20th Century Modernization and the Individual

Fred Allebach

2/24/08

In the 1920’s the US automobile industry tripled in size and drove the expansion of related industries such as steel, oil, rubber as well as serving to create a tourism industry and the phenomena of the suburbs. These trends also went hand in hand with the increasing development of automobile-related transportation infrastructure. (This connects with me personally in terms of suburbs, strip development and city vitality as my father was the director of the second largest urban renewal project in the US, in White Plains, NY.)

At the same time, in the 1920s, there was a shift in social emphasis towards individual fulfillment and away from civic-oriented, small town cultural contexts. This trend paralleled a shift in population from country to city. Cities contained ethnic diversity, higher education, art, music, all factors that led to a secular plurality of ideas and cultures. What freedom a small town kid could find, unleashed from the eyes of the community, far from kin, pastors, away from pretty much any traditional social control! And this was all only possible for some segment of the US population, as many did not share in the wealth nor this opportunity. And so we get a rural/ urban cultural divide in the US, the red state, blue state thing.

What all came first in these trends is hard to say; there was a mass consumer culture, by design, with industrial efficiency and technological advancement, business public relations propaganda, advertising hype, bank credit, debt spending, all the things we take for granted today. There was the transportation infrastructure, the cars, and the culture opening up just as physical movement/ mobility and economic opportunity and up. People saw the opening and went for it. Pandora’s Box got opened and there is no putting it back. It seems to me only natural to desire to shed the bonds of restrictive traditional culture, but what is self evident to me is certainly not to traditional fundamentalists. Traditional culture gives you the meaning of the world on a silver platter; you don’t have to think, just follow the forms. Modern culture offers major freedom of thought and movement but offers no security and belonging, no anchoring in unquestioned meaning.

I am fascinated by the idea of the trajectory of the individual over the group. The structural aspects of mobility and freedom opened up and people followed along. Work itself became a means not for 19^th century thrifty self-denial but for self-indulgent fulfillment through consuming and entertainment. And so now we have computers, the whole public library and the history of mankind at our fingertips, DVDs, cruise vacations, easy mortgages (formerly), divorce as a matter of fact, cell phones, beer, trucks, sport cars, trophy wives and shoot, the whole thing has gone hog wild! It seems a logical, natural extension of historical American themes.

I used to think that perhaps this individual trajectory was a western civilization thing, somehow linked to the Greeks, Romans, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Reason, Age of Discovery, the founding principles of our Constitution, that it was a progression of meaning, an evolution of individual from group, but now I wonder if what it really boils down to is that economic success has allowed the leisure time for individuals to indulge themselves, and so they do; that it is a matter of affluence and not cultural history, a matter of economy and not meaning. It is fun to see it one way, then try another, like trying on different clothes.

I read in The Age of Abundance, How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture by Brink Lindsey that the 1960s counterculture was the direct result of post WW2, 1950s affluence. The WW2 generation came through the Depression, were thrifty, saved, took advantage of the post war economic boom and expected that the kids would embody those same values and impulses. But many of the Baby Boom generation did not have the same history; they grew up middle class, raised by Spock self-indulgent principles, free to explore, to be what they wanted, in a world more secular and farther removed from tradition than ever before. For the counter-culture baby boomers, there was no incentive to buy the cow when it was already in the barn.

Lindsay says of the 1970s:  “ On the left gathered those who were most alive to the new possibilities created by mass affluence but who, at the same time, were hostile to the social institutions that responsible for creating those possibilities. On the right, meanwhile, rallied those who staunchly supported the institutions that created prosperity but who shrank from the social dynamism they were unleashing.” This is pretty similar to how the 1920s fundamentalists reacted to increasing secularism, women’s independence,  and cultural pluralism etcetera.

This all then seems to equate an individual, modern, secular stance to the Left and fundamental tradition to the Right. As if everything has to get down to Left or Right, Good or Bad, in some default paired opposites type analysis. But I can see an underlying battle between the inertia of modernization and what it brings and the yearning for past tradition and stability. Robert Pirsig in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals breaks this down into static and dynamic qualities of culture and cultural change, and that both are inherent parts of our experience. I guess there will always be static fundamentalists and dynamic agents of change.