Modernist literature
Modernist literature reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, has often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival in Cubism. She was close friends with and regularly met with Pablo Picasso. James Joyce's publication of Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's Wasteland literature were additional examples reacting to industrialization showing the impact in personal alienation. Undoubtedly the carnage of WWI had made its impact as well, but don't forget that industrialization had changed warfare as well with the introduction of chemical gases, the machine gun and the tank.

Socialism
Though the world outside of the USA began the 20th century being governed by monarchies, by 1917 this had changed. Socialism as a political movement made its first foothold in Russia and quickly spread following in the aftermath of WWI. The market crash of 1929 would accelerate the spread of socialist thinking worldwide. The US would install social security and market managing institutions such as the SEC in the 1930s while other nations would move to heavier governmental forms in socialism. Please note the parallels to the current regulation activity for finance and health care reform in aftermath of the crash of 2008.

The heavier instantiations of socialism was in direct correlation to the amount of repression in nations prior to WWI. Russia, and later China, was highly repressed under the rule of the Czars and therefore their move to socialism had been extreme. Europe would settle in between the US and Russia. This political shift was in direct correlation to industrialization and the labor issues which that change had created as prior skills lost value via new forms in mass production.

The Jazz Age
New Orleans style jazz had broken out of the south to become a new form of music. Originally jazz had been isolated within African American night clubs but quickly was adopted by mainstream musicians. The new technologies in the record player and radio accelerated the impact and adoption for jazz's very different syncopated sound. The classical structure in European based music would also begin to be transformed in short order.

The International Style
The International Style for Architecture was known for its lack of ornamentation and efficient use of space. The bands of glass and supporting materials were austere and made the new architecture look very much like a plain box. The buildings looked as if they had been built in an industrial factory and transported to the site. Office buildings followed by private residences would begin to look like the increasingly automated factories which were now in sight within every major city. The propagation for the changing landscape from industrialization was readily apparent and accelerating with the visual embrace from architecture.

Surrealism
Dictionary: Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation. The import for automated factories had seeped all the way into the lexicon of the writers and painters communities by the 1920s. The change had come so quickly in automation that it spawned questions about what were things like reality, sanity and truth.

French Existentialism
The literary movement called the French Existential School was a major change in worldview. From Sartre to Camus, the writing featured a view of humanity as simply a higher functioning animal, who was aware of their misery, but was as powerless to do anything about it as a dog or a cat. The prevailing worldview at the time was humanity was at the center of God's universe and these stories were a dramatic denial for that inherited perspective. The changes brought about by the market crash of 1929 and WWII would serve to reinforce this new and more pessimistic worldview.

Beebop Jazz
Bebop or bop was a style of jazz characterized by fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and melody. It was developed in the early and mid-1940s. Though improvisation had existed within jazz melodies from the 1920s, the increase in tempo and amount of improvisation were then very new. The technologies in records, and more importantly radio, which had transmitted earlier jazz melodies, were then even found in cars. The speed and complexity for urban living was likely the driver behind the uptick in tempo.

Abstract Expressionism
The painting school in Abstract Expressionism came on the US art scene after WWII. Jackson Pollock was the first member of that school to become very well known. Jackson was even featured on the cover of Life magazine. Pollock's paintings before he began to drip were surreal color abstractions. However his paintings where he dripped and splattered paint featured spontaneous reaction. He tried not to think and many of his paintings were titled by numbers only. Pollock personally was also a huge fan of Beebop music. Bop was likely blaring away on an old beat up radio within his barn studio as he was dripping and splattering his paint.

Professional Sports
The "color barrier" was broken in professional sports starting in 1947. In baseball Jackie Robinson in the National League and Larry Doby in the American League were the first to integrate baseball. In football there had been some prior cracks in the barrier but had been swept away by the depression and the Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. By 1950 most of the teams had at least one African American player on each of the teams. The National Basketball Association (NBA) was also integrated during the 1950s. After the musicians these were the first major inroads by African Americans within US social culture. TV would extend these gains even further.

The Beats
The Beat writers were a school of writers who began publishing around 1957. Howl by Allen Ginsburg and On the Road by Jack Kerouac were to be publications of enormous import. Kerouac wrote his book On the Road on paper sheets that had been taped together so that he could write continously in a stream of consciousness manor. His book featured the stories of his wanderings where bummed around, took piles of drugs and had sex at every opportunity. The beats would impact the thinking for the hippies and beatniks which would arrive on the seen later in the 1960s.

Kerouac always maintained that he was not a beatnik or a hippie. In fact he professed to be a traditional Roman Catholic. This serves to underscore the point that even though new thinking was occurring in the later 1950s – major shifts in worldview had not yet arrived. Though worldview was under attack it had in fact changed very little at that moment in history. However their writings would present new views on sexuality, to include homosexuality, which would provide a very new social perspective of society. His stories were enabled by travelling on buses and driving his jalopy which had become ubiquitous technologies for transportation by the 1950s. On the Road is written in a jazzy lyrical style. I have listened to an audible version of the book and this lyrical aspect comes through very clearly.

Rock and Roll
Rock n Roll would begin in the later 1950s with its roots in Rockabilly (country) and Gospel. Having entered the 1960s it was cored in folk music without amplification. Bob Dylan was a good example of how he wrote songs which featured an almost stream of consciousness story telling set into melodies. Rock's mainstream would become completely standardized on amplified instruments by the middle 1960s. New electrified guitars and other instruments became the back bone for the music industry.

The music was loud, raucous and entirely rebellious. A short period of social spontaneity had arrived. Every social structure and worldview was under attack and in question. The phrase: turn on (take drugs), tune in (to the changes) and drop out (of society) became the mantra for the youth of the latter 1960s. The music became their own sermons and different way of thinking. From then onwards traditional churches saw their membership start to decline. Europe is in the single digits today in church attendance. A recent PEW study (2010) for religious life in the US provides us this picture. Dividing up the time period as follows-- Greatest Generation (born before 1928), Silent Generation (born 1928-45), Baby Boomers (1946-64), Gen. X (1965-80), and Millenials (born after 1980), the survey says that when asked whether they have any religious affiliation or not only 5% of the Greatest Generation, 8% of the Silent Generation, 13% of Baby Boomers, 20% of Gen Xers, and 26% of Millenials say they have no religious affiliation. Clearly the trend for the decrease in traditional religion will continue into the future based on this data.

Civil Rights & Anti War Movements
These two movements would prove to be to the coup de grace in the rigidity of social structures for the industrialized nations. The movements would usher in the legal changes required to remove institutionalized discrimination which had been built into societal systems. The changes which started with these movements would coalesce by the 1980s and 1990s of truly multicultural societies. Where "white flight" had taken whites out of the major cities in the 1960s and 1970s this trend would slow as cities became the hub of urban centers which now account for the majority of populations for industrialized nations.

The language of "them" common prior to the latter 1960s is clearly on its way out relative to not only race but also creed and most other inherited social distinctions. They proved to be unfair and inefficient and slowly over the course of the wave four did the technologies change the world so dramatically that inherited worldview and social structures began the very real change not witnessed since the Agricultural Era update to worldview. The shift at that time was due to the large populations which were moved into increasingly larger towns, cities, city-states and empires. Those changes in population density were achieved by new technologies which would serve to feed the much larger urban areas than had ever existed before in human history. The technology change had been just as ferocious in the first five long waves of the Industrial Era. These changes we have seen with our own eyes - within a single lifetime for some of us who have stradled this shift.

Summary
The classical macro economist Joseph Schumpeter had termed the technology changes which are driving increased automation – the gale force winds of creative destruction. Schumpeter was referring to the impact of technological innovation on the economy. However as our quick walk through this prior technology wave has demonstrated, the same can be said relative to worldview and social structures. The evolution for the development of technology brings change to everything; however, the change is simply moving at different speeds for the various factors.

The force of technology acts in two distinct ways. First as described above, technology innovation creates efficiency within the economy. What is less understood is the second force of technology. That force is the visible changes which technology brings. When human environments are visually changed, the changes are picked up by artists, authors and others. As the changes are incorporated within their minds, new thinking is then created.

History has always been the dance of two steps forward and one step back. The change which technology brings in evolved thought goes through a cyclical pattern where at times the thinking is discarded and at times it is propagated forward. Approximately 40% of the way into the agricultural era we saw worldview and social structures suddenly shift just as we have witnessed in the last few decades of this industrial era. In the agricultural era rudimentary horticultural economies changed over to much more complex agrarian societies and the shift occurred. We have just moved out of the elementary heavy engineering economy in mechanization into the more complex automation of the information societies for the industrial era. The economic eras were at the same structural points in development when this shift occurred.

In the shift to mainstream agrarian economies we saw much higher populations suddenly pack new towns and cities. It was the requirement for economic efficiency which was the change agent for that shift. Correspondingly worldview began to move away from the inherited hunter-gatherer ideals to the ones we would see arise in the near east via Judeo / Christian / Islam and in the Far East Hinduism / Buddhism / Daoism / Confucianism.

It was the change in human economy which changed the world our ancestors inhabited so completely that the inherited worldview and social structures no longer resonated with them. In the last few decades we have seen the same move into increasingly automated economies have the identical effect on human cultures. Human history cycles around technology at our core then over much longer time periods culture shifts for worldview and social structures. That is why the pattern in human history had been invisible to us.

Next stop the economic eras and the transition periods for the model

Economic Eras or Model Index