The Roaring Twenties were known in France as les Années Folles: the crazy years. Following the horrors of World War I, and revolutions and riots throughout the old world and the new, the 1920s were an almost frantic indulgence.
In the United States, relative prosperity, jazz culture, and more overt sexuality defied the false austerity of prohibition. A resurgence of interest in the occult, which started in the late 19th century, peaked in places like California in the twenties and thirties. Cults and esoteric religions may have been reaction to rapid cultural and technological change. Radio was just taking off, and electricity and the telephone were as new to people in 1920 as personal computing and the internet are to us.
The 2020s are not the 1920s, and yet it’s hard to resist drawing comparisons. The Dada movement, an artistic rebellion in part against European Colonialism blamed for World War I, is grandparent to recent trends in the West. A renaming and statue-toppling blitz to protest historic Colonialism has swept through the Anglosphere. The movement to redefine—or undefine—gender and sexuality has promoted an irrational, absurdist idea of what it means to be human. And just as Dada and its wellspring anti-art movement of the 1910s sought to reject classic concepts of aesthetic and beauty, today’s social Dadaism makes a provocative display of anti-beauty.
Dada was a rejection of the bourgeois, and Surrealism was closely associated with communism and anarchism. It is no surprise then that Antifa shows up to fight against feminists who protest trans incursion into female spaces, and to guard “family friendly” drag events. Everything must be undone, even if it harms previously valued groups. The imperative to unmake is greater than the imperative to protect. Even children are in the crosshairs.
For this reason, the 2020s are more dangerous than the 1920s. Dadaism and its associated political movements produced intellectuals like Sartre, Derrida, and Foucault, who in the 1970s petitioned the French parliament to decriminalize sex with children under the age of fifteen. Today there is a movement to blur those same boundaries, with the added insult of blurring gender lines too. Interference with personal development, sexual maturation and functioning by parents, educators and the for-profit medical industry is more ghastly than anything experimental medicine inflicted on adults a hundred years ago. The people who will be our future, who will be expected to administer and build and invent and lead, are being physically and emotionally stunted by an assault of false virtues antithetical to human thriving.
Today’s anti-everything crusade is unlikely to produce a Miro, Picasso or Dali. It’s unlikely to give birth to an intellectual movement even worthy of criticism. There is a cheapness about our modern rebellion. It feels hollow somehow. Inauthentic and too lazy to produce anything of cultural significance. No genius can be found in our anti-beauty. There is only disorder and unhealth and irrationality.
Revelers in les Années Folles could not see the turmoil that lay ahead. With the perspective of time, we view the Roaring Twenties as a harbinger of darker days. In our own time, we sense being in the midst of a historically significant period. There is a feeling that we’re on the precipice of something. We catch whiffs of past atrocities—authoritarianism, government-induced scarcity, the Chinese cultural revolution—but it’s impossible to see clearly when you are living it.