But we should remember that this precarious balance between seriousness and pretence is an unmistakable and integral part of culture as such, and that th play-factor lies at the heart of all ritual and religion.
The nineteenth century seems to leave little room for play……..These tendencies were exacerbated by the industrial revolution and its conquest in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age.
That economic forces and material interests determine the course of the world. This grotesque overestimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological, which in itself had killed the mysteries and acquitted human of guilt and sin. But they had forgotten to free him/her of folly and myopia, and one seemed only fit to mould the world after the pattern of one’s own banality.
This levelling down and democratization of men’s fashion is far from unimportant. The whole transformation of mind and society since the French Revolution is expressed in it.