Nineteenth-Century Western Civilization (Essay Sample)

Nineteenth-Century Western Civilization
Name
Course
College
Tutor
Date
Nineteenth-Century Western Civilization
Factually, every society is endowed with institutions with a scrupulous pattern of self-reflection and self-description. In this case, modernity is viewed as an epoch representing the move from agrarian lifestyle towards capitalism, secularization and industrialization (Giddens, 2003). The society was drifting away from the traditional norms that held the society stringently together. This was an era of rebellion and breaking away from astute culture and the many laws that tethered people’s capacity and their creativity. Modernity espoused the feat of power-knowledge, the divorce between cultural sphere to cement global relations the change in the manner people understood how time and space relate and the cult of the new.
Modernity commenced with a radical break off from the traditional society and its cultural typecast. The traditional society accepted symbols and established order which was sanctioned by both fable and religion; on the contrary modernity spawned critical thinking. I was the major force of creativity and development. As such all the forms of social practices were reconsidered in the light of informed reason so as to evaluate their effectiveness. The triumph of formal prudence and calculative approach to the cosmos desacralized the world, inevitably leading to the disappearance of naive symbolism. As a consequent technology and science became the tools of comprehension leading to the conquest of the world. As contrasted with the medieval era, modernity generated a total divorce of the spheres of beauty, truth and good (Giddens, 2003).
As philosophy and science increased there was introduction of modern technologies such as the telegraph, new paper and other outlets of mass media. People shifted into modernism and embraced industrial capitalism. As modernity transitioned into its third phase modernist arts and individual creativity commenced a new modernist age, the era sought to combat oppressive politics, and other social and economic forces that were domineering(Giddens,2003). The artists broached the world as open t transformation through human intervention. There was the introduction of complex economic institutions and people were moving towards industrial production and a market economy. Politically, people were deviating from autocracy to a more liberal governance and mass democracy. As a result of these characteristics modernity became more dynamic than the other previous types of social order; society became complex which unlike the other previous cultures people focus on the future rather than past (Foucault, 2008).
On the downside, modernity used industry for the sake of the conquest of nature. There was introduction of capitalistic economy and military power based on new technology. The society moved from being communal minded to individualism. Modernity undermined the established traditional society and its culture, the western world birthed gradually spread the rational value standards born within its boundaries across the globe. The Western civilization was organized on the national state and produced new forms of universalism instilling them in the context of other cultures. Modernity came as a result of innovation; people had permanent desires to create...