In the areas of science, religion, culture and human sexuality what were some of the significant discoveries or developments? How or in what ways did they encourage human betterment or encourage anxiety or pessimism. In what ways do those developments still influence us?
In science, various discoveries were made during this time period. In medicine, it was a scientific paradigm that diseases were caused by “bad blood,” and that this could be solved by placing a leech on the body to suck the blood out (Levack 752). Fortunately, as this didn’t solve the issue, the scientific discovery of bacteria replaced the old paradigm. The practice of medicine changed as this knowledge (for the practitioners, in particular) of avoiding the transference of bacteria, such as washing hands, was implemented. In geology, the belief that what is observable today can explain what happened long ago or uniformitarianism was developed by Lyell. This replaced the Bible’s Genesis doctrine for many except fundamentalist Christians. In biology, the creation of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which directly challenged the importance of humankind in the image of God since it would imply later by the publication of The Descent of Man that humans descended from lesser, species by the process of natural selection. In 1895, the discovery of the X-ray, which was an accident, removed the assumption that solid matter blocks everything from the electromagnetic spectrum. And lastly, Einstein’s theory of special relativity in 1905 was developed that said energy and mass were interchangeable by the equation E=mc2. These scientific discoveries opened the door to more paradigm shifts in the West.
Sociologists used rational thought in analyzing human behavior during this time period. Sociologist Lebon’s generalization of crowd behavior and classification of non-educated workers as being more emotional than rational, led to the promulgation of his pessimistic paradigm on the unworkability of democracy. Lebon believed that rationalism was in itself limited, like romantics before the modernist movement. Max Weber saw bureaucracy as a positive development in the modern age, who believed in the meritocracy of the work place. He was more positivist than Lebon. Freud believed that there was a struggle between the unconscious and conscious mind and that the unconscious can sometimes win. Another way to put it is that the apparent negative emotions of the unconscious are suppressed by the conscious, which in the extreme case that the unconscious wins, suicide may result (since he worked with mentally-ill patients).
In terms of religion, while governments had been secularized, Christian fervor remained the same in this time period except in secular activities (Levack 765). As evidenced by the continued support for Christianization abroad and the continual support for churches in England and elsewhere, the superior religious zeal over Islam and other religions didn’t wane . Moreover, religious tolerance wasn’t a paradigm in the West at this time. Before the First World War, the Polish found their adherence to Roman Catholicism part of their cultural identity and they found this to be a reason for “national sovereignty” (Levack 764). Uniformitarianism came into conflict with the doctrines of the Bible in that the world wasn’t 6,000 years old. And Darwinists promulgated that species weren’t created by God as we see them today, but evolved over time, which came into contradiction to Christian doctrine. Catholics at this time were coming under fire due to positivism and scientific paradigm shifts, and they implemented papal infallibility to their avail, which essentially granted them the divine right that previous monarchies had enjoyed. Perhaps as a result of this, anticlericalism ensued throughout France, for instance, as liberals were pitted against the Catholic conservatives in heated debates (Levack 765).
Culturally, the modernist movement, which strayed further from the traditional forms of classicism and the individuality of romanticism, was accepted by those who believed in the progress of art. Artists in Spain developed a new style of painting called cubism (Levack 763). And more broadly across Europe there was an expressionist movement, which believed in the expression of the individual’s intrapersonal perspective on the environment. There were unlike previous non-expressionists who tried to copy what they saw exactly or as close as possible to what was in the environment. Many artists existed in this time period who stuck to the forms of the past and yet were “different” than their predecessors were still accepted as being valid, like Rachmaninoff. He wrote romantic stylized music, yet was a post-Romantic. Social Darwinism was prevalent in the culture of the West during this time period. It also introduced a different paradigm of human behavior. Wrongly, social Darwinists concluded that negative as well as positive habits, such as drug addiction, would be passed down from generation to generation due to genetic inheritance, leaving little room for an alternative explanation—the choice of the individual in explanation of his or her actions (Levack 755). Today, sociologists know that behavior is shaped by one’s environment.
In the West during this time period, many people had the mental condition known as homophobia or fear of the homosexual male or female. And there are few mental illnesses that have been proven to be hereditary, and this one isn’t. In the realm of scientific rational thought, social Darwinism didn’t take into account the other “irrational” aspect of the human mind. Science defines the correct practice of sex as between a man and woman, which many conservatives applauded since it wasn’t in direct contradiction of church doctrine (Levack 759). Today, fewer people are as intolerant as before, but many take a conservative stance on social conduct, believing in the contagiousness of homosexuality as akin to the spreading of Cholera by unforeseen, unscientific means. Homosexuality, however, is now recognized by psychologists that it is by sexual preference that determines identity. Same-sex marriage is not-allowed in many states, Iowa being one of them, though historically, it has been accepted. Homosexuals are now being suppressed by the general will of the majority in my view.
In terms of pessimism, fin-de-siecle, or anticipation of the new century, fostered fears of a person’s respective society (Levack 757). Some novels depicted society as twisted and sinister, such as, Nana and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. On the other hand, economically due to positivism, European empire powerhouses were usurping the resources of other countries, exploiting their manual labor, converting them into Christians. In some ways this can be seen in an optimistic light, that things couldn’t be looking any better for the West, at least until World War I.
Bibliography
Levack, Brian et al. The West: Encounters and Transformations. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Pearson Education, Inc., 2011. Print
