Institutionalized Industrialism Quotes

“The profound meanings of the colors is something that was an integral part of all the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, China and Tibet, as well as the traditional cultures of the Native American Indians, and even the medieval Europeans. For all those thousands of years, symbolic colors functioned as basic building blocks in the world view of most of the religions on Earth. For all those thousands of years. the colors of the cardinal directions (North, East, South, West), and the colors of the primary elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water) were filled with cosmic significance. When these people chose a color to wear around their finger or their neck, they were not trying to look attractive; they were trying to enter into closer communication with the divine spirits of the universe. During the 16th and 17th centuries, an enormous change took place in European civilization. The consciousness of modern times began to be born. Art, science, philosophy, religion had been intimately interrelated aspects of each other. Now they began to go their separate ways. All walks of life shifted away from an unquestioning belief in the transcendent promise offered to the entire community of the faith-promise offered to the entire community of the faithful in 'Heaven Above', and began to concentrate on the more certain, the more immediate reality that each person could experience right here on earth. This new sociology may be characterized as 'Institutionalized Industrialism.' It is a cultural system that integrates the psychologically consonant principles of religious protestantism, economic capitalism, political democracy, and aesthetic single-point perspective. his new psycho-social system - this new consciousness - is the one that continues to describe most of the Western world.”
― The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco