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 have 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 was the dominant political system that acquired a portion of the Roman Empire’s authority. The institution was first designed by Christians, but drifted from its original mission as it gained political power. That power meant the institution both ran and educated the world for a millennium.
Most intellectuals would start at the Roman Empire, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as our near-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 story much later.
The beginning
The beginning eras of our present state of existence starts in 1346. At the time in Europe, the last thing that had significantly happened across the world 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 Catholics tangled with a grandiose political-but-labeled-as-religious struggle with Islam.
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), and 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 explosion of thought and action into entirely new endeavors:
- For various economic, religious, and political reasons, here was a push for colonization into new territories.
- With the development of the movable-type printing press technology around 1440, information started becoming 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 started moving from the abstraction of a relationship with God into more practical matters like “how can we best live together as a society?”.
- Religious development exploded, beginning with Bohemia and bleeding into everything else starting in 1517. The Catholics and Protestants chose sides and picked endless debates about nearly every aspect of daily living.
In a comparatively short time relative to the rest of history, by 1650 European society had expanded its influence across the planet. Its colonies were steadily growing, which empowered economic gain for both the non-nobility and the Protestants. That gain generated a comparatively sizable middle class that quietly maintained an ever-growing quality of life.
The ambition of humanity may be a universal, but the past five centuries’ ambitions have given us more opportunities to communicate and perform than all written history before it. The consequence of it is that we’ve found a wider range of purposes and meaning within society than ever before. For example, there are far more specializations someone can have, with far less time necessary to start into that role.
More thinking
By their nature, the unsophisticated culture of the underclass doesn’t possess the lifestyle complexities that naturally come with at least several generations in high society. Giving them more power means unpredictable changes that veer into creatively straightforward approaches.
In particular, the Protestant Reformation cast off many institutions of religion. The newly formed middle class had a lot of economic power, and they took the risks of settling the colonies’ politically unclaimed land. The beginnings of their political freedoms developed into further desire for even more freedom.
By the 1750s, people had been thinking for themselves for a while, without the clear guidance of a religious institution. Besides Protestantism, those religious devotions were far more pragmatic, and religion dovetailed neatly with political parties.
To this day, a religion of secularism has emerged as the social standard, and science and philosophy have almost entirely replaced the role of tradition and religious devotion.
A new empire
Some people in the 1770s decided to take the risk to assert their independence through semi-secular, semi-religious philosophical values birthed in the Age of Reason. There was some religious overtone to the new nation that arose, but only to the effect that God was the essence of morality and truth. It’s apparent in their founding documents that they believed in a type of human universal, but didn’t want punitive measures about the specifics.
This “United States of America” created itself on the presumption that every person had certain inalienable rights and privileges, with a brand-new political system that attempted to bring more representation to individuals. This constitutional republic arose through many wealthy upper-classmen giving power to everyone else, but didn’t want to see the utter tyranny of influencers steering a mob (“tyranny of the majority”). After the second attempt at a functioning constitution, they were able to succeed, and it has succeeded for several centuries.
Besides the impact it had on the rest of the world, the USA’s trend went farther, with the economic/political/cultural dam bursting in the 1860s with the American Civil War. Until that point, human ownership was a long-standing institution, but the effect of that war meant that slavery had to go underground to persist.
This secular trend continued. Within a few decades, concepts such as Marx’s socialism arose in public discourse.
Even now, people in the West tend to believe their opinion has inherent value, to the point that they tend to voice it without an implicit fear of torture or death.
Power consolidation
People on the highest end of society like to stay there, and the underclasses receiving power was not a welcome experience for the ruling class, since they saw that they’d naturally lose at least some of their authority.
One of the most significant 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: military equipment going in, and reconstruction after the war was over.
America, meanwhile, would give an opportunity to the aristocracy, similar to the underclass a century prior. Enterprising innovators like Rockefeller and Carnegie developed the trust’s living fiction into the long-term wealth-bearing vehicle of the corporation.
Power democratization
Indefinite inheritance through a trusteeship created a new form of wealth management outside aristocracy: the corporate board member.
The wealth management precedent was still through war-based power games of proxy alliances and financing, but the Great World War in 1914 forced that to change. 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 horrific amounts of property damage for everyone.
In Europe, the after-effects of the War resulted in Germany receiving all the blame. They were on the losing side and technically were part of the War’s inception with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but it wasn’t a fair assessment. 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.
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. The cost was once loyalty, but it now only requires sacrificing identity and wellness.
A larger empire
Every loss in power creates a vacuum. The aristocracy responded to the war in the 1920s by moving their collective wealth to mostly American corporations. This influx of money created the Roaring 20s. More people had more conveniences than written history had ever seen before.
There is more to the story, but its recency makes it much more subject to interpretation and politics.