Now let's look at something that exploded with the industrial revolution but is not constrained by technological sophistication -- children's books. Making them is much more dependent on their creators' imagination, not on how fast today's presses can print them or how many of them and in how much detail can be stored on today's computers. Stagnation in the output of dazzling new doo-hickies is understandable, and even stagnation within a specific genre of cultural work -- such as rock music -- but stagnation in children's literature as a whole? Well, believe it:
As part of my leisure research into what books to get my nephew as he nears 3 years of age, I came across these data that I've charted from 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up (luckily for me, I've got plenty of time left for that). Almost all are from the industrial revolution and after; before then, children's books were not a well developed genre. I omitted 5 entries scattered through ancient and medieval times, and just to pick a round starting date of 1800 I left out 7 entries from 1620 to 1799, which lets us see the overall pattern in closer detail without altering the picture.
Once the shift to an industrial society got going, children's books immediately took hold in their own niche. As with technology, there was a decent burst of creativity throughout the second half of the 19th C., and another more impressive surge during the middle 50 years of the 20th C. At the end of this frenetic rise, there were about 10 times as many memorable kids books published per year compared to the very start in the early 1800s, when one or two would come out in a year. However, just as with technology, GDP, and median wages, around or a little after the mid-1970s the rate of increase slowed down and leveled off.
(I wouldn't make too much of the apparent nosedive at the end of the chart: the book came out in 2009 and only had 1 entry from 2008 and 3 from 2007 -- it probably takes the compilers of these gigantic lists several years to sift through all of the recent stuff to tell what's worth mentioning.)
Cultural innovation often reflects larger changes in people's lives, especially ones where they shift from one means of subsistence to another. For example, when people switched from hunting and gathering to settling down and planting crops, this brought about regular famines, epidemic diseases, greater social hierarchy, and wars involving large standing armies. It's hardly surprising that a lot of the mythology and religion that followed centered around the fall of man, battles among the gods, the apocalypse, and so on, rather than keeping on good terms with local plant and animal spirits.
The next shift in subsistence happened when agricultural people took up market-based industrial capitalism. A shift this massive introduces so many changes in people's daily lives that they can't help but write, paint, and sing about them -- not necessarily with the goal in mind of documenting these changes. For instance, the kids book Gorilla could not have been created in a world where there were no latchkey children to grow bored of their TV-babysitter and run off on a wild adventure with their toy gorilla as guide. (Think of how rare it was for the children of farmers and herders, let alone hunter-gatherers, to own toys, dolls, stuffed animals, etc., and how frequently these things play a role in the narratives of kids books.)
At some point the cultural innovation has more or less used up all of the great new stories to tell. During the hunter-to-farmer transition, we saw an explosion in new mythologies and religions -- and then it ground to a halt, with Islam being the last big religion to be invented. The farmer-to-laborer transition saw another burst of creativity, but that has stagnated in its turn.
And while on some level this awareness that culture won't be so spellbindingly fresh anymore is a bit of a downer, look back on the previous stagnation of brand new Big Stories -- people still found plenty in the ancient mythologies and religions to fascinate them for thousands of years, even to this day. And anyone who has made the effort to familiarize themselves with culture made before they were born knows how much fun stuff is already out there, so much that you probably won't be able to play with it all in your lifetime, let alone in enough depth to feel it growing old with you.
Looks to me like a chart of investment in children, not a chart of rate of social change.
ReplyDeleteHigh infant mortality, lots of chores on the farm, therefore no time for children's books.
Low rate of marriage formation, high paternity uncertainty, low paternal investment, mom is at work in human resources being banged on the desk in the corner office, therefore no time for children's books.
In the ancestral environment, it would often be to the advantage of both partners to commit themselves irrevocably, to give up some freedom in return for guarantees by the other: the man committing to support the women and her offspring forever, the woman committing herself to sleep with that man as he desires and with no one else, forever. However, since an individual woman is in no position to make such an agreement stick, such agreements are not made, because not believed.
Prisoner's dilemma problem: It would be to the advantage of both if both made commitments and stuck to them, but it is to the advantage of each to cheat.
Parental authority has to substitutes, and for parental authority to substitute, it may be advantageous for parents to restrict the freedom of the daughter by drastic means - such as binding her feet. The man gets a virgin who cannot run away, and in return makes commitments to the family of the virgin rather than the virgin - indefinite support for the virgin and offspring being part of that commitment.
Absent the ability to make binding commitments, and make them stick, and absent violent male coercion of women, human mating tends to the lek pattern or chimp pattern, where a few of the more desirable males impregnate the vast majority of the women, but do not contribute protection or support, and the rest of the males just seeth bitterly, which arrangement is not to the advantage of women and results in both male and female energies being directed to negative sum competition. Thus brutal parental coercion may well be to the reproductive advantage of parent and daughter. If women cannot credibly commit to always bang their husband, and to never bang a more desirable male than their husband, they are apt to wind up single or remain single, thus parental impositions on women that restrict their freedom of choice may well increase reproductive success. Such impositions on daughters are usually associated with equivalent impositions on males by older males - that is to say, shotgun marriages. The patriarch guarantees female fidelity, and demands guaranteed male support by the son in law, and is apt to get upset if that guarantee is broken.
In our society, marriage has not vanished, but it is on the way out, with 39% illegitimacy and 50% divorce rate.