CODA: THE FLASH FLOOD
technologized with the diffusion of forks and other specialized table implements. From a culture that took active pleasure in the sight of a dead animal on the table came a shift toward one in which “reminders that the meat dish has something to do with the killing of an animal are to be avoided to the utmost.’*.
Marriage became more than an economic convenience. War was amplified and put on the assembly line. Changes in the parent-child relationship, in opportunities for upward mobility, in every aspect of human relations brought for millions a radically changed sense of self.
Faced by so many changes, psychological as well as economic, political as well as social, the brain boggles at evaluation. By what criteria do we judge an entire civilization? By the standard of living it provided for the masses who lived in it? By its influence on those who lived outside its perimeter? By its impact on the biosphere? By the excellence of its arts? By the lengthened life span of its people? By its scientific achievements? By the freedom of the individual?
Within its borders, despite massive economic depressions and a horrifying waste of human life. Second Wave civilization clearly improved the material standard of living of the ordinary person. Critics of industrialism, in describing the mass misery of the working class during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, often romanticize the First Wave past. They picture that rural past as warm, communal, stable, organic, and with spiritual rather than purely materialist values. Yet historical research reveals that these supposedly lovely rural communities were, in fact, cesspools of malnutrition, disease, poverty, homelessness, and tyranny, with people helpless against hunger, cold, and the whips of their landlords and masters.
Much has been made of the hideous slums that sprang up in or around the major cities, of the adulterated food, disease-bearing water supplies, the poorhouses and daily squalor. Yet, terrible as these conditions unquestionably were, they surely represented a vast improvement over the conditions most of these same people had left behind. The British author John Vaizey has noted, “The picture of bucolic yeoman England was an exaggerated one,” and for significant numbers the move to the urban slum provided “in fact a dramatic rise in the standard of living, measured in terms of length of life, of a rise in the physical conditions of housing, and an improvement in the amount and variety of what they had to eat”
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