New by Winifred Gallagher

Author:Winifred Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

INSPIRED BY THE eighteenth century’s wave of neophilia, the Europeans who were adventurous enough to migrate to America and their descendants set about developing a new political way of life, and defended it with a revolution. Notwithstanding their radical ideas, however, life in their agrarian society moved slowly outside of its few big cities, and occasions for excitement were few and far between.

Then, in the mid nineteenth century, the technological and social developments of the accelerating Industrial Revolution began to inject hefty doses of novelty and change into American life. Public entertainment is an interesting example. Previously, people who lived on farms and in small towns and villages had had little to enliven their monotonous routines beyond the occasional big-tent revival meeting. With the advent of the railroad, however, even remote areas without decent roads could enjoy P. T. Barnum’s “traveling circus.” Its mind-boggling novelties ranged from General Tom Thumb to Jumbo the elephant, from the Fee-gee mermaid to the soprano Jenny Lind, aka the “Swedish Nightingale.” Easier, faster travel also meant that the high-minded upper middle class could indulge its more refined tastes by attending the Chautauqua circuit’s seasonal assemblies and group discussions of the latest intellectual and political ideas.

By the early twentieth century, the amount of novelty in American life had increased almost unimaginably. Moreover, Thomas Edison’s electric light, Henry Ford’s inexpensive Model T car (known as the “flivver”), and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone not only were revolutionary inventions in themselves but also greatly expanded the potential for all kinds of new experiences. From the 1920s onward, a surge of mass production enabled by plastics and other innovative technologies suddenly yielded many, many more new things to buy (and lots of today’s collectibles). The growth of Hollywood and radio broadcasting, followed by television in the forties, elicited a chorus of neophobic protests about the impossibility of keeping up that has grown louder with each passing decade.

No less than those of previous generations, our expressions of neophilia are profoundly influenced by our cultural milieu, perhaps much more than we like to imagine. One obvious example is our twenty-first-century hunger for new stuff, which would astonish our great-grandparents, if not our grandparents. This voracious appetite is fed by ferocious global economic competition, now waged by China, India, Brazil, and other rapidly developing countries as well as Western nations, that forces companies to, as the Silicon Valley mantra puts it, “innovate or die.” As a result, we confront a seemingly unlimited selection of new goods that become old almost as soon as they’re out of the box, and there’s no end in sight to this proliferation. By the lights of the old Protestant ethic, consumer meant something like “spendthrift” or “squanderer.” The avid customers queuing up for Black Friday sales and the latest Apple products, however, resemble religious pilgrims who prove their devotion by sleeping in front of the shrine on the night before they’re permitted to purchase the Holy Grail.

One bright side of our pursuit of the latest, coolest stuff

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