History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0493/04934.txt

Text File | 1992-10-12 | 14KB | 228 lines

$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.