The Great Flattening: 1948-1969
Look closely at the period between roughly 1950 and 1970. It is usually presented as an age of enormous progress. Television brought information and entertainment into the home. New technologies made life easier. Consumer goods became cheaper and more widely available. The sexual revolution promised greater freedom, while modern architecture and design promised a cleaner and more rational world.
Yet there was another side to this transformation.
Across very different areas of life, older forms were being discarded in favor of things that were easier to produce, easier to understand, easier to consume, and easier to adapt to the preferences of the individual. The change was not limited to one industry or one political movement. It appeared in the places where people lived, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the entertainment they watched, the way they understood marriage and sexuality, and eventually in the way they worshipped.
That is what I mean by the Great Flattening.
Consider architecture. For centuries, churches, civic buildings, monuments, and even ordinary houses had been built with an awareness of beauty, proportion, ornament, locality, and permanence. The postwar period increasingly treated buildings as problems of efficiency. Concrete, steel, and glass made it possible to construct quickly and cheaply, while older architectural languages were increasingly dismissed as obsolete. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation became one of the best-known symbols of this new approach.
Food underwent a similar transformation.
The American postwar economy made convenience a virtue in itself. Fast-food chains standardized what people ate and how it was prepared. Frozen dinners and other processed foods reduced preparation time even further. A meal increasingly became something that could be produced according to a repeatable system and consumed with minimal effort. The question was no longer simply whether food was good, nutritious, or connected to a particular place and tradition. Speed and convenience had become selling points in their own right.
Mass media accelerated the process. As television became a fixture in American homes, millions of people were exposed to the same programs, advertisements, celebrities, and cultural references. Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders drew attention to the increasingly sophisticated methods being used to influence consumers. Advertising was no longer merely informing people that a product existed. It was learning how to manufacture desire.
The consequences were not confined to the marketplace.
The postwar period also brought a profound change in attitudes toward the family and sexual morality. The contraceptive pill, approved in 1960, made it possible to separate sexual activity from its natural consequences to an extent that previous generations had never experienced. Within a few years, assumptions about marriage, chastity, motherhood, and the responsibilities attached to sexual relationships were being challenged on a massive scale.
The feminist movement developed within this same changing environment. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, became an important expression of dissatisfaction with the traditional expectations placed upon women. Whatever one thinks of Friedan’s conclusions, the larger cultural shift is undeniable: inherited ideas about the family and the roles of husband and wife were increasingly being subjected to the standard of individual fulfillment.
Even entertainment was changing. The older ideal of art as something capable of forming the imagination and directing the mind toward higher things increasingly competed with entertainment designed primarily to capture attention. The rise of television made this especially obvious. Culture could now be delivered continuously into the home, and commercial pressure naturally favored whatever could keep an audience watching.
Then there was the sanctuary.
The changes taking place in Catholic worship during these same decades cannot simply be understood as an isolated ecclesiastical development. They occurred in a society that was rapidly losing its patience with inherited forms of authority and increasingly demanding accessibility, participation, informality, and immediate intelligibility.
The traditional Roman liturgy belonged to a very different cultural world. Its language was not ordinary conversation. Its ceremonies were not designed around entertainment or personal preference. Silence was not an awkward gap that needed to be filled. The priest and people did not gather around a stage to create an experience. The entire structure of the rite directed attention toward the sacred mysteries being offered to God.
The newer approach was much more comfortable with the assumptions of the surrounding culture. The vernacular made the words immediately accessible. The priest’s actions became more visible. Dialogue and communal participation became more prominent. Familiarity replaced much of the deliberate distance and mystery that had characterized the older rite.
The question is not whether someone sat down in 1955 and decided to make a hamburger, a television program, a housing project, a marriage, and a Mass all conform to one master plan. History rarely works that neatly.
The more interesting question is why so many institutions were beginning to make the same basic move at roughly the same time.
Why did inherited forms increasingly need to justify themselves in terms of usefulness? Why did difficulty become something to be eliminated rather than something that might have a purpose? Why did mystery increasingly appear suspicious while accessibility became an unquestioned good?
Marshall McLuhan’s work is useful here, even though his subject was media rather than theology. In Understanding Media, he examined how new technologies alter not merely what people communicate but the habits of perception through which they experience the world. The medium itself begins to shape expectations.
That helps explain why the changes of this period should not be treated as unrelated curiosities.
A culture accustomed to instant food will naturally have different expectations about meals. A culture accustomed to television will develop different expectations about attention. A culture accustomed to mass-produced goods will become less attached to local variation and craftsmanship. A culture increasingly organized around individual choice will inevitably begin asking why inherited moral obligations should constrain personal desire.
And eventually those expectations reach the Church.
The deepest issue, then, may not be capitalism or socialism, feminism or consumerism, modern architecture or mass media considered individually. Those explanations describe parts of the story, but they do not quite explain why the same instinct appears in so many places.
The common thread is a growing preference for what is immediate and measurable over what is inherited and transcendent.
Anything that asks a person to submit himself to something greater than his own preferences begins to look unnecessarily difficult. Anything that demands patience, discipline, sacrifice, or reverence becomes a candidate for modernization.
That is why the hamburger matters.
It is not important because fast food is uniquely evil. It matters because it is an unusually clear example of a much broader cultural preference: eliminate unnecessary delay, standardize the process, make the result predictable, and give the consumer exactly what he wants with as little resistance as possible.
Once that principle becomes sufficiently powerful, it does not remain confined to restaurants.
It begins to influence architecture. Then entertainment. Then family life. And eventually, inevitably, it raises its head inside the sanctuary.
By 1969, the transformation was no longer difficult to see. The older cultural assumptions had been weakened enough that a new generation could take them for granted.
The world had not simply become more modern.
It had become flatter.