All of this begins with Romanticism. The changes you are interested in have their origin with Goethe, Kant, the rise of subjectivity, Rousseau, and radical writers around the time of the French Revolution like Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Wordsworth was a bigger artistic revolution than the modernists. Beethoven!
No one denies that; the question is whether you are properly identifying the nature of the change. What you describe in your overall thesis was not the product of modernism alone: you are talking about romanticism which carries on into modernism, not as sharp a break in 1910 as you think.
It seems as if an objective measure of cultural change would help here. Word embeddings could do a lot. My intuition FWIW is that high culture changed a lot in the C19, but moral values remained relatively traditional.
You can always trace the cause of any historical episode a step further back, but I concur Romanticism seems like the biggest fundamental shift in culture that led to Modernism.
Don't discount the influence of Rockefeller and Carnegie as progenitors of the Modern Education System. They knew that the key to control lay with the youth and sponsored people to figure out ways to influence them.
Modernism in most ways was a calculated response to the push back against Industrialization.
My recollection is that the designers of the modern education system wanted to produce drones, not revolutionaries.
Modernism favored industrialization, but not all modern art is modernist. I think that when Henry Oliver said romanticism carried on into modernism, it would be more-accurate to say romanticism carried on into modern art. Modern art included pro-modernity modernist movements (eg Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Yale box architecture, centralized planning of entire cities, that whole "high modernism" "Seeing like state" thing) and the anti-modernity, anti-science movements (eg Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, the Situationists). IMHO the anti-modernity, pro-spiritualism part of modern art was more Romantic than the pro-modernity part.
I was going to say basically the same thing about Romanticism. (Not about Wordsworth. How was he bigger than the modernists? I really am curious. Also, I'd list Wagner before Beethoven.)
But I'd add that Romanticism was a reactionary movement against the English Enlightenment, turning back towards rationalistic, spiritualist Platonism. Modern art was explicitly Platonist. This has been erased from the histories of modern art, but the writings of the first modern artists are full of Platonist dog-whistles, and many modern artists were either Theosophist, Catholic, or Orthodox. Hegelianism, and thus Marxism, Nazism, and today's social justice movement, are all also part of the same Platonist, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment, Romantic reaction. So is extremist religious conservatism, which today is nearly all either Catholic or Calvinist. With the additional twist that all these modern Platonisms are deterministic, believing their Utopias are predestined; which Plato did not.
That blog post quotes a speech T. E. Hulme gave in 1912:
"There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing [Romanticism]. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him... This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder... Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress."
Could you expand on this? To me it seems like romanticism was largely reactionary against Enlightenment rationalism and early modernizing trends. Industrialization, urbanization, technological innovation, market capitalism, etc… seem much more directly responsible for creating the social conditions for rapid cultural change than romanticism’s emphasis on “subjectivity”.
I think the problem is that modern art, modernism, and high modernism are different things, which Robin's post doesn't differentiate. The change felt around 1910, which inspired modern art, was a revolutionary spirit of indiscriminate wanton destruction, and was a reaction against modernism. Post-modernism is aligned more with modern art than with eg modernist architecture. But all of them were Platonist movements.
The main difference was epistemology. Modern art was basically phenomenologist; modernism was rationalist. Modernism is thought of as pro-science because it was pro-industry, but was subtly anti-science because science is empirical, and rationalism is anti-empirical. Actual empirical scientists and engineers wouldn't say, "Let's spend ten years building the perfect city, and then put people in it."
Don't trust LLMs for data. (or anything important, really.) Google gemini says it was 4% in 1890 and 20% in 1920, not 7% and 32% like Kimi said. What's the real number? They'll just make the numbers up. You need an actual academic source.
It's a mistake to think there's any canonical demarcation between "modern" and "pre-modern." Take a look at https://xkcd.com/3089/ . The term "modern" has been constantly re-applied to whichever era the historian lived in. At one point the "modern" era was anything after the Middle Ages. What's now (since 1926) called the "early modern" period started in the 16th century.
And of course, complaining about youth culture is a time-honored tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks.
The real driver of cultural change is technology. Society adapts to the technology of the time. Putting more teenagers in school is a consequence of the need for educated workers, which is a consequence of industrialization and rising wealth, with the rising wealth itself being a consequence of industrialization.
They *almost* check out in this case. That source does not list any number for 1890 (looking at table 9, page 36 as labeled in the top left corner of the page, rightmost column, "percentage of 14-17 year olds in grades 9-12"). Where did Kimi get 7% from for 1890? It's plausible but not sourced. Kimi made it up.
And where could Kimi have gotten the median audience age for Debussy, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Bauhaus? There's no way to have collected that data (how are you going to track everybody who looked at a Picasso painting?), and a median is not a range. Kimi was making it up. And one of these "key modernists" is not like the others; Bauhaus was an art school not a person.
1) The youth have been at the front lines of culture changes from the beginning of history, long before modern schooling. ChatGPT mentions the “Athenian youth,” early Christianity, Renaissance, Reformation, revolts of early modern Europe, the Enlightenment.
2) just want to mention this. I’m reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It’s impossible to excerpt, but gives it the best intellectual history of the origins of modern thought that I have encountered. (I think it supports commenter Henry Oliver’s focus on the Romantic movement as the proximate origins of Modernity.) Basically, almost all of sociology should be scrapped and replaced by extensions and critiques of this work.
“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.”
You *may* well have a point here, but… survivorship bias would likely be really high on your scoreboard. As well as “Dog bites man” non-news when the young don’t get what they want but things remain the same.
Prior to Industrialization there was no 'youth culture', there were only youth, most of whom 'worked' in their allotted spaces, well on the way to filling the shoes of their parents upon their demise.
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room." - Socrates
Hansen singles out age-segregation as the cause of youth culture. I broadly agree, but youth culture is one of several interrelated factors that led to modernism. Youth culture itself is caused by several factors, including age segregation and the material abundance in early 20th century. Material abundance allowed individualism, consumerism and marketing to youth. I elaborate on this in my substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/caldwellharris/p/what-caused-the-rapid-cultural-change
Many factors combined to allow businesses to market directly to youth in the 20th century. But I'm on your side, Robin. Age segregation was the biggest cause of youth culture.
Had a bunch of thoughts about something adjacent to this a few weeks ago. The intentional isolation from prior generations is something that Lasch put some good words to in New Radicals when it comes to youth culture and informal education:
> all three LLMs say it is original.
Careful, LLMs are likely to praise you regardless of a thought's merits.
Why was school able to cause this change, rather than homogenizing the children to mostly what their teachers thought?
If you can find someone else who said this before, do point it out.
Have you never been to teen school?
My understanding is that schools in the past were stricter on behavior and would beat you if you went out of line
I'm reading World of Yesterday about 1890s school in Vienna. Kids did their schoolwork, but had their own culture which ignored teachers.
Per Judith Harris, children learn from their peers more than adult authority figures.
All of this begins with Romanticism. The changes you are interested in have their origin with Goethe, Kant, the rise of subjectivity, Rousseau, and radical writers around the time of the French Revolution like Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Wordsworth was a bigger artistic revolution than the modernists. Beethoven!
Even so, there was a big cultural change widely recognized ~1910.
No one denies that; the question is whether you are properly identifying the nature of the change. What you describe in your overall thesis was not the product of modernism alone: you are talking about romanticism which carries on into modernism, not as sharp a break in 1910 as you think.
I'm most interested in the modern fast rate of cultural change. Did Romanticism have something to do with that?
Yes it is the start of it all
culture changed faster after Romanticism, but before Modernism?
It seems as if an objective measure of cultural change would help here. Word embeddings could do a lot. My intuition FWIW is that high culture changed a lot in the C19, but moral values remained relatively traditional.
You can always trace the cause of any historical episode a step further back, but I concur Romanticism seems like the biggest fundamental shift in culture that led to Modernism.
How do you relate Romanticism to the modernist fetishization of change?
Don't discount the influence of Rockefeller and Carnegie as progenitors of the Modern Education System. They knew that the key to control lay with the youth and sponsored people to figure out ways to influence them.
Modernism in most ways was a calculated response to the push back against Industrialization.
My recollection is that the designers of the modern education system wanted to produce drones, not revolutionaries.
Modernism favored industrialization, but not all modern art is modernist. I think that when Henry Oliver said romanticism carried on into modernism, it would be more-accurate to say romanticism carried on into modern art. Modern art included pro-modernity modernist movements (eg Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Yale box architecture, centralized planning of entire cities, that whole "high modernism" "Seeing like state" thing) and the anti-modernity, anti-science movements (eg Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, the Situationists). IMHO the anti-modernity, pro-spiritualism part of modern art was more Romantic than the pro-modernity part.
I was going to say basically the same thing about Romanticism. (Not about Wordsworth. How was he bigger than the modernists? I really am curious. Also, I'd list Wagner before Beethoven.)
But I'd add that Romanticism was a reactionary movement against the English Enlightenment, turning back towards rationalistic, spiritualist Platonism. Modern art was explicitly Platonist. This has been erased from the histories of modern art, but the writings of the first modern artists are full of Platonist dog-whistles, and many modern artists were either Theosophist, Catholic, or Orthodox. Hegelianism, and thus Marxism, Nazism, and today's social justice movement, are all also part of the same Platonist, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment, Romantic reaction. So is extremist religious conservatism, which today is nearly all either Catholic or Calvinist. With the additional twist that all these modern Platonisms are deterministic, believing their Utopias are predestined; which Plato did not.
The situation was much like it is today: the young intellectuals of Europe were convinced that European civilization was corrupt and needed to be destroyed and remade from scratch. See "Modernist Manifestos & WW1: We Didn't Start the Fire—Oh, Wait, we Totally Did" (https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/729568/modernist-manifestos-ww1-we-didnt-start-the-fireoh-wait-we-totally-did).
That blog post quotes a speech T. E. Hulme gave in 1912:
"There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing [Romanticism]. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him... This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder... Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress."
Does any of that sound familiar?
Could you expand on this? To me it seems like romanticism was largely reactionary against Enlightenment rationalism and early modernizing trends. Industrialization, urbanization, technological innovation, market capitalism, etc… seem much more directly responsible for creating the social conditions for rapid cultural change than romanticism’s emphasis on “subjectivity”.
I think the problem is that modern art, modernism, and high modernism are different things, which Robin's post doesn't differentiate. The change felt around 1910, which inspired modern art, was a revolutionary spirit of indiscriminate wanton destruction, and was a reaction against modernism. Post-modernism is aligned more with modern art than with eg modernist architecture. But all of them were Platonist movements.
The main difference was epistemology. Modern art was basically phenomenologist; modernism was rationalist. Modernism is thought of as pro-science because it was pro-industry, but was subtly anti-science because science is empirical, and rationalism is anti-empirical. Actual empirical scientists and engineers wouldn't say, "Let's spend ten years building the perfect city, and then put people in it."
Don't trust LLMs for data. (or anything important, really.) Google gemini says it was 4% in 1890 and 20% in 1920, not 7% and 32% like Kimi said. What's the real number? They'll just make the numbers up. You need an actual academic source.
It's a mistake to think there's any canonical demarcation between "modern" and "pre-modern." Take a look at https://xkcd.com/3089/ . The term "modern" has been constantly re-applied to whichever era the historian lived in. At one point the "modern" era was anything after the Middle Ages. What's now (since 1926) called the "early modern" period started in the 16th century.
And of course, complaining about youth culture is a time-honored tradition that goes back to the ancient Greeks.
The real driver of cultural change is technology. Society adapts to the technology of the time. Putting more teenagers in school is a consequence of the need for educated workers, which is a consequence of industrialization and rising wealth, with the rising wealth itself being a consequence of industrialization.
The stats given check out in the source it gives: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
They *almost* check out in this case. That source does not list any number for 1890 (looking at table 9, page 36 as labeled in the top left corner of the page, rightmost column, "percentage of 14-17 year olds in grades 9-12"). Where did Kimi get 7% from for 1890? It's plausible but not sourced. Kimi made it up.
And where could Kimi have gotten the median audience age for Debussy, Picasso, Stravinsky, and Bauhaus? There's no way to have collected that data (how are you going to track everybody who looked at a Picasso painting?), and a median is not a range. Kimi was making it up. And one of these "key modernists" is not like the others; Bauhaus was an art school not a person.
Let me add two points.
1) The youth have been at the front lines of culture changes from the beginning of history, long before modern schooling. ChatGPT mentions the “Athenian youth,” early Christianity, Renaissance, Reformation, revolts of early modern Europe, the Enlightenment.
2) just want to mention this. I’m reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. It’s impossible to excerpt, but gives it the best intellectual history of the origins of modern thought that I have encountered. (I think it supports commenter Henry Oliver’s focus on the Romantic movement as the proximate origins of Modernity.) Basically, almost all of sociology should be scrapped and replaced by extensions and critiques of this work.
There exist many X such that almost all of sociology should be scrapped and replaced by X.
True. X = {} would be an improvement. But X = Charles Taylor is what I would argue for.
“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.”
You *may* well have a point here, but… survivorship bias would likely be really high on your scoreboard. As well as “Dog bites man” non-news when the young don’t get what they want but things remain the same.
Is the classification of cultures as "traditional" or "modern" a useful one?
Prior to Industrialization there was no 'youth culture', there were only youth, most of whom 'worked' in their allotted spaces, well on the way to filling the shoes of their parents upon their demise.
“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room." - Socrates
LLMs are making you stupid, and your writing, worse.
How about the Flynn effect, increasing IQ scores 30 points over the 20th century? Higher IQs certainly would cause a cultural change.
Hansen singles out age-segregation as the cause of youth culture. I broadly agree, but youth culture is one of several interrelated factors that led to modernism. Youth culture itself is caused by several factors, including age segregation and the material abundance in early 20th century. Material abundance allowed individualism, consumerism and marketing to youth. I elaborate on this in my substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/caldwellharris/p/what-caused-the-rapid-cultural-change
Wealth had been increasing for several centuries by 1910.
Modern people disprefer single-factor causality.
Many factors combined to allow businesses to market directly to youth in the 20th century. But I'm on your side, Robin. Age segregation was the biggest cause of youth culture.
Had a bunch of thoughts about something adjacent to this a few weeks ago. The intentional isolation from prior generations is something that Lasch put some good words to in New Radicals when it comes to youth culture and informal education:
https://x.com/ASeabrook36/status/1953643855779160375?t=fSRE2fUehoRsgj8vXWrzVg&s=19
Are schools an important contributor to fertility decline, via causing parents to be less satisfied with the culture that kids adopt?
Learning communities (including secondary schools) have always been melting pots for cultural change. Nothing new that I can see.