1. Increasing mechanization and materialization in the West as a result of the Industrial Revolution. This dovetails neatly with American pragmatism. America rose to prominence as an Industrial powerhouse in the 19th century for its fearless conquering spirit and single-minded attention to mass-production. The American Protestant outlook favored none of the Catholic metaphysical, spiritualist mumbo jumbo; hard work paid off not by spiritual uplift but money in the bank. Nominal Christians, we nevertheless distrust too much religious enthusiasm. God rewards sensible minded folk who keep their enthusiasm a private affair and spend their hours in the sphere of human toil and material gain.
2. The success of empiricism and its concomitant materialist assumptions vis-à-vis the acquisition of knowledge. There can be little doubt that modern science is unthinkable without an essentially empiricist framework. None of the modern luxuries and freedoms would be possible without the rigor of testing hypotheses against data collected and sorted, analyzed and categorized. We see this tendency influencing education reform nowadays with its focus on outcomes assessment, based on a business model which values that which works above all else. Knowledge today is not sought from spiritual advisors but from empirical testing. Not a day goes by when some study or other is not trumpeted in the press infallibly suggesting the truth as we have known it is flawed, incomplete, or flat out wrong.
3. The victory of the worldly over the spiritual as our inheritance from Renaissance individualism. Even those unwilling to divorce themselves from religious values would be hard pressed to put their faith entirely above when it comes to the settling of practical affairs. Today’s most valued professions are those of a worldly, physical nature: law, business, medicine, science. We have little to no room for the poet, the seer, the shaman healer in today‘s mechanistic-materialistic milieu.
4. Capitalism as the engine propelling forward the science & technology mill. Marxism as a sociopolitical experiment has largely failed; there remains today no true challenger to the capitalist ethos. Mankind is engaged in a never-ending quest for material gain---more wealth, more power, more fame. While the capitalist mindset provides the physical basics, it offers little sustenance for the heart, soul, or mind.
5. It should go without saying that our enslavement to technology is concomitant with the cult of the “new”--this manifests itself in not just material gain but also the new in a metaphorical sense--new fame (celebrities), new age (youth), new social customs (fads). The capitalist machine thrives on convincing the consumer that what is needed to make life complete is something bigger and better than what came before when the truth is, as many studies have borne out, happiness levels off after a certain degree of material attainment. What is needed is not more of the same but a new way of looking at the world around one.
6. Perhaps a result of the above materialist focus has been the death of the liberal education and the old medieval trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic as subjects useful in themselves went out well in the early days of the 20th century. Today I doubt even the Catholic schools teach them. The materialist questions their practical relevance and easily dispenses with that which does not proffer immediate and quantifiable material gain. School teachers in the 1960s tossed out grammar on the evidence of a few studies indicating (not conclusively, it must be said) it had little to no impact on writing remediation. And logic nowadays is the otiose domain of the mathematicians and philosophers leaving specious rhetoric, that wily manipulator, as the sole province of the humanist.
7. It must be admitted to a large extent that recent ridiculous excesses in the humanities have brought upon the field its own demise: specifically, political correctness and otiose critical theory. There was a time in the 90s when one couldn’t open a newspaper without some uproar over date rape debated, ethnic sensitivities offended, or multicultural hoopla paraded for all to see. The victim mentality, buffeted by moral and philosophic relativism favored by so much modern poststructuralist theory, replaced the old verities propounded by, to use the once fashionable jargon of the English depts., the Anglo, heterosexist, phallocentric old guard. The devotion of English depts. (formerly custodians of sensible and hardheaded moral authority) to obtuse, recondite French theorists, where erstwhile truth was fiction, perspective mere perception, was essentially at odds with clear-headed Anglo-American values. In the end, it proved to be a grave misstep. Science did not build its reputation by ignoring or dismissing the past but by building upon it and only discarding antiquated notions when they became barriers to understanding or when incapable of withstanding the scrutiny of empirical observation. The combination of impenetrable, jargon-riddled prose and relativist (a)moralism was a recipe for disaster (most devastatingly realized in the Sokol Affair), convincing many that if they had doubts about the relevance of humanism before, recent events had all but confirmed them. The prestige of the humanities has never recovered since.
It would be simplistic to put this in terms of the Stanley Kowalski hardheaded mindset triumphing over the Blanche du Boises of the world. The physicists and those of their ilk are not by necessity dull, insensitive brutes; similarly, not all humanists are silly airheads who mistake rhetorical excess for profound complexity. But the comparison does yield a certain blunt veracity. The war waged, the victor emerged triumphant, dwarfing his poor, enfeebled humanistic relation in stature and public trust.
Stanley: Oh, you're the, a teacher, aren't you?
Blanche: Yes.
Stnaley: What do you teach?
Blanche: English.
Stanley: Oh, I never was a very good Engish student.
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