From close up, at any rate, it looks as though specialization
and professionalization of art and thought had run riot since
1914. Artists who are so original that no one understands them
are easy to discover in any art colony. Scholars whose interests
are so specialized that only a few others in the entire world
can understand what the argument is about also exist on many university
campuses. On the other hand, the gap that used to exist between
local folk cultures and the concerns of the upper classes was
probably no greater than the gap between experts and the masses
in our own day. What has happened is that the popular level of
culture has achieved visibility through the mass media of communication,
whereas before, popular culture passed from generation to generation
invisibly, by word of mouth and by example.
Taking the world as a whole, the dominating fact about popular
culture is the break it represents with folk traditions of every
kind. Wherever economic conditions allowed, peasants and ex-peasants
left traditional local styles of living behind them as fast as
they could. New city-made clothes and gadgets of all kinds tend
to be the first things that matter. People emerging from traditional
peasants ways of life may find their most fascinating introduction
to civilization in studying an illustrated mail order catalogue
or the advertisements in a glossy magazine. This allows them to
learn about what can be wished for. The next thing is actually
to possess a bicycle, then household appliances; and the climax
is a car. But to have a car in such societies is still reserved
for a tiny few who have made it all the way to the top.
Somewhere about midway in this curve of rising expectations,
people start to pay serious attention to the mass media. To begin
with, it was nearly always government initiative that brought
the radio and roads to the countryside and to urban slums. During
World War II, for example, the United States Information Service
distributed thousands upon thousands of cheap radio speakers to
villages in many different parts of the world. These radios were
tuned to a central radio station and were usually planted in a
public place near the center of the community. In many regions
of the world where official propaganda and news had never penetrated
on a regular basis, it now became possible to speak daily to the
villagers. An entirely new kind of political life thus became
possible.
Even the busiest politicians have to stop talking sometimes. This
means that national radio and television hookups must fill the
time with other sorts of material, exposing hundreds of millions
of human beings to new forms of cultural expression. Popular music
and popular TV programs, differing from country to country, did
something to close the gap between city and village populations.
Performers attracted a following among the vast numbers of persons
who became able to listen to them or see them on the screen. And
new art forms arose as well: westerns, crime shows, soap operas,
quiz shows, jazz, rock music, and the like.
The most original creation of American popular culture was jazz.
This originated in the black ghettos of New Orleans, Memphis,
and Chicago. It came to the attention of whites in the 1920s and
spread widely through Europe and round the world. After years
of resistance, even the Russians have begun to let jazz be heard
in public. Popular music in the jazz tradition soon cut loose
from its folk roots and became big business. One style succeeded
another as popular performers vied for attention. In the 1950s
a countercurrent manifested itself. Students and other Americans
became interested in folk music found mainly in the South and
picked up old songs or invented new ones. Thus, while most of
the world was trying to leave oral folk traditions behind, in
the United States, at least, an influential group tried to recover
something of the old simplicities of folk culture.
An important byproduct of mass media culture is standardization
of language. A few "world languages" attained greater
importance with the rise of mass communications. English has profited
most, for United States and British radio programs, movies, and
phonograph records have spread literally around the world. Russian
has met with great success inside the borders of the Soviet Union,
where all the other nationalities have learned Russian and use
it increasingly in daily encounters. In other parts of the world,
the pattern is unclear. In India, for example, government effort
to make Hindi a national language has met with organized local
resistance, and English still retains some importance for the
well-educated. The future of European languages in Africa remains
completely uncertain; but in Latin America, Spanish and Portuguese
seem to be encroaching on the Indian languages that still survive.
In China and Moslem lands, however, the old classical languages,
enriched by new coinages to fit new conditions, have had their
power reinforced by the advent of mass media. The end result,
in all probability, will be to reduce quite sharply the number
of living languages. Speech patterns familiar to only a few people
will have trouble resisting the new means of communication.
Links between popular mass culture and highbrow thought and art
seem unimportant. Artists sometimes have tried to find roots for
their work in the folkways of their nation. Thus, for example,
a Mexican school of painters, of whom Diego Rivera (1886-1957)
was the most famous, sought to arouse popular response by reviving
pre-Columbian styles of art. In the 1930s, Parisian artists experimented
with creating visual surprises by cutting out parts of magazine
advertisement and pasting them together in absurd or shocking
patterns. In the 1960s "pop" art tried similar techniques
with paint and canvas, and in a different way the revival of folk
music in the United States tried to accomplish the same thing.
In times past, when schoolteachers were the most important link
between popular and high-brow culture, upper-class tastes tended
to seep downward with the passage of time. Perhaps a similar process
will continue if the persons who mange the mass media, searching
for something new to put before the public, find use for what
began as inaccessible highbrow stuff. But it is certainly not
clear that seepage downward will be the prevailing movement. Popular
mass culture may instead crowd out at least some aspects of upper-class
culture, or transform it. So far, neither process seems very important.
Instead, highbrows go one way and the mass media go another. At
any given moment in time there seems to be little in common between
the two levels of thought and feeling.
Although enormous amounts of new data have been gathered since
1914, the hard sciences that allow prediction have not achieved
any radically new breakthrough since Albert Einstein proposed
his theories of relativity in 1905. All the same, it took physicists
some time to get used to the sort of universe that Einstein's
formulas implied; and ordinary people found it still more puzzling
to be told that space and time were not clearly separate, and
that waves and particles, as well as matter and energy, were somehow
the same thing.
The potential importance of a number of new inventions staggers
the imagination. Total destruction of human life is one possibility.
An almost unlimited supply of energy, if the cost of disposing
of atomic wastes can be met, might be another. In either case,
old limits on human powers have been broken through; whether for
good or ill remains to be seen.
The development of workable electronic computers was another
important breakthrough that came at the close of World War II.
Designs for computers were fairly familiar from the work of nineteenth-century
mathematicians, and the principle of storage and retrieval of
information was well understood before transistors made it possible
to make a machine that would really work. In the years since 1945,
several different generations of computers have come into existence,
each more flexible and with greater storage capacity than its
predecessors.
The uses of computers are many. Banks, libraries, and income tax
collectors can use them to keep track of individual accounts.
In science, much more complicated uses arise, for computers can
make calculations and pick out answers that fit given conditions
much faster than human minds, unaided, can. This, in turn, makes
various kinds of mathematical information available to scientists
and engineers that simply could not be had if they were forced,
as before, to sit down and figure out each step with pencil and
paper.
Another frontier of inquiry opened by computers is investigation
of how the human brain handles its input and output of data. There
are some resemblances between the way a computer works and the
activity of the brain. As computers become more flexible, they
resemble brains more closely, so that theoretical insight into
the one seems likely to rub off upon investigation of the other.
Understanding of the structural limits of languages and of logic
is also likely to be affected by computers. Sociology and history
may be transformed in the future as data describing individual
human lives are put on tapes and become available for analysis
by computers. At least in principle, this ought to make possible
statistically precise generalizations about different aspects
of social behavior among a population whose individual life histories
have been recorded in detail.
Computers thus span the gap between the hard and soft sciences.
They may in the future make some of the soft sciences a good deal
less soft, that, make possible more nearly accurate prediction
of human behavior. Predicting election results has already become
almost a science, thanks to computers. Other similar changes may
follow, particularly in economics, since fuller data on exchanges
of money and of materials ought, again in principle, to permit
far more accurate forecasting of future economic conditions than
has yet been achieved.
Although social scientists were, and still are, slow to react
to the new ideas that Freud brought before the public, writers
and artists in Western lands reacted at once and with considerable
enthusiasm.
The communists, once again, stood aside. In Russia and other communist
states, art was supposed to serve political purposes by helping
to shape the new consciousness that communism required. It was
a branch of propaganda, a kind of engineering of the soul. In
the first years of the Russian Revolution, wild experimentation
had been allowed, even encouraged. But from the 1920s, official
directives instructed writers and artists what to do. Uplifting,
inspirational subjects were prescribed; what was produced was
often dull and trite.
Dullness and triteness were exactly what Western artists and writers
were most anxious to avoid. Novelty, experiment, adventure to
the limits of intelligibility, attracted them. To do what others
had done seemed a confession of failure, of lack of genius. Self-expression
on the part of the artist and remorseless analysis of his or her
subject were characteristic of the most famous writers and artists
of the age.
In the 1920s both artists and writers experimented with new forms.
Painters had only to carry on with the effort begun before World
War I. Bit and pieces of ordinary visual experience were jerked
out of context or distorted to the point where recognition by
the viewer became hit-or-miss. Symbols aimed at affecting the
subconscious mind were deliberately sought after. A desire to
surprise and shock was a second goal pursued by many artists.
The greatest names had already emerged to fame before World War
I: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Georges Braque (1882-1963), and
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) among them.
Non-objective paintings that made no effort whatever to look like
anything else carried the breakaway from the Renaissance ideal
to its logical conclusion. Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Vasili
Kandinski (1866-1944) were among the pioneers of this kind of
painting. The ideal of non-objective painting was "pure design,"
mathematical, geometrical, like music in its underlying principles.
In Germany an influential group of architects and industrial designers,
the Bauhaus School, arose in the 1920s, inspired by the same ideas.
The so-called international style of architecture resulted. It
was characterized by the free use of news materials such as concrete,
steel, and glass for walls, and by sparse, rectangular, functional
shapes. One great advantage of the new style was the lower costs
of construction. Walls of glass were lighter, less expensive,
and resulted in bright, open interiors. The Bauhaus style spread
round the world within a couple of decades. Nearly all of the
world's airports, for example, are in this general style, as well
as thousands of new buildings in every important city of the world
outside of the communist countries, where brick and mortar (more
recently, concrete) continued to be preferred to glass.
Writers such as the novelist James Joyce (1882-1941) or the poet
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) experimented with words. By inventing
new words, using fragmentary sentences, and stretching grammar,
they and other writers, tried to affect subconscious levels of
their readers' minds in much the same way that artists were trying
to do. But even in the hands of a master, tinkering with language
quickly degenerated into mere unintelligibility; so this was not
a very promising field to explore-nothing to compare with what
painters were able to do. Accordingly, in the period after World
War II, this line of literary development almost stopped. Writers,
instead, concentrated on other ways of breaking with the past.
One technique was the shock value of exploring previous forbidden
themes, such as sex. Another was to celebrate the antihero, that
is, to create a fictional characters who did not impose his will
on people and things around him in the way heroes had done since
the time of Homer but became instead the helpless victim of circumstances.
Amidst all this striving for novelty, there were some writers
who clung closer to old themes and contentions; among them were
the playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the poet Dylan
Thomas (1914-1953), and the novelists Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
and William Faulkner (1897-1962). It is impossible to tell which
of these artists will turn out to be the more important authors
of the age.
If popularity is any standard to depend upon, the really outstanding
authors of the post-World War I period were the writers of murder
mysteries. This branch of literature became popular before World
War I with the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), which
told how a gentlemanly detective, Sherlock Holmes, used his powers
of observation and deduction to solve mysteries. Hundreds of authors
followed in Sherlock Holmes's footsteps, and millions of people
read their works.
Still another new form of writing that came to the fore after
1914 was children's literature. Better understanding of how children
grow from year to year made it possible to write more effectively
for different age levels. Some stories became so well known as
to populate the English-speaking world with a host of new characters:
Pooh, Dr. Doolittle, Charlie Brown, and many more. Talking animals
and clever children, generally speaking, took the place of the
witches and fairies of older nursery tales.
Comic books, too, first gathered together from already published
newspaper strips and then printed as an independent form of literature,
also became very popular, appealing mainly to young and not fully
literate readers.
Perhaps the most influential form of writing in the last fifty
years has been manuals on how to raise infants and small children.
Once upon a time, knowledge concerning the care and feeding of
infants was handed down from generation to generation without
being written down. In the 1920s, however, the movement of people
from country to city meant that millions of young women married
later in life after forgetting how their own mothers had looked
after them as children, and they had no close relative nearby
to pass on traditional lore. In addition, new information about
vitamins and infant health gave doctors something new to say to
mothers. The result was a rash of "How to" books. Millions
of middle-class American mothers raised their babies according
to instructions laid down in such books. Since then, "How
to" books have covered a vast range of other subjects, replacing
or supplementing older "hands-on" ways of transmitting
practical skills from one generation to the next. The impact upon
the national life was tremendous. In other countries, such manuals
had less importance, perhaps; but everywhere the breakdown of
oral tradition, linking the generations, required books of this
kind.
Most of the recent developments in science and thought have
paid little attention to traditional religion. Yet Christianity,
Judaism, Islam, Hnduism, and Buddhism remain. They are massive
facts of the human scene. Their power over human minds is probably
as great as ever. After all, religious groups also can use the
mass media to spread their doctrines.
Among Christians, the most striking development of the years since
World War I was the growing willingness of different sects and
denominations to seek common ground. For a long time, this ecumenical
movement was the work of Protestant groups, especially in the
English-speaking world. Pope John XXIII (1958-1963) brought the
Roman Catholic church into much more sympathetic relationship
with this movement. He summoned the Second Vatican Council (1962,
1963), which defined Roman Catholic relationships with Jews and
with other Christian sects in a conciliatory way.
Although mainline Christian churches began to emphasize the points
that they have in common, new sects-with strong and uncompromising
views-continued to arise and flourish, especially among poor and
disadvantaged people. Jehovah's Witnesses is an example of one
of these sects in the United States, this sect has also won converts
in Africa and Latin America among peoples emerging from traditional
peasant life, who felt the need of new, clearly defined guidelines
for conduct and belief.
Perhaps, therefore, the movement toward reconciliation and unity
is about evenly balanced by the rise and spread of new uncompromising
sects. Even if this is true (and statistics seem unavailable to
prove one thing or another), the existence of these two contradictory
Christian movements is evidence of the vitality churches continued
to enjoy.