Word: wagnerism
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...even among Christians, few people think of World War II as a religious war-Europe's greatest since the Franks beat back the Saracens at Tours. This oversight and the pagan success has a common cause. What it is can be found out by reading Darwin, Marx, Wagner, a 420-page study of dominant ideas and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries by Columbia University's Assistant Professor of History Jacques Martin Barzun...
...chose that year because in 1859 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species, Karl Marx published his Critique of Political Economy, Richard Wagner finished Tristan und Isolde. These three were the intellectual forebears of Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini. They were the intellectual forebears of nearly everybody else in the Western world too. And, says Author Barzun, "it would be hard to find in the whole history of Western civilization a corresponding trio to share the honors of a single epoch with such perfect parallelism...
...West Front should have been named the Siegfried Line; that the new regimes of force should have taken the title of social ist; or that the most powerful myth of today should be a mixture of biological, economic and cultural dogmas. The 20th Century . . . belongs to Darwin, Marx and Wagner. ... So true is this that the ordinary educated man of today sees no third choice between the 'scientific ideas' of the late 19th Century and the 'obscurantism and superstition of the Middle Ages...
Some three-fourths of Author Barzun's book is taken up with biographical sketches of Darwin, Marx, Wagner, which serve as background for the development of their ideas. Barzun describes Darwin's difficulties in getting famed British Publisher John Murray to publish On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (a title whose four great phrases seem to Barzun "a stroke of genius...
...Wagner. "With Wagner we . . . reach an uncertain twilight region - part biological, part social, and part . . . esthetic. But the pattern is the same. Art has its evolution, which follows the development of races and nations, the progress of culture ultimately requiring the union of the arts in a popular synthesis of sociological import. The Ring [of the Nibelungs] accordingly celebrates in turn the superman-to-be, the fall of the old gods through the curse of gold, and the triumph of Germanism, in one long tale of blood, lust and deceit. . . . History is a sieve that works, and the residue...