Cultural Change Is Slowing Down
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on July 30th, 2011 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball,
Science Fiction
Earlier, I blogged on my predictions for technological progress, with an angle on the implications for science fiction writing. My basic thesis is that writers in most times are guilty of extrapolating the notion of progress from their own time. Pre-nineteenth-century authors would generally extrapolate technological progress flatly, or shallowly, if it occurred to them to anticipate it at all. Nineteenth and early twentieth century authors perceived the rapid rate of progress in their time but extrapolated it linearly, tending to undershoot many aspects of the actual progress which occurred. And mid-twentieth-century to twenty-first century authors have tended to extrapolate the apparently exponential progress of our own time and overshoot our actual progress (i.e., "Where is my flying car?"). I was lately struck by the impression that the same thing seems to have happened with the way cultural change is depicted and anticipated.
The 60's and 70's were a time of great cultural foment. Radical social changes occurred in the Western world - look at the changes in the status of women and minorities for the single biggest example. Whole new artistic genres took shape and exploded, producing great generational conflict regarding cultural tastes in things like music. Many of our most prominent authors today had their worldview forged in that time, and maintain an internal conflict between the mores of the new social order and the one that preceded it. Many are not entirely viscerally comfortable with subsequent, less momentous developments, such as the advances in gay rights.
The point being that when you read a lot of science fiction, there seems to be a subtle expectation that each new generation will be alien and repulsive to the one that came before and the culture can be expected to continue to churn at the same high rate.
I would posit that the social revolution in the West was driven by our technological revolution - in other words, that the timing is not coincidental. Other forces are at work in countries which were dragged in the wake of progress which originated in the West, which make their reactionary forced more potent in areas such as women's rights, but the same dynamic is nevertheless observed around the world.
I predicted that technological progress is really an S-shaped curve and that we are already passed the equivalence point and into the slowing down phase. I point out that aside from the computer revolution, the world of today is fundamentally very recognizable from the perspective of the world of 1975 when I was born, and you have to go back a generation to 1950, the year my mother was born, before you start to see really substantial change.
I think that cultural change works in the same fashion. Real cultural progress, such as women's liberation, equality for minorities, and gay rights are a product of the unprecedented real wealth that new technology has generated. The attendant liberalization and artistic flowering that accompanies this marches in tandem. The biggest changes affecting the most people came first, and then progressively smaller changes have occurred, such as advancing social acceptance of gays starting in the 70's and 80's, to gay marriage in the 2000's.
I have been really struck by this in teaching karate in teenagers and interacting with them. I am very old and stodgy and in no way make any claim to be "hip" or in tune with the younger generation. Science fiction predicts that I should find the younger generation strange and offensive, much as the authors' parents found their generation(s). This prediction is striking in its failure. Modern teenagers and children are completely comprehensible. They like much of the same movies and music that we do, and consume and enjoy much of the same cultural products. The musical styles which are currently popular are completely interpretible and accessible to any adult who would be inclined by personality to engage the analogous genre from their own era, and much of the older music is still popular and respected. Truly revolutionary new genres are not really emerging, more like a general drift of existing categories. Fathers and sons love the same video games and are showing no signs of growing out of them or being left behind by the new technology.
The thing that blows my mind is that I am surrounded by Star Wars nerds who know and argue about intimate details of a movie that is about twice their age.
So here's my prediction. In an all-things-being-equal scenario where we solve the energy and climate change crises and achieve a technological plateau utopia, each generation will be very much like the one that preceded it, will be readily conversant with other generations without the need of an interpreter, will have very compatible social mores with their parents, and barring linguistic drift, will find the vast body of art of all kinds produced starting around 1960 and going on potentially for decades or even centuries is completely accessible without any special training. This will make it progressively harder for new artists to gain recognition as they have to compete with the best of the best cherry-picked from across decades, a comparison against which most will be found wanting. This will drive artists to likely-futile extremes to try and blaze new ground to escape from the tyranny of comparison to the past and to achieve recognition. You will see churn, but it will not be the creative explosion of the 50s to the 70s when whole new genres came into being in the new atmosphere of freedom, rather, it will be tinged with an element of artificiality and desperate futility.
However, in the much more likely event that the present moment is actually at or past the peak of our civilization and we are currently entering an irreversible decline where our failure to deal with overpopulation, our changing climate and the end of cheap oil lead us to tear ourselves apart, the picture is of course quite different. The older and younger generations will be quite alienated from each other, but again I think in a way which will be quite different than has been generally predicted, as a younger generation which grew up with strife and want struggles to connect with a disaffected older generation which feels that it has been cheated and robbed of the comfort and safety which is its birthright. And in that scenario, the kids of today are squarely lumped in with us in the older, privileged generation.
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