Since World War II, Western culture has become a global culture.  This chapter surveys the postwar historical trends that have contributed to this process of globalization and the developments in thought and the arts that have accompanied it.

Three major developments defined post-war Europe.  The first was recovery from the war.  With the help of the United States, Western Europe recovered quickly, rejecting extreme nationalism and embracing democracy.  As Western Europe rebuilt, the Soviet Union imposed communism on Eastern Europe, provoking the Cold War with the United States.  This conflict achieved global proportions as China emerged as another communist power and as the two superpowers struggled through proxy regimes including the two Koreas, Cuba, and North and South Vietnam.  Soviet rule ultimately proved weak, so that the reforms initiated by Gorbachev culminated with the fall of communism in most Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the USSR  The third major development of the period was decolonization.  Stirred by Western ideals, colonized peoples after the war demanded independence.  As the imperial powers withdrew from their Asian and African colonies, the superpowers tried to influence many of the emerging states, pulling them into Cold War politics.  Unprepared for independence, many of these states fell into dictatorship and civil war, some of which still persist.  Decolonization has also hastened globalization, the process through which Western—especially American—ideas, popular culture, goods, etc., continue to spread throughout the world.  Despite the global popularity of Western ideas and ways, as they leave their original cultural context, they often clash with different value systems, most recently with militant Islam, which struck back on September 11, 2001.

After the war, many Westerners embraced Existentialism.  Emphasizing the absurdity and incomprehensibility of existence, the limits of reason, and the need for people to create their own meaning in life, Existentialism reflected post-war European doubt and anxiety.  By the seventies, postmodernism had emerged to challenge the entire Enlightenment tradition.  With its emphasis on linguistic indeterminacy, deconstruction exemplifies postmodernism's rejection of stable principles from which truth may be discovered.  Postmodernism has provoked many critics, who ask how, if all knowledge and values are relative and fallible, can we judge conduct or maintain democracy.

As Western authors addressed postwar concerns, American writers achieved a leading role.  The most vociferous critic of communism was Solzhenitsyn, whose novels exposed the oppressive Soviet police state to the world.  Golding and Capote explored the violence at the heart of human nature, as did Malamud, one of several prominent Jewish American novelists who have addressed questions raised by centuries of anti-Semitic brutality.  O'Connor reflected on the problems of redemption and revelation in a secular age.  Beckett's Theater of the Absurd represents a world made meaningless by the absence of God, and Potock explores the conflict of religious values among his Jewish characters.  Salinger memorably represented coming of age as a quest for truth.  Themes of sexual power and gender relationships define the most famous works of Williams, Nabokov, Roth, and Albee.  Bellow draws upon his Jewish values to make his fiction a force for social accord.  Miller has used the stage to examine the human cost of the American dream and McCarthy-era anti-communism, while Updike's novels explore small-town middle-class life.  Several authors have addressed racial injustice, including the South African Paton and the Americans Lee, Brooks, Morrison, Angelou, and Walker, the latter two linking that concern with issues of sexism.  The works of Bradbury, Tolkien, and Vonnegut use fantasy to create mythic, future, or alternative worlds that illuminate contemporary concerns.

The first major postwar artistic movement was Abstract Expressionism.  Inspired by Freud, Jung, and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Rothko used pure color and nonrepresentational forms to capture the creative energies of the unconscious.  Influenced by Dada, Pop artists including Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol reacted against abstract art, depicting consumer objects and pop-culture icons through techniques that questioned the idea of the unique art object.  Minimalism came to dominate sculpture, the simple, symmetrical works of Smith, Lin, and Puryear exemplifying the style that decisively broke with Modernism.  Gormley has helped reintroduce the human form to sculpture by casting his own body in various positions.  Combining music, performance, photography, and video, conceptual artists such as Paik, Sherman, and Anderson create works that prompt audiences to consider a variety of social and political issues.  Rejecting the International Style, postmodern architects including Piano and Rogers, Graves, and Gehry combine forms in unusual, even fanciful, ways that often challenge people's sense of the beautiful.

During this period, classical music developed along two distinct lines.  Copland pioneered a popular style, drawing on American folk themes and landscape and composing patriotic works.  Leading the avant-garde, Cage rejected traditional methods to "compose" pieces from electronic and chance, ready-made sounds.  An original American genre, the Broadway musical developed into popular form combining memorable songs and exciting choreography.  Central to the history of postwar music and culture is the emergence of rock and roll.  Originating in R&B, rock achieved international popularity by the late fifties as Presley unveiled his uniquely eclectic style.  During the sixties, various regional styles emerged, including Motown and the Philadelphia sound, while a wave of bands led by The Beatles popularized British rock.  Dylan introduced a new level of literary craft into song writing, and psychedelic rock developed under the influence of the drug culture.  Since Woodstock, rock has become increasingly fragmented.  One of the most influential recent styles is rap, which has itself divided into pop-oriented hip-hop and misogynistic, violent hardcore rap.

After the pioneering inventions of Edison and the Lumiere brothers, the motion picture industry began its journey to the world cultural preeminence it now enjoys.  Silent-movie directors and performers—including Griffith, Gish, and Chaplin—made film into an expressive form, while the great Hollywood studios turned it into mass entertainment.  Further technological advances introduced talkies, and a variety of genres proliferated during the Golden Age of the thirties.  By 1940, Technicolor enabled the production of color films.  Hollywood studios addressed the war with productions ranging from military training films to escapist comedies.  During that period, Hitchcock and Wells emerged as two of the most distinctive directors.  During the fifties, anti-hero actors and actresses captured the popular imagination, and the B-movie took shape in drive-in theaters.  The industry successfully responded to the challenge of television in various ways, including the development of the motion picture epic and the support of cable channels devoted to movies.

Since the late nineteenth century, the story of Western civilization has been defined by ever-greater challenges to the Enlightenment tradition.  Recently the challenge has come in the form of attacks on Western humanism from postmodernists and advocates of post-colonial peoples.  These critics reject what they see as the racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism of the West's Greek and Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as its emphasis on reason and autonomous individuality.  Defenders of that tradition point out that it produced the concepts of liberty, equality, and individual worth, without which the struggle for human rights would not be possible and oppressed peoples could not begin to imagine their freedom.  Study of the Humanities can give us the intellectual tools to appreciate the civilization that created them and to address its flaws.  Further, the Humanities offer the means of personal growth that may, in turn, enable us to appreciate the worth of other individuals and cultures.