This is interesting! I might make a counter-point: modern post-industrialists are more similar to even the earlier agriculturalists than those agriculturalists were to hunter-gatherers. If only from an individual-scale psychological perspective.
Hunter-gatherer societies, if anthropologists can be trusted, have extremely communialist identities. And they saw themselves as ‘embedded in’ the world, rather than ‘standing on’ it. While you might argue that farmstead culture has an element of collectivism, it’s pretty clear they have that idea that ‘the world exists to serve humanity’, that is the very essence of industrialism.
And besides, my reading of agrarian society is that it is a very individualistic thing. Farms are groups, ya, but they belong exclusively, almost without exception, to the patriarch. Everyone follows the patriarchs rules, until they either marry a different patriarch or go off to found a new patriarchy of their own; hence the imperalistic tendencies of agrarian societies.
What I’m getting at is that industrialisation isn’t so much a radical shift away from what came immediately before it, but rather is a very natural expansion of those core ideas.
Much as agriculture took families out of the community, modernity takes individuals out of the family. It’s all one story, to me.
I’d be a fool to deny that industrialization didn’t change a hella lot hella fast tho, of course. If you look at all the graphs, particularly of materialist trends (consupmtion, climate change, etc), they all hockey-stick starting in the ~1950’s. And mass society, communication, all that amplifies core cultural impetuses.
I guess all I mean to say is that I tend to object to ‘industrial exceptionalism’; the idea that things were fundamentally all new again, starting right there. It was a threshold, but not necessarily the biggest or most important!
I heard a sociologist say that teens in the 1960s were more similar to people today than they were their own parents. But, also, they weren’t that different. Just like I don’t think ‘modernity’ is fundamentally different than the largely christian roots it arose from, even if it was tossed through the ringer of industrialization and rationalist secularism.
Gosh I get away from myself sometimes. But, I think, if you compare, say, you and I to a medieval christian, and then compare all three of us to someone in a traditional non-agrarian society, all three of us would have a lot more in common than the ‘hunter-gatherer’. Just... an intuition, though haha; also skewed because we’re two leftists here, of course! :)
This is interesting! I might make a counter-point: modern post-industrialists are more similar to even the earlier agriculturalists than those agriculturalists were to hunter-gatherers. If only from an individual-scale psychological perspective.
Hunter-gatherer societies, if anthropologists can be trusted, have extremely communialist identities. And they saw themselves as ‘embedded in’ the world, rather than ‘standing on’ it. While you might argue that farmstead culture has an element of collectivism, it’s pretty clear they have that idea that ‘the world exists to serve humanity’, that is the very essence of industrialism.
And besides, my reading of agrarian society is that it is a very individualistic thing. Farms are groups, ya, but they belong exclusively, almost without exception, to the patriarch. Everyone follows the patriarchs rules, until they either marry a different patriarch or go off to found a new patriarchy of their own; hence the imperalistic tendencies of agrarian societies.
What I’m getting at is that industrialisation isn’t so much a radical shift away from what came immediately before it, but rather is a very natural expansion of those core ideas.
Much as agriculture took families out of the community, modernity takes individuals out of the family. It’s all one story, to me.
I’d be a fool to deny that industrialization didn’t change a hella lot hella fast tho, of course. If you look at all the graphs, particularly of materialist trends (consupmtion, climate change, etc), they all hockey-stick starting in the ~1950’s. And mass society, communication, all that amplifies core cultural impetuses.
I guess all I mean to say is that I tend to object to ‘industrial exceptionalism’; the idea that things were fundamentally all new again, starting right there. It was a threshold, but not necessarily the biggest or most important!
I heard a sociologist say that teens in the 1960s were more similar to people today than they were their own parents. But, also, they weren’t that different. Just like I don’t think ‘modernity’ is fundamentally different than the largely christian roots it arose from, even if it was tossed through the ringer of industrialization and rationalist secularism.
Gosh I get away from myself sometimes. But, I think, if you compare, say, you and I to a medieval christian, and then compare all three of us to someone in a traditional non-agrarian society, all three of us would have a lot more in common than the ‘hunter-gatherer’. Just... an intuition, though haha; also skewed because we’re two leftists here, of course! :)
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