There are certain Western trends and fashions: cultural patterns that exist within our lifetimes that won’t change anytime soon.
Before now
Culturally, many precedents existed a long time ago, relative to now:
- Greek thought explored many philosophical domains that framed our understanding of the world.
- The Roman Empire was one of the first foundations of infinitely scalable government.
- Even the most devout atheist can agree the ideas of Jesus Christ have been profoundly influential toward society’s development.
- The Catholic Church turned Jesus Christ into a political system. Christians first designed the institution, but it drifted from its original mission as it gained political power. It acquired a portion of the Roman Empire’s authority and became the dominant control mechanism for all of Europe. That institution both ran and educated the world for over a millennium.
Most historians start at the Roman Empire, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as our shorter-term history. Like memory, history fades with time, and only stray writings survive from the distant past. After a millennium, we typically have a very limited understanding of how our ancestors lived or thought differently than us. It’s far more reasonable to begin our present cultural eras at the year 1346.
The start
At the time in Europe, the last world-altering event was the Great Schism of 1054.
- Like thousands of years before, a comparatively small number of kings oversaw most people, who were agrarian peasants by trade.
- One addition to the system was that every Western king had some power constraints through the Catholic Church.
- Existentially, the Catholic Church tangled with a grandiose political-but-labeled-as-religious struggle with Islam.
- The Church also had to stomp out some dissidents trending in Bohemia who attested to the Church’s corruption.
Within 7 short years, a bubonic plague pandemic killed 30-60% of the people. It came unexpectedly (and we still don’t know what precisely started it). The economy-shattering amount of death forced people to directly face the Great Unknown.
The explosion
Once everyone recovered from the loss, there was a tremendous revolution of thought and action toward entirely new endeavors:
- For various economic, religious, and political reasons, people used the technology of the time to colonize new territories.
- With movable-type printing press technology around 1440, information became much easier to disseminate. This opened up the opportunity for the Protestant Reformation to take hold, which severely weakened the Catholic Church’s power.
- Philosophical discussions shifted away from our abstracted relationship with God. The dominant question became, “How can we best live together as a society?”
- Religious ideas also exploded, beginning with Bohemia and bleeding into everywhere else starting in 1517 with the Protestant Reformation. The Catholics and Protestants chose sides and picked endless debates about nearly every aspect of daily living.
By 1650, merely 130-something years later, Europeans had expanded their influence across the planet. Their colonies were steadily growing, which empowered economic gain for both non-nobility and Protestants. That gain generated a comparatively sizable middle class that quietly maintained an ever-growing quality of life.
Humanity’s ambition may be a universal, but the past five centuries have broken a new record. We have generated more communication and action than all written history before that point. The consequence of it is that we’ve found a wider range of purposes within society than ever before. For example, we have far more specializations available, with far less time necessary for starting that role.
But let’s not stop there.
More thinking
By their nature, underclass cultures aren’t as sophisticated as the legacy of several generations in high society. To give them more power guarantees unpredictable changes. Many of these changes will veer into creatively brutal and straightforward approaches.
In particular, the Protestant Reformation cast off many institutions of religion. The newly formed middle class used their tremendous economic power to take risks with settling unclaimed colonial land. The beginnings of their political freedoms developed into further desire for even more freedom.
By the 1750s, people had been thinking beyond the guidance of a centralized religious institution for over a century. Besides Protestantism, those religious devotions were far more pragmatic. The religion of the Age of Reason dovetailed neatly with political parties.
To this day, we still maintain a secular religion as the social standard. Science and philosophy are now more important than tradition and religious devotion.
A new empire
In the 1770s, some British colonists risked asserting their independence through semi-secular, semi-religious philosophical values. They declared independence, then successfully built a constitution after only the second attempt.
This “United States of America” started its founding documents by presuming a few radical ideas:
- God is the essence of morality and truth.
- Given God, there are certain non-negotiable human universals.
- Given these universals, every person had certain inalienable rights and privileges.
However, they didn’t want punitive measures about the specifics on God.
It was a brand-new political system that attempted to bring direct power to individuals. To avoid influencers steering a mob (“tyranny of the majority”), they assembled a constitutional republic. Every voting citizen received proportional representation relative to everyone else.
Like every government before it, this new government had undeniable religious overtones before it, but without much religious substance. This new empire was an idea that had successfully become reality.
Religious divorce
After the second attempt at a functioning constitution, they were able to succeed. If it had collapsed a few decades later, it would have merely been a trend that rocked the world. However, it has continued successfully for several centuries.
This egalitarian view burst an economic/political/cultural dam in the 1860s. A series of events spurred the American Civil War. Up to the 19th century, slavery was a long-standing and necessary institution. Between other European nations’ abolitionism and the Civil War’s conclusion, slavery steadily became a black market commodity.
This secular moralist trend continued. Within a few decades, concepts such as Marx’s socialism and Nietzsche’s Superman arose in public discourse. These ideas prioritized man’s reasoning above God.
Even now, we have an implicit belief that our opinion has inherent value. Many people will assert their opinion without implicit fear of torture or death. Many more go far enough to think their opinion is the only thing that matters.
Shifting power
As a human universal, people on the highest end of society like to stay there. The middle class gaining power is a risk to at least some of their authority.
One of their most effective power-consolidation tricks was to maintain a state of war. The 19th century’s Age of Imperialism saw every little empire in Europe squabbling with every other empire. Endless skirmishes gave the financiers profit on both sides: expensive military equipment goes in, and reconstruction after the battles.
America, meanwhile, would give a unique opportunity to the aristocracy, similar to the underclass a century prior. Absurdly wealthy innovators like Rockefeller and Carnegie started with the trust’s living fiction that assisted in inheritance transfer. Many lawyers successfully rebuilt it into an “endless” wealth-holding vehicle, which we now know as the corporation.
Power democratization
Indefinite inheritance through a trusteeship created a new, non-aristocratic form of wealth management: the corporate board member.
The Great World War of 1914 caused a massive upset for everyone in Europe. In 4 terrifying years, technologies like aircraft and mustard gas invalidated the known-effective military tactics of the time. This led to a truly awful death rate and caused horrific property damage across all of Europe.
The aristocracy responded to the war in the 1920s by seeking somewhere else to move their collective wealth. The Great War hadn’t touched American corporations, so they were the logical destination. This influx of money created America’s Roaring Twenties. That era gave more people more conveniences than written history had ever seen before.
Since then, anyone sufficiently talented, hard-working, obsessive, and lucky can climb all the way to the top of society. Instead of swearing fealty to nobility, they imply fealty to a trust. Sacrificing all identity and wellness has replaced well-choreographed devotion.
A new world order
As far as the direct after-effects of the War, though, Germany received all the blame:
- They were on the losing side.
- The assassination of Franz Ferdinand technically started the War.
- However, it wasn’t really a fair assessment, but Europe needed someone to blame.
- Europe required Germany to pay off massive reparations debts.
- This requirement was a severe face-for-an-eye model of justice against Germany, which utterly devastated them.
Every loss in power creates a vacuum, and there is more to the ongoing story in another essay.
Everything up to now is codified history, with very few arguments over the truth. We live in the shadow of its impact, but only the nerdiest and craziest will argue its finer points.
Everything after this point, however, represents an interpretation that creates dramatic political consequences.