Disclaimer: this comment includes a lot of speculation on philosophy and art movements that I myself don’t have an in-depth understanding of. Please take this with a grain of salt. If anyone reading this understands the matter better and sees me saying BS, please correct me.
I think that one thing that can be helpful to examine is postmodernism. As Jean-Francois Lyotard had originally described it in the late 70s, it is “incredulity towards metanarratives”. For Lyotard this meant rejecting the idea that the world is described or describable by some unified model. He criticized both capitalists and marxists, which were two sides of the big ideological struggle of his time, for trying to assert that there is a single and universally true vision of society and money and power and how to handle those. He also criticized science, which he said had turned from “truly producing knowledge” to “performativity” and churning out self-contradictory results, which to him meant that the “metanarrative” of science explaining the world was fake and discredited.
Now, Lyotard later rejected some of these ideas and admitted he did not have a very good understanding of the sciences he was trying to criticize, but his work was influential and the notion of skepticism towards big universal narratives (including scientism) took hold in the French intellectual sphere and birthed the entire movement of postmodernism.
These are things I’m relatively (see disclaimer) confident in. From here, we have to make two assumptions to get us somewhere relevant to your question. First, assume portrayal of some event in art has influence on its public perception, including this event being celebrated or not (I’m quite confident in this assumption). Second, assume Lyotard’s ideas had influence not only on philosophy, but also on art (I’m less confident in this—in fact, Lyotard borrowed the term “postmodernism” from art critics, who were using it before him, and I’m not familiar with anything about postmodernism in art that would scream rejection of science and technology—maybe aside from that postmodern artists are broadly understood as rejecting modern ones, and Bauhaus, an art movement obsessed with glorifying technology, is broadly understood as modernist).
If these assumptions hold, we have something like an answer to your question—if the artist starts with the abstract notion that there is no universal rhyme or reason to the world that humans could discover, they will not create works that glorify discovery or science, and thus will not spur public celebration.
When I first read the original post, I thought of how in culture there seems (to me) to be a drop off of passion somewhere in the 1970s, and that postmodernism kind of goes with that. Passion about something that happens is more powerful if it really is—if things no longer seem to be as firmly to us, there is less passion. From a naive outsider point of view, it looks like Buddhism softens is as well, so the hypothesis that celebration follows being could be tested by seeing if Buddhist countries have as intense of celebrations about progress, or anything in general.
But then I see in the comments people talking about how there were celebrations and excitement in America in the last 50 years—maybe not as big, but still significant. Maybe postmodernism doesn’t affect sports fans as much, or minorities who see their first president, or space fans?
Disclaimer: this comment includes a lot of speculation on philosophy and art movements that I myself don’t have an in-depth understanding of. Please take this with a grain of salt. If anyone reading this understands the matter better and sees me saying BS, please correct me.
I think that one thing that can be helpful to examine is postmodernism. As Jean-Francois Lyotard had originally described it in the late 70s, it is “incredulity towards metanarratives”. For Lyotard this meant rejecting the idea that the world is described or describable by some unified model. He criticized both capitalists and marxists, which were two sides of the big ideological struggle of his time, for trying to assert that there is a single and universally true vision of society and money and power and how to handle those. He also criticized science, which he said had turned from “truly producing knowledge” to “performativity” and churning out self-contradictory results, which to him meant that the “metanarrative” of science explaining the world was fake and discredited.
Now, Lyotard later rejected some of these ideas and admitted he did not have a very good understanding of the sciences he was trying to criticize, but his work was influential and the notion of skepticism towards big universal narratives (including scientism) took hold in the French intellectual sphere and birthed the entire movement of postmodernism.
These are things I’m relatively (see disclaimer) confident in. From here, we have to make two assumptions to get us somewhere relevant to your question. First, assume portrayal of some event in art has influence on its public perception, including this event being celebrated or not (I’m quite confident in this assumption). Second, assume Lyotard’s ideas had influence not only on philosophy, but also on art (I’m less confident in this—in fact, Lyotard borrowed the term “postmodernism” from art critics, who were using it before him, and I’m not familiar with anything about postmodernism in art that would scream rejection of science and technology—maybe aside from that postmodern artists are broadly understood as rejecting modern ones, and Bauhaus, an art movement obsessed with glorifying technology, is broadly understood as modernist).
If these assumptions hold, we have something like an answer to your question—if the artist starts with the abstract notion that there is no universal rhyme or reason to the world that humans could discover, they will not create works that glorify discovery or science, and thus will not spur public celebration.
When I first read the original post, I thought of how in culture there seems (to me) to be a drop off of passion somewhere in the 1970s, and that postmodernism kind of goes with that. Passion about something that happens is more powerful if it really is—if things no longer seem to be as firmly to us, there is less passion. From a naive outsider point of view, it looks like Buddhism softens is as well, so the hypothesis that celebration follows being could be tested by seeing if Buddhist countries have as intense of celebrations about progress, or anything in general.
But then I see in the comments people talking about how there were celebrations and excitement in America in the last 50 years—maybe not as big, but still significant. Maybe postmodernism doesn’t affect sports fans as much, or minorities who see their first president, or space fans?