Millennium Iii, Century Xxi by Peter N Stearns

Author:Peter N Stearns [Stearns, Peter N]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367316860
Google: TesjyQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-08-28T05:06:01+00:00

Causes of the Contradictory Takes on the Century’s Turn

What was going on? How could the same trans-Atlantic society generate both such ringing, even naive optimism about the 19th century and the prospects of still greater progress to come and this odd mood of lassitude, anxiety, and artistic nose-thumbing? Without venturing a detailed analysis, we need to tackle the conundrum before asking how the elements of our own upcoming greeting to a century’s end compare with those of its closest analogue.

Both positions—the progressive and the defiant/pessimistic—were solidly anchored. Optimistic renderings combined a long-standing belief in progress, derived initially from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, with the kind of chamber of commerce reactions to key 19th-century trends that had peppered the Western world since the 1830s. The conviction that society could improve through education, political reform, and technical change had crescendoed since its 18th-century formulation. One interpretation of Darwinism (although Darwinian metaphors were not commonly used in turn-of-the-century rhetoric save in the frequent references to the races of man) had also supported the progressive concept. Self-interested, largely middle-class judgments about industrial and humanitarian gains—the stuff of graduation speeches and inaugural talks at commercial expositions for many decades—translated this optimism into specific praise for what were, indeed, some of the key trends of the 19th century. The extension of education, improvements in medicine and nursing, and various political changes, including the spread of constitutions, parliaments, and the vote, along with the drumbeat of industrial and scientific advance, readily lent themselves to a year-to-year instantiation of the progressive view. Even many socialists, although critical of specific aspects of their society, derived their theoretical framework from a fundamentally Enlightenment optimism that could easily identify 19th-century landmarks (industrialization, popular education, democracy) with progress once they were recast in an egalitarian mold.

The deliberate defiance of this optimistic-boosterish approach through world-weary anxiety or artistic innovation had a more complex, and somewhat more recent, pedigree, but it, too, was no superficial interloper. A number of intellectuals and artists had been worrying about the inadequacy of Enlightenment culture since the later 18th century. They variously sought alternatives that would provide greater spirituality, greater recognition of emotional complexity, or simply enhanced attention to the artistic side of human nature. Romanticism was the first expression of this major countercurrent; it promoted the importance of stylistic innovation (rather than adherence to traditional or rationalistic artistic rules), expressed the need to defy straight-laced bourgeois codes of respectability, and emphasized the role of sorrow and despair in human life. By the middle of the 19th century, even as formal Romanticism waned, groups of artists were accelerating their attacks on bourgeois culture, proclaiming the validity of art for art’s sake, stepping up stylistic innovations (as in unrhymed or unmetered poetry), and publicly experimenting with alternative lifestyles. Middle-class critics promptly responded with widely publicized criticism of what they considered immoral artistic bohemianism, even as they maintained their interest in purchasing conventional portraits and literary classics instead of the output of the ragtag contemporary crop of artists.

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