This is shamelessly inspired by a KnowledgeHub video on YouTube, which nonetheless raises an interesting point which can be extended. I’ll summarise the argument of the video first, then move further.
KnowledgeHub’s view of decades is that they’re an exclusively twentieth Christian century phenomenon characterised by popular culture and consumerism, which began in earnest in the 1920s when a wide range of people began to have a fair bit of disposable income. Then there was the Depression, when nobody had any money again and therefore there was little consumerism. This was followed by the War, which dominated popular culture as can be seen, for instance, in military-inspired fashion and films such as ‘Casablanca’. This was followed by the Baby Boom and the return of disposable income which led to the advent of a decade often appealed to as some kind of ideal time, though not by all, and the rise of rock music and its associated youth culture. His thesis includes the notion that the decades also focus on the young. The boomers reached adolescence in the ’60s, with the rise of the counterculture, then in the ’70s, as some of them settled down and had children, a secondary boomer generation arose referred to as Generation X. This decade, the ’70s, was accompanied by an economic downturn and ended with the breakdown of the Postwar Consensus, followed by the ’80s, which once again involved people splashing cash around a lot and the evolution of production-line film making which targetted their audiences more precisely. Then in the ’90s a fragmentation began which meant there was a strong hindsight association mainly with grunge because this dominated the early part of the decade before this had begun. The fragmentation continued into the twenty-first century where experiences of popular culture became more individual due to the increasing ability to produce media oneself and successfully find works which were to one’s personal taste. In the meantime, the aftermath of 9/11 had a major influence. As for the 2010s, and here the decade is too recent for hindsight either to pin it down precisely or to caricature it, social media came to dominate and this had a more long-lasting influence and broadened appeal beyond youth. It also accelerated changing trends, which made it harder for particular movements in music and the like to be marketed effectively, so the media companies turned to nostalgia in order to cash in on older generations. This will work for a while, but the time will come when there’s nobody left to be nostalgic about anything because no-one will remember when decades had their distinctive atmospheres, and social media seem to be permanent.
That’s the summary of the thesis. Now I don’t want to turn this into a simple parroting of “wot that bloke sed in that video”, so I will broaden this out somewhat. I would say that from about the middle of the 2010s it felt like the future was becoming less predictable, to me at least, with for example the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s victory, both of which seemed to have similarities. Also, it’s instructive to look back into the nineteenth century, and perhaps further, to identify other trends, and to broaden this beyond popular culture into wider political and social happenings.
Looking back at the start of the twentieth century in what was then the British Empire, we have a period close to a decade which we refer to as the “Edwardian Era”. The use of the word “era” to refer to relatively short periods of time seems incongruous to me, possibly because I learnt it first from its geological application. The average length of the three eras of the Phanerozoic Eon is 180 million years, and even the short Cenozoic Era has lasted 66 million years so far. Historical eras are bound to be much shorter but I can’t help feeling the word is overused and refers to ever shorter periods of time. Then again, the eras of the early Universe were only supposed to last tiny fractions of a second, so maybe not. However, maybe it makes sense for the word to do this due to accelerating change. Nonetheless, the “Edwardian Era” was only nine years long, and over a century ago, making it difficult to fit into this tendency. It really amounts to an oddly-labelled decade, more or less, and brings to mind the preceding sixty-four years of the Victorian Era, again in the Empire as opposed to elsewhere in the world. However, preceding the Edwardian Era was the “Gay Nineties”, also apparently known as the “Naughty Nineties”, although I only know the former term, and which even now is associated in my mind with ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’, from 1891. The 1890s were also known as the “Mauve Decade” because of the invention and use of aniline dye by Henry Perkin in 1856 at the age of eighteen when he was trying to synthesise quinine. It’s notable that it took over three decades to become trendy. Maybe that was just the pace of things at the time.
The trigger is said to be the Second Industrial Revolution, which was the development of a second wave of innovations following on from the first phase, which had plateaued a few decades earlier. It was underway roughly from 1870 to 1890 and involved improvements in agricultural productivity, rail travel, the invention of the internal combustion engine and the telephone and these and other events all worked together to improve potential standards of living. The record player was invented in the 1870s and cinematography in the 1890s, and these two alone would go on to have major influences on popular culture. The aforementioned aniline dyes are part of this too. However, it took a while after these inventions for them to be widely used and penetrate society. Cinema, for example, although a major influence eventually, would have begun as a mere curiosity, and you can easily imagine people saying sound recording and films would be a flash in the pan and never catch on.
In terms of design, one early influence which can be identified easily is the Arts And Crafts movement. This was a reaction against industrialisation and mass production and lauded the artisan, and was of course led by William Morris. It led to the Edwardian Art Nouveau, and could also be understood as a “back to nature” movement. William Morris’s own ‘News From Nowhere’, published in 1890, espouses libertarian socialism in response to Bellamy’s more state-oriented vision as expressed in ‘Looking Backward’. It’s interesting that the advent of consumer culture was preceded by this very different version of how things might be, and it’s conceivable that everything that happened afterwards has an element of “bread and circuses” about it. Nonetheless, like most other people I do feel an emotional attachment and strong interest in popular culture.
I can certainly see that the apparent acceleration of change would “shrink” the decades. The Arts And Crafts Movement was a reaction to the kind of trends which were epitomised by the Great Exhibition of 1851, and continued until at least the 1890s. If Art Nouveau is seen as part of it, it lasted even longer and in other parts of the world it was still current in the 1920s. This is seven decades, an entire lifetime for many at the time. The gradual infiltration of recorded sound and cinema into popular culture also took several decades, and the advent of radio was significant. It’s also interesting to note that in the US, the hit parade precedes ours by a decade and a half, beginning in January 1936. Here in Britain it began in November 1952, which precedes rock and roll, and that genre of music is a response to the creation of the charts themselves. I’m not sure when the charts ceased to have much real meaning because I’m old, but I would say it was after the Spice Girls, which rather neatly places it near the end of the twentieth century. This in itself could be seen as a barometer for the times because the advent of MP3 downloads and YouTube probably did for them in terms of them having much significance. I remember in the mid-‘noughties not realising that Dido’s ‘White Flag’ was at number one and getting the erroneous impression that I’d “discovered” it. Apparently that was in September 2003, so that fragmentation does seem to date it to around the end of the century and the consequences of widespread online access and always on internet connections.
If accelerating change, which has been a tendency probably for centuries now if not longer, destroys decades, this suggests there would’ve been a point at which the rate of change matched the decade perfectly, although oddly it might have been an instantaneous inflection on a curve. This would mean that there would be a most “decady” decade at some point, and I have a feeling this was the 1960s although I’m not sure. This would then presumably mean that the 1970s would show a more notable change of Zeitgeist between the early and late halves. It also means that my preferred division of dating into twelve-year cycles would place the most “cyclical” cycle slightly earlier, unless there’s a psychological and marketing influence on what a decade is. I also wonder if the growing awareness of a vast interval of time in the new millennium influenced us to think more in the long term, or perhaps simply to lose track, and the difficulty in referring to what I call the ‘noughties but others call the 2000s, which is more ambiguous, might lead to a kind of vagueness about the “Decade That Dare Not Speak Its Name”. Then we have the issue of thinking of our own lives as having teenage years, and we then have a shorter stretch of time we might call the “‘teens” from 2013 to 2019.
Using the dozen-year division based on the duodecimal system could have the effect of slicing time up into slightly larger sections which might reveal the influence of marketing. The gross of years which ended half-a-dozen years back in 2016 began in 1872 if we stick to the round numbers rather than use the “+1” approach of naming centuries, and in fact decades don’t match centuries perfectly either because although 2000 is the last year of the twentieth century, it’s also the first year of the ‘noughties. The twelve-year intervals are then: 1872, 1884, 1896, 1908, 1920, 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992 and 2004. Doing this extends the period back to before decades really becoming a “thing” and perhaps out the other side to when they stopped having much meaning. This list of numbers also reminds me of the feeling that there is always a year in a decade which seems to epitomise it, and that oddly that year rarely ends in a 5. There’s 1933, 1945, 1955, 1968, 1977, 1984 and 1999. This might just be me of course, but I can make an argument for the focus on 1984, as stimulated by Orwell, and the protests of the ’60s peaking in 1968. Two of those numbers also coincide with the start of decades. The span from 1980 to 1992 is bounded by the year Reagan was elected and the year John Major was returned to Parliament by the “Shy Tories”, which perhaps describes a trajectory beginning with proud support for what was seen as freedom, reaching a crescendo with the “greed is good” rhetoric and then becoming something people were quite ashamed of but still quietly supported. This takes it somewhat away from popular culture.
There is another way of looking at decades as somewhat shorn of the movies, fashion, music and the like associated with them, although of course these things form an organic whole and can’t be entirely separated. This is in terms of time periods when particular historical events and social changes occurred. Going way back, the fourteenth century was a period of crisis for Mediæval Europe which can fairly easily be regimented into shorter intervals. The 1310s were characterised by poor weather for farming, crop failures and severe famines, and this seems to have led directly to generally poor health and particular susceptibility to the Black Death in the 1340s and ´50s. A couple of centuries earlier, the Crusades marked a particular episodic pattern which would have made the 1090s, 1140s, 1190s, 12000s and 1210s quite distinctive, particularly involving young men and in the last case children, who were sold into slavery. More recently, the English Civil War and Commonwealth period and the Regency spring to mind, covering the 1640s, 1650s and 1810s. The reign of Edward VII is closely identified with a particular decade, suggesting that the monarch used to be considered as bestowing a particular character on a period, though not a decade. This would enable the times of the following sovereigns to be identified with decades: Ælfred (890s), William Rufus (1090s), Richard the Lionheart (1190s – closely associated with a Crusade), Henry IV (1410s), Edward IV (1460s), William and Mary (1690s), George IV (1820s) and of course Edward VII (1900s). These are just coincidences of course but they do lend particular decades a certain distinctive character. Altogether there are fourteen of these including the famine and Plague examples, but social change was very slow most of the time before the Industrial Revolution.
An argument exists that technological change is slowing down, because the differences made to lifestyle from 1920 to 1970 were much larger than from 1970 onwards. Such a deceleration might be expected to “kill” the idea of distinctive decades by extending the period over which changes are likely to have an impact. Moore’s Law contradicts this, but seems to have ceased to operate. It’s also been suggested that mobile devices have reached some kind of peak beyond which it isn’t necessary to go any further, or rather, that new capabilities would probably not be popular but would be more likely to be perceived long-term as gimmicks or just not worth paying for. Televisions have also reached the stage where increasing resolution will make no difference to picture quality because the angular diameter of individual pixels at a sensible viewing distance is now smaller than the resolution of human colour vision (human monochrome vision is lower resolution anyway). All that said, it often seems to the people living in a particular time that they are ultra-modern and no more innovation is possible except the apparent fads which end up changing the world.
What if there’s a combination of increasing and decreasing rate of change though? Pure deceleration of change might be expected to lead to homogenised decades. This would be a bit like the unifying effect ‘Andy Pandy’ might have on our childhood memories, as only twenty-six episodes were made and it was then repeated in a cycle between 1950 and 1970, and continued to be shown until 1976, but across the board. Maybe twenty-year or quarter-century periods would then become more important. On the other hand, trends and fads are now so short and fragmented that they are much briefer in nature. Is it perhaps that we no longer notice the big picture because the little details and the short term have become more attention-grabbing? Certainly we have less in the way of unifying experience, although the pandemic probably is one.
Maybe, then, what’s happening is that we no longer have popular culture-based flavours of decade, but we still have social and historical change-based decades. I wonder also if the changes were partly fuelled by baby boomers and the events leading up to them. The roaring twenties were a time when it was genuinely believed there would never be another recession. This came crashing down at the end of that decade, leading to the exploitation of hard times by fascists and Nazis, and through them the Second World War. This chain of events easily gave the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s their own characters. Then came the baby boom, and with it an attempt to put the genie of women in the workplace back in the lamp by encouraging domesticity, leading to the combined ’50s boom in teenage culture and rock and roll along with the “cosy” feel attributed by some to that decade. Then, in the 1960s, the boomers were teenagers and young adults and the acme of the attitudes of the young became manifest. Towards the end of that decade, the boomers had children of their own, ensuring a future of a second boom with further significant consequences. The ’70s were like a hangover as the ideals of the ’60s turned out not to work, and the ’80s marked the Generation X children of the boomers reaching adulthood, although this was more smeared out because people don’t all have children at the same age. In the ’90s, Gen-Xers were kind of settling down, to the extent that we could, and we had the even more diffusely distributed Millenials and Gen-Zers. In the meantime, people all have to cope with an ageing population, leading to resentment of the boomers and perhaps a reduction in disposable income. So ultimately, maybe one thing that’s happening is that the effects of the Second World War on the ages of the population are just getting more diffuse, leading to a return to the situation which existed before, where there was childhood and then adultood, due to a more even range in ages in the population.
I don’t know. Are the decades over? Why or why not? What do you think?
A Box Of Chocolates 