Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the 20th Century by Peter Conrad Thames & Hudson 752pp, £24.95 in UK
Come to think about it, this has been one hell of a century. The survival of our species up to now has been a haphazard achievement. The most influential concept of modern times, cited at length in the index of this comprehensive cultural history, is "God, death of". Godless, the era is to be remembered especially for Einstein, Marx and Freud; Hitler, Stalin and Mickey Mouse.
Having analytically disentangled the nuclear components of ourselves and and all other matter, humankind has proved the validity of E=MCs2] with the mushroom cloud, the paramount image of apocalypse. Modern technological progress is symbolised almost equally well by astronauts on the moon, a sheep's clone, violent games in virtual reality, and the golden arches of a global empire founded on hamburgers. Exhibits in a museum of modernity should include also a motor car, a television set, a mobile phone, a hypodermic needle and a waxwork scarecrow figure behind barbed wire.
Twentieth-century homo sapiens first oedipally killed inherited authority, philosophy and aesthetic orthodoxy, then engaged in suicidal acts of aggression - the first World War and its inevitable sequel, the second World War, and all the regional wars that have continued sporadically ever since. We congratulate ourselves on having refrained so far from waging the third World War. How fortunate it is that demented dictators have not yet made genocide universal.
Science, industry and commerce have created "a new kind of society", Conrad writes, "defined by the novelist J.G. Ballard as a `technarchy' - a culture geared to hyperactivity and over-acceleration, erotically elated by the possibility of its own destruction, which Ballard calls `autogeddon'."
Conrad derides the 1969 American moon landing as "that sublimely pointless conquest of a dead, uninhabitable planet; our grandest gesture of abstraction, because it merely gave us a point of vantage from which we could gaze, over a black gulf, at our vulnerable, exhausted earth hanging in suspense."
This has been a century of revolutions. The revolutionaries call them liberation movements - political, social, sexual and artistic. Conrad describes them in richly informative and entertaining detail, illustrating every trend with well-chosen quotations and pictures. He seems to have read every book worth reading, listened to all the music worth hearing and looked at all the paintings, sculptures and buildings worth looking at - and, deliberately, some that were not.
Contemplation of Thanatos stimulates interest in Eros. Conrad is good on the subject of sex, in all its manifestations. The Pill - the pill - giveth; AIDS taketh away. Galbraith's "affluent society" has been given access to many consumer unendurables.
As more and more people travelled by air, as the communications network tightened and the world shrank to what Marshall McLuhan prophetically called a "global village", international consumerism was influenced increasingly by "futuristic America - the realm of the ersatz, an Eden carpeted with Astroturf". The periods of Dada and Surrealism began to seem like the good old days.
Under corporate capitalism, in the world-wide "mass culture of the modern megalopolis", guided by showbiz politicians' soundbites on CNN, everybody everywhere will soon be free to choose between Coke and Pepsi. Gore Vidal's elegant pessimism and Andy Warhol's icecold amorality are both now true expressions of the Zeitgeist. In the cacophony of psychobabble and computer jargon, in a world where it is becoming difficult to distinguish between ordinary, accidental humans and androids programmed, like robots, with artificial intelligence and focus-group opinions, the sayings of Gertrude Stein sound like the voice of reason.
"Looking at Japan with envy and intimidation," Conrad writes, "we see a future which might be an epilogue to human life on earth." "Fraught Tokyo yuppies have long been able to hire companions from another species for an hour or two. They pay for the privilege of accompanying a dog on its walk, or stroking a cat to reduce their stress level.
"A brisk trade emerged during 1997 in electronic ovals known as Tamagotchi . . . a digital infant, hatched when the buyer starts a battery in the pastel-toned case."
In spite of the traumas of Disneyland East and contrary to gloomy forecasts, Conrad consolingly points out that "Doomsday did not occur. Nor was the individual exterminated, as the ideologues of both left and right wished . . . Despite wars, bombs, epidemics, pollution and ominous comets, the twentieth century has managed to keep going."
Modern Times, Modern Places is a virtuoso performance of orderly concision. Peter Conrad teaches English at Christ Church, Oxford. Lucky Christ Church. He writes with the skill and patience of a humane polymath who would recognise civilisation if he came across it.