This Crazy Millennium
Well, I’m sick of the Millennium, so I’m just going to talk about the century for a moment instead. No other century is remotely comparable to the 20th in terms of significant changes to society and technology and religion.
Now that we are at the beginning of the last year of this century, it is an appropriate time to consider what the really significant events were of the past 100 years. It’s not that hard. Here they are, in chronological order.
- The Development of Cinema
- Industrialization
- The 1917 Communist Revolution
- The Automobile
- World War I
- Radio
- Flight
- The Depression
- Government Intervention in the Economy following the Depression
- World War II
- The Development of Atomic Weapons
- The Birth Control Pill
- Television
- Feminism
- Rock’n’Roll Music
- Personal Computers
- The Internet
- Biochemistry and Genetic Engineering
Now, what was the most significant development of the past 100 years? I mean, in terms of sheer, brute influence on all of our lives. Surprise—none of the above. We hardly notice the most significant development because we don’t notice the forest for the trees: urbanization.
What happened was this: with the invention and development of automobiles and other technologies, people were able to move to cities in massive numbers. In 1900, we were an overwhelmingly agricultural, small-town society. In 2000, we are overwhelmingly urbanized.
How significant is that? All of the other important developments of this century were radically shaped and influenced by the simple fact that most of us began to live in cities instead of small towns and villages. Anyone who has lived in a small town or village understands this immediately. The city is huge. It is anonymous. It is economically powerful. It is commercial. It is rich. It is filled with competing interests. It is sophisticated, fast-moving, complex. It is concentrated, organized, chaotic. It is full of people, cars, buses, buildings, devices, police, stadiums, hospitals, universities. It is, in the minds of many people, utterly empty and devoid of human values.
Christians like to point to rock’n’roll or the movies or literature or comic books or the Internet or whatever as being responsible for the “decline” of public morals in this century. First of all, there never was a public morality like they imagine it. Secondly, it was never those things anyway. All of those things were only possible because of urbanization, and all of them were given content and meaning by the insurmountable fact that we all lived in cities and had developed an urban mentality.
What is an urban mentality? It is the embrace of mass culture and homogenization. In a small town, where everybody knows you, culture and religion and social patterns develop indigenously, influenced by local hierarchies and institutions, and closely monitored by everyone. We all know how difficult it is to go against the grain of a small community. We are held accountable for our behavior by our neighbors and friends and churches. We know the teacher. We know the grocer. We know the local mechanic. We have our own ideas about how to do things. We know what works here.
In a large city, we are anonymous and autonomous. We could go to church or go to another church or not go at all. We don’t even know our neighbors, let alone the grocer or the mechanic. We drive across town to visit our friends.
So how do we learn about our culture? What begins to shape the way we think about things? Mass media. Radio, television, the movies. This is why we have Hollywood and the NBA and Michael Jordan and Stephen Spielberg, and it’s why we had Elvis, and the pill, and the internet, and it’s why we’re going to have genetic engineering.
As much as we would like to flatter ourselves and declare that our ideas are shaped by the influence of other people’s ideas, the truth is that our ideas are also powerfully shaped by our immediate environment and our perceived needs.
The city has produced our culture. Our culture is hysterical. We’re like those little ants running around in circles around the ant hill that someone has just crushed with his big toe. We’re out of our minds, but we have no idea of where else to go.