit-run Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and later studied under the heterodox historian A.J.P. Taylor at Oxford University, after which he served in the British Army. He began his journalistic career in the 1950s writing for and later editing the liberal New Statesman. The prejudice he experienced against his Catholicism while there contributed to his shift to the Right in the 1970s.
In his last 25 years, Johnson reeled off a series of shorter books, some of lesser quality. Nonetheless, four of Johnson’s books published during the ten-year period beginning in the 1980s stand out as remarkable achievements, the first of which, Modern Times, was mentioned above. The second is Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1988), also a modern classic.
In Intellectuals, Johnson takes up the most important intellectual event of the past 200 years: the rumored death of God. This disruption diminished the role of the clergy, who were replaced by intellectuals, who, in contrast to priests, parsons, and rabbis, are not constrained by a corpus of revealed doctrine. In fact, much of their reputations was made by mocking religion. So Johnson puts the shoe on the other foot by replaying this clerisy’s pronouncements and measuring them against their own behavior.
Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the first figure Johnson examines in Intellectuals and he remains a fitting representative of the other destructive egomaniacs in the book. As Johnson writes, “Rousseau altered some of the basic assumptions of civilized man and shifted around the furniture of the human mind.” He invented Romanticism when he wrote, “I feel, therefore I am,” an update of René Descartes’s dictum “I think, therefore I am.” Rousseau placed man in a mythic past removed from “constructs” like capitalism and acquisitiveness and rechristened him “the noble savage,” a forerunner of the noble illegal alien, the noble criminal, and noble mass murderers like Stalin or Mao.
Rousseau believed society is a collection of constructs, which he freely ignored, siring several children with different mistresses, all of whom he abandoned while claiming an Oprah-like empathy for victims and causes. Such are the seeds of the modern confessional pose, which Johnson describes as “the heart thus exhibited misleading, outwardly frank, inwardly full of guile.”
Intellectuals continues in this vein, depicting the personal and the public lives of influential figures such as Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, and Leo Tolstoy, and more recent intellectuals such as James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Noam Chomsky, each of whom, however talented, ended up being a pernicious hypocrite.
Marx is of particular interest because one of the great questions of the 20th century centered around the nature of Marxism and its founder. Though many biographers portray Marx sympathetically, “there is nothing in the Stalinist epoch that is not distantly prefigured in Marx’s behavior,” Johnson writes. Indeed, Marx’s harsh language and constant state of anger would “periodically explode into violent rows and sometimes physical assault…. At Bonn University, the police arrested him for possessing a pistol…. The university archives show he…fought a duel.” The only proletarian he knew was his loyal housekeeper, whom he never paid and with whom he fathered a child — a child he never acknowledged. Meanwhile, Marx kept his family impoverished while mooching off Friedrich Engels and his parents so that finally Marx’s own mother sarcastically wished that “Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.”
Critics of Intellectuals damn it as merely an extended ad hominem, a conflation of writers with their works. But the individuals in this book prescribed solutions to societies’ problems that were forced on millions of people by bullets and bombs, so it’s fair to assess whether they took their own medicine. As Johnson puts it, “It is a fact, and in some ways a melancholy fact, that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination: they are deeply rooted in the personality.”
Personalities play a large role in history, as Johnson memorably shows in A History of the Jews (1987), another of his great books. Taking the side of Jerusalem against Athens, he writes that “the biblical historians achieved a degree of perception and portraiture that even the best Greek and Roman historians could never manage. There is nothing in Thucydides to equal the masterly presentation of King David, composed evidently by an eyewitness at his court.” And these miniature bios “never obscure the steady progression of the great human-divine drama and narrative.”
The Bible maintains an admirable balance between evocative descriptions of nature and the sense that there is something behind nature. This spiritual vision guided the Israelites, who saw themselves “as a pilot project for the entire human race,” Johnson writes.
Maimonides was the exemplar of Jewish scholarship and rationalism in the 12th century, but Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century extended Maimonides’s rationalism to an irrational degree by discounting the authenticity of the Bible. To Johnson, Spinoza “represents the hypertrophy of one aspect of the Jewish spirit: its tendency not just to rationalize but to intellectualize.”
The German Higher Criticism movement of the 19th century took Spinoza’s skepticism further by arguing that the biblical narratives are a medley of fiction and fact. But the latest archeological, linguistic, and historical findings point in a different direction. Johnson writes, “It is not now the men of faith; it is the skeptics who have reason to fear the course of discovery.”
Amazingly, Jews have earned 20 percent of Nobel Prizes while comprising only 0.2 percent of the world’s population. Another example of their disproportionate success relative to other groups is in the movie industry, which they almost singlehandedly established. Johnson comments, “If Einstein created the cosmology of the twentieth century and Freud its characteristic mental assumptions, it was the cinema which provided its universal popular culture.” Indeed, it remains a remarkable synchronicity that the cinema, with its capacity to duplicate our mental imaginings, developed as psychology and literature began scrutinizing our subconscious minds. Freud did it with psychology, and modern writers did it when they increasingly told their tales from a first-person perspective. “Stream of consciousness” writers such as Proust and Joyce even rendered the subconscious of their characters in a grainy, seemingly unedited flow of sensations and thoughts.
Johnson traces modern anti-Semitism to the need for a secular hate theory; that is, the exchange of the solitary, otherworldly figure of Satan for human devils, in this case, the Jews. As Johnson puts it, “Marx’s invention of the ‘bourgeoisie’ was the most comprehensive of these hate-theories,” which invariably degenerate into anti-Semitism. When this updated version of anti-Semitism appeared, Johnson avers, “Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular, pseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse,” was among the first to attack it. According to Johnson, Nietzsche wrote that “anti-Semites…endeavor to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a misuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.” After discussing its many features, Johnson concludes that anti-Semitism is an irrational belief and resembles an almost inexplicable disease.
The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (1991) is another of Johnson’s thousand-page tomes, the size and weight of which make it suitable for use in a concrete-block fence. Put another way: It’s not a bathroom book. Its focus is the post-Napoleonic period, when science and technology promised a better life for increasing numbers of people.
With Napoleon a part of history by 1814, European leaders gathered at the Congress of Vienna to reset the borders of Europe. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian diplomat, made a claim of breathtaking prescience by declaring that “Germany” should remain a confederation, unleashing Germans to devote themselves to science and scholarship! However, Prussia, having prevailed in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, took the lead in the eventual uniting of Germany. Is the reunification of Germany after the fall of communism a similar portent? Certainly, Germany’s present drift toward pacifism would prevent a rejuvenation of its revanchist DNA. But European geopolitics at the moment are fluid, to say the least.
Johnson describes the master of realpolitik, the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich, as a romantic who was “almost always in love, intolerably loose and giddy with women.” He had simultaneous affairs with the wives of various notables. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the equally astute French master of the geopolitical chessboard, was also happier with women than with men, finally marrying his lowborn mistress, contrary to his interest. Johnson describes him as “mendacious, mercenary, treacherous and unscrupulous.”
Despite the attempted return to normalcy after Napoleon’s defeat, the Romantic movement, a continuation of Rousseau’s natural religion, proceeded unabated, as highlighted by William Wordsworth’s poetry, Lord Bryon’s heroics, Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies, and J.M.W. Turner’s landscape paintings.
Colonialism continued as it always has among all peoples, including Rousseau’s noble savages, one of whom was King Bodawpaya of Burma. He massacred potential rivals and their families and destroyed every living thing they owned. This savagery continued until the Burmese Empire was defeated by the British, to the relief of the surrounding peoples who had allied themselves with the British “imperialists.”
Johnson does here what genuine historians do when they dolly back their cameras and offer, in this case, the wider view that Westerners brought improvements to the regions they colonized. This fact has been strikingly corroborated by Bruce Gilley of Portland State University. In his book The Case for Colonialism (2023), Gilley shows that whereas European colonialism caused adjustments and suffering, these were far outweighed by the improvements in health and governance bequeathed to the primitive societies in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, which practiced slavery, misogyny, incessant warfare, and human sacrifice. In other words, Western colonialism was like the bee that takes nectar from a flowering plant, but in doing so it also deposits pollen, which insures the fecundity and productivity of the plant.
Vladimir Lenin cast those living under the hegemony of Western colonialism as victims in the Marxist melodrama, a role played earlier by European factory workers. As Johnson points out, the conditions of European and American workers were improving in Lenin’s time, just as they were during Marx’s time, despite his attempt to show otherwise with his outdated “scientific” studies.
Germany began to organize Lenin’s “third-world proletariat” during World War I, but the effort fizzled. In 1920 the Soviets formed the Congress of the Peoples of the East, which held a conference in Azerbaijan. But it took post-World War II decolonization to embolden the movement.
Modern Times picks up the story with the Bandung Conference in 1955 in Indonesia, where 29 leaders of newly independent third-world countries gathered. Their stated goal was peace. However, as Johnson points out, 1,700 secret police were in attendance, a prelude to the invasions, massacres, genocides, starvation, corruption, terrorism, and dictatorial cruelty these leaders were to unleash on each other, their own people, and the world. Nonetheless, post-colonialism is now firmly entrenched as a fundamental part of the received wisdom.
The second longest chapter in the book, “Forces, Machines, Visions,” begins with a human tragedy: In England in 1812, 92 people were killed by an explosion in a coal mine that was caused by an open oil lamp. Along with the unimaginable grief the event caused, some feared it would put a brake on coal production, which was fueling the Industrial Revolution. However, a safety lamp was soon invented. This story of need begetting invention leads to Johnson’s intriguing explanation about how science, technology, art, and craftsmanship are indispensable to one another.
Although progress spread to much of the world during the Industrial Revolution, governments played virtually no role in its advance. Johnson demonstrates how free societies propelled this great leap forward, in contrast to command economies, which mostly “produce statistics,” as he mockingly writes.
A free society permits individuals, often of humble backgrounds, to become pioneers of technological advancement. For example, Michael Faraday produced the first electric motor. The obscure Charles Babbage invented machines that could tabulate tables of tides and longitudes, which were invaluable for maritime trade. Johnson credits him with “inventing computer science singlehandedly” and being “100 years ahead of his time.”
Johnson sees art and science, industry and nature, as inseparable parts in the continuum of creation. Poets such as William Blake, himself an engraver, and especially Turner, the great landscape artist, had an affinity with scientists, as they both worked with their hands, eyes, and head toward their mutual goal of discovering the secrets of nature. Johnson bemoans the separation of these areas of endeavor into “two cultures” during the past 200 years.
Freedom is a consistent theme in Johnson’s work. He believed in man’s natural capacities and glories in the fluid class system that has been a strength of the West, as opposed to the clannishness of tribal societies. Moses, David, and other biblical leaders from humble beginnings are an “adumbration” of this fluidity, a lofty word Johnson uses, perhaps overuses, to show that history is not merely history; it is one long continuum.
Johnson’s Catholicism is presented directly in his books The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage (1996) and Jesus: A Biography from a Believer (2010), which are full of fascinating personal reflections on such topics as the afterlife. In the former book, he says he prays to secular saints like Jane Austin, as well as to Church-sanctioned saints and “former saints” who have been cut from the approved list.
I once had a conversation with Johnson in which he ridiculed “Darwin fundamentalists” such as Richard Dawkins. I suggested to him that Darwin himself was a “Darwin fundamentalist” who, like Dawkins, believed that life had made itself because there is nothing outside nature that is up to the task. My comments apparently were not persuasive, as demonstrated by Johnson’s misguided book Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (2012). But Darwin was no genius. He was an artifact of 19th-century atheism, which created a demand for a fully materialistic origins story, which itself helped to destroy the sense of personal responsibility that Johnson saw as the worm in the apple of modernity.
Johnson also tried to separate “Islamic fundamentalists” from peaceful Muslims. But Muslims have been attacking the West for 1,400 years. And though Johnson took seriously their stated goal of outbreeding the West, he failed to see that though the methods have changed, Muhammad’s efforts to make all nations submit to Allah continue. Moreover, Islam is revanchist, meaning that once it has occupied a territory, its ownership exists in perpetuity, which helps to explain why the “Palestinians” will never accept “a two-state solution,” which Johnson naïvely advocated.
Johnson’s output was so great that it’s hard to believe he published so much, even considering his own statement that he produced 3,000 words per day (though some reports have it at 6,000). You would think he had help, and I did once ask him if he had any “minions.” He shot back, “I don’t have any minions. I’m a one-man battalion!”
Johnson once wrote, “I sometimes think I may be a Whig.” And he was often called a “Whig historian,” which means, I guess, that he thought things were getting better. Nonetheless, it would be more accurate to say that he found the tide of events sobering. Perhaps, in the largest sense, he believed that history has a destination, a telos. For, as he admiringly said of the Jews, “They were the first people to see that man has a destiny and history a goal.”
Johnson’s writing often resembles a highwire performance in its exactness and anticipation, an anticipation invariably fulfilled by the endless facts and incisive quotations he unearthed and the penetrating wit he commanded. Even among the remarkably talented group of contemporary historians, he remains pre-eminent, a monument of virtuosity and genius.
Terry Scambray lives and writes in Fresno, California.
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