World History

Unit 5: Industrialism and Nationalism

Chapter 20: Life in the Industrial Age

43. Thu, Feb 13, 2014

It's worth noting that while some of the scientific, technical, and medical achievements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had genuinely global influence, the artistic and cultural elements that your textbook discusses are more or less exclusively confined to Western industrialized nations. This is probably fair, given that it's entitled “Life in the Industrial Age” — but just as it wasn't the Bronze Age everywhere in the world at once, it wasn't the Industrial Age everywhere either. Great regions of the globe were almost entirely unaffected by these impulses till well after 1928. A few are barely affected even today, though they are vanishingly few.

Critical in the whole survey of society from about 1800 to the present is the rise of the notion of universal education, as well as a basically democratic impulse. Certainly it seems to be the case that democracy is barely (if at all) workable without an educated electorate. The machinery of this process obviously includes schools proper, both run by the state and by private groups, but also those ancillary institutions that have to do with education in a supporting role: museums, parks, facilities for concerts, plays, opera, ballet, and other displays of the performing arts.

This in turn represents a subtly transformed attitude toward art — especially performance art. As recently as Elizabethan England, plays were considered basically common entertainment: the state as such supported them occasionally out of necessity, but generally governments were as concerned to regulate them and control them as to promote them. They were not considered “high culture” until much later — well into the nineteenth century. What does this do to or for their appreciation? Does it enhance them? Limit them? This enters into our contemporary debates about such things as the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, so it is a lively issue.

• Education: What are some of the implications of a social and cultural model that presupposes universal education for all or nearly all members of the society? While of course everyone alive acquires some practical kind of education, whether formal or not, it is only in relatively recent times that the idea of widespread formal education has become normative. What does this do for a society? Does it have any potential drawbacks?
• The Arts: The progression from classicism that flourished during the so-called “Age of Reason” in Europe, to a reactive romanticism and thence to modernism occurred in literature, music, and the visual arts — but not all at the same time. The literary Romantic can probably be said to have started as early as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther on the continent; the peak of the English manifestation of the movement was about 1800-1825 (following the second edition of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's collaborative effort Literary Ballads in 1800), while the musical Romantic period is distinctly later — running from late Beethoven and Schubert to approximately Wagner; Mahler becomes postromantic in the late nineteenth century. Is there an identifiable essential thing behind these that is the Romantic in an ideal sense?
• Our expectations of life and leisure: what (put rather too bluntly) does the average person see as the point of life? Is it to work? Is it to experience? Is it to gather all the toys before dying? Or is it something else? This is not entirely about your own ideas here — though they are welcome as well — but about prevailing sentiments and ideas in the culture as a whole.

Contents of this page © Copyright 2011, 2012 by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.