$Unique_ID{how04934} $Pretitle{} $Title{World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony Popular Culture And High Culture} $Subtitle{} $Author{Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.} $Affiliation{} $Subject{new science human social western art leisure popular society work} $Date{1992} $Log{} Title: World Civilizations: Industrialization And Western Global Hegemony Book: Chapter 29: Industrialization of the West, 1760-1914 Author: Stearns, Peter N.; Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B. Date: 1992 Popular Culture And High Culture Key developments in popular culture differentiated Western society after 1850 from the decades of initial industrialization. Better wages and the reduction of work hours gave ordinary people new flexibility to express themselves. Changes in social and economic structure also opened new doors. Alongside the working class grew a large white-collar labor force of secretaries, clerks, and salespeople, who serviced the growing bureaucracies of big business and the state. These people, some of them women workers, adopted many middle-class values, but they also insisted on interesting consumption and leisure opportunities. The middle class itself, freed from the work burdens of early industrialization, became more open, though with reservations, to the idea that pleasure could be legitimate. Furthermore, the economy demanded change. Factories could now spew out goods in such quantity that popular consumption had to be encouraged simply to keep pace with production. Widespread advertising developed to promote a sense of need where none had before existed. Product crazes emerged. The bicycle fad of the 1880s, in which middle-class families flocked to purchase the new machine, was the first of many consumer fads in modern Western history. Bicycles were expensive; they altered previous social habits, as women neaded less cumbersome garments and young couples could outpedal any potential chaperon during courtship; and people just had to have them. With consumerism spreading, becoming indeed a basic ingredient of the economy, older hesitations about pleasure seeking declined. Mass leisure culture began to emerge. Popular newspapers, with bold headlines and compelling human-interest stories, won millions of subscribers in the industrial West. They featured shock and entertainment, more than appeals to reason or political principle. Crime, imperialist exploits, sports, and even comics became the items of the day. Popular theater soared. Comedy routines and musical reviews drew thousands of patrons to music halls; after 1900 some of these entertainment themes dominated the new medium of motion pictures. Vacation trips became increasingly common, and seaside resorts grew more and more to the level of big business. Leisure outlets of these sorts were designed for fun. They appealed to impulse and escapism. Leisure was now a commodity to be enjoyed regularly, rather than through periodic festivals as in traditional society. With work increasingly disciplined, leisure was seen by many not as a chance for restraint and self-improvement, as the middle class still sometimes tried to insist, but as release. The rise of team sports readily expressed the complexities of the late 19th century leisure revolution. Here was another Western-wide development, though one that soon had international impact. Soccer, football, and baseball all surged into new prominence, at both amateur and professional levels. These new sports reflected industrial life. Though based on traditional games, they were organized with rules and umpires. They taught the virtues of coordination and discipline, and could be viewed as useful preparation for work or military life. They were suitably commercial: Sports equipment, based on the ability to mass-produce rubber balls, and professional teams and stadia quickly became major businesses. But sports also expressed impulse and violence. They expressed irrational community loyalties and even, as Olympic Games were reintroduced in 1892, nationalist passions. Overall, new leisure interests suggested a complex set of attitudes on the part of ordinary people in Western society. They demonstrated growing secularism. Religion still counted for something among some groups, but religious practice had declined markedly as people looked increasingly for worldly entertainments and gave allegiance to secular faiths such as nationalism or socialism or simply the growing prestige of science. Many people would have agreed that progress was possible on this earth, through rational planning and individual self-control. Yet mass leisure also suggested a more impulsive side to popular outlook, one bent on display of passion or at least, as spectators, vicarious participation in emotional release. Science And Art A similar dualism, though a more formal one, developed in intellectual life in the West, with roots going back to the early 19th century. On the one hand, science continued to gain ground; on the other hand, a bewildering array of intellectual movements attempted to provide alternate views of reality and a less structured approach to human understanding. There were some common basic themes. The size of the intellectual and artistic community in the West expanded steadily, with rising prosperity and advancing educational levels. A growing audience existed for various intellectual and artistic products, making it more possible than ever before to hope to earn a living through painting or writing or scientific research. The bulk of the new activity was resolutely secular. Though new churches were built as cities grew, and missionary activity reached new heights outside the Western world, the churches no longer served as centers for the most creative intellectual life. A major portion of Western cultural activity built on the traditions of rationalism that had been firmed up by the Enlightenment. Major political theories, such as liberalism, assumed that people were basically rational and improvable, and that human society could be grasped through investigation of fundamental social laws. Thus liberals urged the importance of education and freedom of inquiry, while also urging that economic activity, for example, could be grasped through basic operations of supply and demand. Karl Marx, though arguing that large historical forces dominated individual action, also urged rational investigation, claiming that his revolutionary society would place rational human nature and benevolence in full command at last. Continuing advances in science kept alive the rationalist tradition. Universities and other research establishments increasingly applied science to practical affairs, linking science and technology in the popular mind under a general aura of progress. Improvements in medical pathology and the germ theory linked science and medicine, though no breakthrough therapies as yet resulted. Science was applied to agriculture, with Germany and then the United States in the lead, through studies of seed yields and chemical fertilizers. The great advance in theoretical science came in biology, with the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin (whose major work was published in 1859). On the basis of careful observation, Darwin argued that all living species had evolved into their present form through the ability to adapt in a struggle for survival. Biological development could be scientifically understood as a process taking place over time, with some animal and plant species disappearing and others evolving from earlier forms. Darwin's ideas clashed with traditional beliefs that God had fashioned humankind as part of initial creation, and the resultant debate further weakened the intellectual hold of religion. Darwin's advance also created a more complex picture of nature than Newton's simple physical laws had suggested. Nature now worked through random struggle, and people were seen as animals with large brains, not as supremely rational. The theory of evolution confirmed the link between science and advancement of knowledge, and Darwin's theory was in fact compatible with a continued belief in progress. Developments in physics continued as well, with work on electromagnetic behavior and then, around 1900, increasing knowledge of the behavior of the atom and its major components. New theories arose, based on complex mathematics, to explain the behavior of planetary motion and the movement of electrical particles, where Newtonian laws seemed too simple. After 1900 Albert Einstein's theory of relativity formalized this new work by adding time as a factor in physical measurement. Again, science seemed to be steadily advancing in its grasp of the physical universe, though it was also important to note that its complexity now surpassed the grasp even of educated laypeople. The social sciences also continued to advance, on the basis of observation, experiment, and rationalist theorizing. Great efforts went into compilations of statistical data concerning populations, economic patterns, and health conditions. Sheer empirical knowledge about human affairs had never been more extensive. At the level of theory, leading economists tried to explain business cycles and the causes of poverty, while social psychologists studied the behavior of crowds. Toward the end of the 19th century the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud began to develop his theories of the workings of the human unconscious, arguing that much behavior is determined by impulses but that emotional problems can be relieved if they are brought into the light of rational discussion. Social scientists were thus complicating the traditional Enlightenment view of human nature by studying the animal impulses and unconscious strivings of human beings. Still, they continued to rely on standard scientific methods in their work, believing that human behavior can be described in rational categories; most social scientists asserted that ultimately human reason would prevail. Social scientists claimed that personal and social problems alike could be reduced through knowledge and logical planning, and indeed the role of social science experts in advising governments and even individual families increased steadily. Yet there was a second approach in the Western culture that developed in the 19th century. This approach emphasized artistic values and often glorified the irrational. To be sure, many novelists, such as Charles Dickens in England, bent their efforts toward realistic portrayals of human problems, believing that they could inform as well as improve the world around them. Many painters built on the discoveries of science, using knowledge of optics and color. Nevertheless, the central artistic vision, beginning with romanticism in the first half of the century, held that emotion and impression, not reason and generalization, were the keys to the mysteries of human experience and nature. Artists sought to portray intense passions, even madness, not calm reflection. Romantic novelists wanted to move readers to tears, not philosophical debate; painters sought empathy with the beauties of nature or the storm-tossed tragedy of shipwreck, not structured portrayal. Romantics and their successors after 1850 also deliberately endeavored to violate traditional Western artistic standards. Poetry did not have to rhyme; drama did not necessarily need plot; painting could be evocative, not literal (for literal portrayals, painters could now argue, use a camera). Each generation of artists proved more defiant than the last. By 1900 painters and sculptors were becoming increasingly abstract, while musical composers worked with atonal scales that defied long-established conventions. Some artists talked of an art for art's sake - arguing essentially that art had its own purposes, regardless of the larger society around it. The development of modern artistic styles brought constant innovation into literature and art. This linked art to other facets of Western society where change and novelty were the name of the game, but it distressed many people who hoped art would confirm traditional values. After 1900 the new styles began to have an international influence, but they also pulled into the Western experience stylistic lessons from African and East Asian art, newly accessible as a result of growing cultural links. Within the West itself, the split between rationalists and nonrationalists assured continued debate about the nature of truth. The debate had institutional implications: Most scientists and social scientists by 1900 worked in or around growing research universities, whereas artists often had no set institutional apparatus. Scientists were viewed as bastions of progress, as an essential part of industrial society, whereas artists might be seen as dangerous experimenters or immoral vagabonds. Despite the imbalance, the modern art impulse continued to expand, which meant that many creative Westerners required a vision different from that of the established order and that elements of a wider public also wanted an outlet that would express some of the confusion of modern life and the human personality. At neither the formal nor the popular levels, then, did Western culture produce a clear synthesis in the 19th century. New discipline and rationalism warred with impulse, even evocations of violence. The earlier certainties of Christianity or even the Enlightenment gave way to greater debate. The debate could be vigorous, and it seemed to reflect different facets of the industrial experience in the West; but some observers worried that it also expressed tensions that could become dangerous, between different kinds of observers or between different facets of the same modern mind. Perhaps the Western world was not put together quite so neatly as the adjustments and consolidations after 1850 might suggest.