Modernism Tests Cultural Drift
Modernism, in the fine arts, [is] a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression … felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. … impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. … postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. …
In the visual arts the roots of Modernism are often traced back to … Manet, who … broke with tradition when he made no attempt to mimic the real world … moved away from inherited notions of art. … Architects also had increasingly abandoned past styles and conventions in favor of a form of architecture based on essential functional concerns. … Composers … sought new solutions within new forms and used as-yet-untried approaches to tonality. …
Modern dancers in rebelling against any formal technique … open up fresh elements of emotional expression in dance. … Postmodernism … reaction against Modernism …. architecture … use of decoration for the sake of decoration itself … In literature, irony and self-awareness … and the blurring of fiction and nonfiction (More)
I’ve theorized that an essential trend of the modern world is “cultural drift”, i.e., selection becoming much weaker relative to internal drift in driving/disciplining the cultural features that are harder to vary within cultures. (Other features are doing great.) This effect should have gradually increased as selection pressures and variance declined, and as we came to promote and celebrate culture change activists.
An interesting test of this theory is high culture. Did the most prestigious folks who specialize in tracking and expressing culture notice these changes, and if so how did they respond?
The high culture of ancient civilizations tended to be stable, integrated across forms, and focused on celebrating its highest ideals. Individual artists did not stand out much. Modern high culture tried to stay like that in the face of large social changes like urbanity and industrialization, but eventually it made a big “modernist” break into new modes.
These new modes were characterized most clearly by frequent diverse big change movements organized around heroic innovators with individually distinctive styles. Over time we have gradually seen more cultural fragmentation, ambiguity, alienation, and disillusionment, and have switched from celebrating ideals to describing common life and feelings. We have preferred change movements that are original, break with tradition, subvert expectations, connected to universals, emotionally expressive, intellectually abstract and deep, and led by the prestigious.
Here is how I interpret this. First, many noticed that cultural values, technology, and social conditions were not very modular. While in principles sufficiently abstractly-encoded values could have retained their relevance as other things changed, our values were not so encoded. This created a perceived need for new cultural values, to match the new tech and social conditions.
Second, invention and innovation more generally became very prestigious, as they were correctly credited for most modern success. So cultural elites sought to lead and join innovative cultural movements containing as many prestigious elements as possible. This continued even as such innovation more slowly changed who and what counted as prestigious. For example, art become less religious with more political and social commentary, as such things became more prestigious. And as the world became more integrated, culture become more global.
However, as these cultural change movements were not actually directed by or aligned with key selection pressures, they did not actually make for more functional or adaptive cultures. Hence the continuing trends toward more ambiguity, alienation, and disillusionment. Which is plausibly not the stance of an adaptive culture toward its main values. In fact, many declared a break from “modernism” to “post-modernism” mainly to embrace more fragmentation, playfulness, and skepticism of prior aspirations. You can’t be disillusioned if you have no hopes.
This history seems to me roughly consistent with the cultural drift story.
Added 14Sep: When modernists sought new values, what signs did they use to infer that they had problematic/broken values, which needed replacing? And what signs might mark promising replacements?
They apparently had a strong consensus to presume that whatever was passed down via tradition and dogma was wrong. And also that promising replacements would come from prestigious intellectual analysis in a growing movement of prestigious folks.
Values were problematic when poorly integrated into new tech & social conditions, and when more fragmented and less coherent across art forms, life contexts, and geographic areas. Strong conflicts between values, and deep inclinations, were also bad signs.
While I intuitively feel “cultural drift” is a fruitful concept, it is unclear to me what it is, apart from a catch-all concept for all types of changes where one cannot immediately see “ok these cultural ideas & practices are obviously adaptive for the organism”.
The concept is inspired by the concept of “genetic drift”. And when evolutionary theorists use this concept, it seems to me that they often use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. When they face some queer behavior in an animal or some queer type of antlers or whatever that does not seem to represent any evolutionary advantage, some theorists throw up their hands and say: “Well, what we observe can simply be the result of genetic drift”.
Which is true, it can be! Genetic drift is real. But it is also a lazy type of explanation. The fun part of evolutionary theory is to consider strange behaviors or strange body morphology as a puzzle (in the Kuhnian sense), and then to attempt to solve that puzzle by suggesting (and testing) hypotheses why whatever is observed, may actually be adaptive after all. (Example: Amotz Zahavi explaining gigantic antlers on some deer as the evolutionary outcome of a partly runaway signals arms race.)
Likewise, to jump too fast to the suggestion that an observed change in human culture is due to (random) cultural drift, rather than by changes in the environment that actually make the new cultural practice/behavior adaptive for the organism (in ways we yet have to find out), seems to me – well - a bit lazy perhaps….
…don’t get me wrong: there are good reasons to assume that cultural drift, as well as genetic drift, are real processes taking place in the world. But we should not jump to them as explanations of observed behavior before first considering less random-based alternative explanations.
For example, the dominance of “modernism” and later “post-modernism” in art and architecture is not due to cultural drift, but due to the Nazis losing the Second World War. Culturally, we are still living in the shadow of the outcome of that war. Nothing “random” there, once you factor in that the Nazis lost. If they had won, “Entartete Kunst” would highly likely still be a minority thing, and neo-imperial architecture a la Speer would be the order of the day.
Be that as it may. My main/theoretical point is that “cultural drift” is a bit vague as a concept. Further specification of what the concept signifies/what goes on according to it, is needed.
I don't see where you argue that modernism is *bad*. To call it "drift" suggests it is bad, and not a legitimate response to social problems.
As you say, modernism is motivated by disillusionment with prior ideals. By the timeline, these ideals that the early Modernists rebelled against were Victorian-era ideals. This would only be bad if those prior ideals were actually all good. Are you claiming that Victorian-era ideals were all good?