THE THIRD WAVE
school. He got his basic image of the world from the mass media. He worked for a large corporation or public agency, belonged to unions, churches, and other organizations—to each of which he parceled out a piece of his divided self. He identified less and less with his village or city than with his nation. He saw himself standing in opposition to nature—exploiting it daily in his work. Yet he paradoxically rushed to visit it on weekends. (Indeed, the more he savaged nature, the more he romanticized and revered it with words.) He learned to see himself as part of vast, interdependent economic, social, and political systems whose edges faded into complexities beyond his understanding.
Faced with this reality, he rebelled without success. He fought to make a living. He learned to play the games required by society, fitted into his assigned roles, often hating them and feeling himself a victim of the very system that improved his standard of living. He sensed straight-line time bearing him remorselessly toward triemture with its waiting grave. And as his wristwatch ticked off the moments, he approached death knowing that the earth and every individual on it, including himself, were merely part of a larger cosmic machine whose motions were regular and relentless.
Industrial Man occupied an environment that would have been in many respects unrecognizable to his ancestors. Even the most elementary sensory signals were different.
The Second Wave changed the soundscape, substituting the factory whistle for the rooster, the screech of tires for the chirruping of crickets. It lit up the night, extending the hours of awareness. It brought visual images no eye had ever seen before—the earth photographed from the sky, or surrealist montages in the local cinema, or biological forms revealed for the first time by high-powered microscopes. The odor of night soil gave way to the smell of gasoline and the stench of phenols. The tastes of meat and vegetables were altered. The entire perceptual landscape was transformed.
So too was the human body, which for the first time grew to what we now regard as its full normal height; successive generations grew taller than their parents. Attitudes toward the body changed as well. Norbert Elias tell us in The Civilizing Process that, whereas up to the sixteenth century in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, “the sight of total nakedness was an everyday rule,”nakedness came to be regarded as shameful when the Second Wave spread. Bedroom behavior changed as special nightclothes came into use. Eating became
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