neoliberal policies from the 1970s onwards, which saw a return to medieval levels of social inequality. Medieval history shows what happens when new technologies are introduced into very unequal societies, as with the water mill and then the gun. The precedents are not encouraging.
Computers were one of a constellation of transforming developments that broke through into the real world during the politically contested and chaotic years during and just after the Second World War, and not just in the ‘hard sciences’.
Old shibboleths about the nature and potential of human beings, how they should be treated, and about how society should be ordered, were being demolished and discredited by new currents of work in the social sciences (anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, education) and by people’s own direct experiences in the War. Understandings of how the planet itself worked were being elaborated at a breakneck rate with the brand-new sciences of cybernetics and general systems theory. Many people thought that these understandings, which had developed in lockstep with the development of computing machinery and signal processing, were much more significant for humanity’s future than the machinery itself. The world was being recognized as a whole system, and so was knowledge.
All economic and political trends seemed to be pointing toward greater and greater equality. The brief failure of ‘business as usual’ that allowed the likes of Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers to work together was one of millions of instances of a much bigger egalitarian and humanistic turn that was struggling to shape the course of events globally.
Old and entrenched doctrines of innate inequality and racial superiority, so widely held and even respectable before the war, were abruptly silenced by the defeat of the Fascist powers, and the exposure of the unambiguous horror of the Nazi ‘final solution’ to its ‘Jewish problem’. Fascism ceased to be respectable, and there was a general stampede among those who had supported it during its heyday, to higher moral ground. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ gained legal force for the first time, and political leaders were jailed, put on trial and sentenced for committing them.
The post-War political climate was shaped to a surprising degree by people who had wielded pathetically little military muscle during the conflict: resisters and rescuers now found themselves almost the sole uncompromised bearers of the West’s claims to moral superiority. Leftwingers and liberals, who had been pre-eminent in the resistance movements, briefly found themselves at or at least in sight of the top table. One of these was the late Stéphane Hessel, author of the 2011 bestseller Time for Outrage!1 (published in French as Indignez-vous!), which sold millions of copies worldwide, especially among supporters of the various mass protest movements that broke out after the financial crash of 2007/8.2 Hessel was a German-born, Jewish member of the French resistance who survived capture and torture, escaped, and ended the war as part of the team responsible for drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
While France was still under Nazi occupation, its National Resistance Council (the CNR) drafted a Charter demanding, for example,
a complete Social Security scheme aimed at guaranteeing means of subsistence for all citizens, in every case where they are unable to procure these through labor, the management of which will belong to representatives of the interested parties and the state [and] a pension that will allow old workers to end their days with dignity.
The Resistance was rudely sidelined by the incoming De Gaulle government, but even so, the extent to which its proposals were implemented is striking (especially when compared with social provisions at the beginning of the 21st century).
The Scottish writer Neal Ascherson has observed that, independently of each other, in ‘the years between, say, 1943 and 1947… resistance movements from Poland to France and southern Europe developed similar programs for revolutionary democratic renewal after the war’.3 Britain’s welfare state was part of the phenomenon, perhaps reflecting a feeling many British people had of having in a sense lived ‘under occupation’ by Winston Churchill – whom they comprehensively ejected from office when elections were resumed in 1945.
All of the victorious powers introduced some kind of basic welfare provision for their citizens: pensions, unemployment benefits, healthcare and even that essential preserve of the rentier class, housing.
Major firms and industries were nationalized with popular approval. On France’s liberation, the owner of the Renault automobile company, Louis Renault, was arrested as a collaborator and his company was confiscated. The following year the rest of the automobile industry, the whole banking sector and the coalmining industry were nationalized.
The Right was even more deeply and durably discredited in Germany, where strong social-justice measures were introduced after 1945. Trade unions were given a stronger role, including seats in German boardrooms. The French economist Thomas Piketty has argued that this has helped maintain the country’s prosperity by restraining the scope for runaway managerial incomes.
The social groundwork was set for a progressive shift towards greater and greater equality – in line with the uncontested general acceptance that all human beings were, in fact, equal.
The world was suddenly full of people who had discovered capacities for heroic and creative achievement, and interests and experiences they never would have dreamed possible a few years earlier. Women in their tens of thousands had escaped from domestic duties, done ‘men’s jobs’, including some of the most dangerous and exciting ones. There were thousands of people like Tommy Flowers who had lived and worked at the outer edge of technological and human possibility, and resented being dragged back into their allotted social niches and told to stay there.
The conditions needed for people to realize their potential became, however, a legitimate subject of research. Education was expanded massively in all the main economies, and there was a proliferation of new, more ‘liberal’ educational regimes. For the first time in centuries, it was becoming official policy that all human beings should be treated humanely, and this was backed by new international laws. There was also a widespread sense that the future would be one of greater equality within and between nations, rather than less.
It is true that much of the new work in psychology served a social-control agenda – such as harnessing propaganda and finding better ways of getting troops to follow orders – but it also included radical departures in, for example, understanding child development and mental illness.
Both during and after the War governments and aid agencies were overwhelmed with traumatized people and orphans. In Britain, Wilfred Bion pioneered what became the group therapy movement for the treatment of mental distress, when the War Office found itself in charge of thousands of men who had been emotionally shattered by the ordeal of Dunkirk.4 While working with evacuee and refugee children, John Bowlby developed his theory of attachment and the damage caused by separation, which profoundly altered views about parenting and the treatment of children in the post-War years. Bowlby’s colleague Donald Winnicott developed a theory of the vital importance of play.5 These theories have subsequently done nothing but grow in their explanatory and therapeutic power.
Genocide, and the Nazi defeat, triggered a wave of research into the human capacity for cruelty. Why do apparently decent people, in some circumstances, become murderers and torturers, while others feel compelled to become rescuers and resisters, whatever the risks?
Theodor Adorno’s colleagues in New York discovered plenty of potential for complicity in brutal regimes among ordinary Americans.6 Through scores of interviews, they identified a strong link between strict, punitive parenting, and attitudes predisposing people to support fascistic regimes and authoritarianism in general. Stanley Milgram7 and others began to expose the unwelcome truths about the ease with which people can be persuaded to inflict lethal harm on others.8
