Timothy J. Bertoni and Patrick D. Nolan

Academic Paper

Timothy J. Bertoni and Patrick D. Nolan are sociologists at the University of South Carolina. In their academic research study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Sociation Today, Bertoni and Nolan use data collected from New York Times obituaries ranging from 1850 to 2000 to test their hypothesis that our society has become more secular and hedonistic. This excerpt presents the authors’ sources in APA documentation style, which is commonly used in sociology and other social sciences. To view the authors’ full analysis and the charts compiling their data, visit the original source. Read the excerpt, and then respond to the critical reading questions that follow.

1

Although the specific names will vary, everyone can recite from memory a list of famous or infamous figures from the past—Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Sir Isaac Newton, Madame Curie, Galileo, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell—people whose names live on because of the notable achievements or discoveries th ey made. But we also recall others such as P.T. Barnum, Sally Rand, Annie Oakley, and “Buffalo Bill” Cody, people known largely for their “celebrity.” This raises the question: Have we always been obsessed with celebrity and celebrities, or is this a product of the increased disposable income and leisure afforded by advancing industrial technology? To address this question, we develop a quantitative measure of the cultural attention directed toward celebrities and achievers, and use it to explore trends across the 20th Century.

2

Advancing industrialization has produced concomitant trends of increasing technological productivity and declining rates of population growth. Together they have produced a more than thirteen-fold growth in real per capita wealth and income in the United States since 1870 (Nolan & Lenski 2009, p. 219). Anecdotally, this increasing income “surplus” appears to have enabled the population to shift its attention away from issues of survival and subsistence and toward leisure, entertainment, and amusement—more secular “hedonistic” pursuits. At the same time, science, technology, and secular ideologies have greatly undermined and eroded the influence of theistic religions (Nolan & Lenski 2009, p. 237).

3

Increasing per capita wealth and increasing leisure time have offered the opportunity for more people to indulge in more hedonistic urges and pursuits, and, this, in turn, has created a growing number of occupations that cater to these pursuits. We believe that, together, these trends may have fundamentally transformed American culture.

4

If they have, we would expect this transformation to manifest itself in observable “collective representations” (e.g., Durkheim 1895/1982), and, a reasonable place to look for evidence of this is in the popular mass media, more specifically, editorially-chosen and prominently-featured published obituaries. If the cultural importance of secular hedonism has increased, we would expect that there would be a concomitant increase in the relative proportion of “celebrity,” (e.g., athletes, actors, entertainers) and a decline in religious (e.g., clergy) and “producer” (e.g., scientists, industrialists, and inventors) obituaries. Such a trend (social fact) would reflect either a shift in the editorial judgment of the press, since featured obituaries reflect editors’ twin judgments of the individual’s “importance” and of the potential reader interest in them, a shift in the relative numbers of people employed in these occupational categories, or some combination of the two.

5

The pursuit of pleasure, hedonism, has unquestionably been an aspect of all human societies. But its form, direction, and scale have varied greatly. Art history suggests that religious art, music and ceremony dominated entertainment in the middles ages, while secular activities predominate in advanced industrial societies today. This shift is not simply a shift in individual tastes, but an institutional shift organized around a growing market economy, political liberty, and slowing population growth. In our opinion, the growing prominence of, and attention directed toward, entertainers, actors, and star athletes is merely a collective representation of this underlying socio-cultural change.

6

We hypothesize, therefore, that with advancing industrialization and the growing economic surplus it produces, there will be a growing proportion of obituaries for secular hedonistic occupations and a declining proportion of obituaries of religious, scientific, and industrial figures. We will test our hypothesis with data obtained from The New York Times—”The Newspaper of Record.”

Measures and Methods

7

We will test our arguments with three sets of hypotheses. The first hypothesis in each set is the “weaker” form, which merely posits proportional changes in the obituaries of people in certain occupational categories. The second is the “stronger” form, which posits, further, that the change is greater than the change in the relative numbers of people employed in such occupations. Thus, support for the second would imply that the change is the result of greater (or lesser) importance and attention being accorded to the activity/occupational category, not simply changes in the relative number of people employed in them.

Hypotheses:

8

Data to test the hypotheses were gathered from The New York Times obituaries and Statistical Abstracts of the United States. We first briefly review a special feature on “notable deaths” in 1852 (published in January of 1853), and then sample obituaries for the years 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000. Since the U.S. is argued to have crossed the industrial threshold about 1870 (Nolan & Lenski 2009, p. 197), we have a snapshot of the state of affairs in a late pre-industrial phase and a systematic sample of changes across succeeding phases/degrees of industrialization. By tracing the distributions of obits over time, it may be possible to trace the state of these social facts through this period.…

[Eds. Note: To review the authors’ analysis of the data and view charts that compile the results, go to the original source.]

To Summarize

9

H1a is strongly supported. Celebrity obits increase in all years, reaching 28 percent in 2000, the largest percentage for any category in all times examined.

10

H1b is strongly supported. The increasing prominence of celebrity obits clearly outpaces changes in employment—with the lagged ratio reaching nearly 28, and the contemporaneous ratio, more than 31! By far, the most striking and consistent trend in the focal occupational categories is the increase in the ratios for the celebrity occupations.

11

H2a is substantially supported. After increasing modestly from 1900 to 1950, religious obituaries plummet to zero in 2000, the only occupational category, in any year, to have zero obits.

12

H2b is substantially supported. Religious obituaries, highly overrepresented in 1925 and 1950, drop substantially in 1975, and as noted above are zero in 2000.

13

H3a receives some support. Manufacturing obituaries peak in 1950, but by the end the century are only a third of the level they were at its beginning. Business and finance obituaries basically hold steady (or increase slightly) from 1900 through 1975, but then drop substantially in 2000.

14

H3b receives mixed support. Greatly underrepresented overall, the trend in contemporaneous and lagged ratios for manufacturing and industry is essentially flat, while both ratios for business and finance steadily and substantially decreased across the time period examined.

Discussion

15

These results show substantial support for our predictions. Most striking are the concomitant increases in celebrity, and declines in religious obituaries, documenting the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture, together with its shift away from concern with issues of subsistence. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we turn increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.

16

As a result, the power of celebrities has also dramatically increased. As Mills (1956/2000, p. 4) wrote, “If such celebrities are not at the head of any dominating hierarchy, they do often have the power to distract the attention of the public or afford sensations to the masses, or, more directly, to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power.” Additional evidence of celebrities gaining access to power are the notable careers of Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the influence of U2’s Bono and Oprah Winfrey, just to name a few. The author Alan Schroeder (2004) details more of these relationships of celebrities with political power in his book Celebrity-In-Chief. These elites with their increasing influence, and public attention, have filled the vacuum created by the declining influence of (theistic) religious elites and other institutions. In the process, “factoids,” “sound bites,” “infotainment,” and “arguing heads” have blurred the line between news (information) and entertainment and replaced reasoned debate (to the extent it existed anywhere outside our imagination) with noise and distraction....

17

Finally, it has been suggested that an alternative explanation for rising hedonism, as we have measured it here, is that hedonism is just being “outsourced.” Hedonism itself is not on the rise; rather, individuals, instead of producing their own music, art, and films, are now buying it on a market and thereby are creating and financing entertainment and sports celebrities. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, however the spectacular increases in more personalized, individual hedonistic activities and paraphernalia (e.g., YouTube, Facebook,Wii, podcasting, blogging, “flashmobs”) suggest that consideration of this dimension further might only serve to magnify the trends observed here, for these venues and technologies of self-entertainment were not available in the past, even for the wealthiest and most privileged members of society. Their very existence, thus, further supports our argument.

18

In advanced industrial societies more people are able to purchase secular pleasures and thus sustain a vast and differentiated secular hedonistic industry. More people are more engaged in pursuing a greater variety and volume of entertainment and are less concerned with issues of subsistence and mere survival. Hedonism has been discussed by thoughtful people as early as ancient Greece, where it received its name. But in the past, it has been viewed largely a matter of individual choice. While we do not reject the importance of such micro level processes, in this study we have taken a more macroscopic view, taking seriously Durkheim’s (1895/1982) argument that social facts have an external objective reality. Our findings of increasing celebrity, and declining religious and producer, obituaries document a macro-social trend of increasing hedonism and declining religiosity, at least in one advanced industrial society. As we noted above, we believe our argument differs dramatically from the secularization thesis so strongly critiqued by Stark (1999), but should he, or others, disagree, the evidence presented here would suggest that reports of its death are greatly exaggerated.

References

Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of sociological method. (S. Lukes, Ed.; W. D. Halls, Trans.) New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1895)

Mills, C. W. (2000). The power elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1956)

Nolan, P. & Lenski, G. (2009). Human societies: An introduction to macrosociology. (10th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Nolan, P. & Lenski, G. (2009). Studying human societies: A primer and guide: A student study guide. (10th ed.). Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Schroeder, A. (2004). Celebrity-in-chief: How show business took over the White House. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Stark, R. (1999). “Secularization, R.I.P.” Sociology of Religion, 60, 249-273.

Stark, R. (2011). The triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus movement became the world’s largest religion. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/dpB005C6IJZA

Reprinted by permission of Sociation Today.

Source: http://www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v101/dead.htm

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