"The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization"
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Lucas is doing what the best mid-century critics did: smuggling a moral indictment into a sentence that looks like cultural commentary. His provocation is not that art caused catastrophe, but that the same restless impulse - the modern appetite for novelty, rupture, and sensation - can metastasize from aesthetics into politics. The line lands because it treats the World Wars not as inexplicable eruptions or purely strategic failures, but as symptoms of a mood: boredom with the ordinary disciplines that keep societies habitable.
The phrase "men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn" carries a quietly scathing anthropology. Lucas isn’t describing a few villains; he’s describing a species-level weakness. By the time he reaches "tired of common sense and civilization", the word "tired" has curdled from casual fatigue into moral negligence. Civilisation, in this framing, is not a proud inheritance but a daily practice that can be abandoned for the thrill of extremity.
Context matters: Lucas wrote in a Britain and Europe still processing two wars, watching avant-garde experimentation become both scapegoat and shorthand for a broader crisis of values. His swipe at "modern literature and art" echoes a familiar conservative suspicion of modernism, but his deeper target is the cultural psychology that makes radicalism feel like relief. The subtext is a warning about decadence’s political twin: when a culture gets bored with restraint, it starts mistaking destruction for renewal.
The phrase "men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn" carries a quietly scathing anthropology. Lucas isn’t describing a few villains; he’s describing a species-level weakness. By the time he reaches "tired of common sense and civilization", the word "tired" has curdled from casual fatigue into moral negligence. Civilisation, in this framing, is not a proud inheritance but a daily practice that can be abandoned for the thrill of extremity.
Context matters: Lucas wrote in a Britain and Europe still processing two wars, watching avant-garde experimentation become both scapegoat and shorthand for a broader crisis of values. His swipe at "modern literature and art" echoes a familiar conservative suspicion of modernism, but his deeper target is the cultural psychology that makes radicalism feel like relief. The subtext is a warning about decadence’s political twin: when a culture gets bored with restraint, it starts mistaking destruction for renewal.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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