Naturalists study nature, based on Darwin.
The human is not "special," but subject to the same laws of nature, the same reality of natural selection. "Survival of the fittest" used as a justification for amorality. Because a species cannot adapt to a changing environment or condition, it dies out. The extension of this idea to individuals can be used to justify any behavior, since the very fact of one animal, person, or ideology being killed indicates that it is unfit for survival. This can proceed logically to a ruthless selfishness. Abandoned by morality, and even God, in the face of science, a moral relativism and reductivism predominates. A psychological transformation in the ethics of human behavior helps signal a change in direction away from the idea that an individual is responsible for his or her own actions. Their subconscious and conditioning have more to do with this. the accident of their birth delimits the trajectory of their potentiality. Chance and "fitness" come to the forefront in the justifications of unequal social hierarchies. This can be used to argue anything from social control to euthenasia to genocide. The "shock of the modern" begins to shake loose the old idealisms.
The triumph of science. "The aimless blade of science slashed the pearly gates."
Freud: 1900.
Television:
Radio: 1888-1896
Electricity: Alternating Current: 1886; The first modern commercial power plant using three-phase alternating current was at the Mill Creek hydroelectric plant near Redlands, California in 1893 designed by Almirian Decker
Light Bulb: ~1879
Motion Pictures: Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest film, by Louis Le Prince, 1888
Internal Combustion Engine: late 1870's-90's
First automobiles sold by Karl Benz: 1888
Flight: 1903
TNT used in weapons: 1910
dynamite: 1866.
telephone: 1876
phonograph: 1877; gramophone: 1887
Fabian Society: 1884
Social Progress: Early sociocultural evolution theories—the theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously but independently of Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much criticised theories like social Darwinism, and scientific racism, used in the past to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery, and to justify new policies such as eugenics.
The casting of doubt upon much of this came as a direct result of the seemingly meaningless carnage of WWI. Modernism began as a projection of futuristic progress, limitless possibility of technology. When much of this new technology, in chemistry and related fields, was used to inflict wholesale death on Europe, the idealism of technology was quickly problematized, and Modernism looked inward, toward the psychological and away from the social, to find answers. Jazz, the Avant Garde, Dada, surrealism, followed. The loss of a moral center to life marked realism and naturalism, but the loss of a scientific hopefulness marked the beginning of the 20th century's most tenacious problem: alienation. An antidote was suggested by Marx, and his response was revolution and socialism. The bitterness of life in urban industrialism guaranteed an equally brutal reaction. It's Newton's third law of mechanics: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
one becomes separate from self, separate from community, and is left alone, seeking in vain for consolation. This gives free reign to any behavior, and the necessity arose to create an aesthetic morality, one that condemned various behaviors as barbaric. Barbarism was, prior to this, a distance from God. Then, it was savagery, unevolved, brute man, closer to ape than god. this gave rise to the "superman" theories of George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hitler, etc. The exposure of human venality in industry by the muckrakers fueled the imagination of many artists, including London. The idea of a mass progress of society found difficulty in historical realities, and so the individual, with a personal "code," became dominant in American Literature. Hemingway, especially. After WWII, he killed himself. The postmodern anti-hero, Salinger's Holden Caulfield. Suicide is the question. The moral question. There is no longer any law 'gainst self-slaughter. It seems a moral tradeoff, no better than an approximation. "First, do no harm." Only by abdicating one's existence can one arrest the necessary parasitism, predation, and psychological violence intrinsic to life in society. Perhaps returning to an original state, wild, apart from civilization, would provide one with an authentic ethics. The original necessity is to live, pure and simple, and to perpetuate the species. Violence, sex, toil, luck, invention, and intelligence--not theoretical, but practical--form the ground rules for existence.
Experience of life, pitting a protagonist in a primal struggle for survival, the dramatic constructs of Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. Self almost become one and the same, for man is nature, a small, practically insignificant part of nature, an organism, food for wolves or vultures. There is no room, in this worldview, for Grace of God, or Faith in God, for it is a cold struggle, Man Alone, forsaken by the consolation of his invented religions and fairy tale of being "chosen" or "saved," or even "moral," for ideas like "good" or "evil" are exposed as survival mechanisms, designed to keep the species intact and impose social control on brutish, devious omnivores.
The concept, prevalent at the same time, of evolution as a movement forward, to a better life, a more civilized human population, seems to be in direct contrast to this view of Man as Beast. The primal truth of "survival of the fittest" provides, in fact, a great richness of characteristics which could lead to any number of conclusions. An individual could be elevated or degraded. Conditions seem to determine which. "Been Down So Long, It Looks Like Up to Me." The violent and selfish behavior at the core of human desire can render an individual either more or less fit, depending on the circumstance. An individual who acts too anti-socially can be "culled from the herd" as an unfit member of society. The main idea, then, of the Naturalists is that there is no particular direction toward which the individual or the species is headed. Progress is blind. There is no predetermined salvation or benevolent benefactor of humankind. God is not looking out for us. Where we end up is chance, probability, struggle, and adaptation. Many characters in Naturalist literature simply have no future. They exist as animals, in the moment, in their pleasure or pain. Plans or assumptions are destroyed by circumstances. The "get rich quick" motivation leads to destruction: in the North and the West.
I need examples of all these things. I have a framework. I can give a task, and they can bring it to pass. A mini-research project. Look into the time period, find a connection between an author, one of those who write about naturalism, and their time. Print something? hmm. We could try it. time now for sleep.
modernism.
postmodernism: nuclear weapons. television.
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