Cliches of Modern Culture

...Wandering through the intellectual hall of fame from Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (neither of whom truly belong to his period) to Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and others, he eschews discussion of their intellectual courage, critical insight and resolute secularly, focusing on their failure to find comfortable truths...

...That group saw Europe altered as had no other—in commerce, society, the professions, the arts, and ideas...

...The cliches about modernism as unrelenting enemy of tradition, as the root of discontent, will no longer do...

...Yet, sustained by his own rhetoric and dedicated to squelching nostalgia for la belle epoque, Tannenbaum manfully upholds his belief in modernization as the mother of despair...

...The final chapter, on the revolution in the arts, caps his vision of anguish by laboring the cliche that "after 1870 most European artists and writers were openly hostile to the new, modern order in one way or another...

...This is to reduce cultural change to a melodrama of bodiless forces pitted against people...

...Historian Edward Tannenbaum takes modernization as his clue to the "generation before the War," meaning every European alive from 1890-1914...

...Where bad effects do not directly manifest themselves to him, he discovers them concealed: In rising worldly hopes, he, like all good conservatives, finds frustration ("modernization keeps raising the stakes...

...Modernization" did not even appear in the 1930-35 first edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences...

...and even the Museum of Modern Art is mounting exhibitions reassessing the modernists' relation to the past...

...The author fails, however, to note that these advances nourished people's confidence that they could master their lives—as is stressed, for example, by Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith in their authoritative sociological study, Becoming Modern (1974...

...Moreover, the few facts he adduces from currents of modernism less congenial to his thesis, such as cubism, futurism and modern architecture, suggest a different relation of the artists to modernity: Picasso, Marinetti and Gropius, after all, embraced rather than rejected it...

...The Expressionists are, of course, an easy choice for one with Tannenbaum's point of view because they said much about their social and psychological selves...

...Apart from betraying Tannenbaum's bias toward the negative, the judgment distorts and trivializes the achievements of modern social thought by reducing them to pathos...

...To support this dim commonplace, echoing Lionel Trilling's older and stronger idea of an "adversary culture," the author dwells on those artists, especially the Expressionists, who explored abstraction and metaphysics or developed "means of portraying the deterioration of the individual personality in a disoriented world...

...Here is a typical passage: "Modernization brought changes in economic, political, and social structures which tore people away from their familiar worlds and thrust them into situations in which they had to cope with competing moral orientations based on unfamiliar views of reality...

...and in the delights of popular culture, he sees merely blind escape...

...This leads him to concentrate on the "pessimism of philosophers and social thinkers concerning modernization," and to conclude that it is their chief theoretical accomplishment...

...His error is embedded in his theme: "Modernization and Its Discontents...

...As might be expected of a work enfolding copious detail in such conceptual clouds, 1900 also contains evidence at odds with its thesis...

...Tannenbaum's concluding remarks on avant-garde writers hint at the frailty of his onesided interpretation, too: They "tried to invent new languages capable of evoking" the "complexities and paradoxes" of modern life...

...all else is abstraction...

...From cognition to morals, social structure to emotions, politics to work, modernization has touched everything, dissolving traditions and replacing faith with calculation...

...The allusion to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents is largely gratuitous, since Tannenbaum does not refer to deep psychological conflicts inherent in culture but to open tensions between the "forces" of the new and society's "responses" to them...

...it claims 20 pages in the second edition, 1968...

...Instead, Tannenbaum calumniates many apparent improvements for fostering selfishness, standardization and a popular culture rooted in "a superficial view of reality which offered no way of understanding how modern structures and systems worked...

...The warped portrait rides on heated verbs...

...Perhaps," he writes, "the most important new perception of the classical sociologists was that modernization did not necessarily bring social and political progress...

...In his eyes, everyone was driven by unhappiness with the new era: The waning aristocracy clung to the past, the rising working class assailed the present, the masses of the "uprooted" everywhere "mobilized their discontents" in political movements, and artists and intellectuals became obsessed with creating images of chaos...

...Tannenbaum's insistence on the sorrows of modernity reaches familiar heights in his renderings of innovative ideas and art...

...And Tannenbaum covers the gamut in 10 topical, detailed, textbookish chapters that would rouse no comment were it not that they carry a mistaken interpretation of modern culture...

...Among historians, for instance, Peter Gay has taken steps in Art and Act and in several articles to counter the conventional view of the modern artist as adversary...

...The question imposes itself not because Tannenbaum is altogether wrong to see discontent in modern artists, but because he has glossed a complicated issue, seemingly blind to the serious reflections on it and the reappraisals now occurring everywhere...

...Still, he does little more than retail common assumptions about the Expressionist style as a troubled quest for essences and wholeness, and he does nothing whatever to prove that the modern personality actually deteriorated...

...Reviewed by James Sloan Allen Teacher of Cultural History, New School and Manhattan School of Music Western culture has experienced many shocks and upheavals, births and rebirths, but nothing has affected it more than modernization...

...Does the search for an authentically modern style imply disaffection with modernity...

...Although the process began long ago with the rise of secularism, empirical science, central government, and industry, discussion of it became current only after World War II when underdeveloped countries started their rapid advance toward Western-style modernity...

...There are abundant instances of expanding education, improved skills, widened marketing, new public diversions, heightened purchasing power, rising economic expectations and standards of life...

...He treats these as discontent to lend drama to his cloudy notion of a development "involving all human affairs" that "changes everything" and "has no fixed beginning or end...