Is Modernism Due To Youth Culture?

"On or about December 1910, human nature changed." Virginia Woolf.

I’ve been puzzling over the transition from traditional to modern culture. It happened after tech started changing a lot, when long distance trade, travel, and talk greatly increased. But with a big delay; those things had changed lots a few centuries before culture started changing fast ~1900-1920. And strangely, the new modernists were then most sure that the culture of their grandparents was not what they wanted, even though they felt quite unsure of in which new directions culture should go.

Clothing fashion had been changing for several centuries before, and there had also been slowly changing fashion in governance and morals. But suddenly art, sculpture, architecture, music fashion changed much more radically, and soon after norms and values also started changing faster.

At the key transition time, it seems that the culture of elite youth was more modern than the culture of older adults. And even today, most people most like the food, music, etc. popular when they were ~20yo, suggesting youth have a disproportionate role in cultural change. And elites have always had more influence over most everything.

All of these lead me to wonder if a key was the rise of school, which concentrated elite youths together so that they could form their own internal elite youth culture. Youth are eager to distinguish their cohort’s culture from that of prior cohorts, which helps explain why the moderns were most sure they didn’t want past culture. The delay would be due to a need for school to become widespread enough among elites, with enough internal long distant contact, and perhaps also for prior traditional adult culture to lose its confidence in the face of a big accumulation of tech change.

I asked three LLMs to look for evidence to check this theory. Kimi noted that % of US kids in secondary school was 7% in 1890, 11% in 1900, 32% in 1920, 51% in 1930, and similar stats applied in Europe. Kimi also noted that the median age of the audience for key modernists was 17-22, 19-25,18-24,18-25 for Debussy (1894), Picasso (1907), Stravinsky (1913), Bauhaus (1919) respectively. Claude notes that modernism and teen school appeared not only at the same time, but also in the same places: urban areas before rural ones. ChatGPT notes that in 1890-1918 in US/UK/Germany, many special institutions for teens were formed: juvenile courts, legal reforms, youth orgs, and student media.

Overall this thesis seems promising, and all three LLMs say it is original.

Added 1Sep: I asked ChatGPT to collect a sample of 100 conflicts (that happened at least 50yr ago) between generations over cultural changes, & say in how many the young cohort won over the old in the long run. Score: Young 96, Old 1, Mixed 3.

Added 14Jan: Asked other LLMs. Gemini says young won 78, old 12, mixed 10, Claude says young won 73, old 14, mixed 13, and Grok says young won 85, old 5, mixed 10. So less lopsided, but the young still usually win.