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preface
Scientific progress has led more and more people to believe that human progress is an inevitable trend and develops linearly. This optimistic view came to be known as positivism.
Social theorists' analysis of industrial society
August Comte (1798-1857) had spread faith in the bright future of science. Comte believed that scientific discovery had gone through three stages of development—theological, metaphysical, and "empirical" (or scientific). Comte thought that the field he called "social science" would also have these three stages. He reasoned that society itself, like nature, could be studied through the scientific method, and its development could be outlined. Comte's positivism requires people to accumulate useful knowledge that will help social science students understand the laws of social development.
Positivists challenged some of the core tenets of the state church, especially those of the Catholic Church. Catholic theologians firmly believe that human nature is inherently constant. Darwinism (see chapter 18) denies the biblical claim that God created the world in seven days. The clergy of many sects and many others were horrified to think that humans might be descendants of apes. Intellectuals at that time, faced with drastic social change, saw that the society around them was changing, and tried to understand the structure of society. They use the model of natural science to objectively and systematically analyze observed social data.
Gradually, sociology developed as a social science, which posed the question: How can society continue to hold it together when economic and social forces try to disperse it? The problem itself manifests itself as a cultural crisis at the end of the century. In 1887, the German Ferdinand Tennes (1855-1936) published a seminal work, Community and Society, in which he attempted to combine the application of historical experience to understand the development of modern Western civilization.
Max Weber (1864-1920), one of the originators of modern social thought and sociology, was influenced by Tennis, and was attracted by the emergence of industrialized society and the growth of the state. Weber wanted to create an objective and "value-ree" social science that he believed was key to guiding the future. Weber trained as a law professor in Heidelberg and was interested in the relationship between religion and society.
Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism
In his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905), he defined the "capitalist spirit" as a concept that asserted that people were fulfilling their moral obligations as long as they worked hard in pursuit of profit. He linked the origins of capitalism to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Calvinists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Weber was aware of the tendency of the current structure of government to expand, with the state, business, and political systems leaning toward bureaucracy, which he saw as a sign of the triumph of rationalism advocated by the Enlightenment and the increasing refinement of social stratification.
But he also worries that in this era of impersonal bureaucracy on the move, state officials will ignore political and social ideals. Weber's eyes seem to be trapped in what he calls "the iron cage of modern life." Weber as a theorist lived in an anxious time, and he himself experienced a nervous breakdown at the turn of the century. During this era, doctors diagnosed more cases of hypochondria, "depression" and hysteria. Many people blame these paralyzing mental disorders on the complexity of modern life, which seems to stimulate the nervous system too strongly.
Neurasthenia seems to be characteristic of the era, with symptoms being sensitive to light and noise, the two hallmarks of urban life, as well as tiredness, worry and indigestion. Alcohol abuse is also a problem in many countries. In Britain, the habit of workers "drinking two beers every now and then" worries reformers. A researcher at the time said many workers spent a quarter of their income on drinking. Wine production in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal has risen sharply, flooding the market, causing prices to fall sharply.
In some parts of France, more than 60 gallons of wine are consumed per capita per year, in addition to beer, brandy and vermouth. At the turn of the century, nearly 500,000 businesses in France were allowed to sell alcohol, equivalent to one for every 54 people, compared with almost one bar for every 843 people in Britain. France's alcohol cessation movement is as powerless as a diminutive to stop the drinking spree. Nationalists, fearing that the birth rate was falling too fast, joined some doctors and reformers in claiming that France faced "racial degradation" as people could lose their ability to reproduce due to alcoholism.
Some doctors blamed women for not doing their part, so the French population increased slowly. This assertion that the rise of feminism faces its own obstacles is compounded by the assertion that it is even worse. Some women began to see themselves first and foremost as mothers in the Republic, and later demanded more rights. Nationalists insist that only by uniting people around patriotism can France avoid a complete collapse. The British alcohol cessation movement was earlier and much more violent than in France. The British and Swedish alcohol cessation movements were closely linked to the church, and in 1909 the Swedish drinking society had nearly 500,000 members who signed pledges to drink alcohol.
Unfortunately, opium and its derivatives morphine, opium tincture and heroin, as well as cocaine and hashijuana, also became part of the avant-garde movement, and most people realized much later how serious the consequences of these drugs could be. Drugs enter Europe from Turkey, Persia and India, while coca used to extract cocaine comes from Peru and Bolivia. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) smoked hashish, which may have influenced his fantastic rose-colored paintings between 1905 and 1908.
It took many years for the French government to ban drugs because of a series of drug-related suicides. Exotic occultism, mysticism, psychicism, and obsession with the occult are relatively less dangerous, and their popularity is unprecedented. This is another sign of a rejection of science and the associated fascination with irrationality. Modern life seems to prove that industrialization and urban development are making traditional values die out. Crime is on the rise.
In his quest to explain this phenomenon, the French social theorist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) believed that the rapid and seemingly uncontrollable growth of metropolises had destroyed the moral bonds that supported individuals in traditional societies. Durkheim believed that the decline of religious practice had undermined authority and, therefore, social cohesion. Durkheim quantified suicide and concluded that as people live more industrialized and urbanized, the stress and tension of this life becomes increasingly debilitating.
He argues that individuals overwhelmed by the featureless world of cities and industries will be "out of order." However, he is optimistic that systematic scientific research into social problems can solve these problems. Durkheim was not the only one who thought so: in the flood of rural populations, urban development gave birth to social pathologies, and crime was only one manifestation. In 1895, Gustave Le Pen (1841-1931) published The Rabble, in which he worried that modern life would drown the individual in the "rabble."
He has warned that riots and strikes are becoming part of the political process. He believes that the group is extremely unstable and sometimes dangerous, like drunk people. It just so happened that it was a time when there was a growing awareness of the dangers of alcoholism. Some nationalists fear that their people are being eroded by "racial degradation," which jeopardizes the natural process of evolution through genetic degradation. Some scientists claim that great racial differences can be found in certain particular ethnic groups that have led to soaring crime rates, alcoholism, madness, syphilis, and even popular political behavior. An Italian anthropologist believed that the offender had relatively poor physical and psychological development and claimed that these differences could be determined by measuring the skull.
Nietzsche's embrace of irrationality
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the philosopher who made the sharpest attack on the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche's father was a strict Protestant lawyer in Germany, and Nietzsche died when he was young. Nietzsche was raised by his domineering mother. When he grew up, he became a professor of classics in Basel, Switzerland. Suffering from illness, Nietzsche had to leave university and move to the Swiss Alps, where he made a living writing but with little success. At the age of 45, Nietzsche sent some friends a telegram signed "The crucified man" and suffered a nervous breakdown shortly thereafter.
He died shortly after being imprisoned in a mental hospital, and one joker commented: "He finally went where he needed to be." "Nietzsche abhorred all religions equally, believing that they destroyed the natural development and self-actualization of the individual by imposing an emphasis on consistency. He became an atheist, claiming that "God is dead... We've killed him." He tried to show that religion was not enough to provide moral guidance and that no morality applied to all.
Nietzsche believed in the need to "engage in philosophy with a hammer", and he looked forward to heroic figures, that is, a noble man, the "superman", who ruled over man through the "will to power". Both Hegel and Darwin believed that human beings could evolve to a higher level, and although Nietzsche's ideas were indirectly influenced by them, his ideas marked a complete rejection of all previous philosophies.
He believed that the so-called "life force" could only be found in new philosophers like him, and that such a life force idealized power and struggle was morally contradictory. Nietzsche wrote that free men "are warriors." But despite Nietzsche's talk of "master race" and "slave race" during a period of significant racist development, he denounced the herd-like instincts of fanatical German nationalists and anti-Semites.
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