Confidence and Fear: What Mass Society Believed About Itself

The idea

This unit's societies were the first that could read, buy and count themselves, and what they believed about themselves ran in two directions at once. The confidence was earned. Pasteur and Koch found the germs; sewers and water cut cholera; deaths from infection fell and children lived; steel, electricity and the telephone remade work; a French worker's buying power more than doubled, the anchor says, and the department store made luxury a habit. Literacy neared universal, and Darwin gave the first evidence-based account of life's history. The fear was the same knowledge turned inward. If nature killed the weak, then the poor, the drinker, the disabled and the stranger were the weak, and Spencer's phrase and the eugenists' scalpel followed. If the nation was a race, then the Jew who had been emancipated was a race apart, and Marr's league, the Protocols and the Dreyfus courtroom followed. If the home was woman's sphere, the woman who asked for property, person and the vote was a degenerate, and the force-feeding tube followed. Sixty million left Europe in these decades; the ones who stayed built the first mass culture and the first mass hatreds with the same paper and the same ink. The art witness shows painters leaving the Salon for light, then for feeling, then for broken form, as if they saw it coming. Unit thirteen follows the confidence overseas, where the civilizing mission and the raw-material hunger met people who had not been consulted.