Fish in Water

Chapter 1 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

Previously: “The Present Crisis” (Introduction).

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It may seem odd that progress needs a defense.

The triumph of science, technology and industry has been told many times over—as the Great Enrichment, the Great Escape, or the Great Surge; the Origin of Wealth or the Birth of Plenty; the Rise of the Western World or simply the Ascent of Man.¹ Its scorecard over the last few centuries is legendary: more than a twenty-fold increase in GDP per capita in developed nations, and a reduction in extreme poverty from almost 80% of the world to less than 10%; more than a doubling of global life expectancy at birth, including a tenfold reduction in child mortality; an increase in basic education and literacy rates from about 15% to over 85%.² For such staggering benefits, what cost could be too high? For so many lives saved, what risk too great?

But for most people in wealthy countries, the problems of poverty, child mortality, or illiteracy are no longer in living memory. And the vast machine that delivers our unprecedented prosperity is all but invisible. We see its products—fresh food, cheap furniture, paved roads, clean water, streaming music—but we seldom ask where they came from or how they were created, even if we are dimly aware that humanity did not always enjoy their blessings. And so it becomes all too easy to take them for granted.

You can eat a meal—wolfing it down with one hand while checking the news on your smartphone with the other—without a second thought to the tractors and harvesting machines, the irrigation pipes, the industrial furnaces making synthetic fertilizer, the researchers in the lab breeding and engineering hardier varieties of crops. And you can easily forget that not long ago, being able to eat a meal at all was considered a gift, for which thanks are traditionally given to God.

You can amass a closet full of outfits, in a variety of styles and colors, with no knowledge of the spinning machines, the dyeing vats, the automatic looms, the sewing machines, or the tremendously efficient factory system they are a part of—the system that has turned this kind of product from a luxury for the rich into a commodity available to the average worker. And no one will remind you that this work was once done by hand, using only basic tools and a lot of manual dexterity, in routine, monotonous motions, by a large fraction of the workforce.

You can walk into a room and unconsciously flick on the light, unaware that you are summoning powerful forces in distant structures, rousing multi-ton turbines powering electric dynamos, to deliver energy via invisible force fields that ripple through a web of transmission lines and route it to your exact location. You have probably already lost count of how many times you have done this today.

You can relax in the evening with streaming movies or music, even if you do not know the binary language of computers, or how to program them, or the rules of the protocols that they follow when they exchange information. If you put on a period piece from Netflix, however, you may be reminded that in the time of your great-great-grandfather, sound and video could not be recorded in any form, and to experience the world’s best performers was a luxury for wealthy city-dwellers.

If you get an infection, you can treat it with an antibiotic, whether or not you are aware of the researchers who discovered it, or the extensive trials that were performed to determine its safety and efficacy, or the meticulous manufacturing processes that ensure its purity. And no one will point out that less than a century ago, there would have been little if anything the doctors could have done to prevent your death.

The comforts of the modern world are among its greatest achievements. But by their nature, those achievements detach us from the harsh reality of daily life that used to be the norm. We don’t smell the stench of sewage or horses in the streets, we aren’t burned by the sun while laboring in the fields, we don’t feel the weight of a pail of water as we carry it back from the well. We don’t worry about whether the crops will fail from drought or frost, or whether the creek will flood and wash out the footbridge, or whether we’ll have enough firewood to last the winter, or whether a brother will be lost at sea on his two-month voyage across the Atlantic, or whether a child will die from a scrape by a rusty nail. Life is convenient, comfortable, predictable, safe, and clean, in a way that’s hard for any of us to appreciate.

Industrial civilization has become a victim of its own success: it has solved the problems of daily existence so thoroughly, and with such finesse, that the solutions and even the problems fade from our collective memory. Like fish in water, we are so immersed in technology and industry, so completely dependent on it every day of our lives, that it recedes into the background, out of our awareness. We only notice the inverse: the rare occasions when the heat doesn’t work, or the water isn’t clean, or the store shelves are empty, or there is a power outage—or even a wi-fi outage. Indeed, many of these events are national news.

We forget that in many ways the average person in a developed economy lives better than royalty of old. Fruits and spices that were once exotic symbols of luxury and prerogative are now found in bulk in the supermarket.³ Clothing in colors once reserved for emperors are now sold off the rack at TJ Maxx.⁴ In winter, our homes are more comfortable than Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles: in its grand Hall of Mirrors, despite two fireplaces, it was “advisable to wear furs for added protection,” and the wine and water sometimes froze in the glasses.⁵

We forget that everything had to be invented, even the most mundane features of daily life. Basic fasteners such as the zipper, the paper clip, the safety pin, and the rubber band were not invented until the 1800s.⁶ Simple food containers such as soda cans, plastic bottles, and milk cartons required a remarkable amount of engineering: to choose the right materials, to make them easily openable, to manufacture them cheaply.⁷ The toothbrush was first mass-manufactured in the late 1700s; earlier, people cleaned their teeth with rags (and incidentally, the bristles were typically made of pig hair until Nylon was invented in the late 1930s).⁸ Much of our road infrastructure is surprisingly recent: streets were not paved with tar or asphalt until the 1800s, stop signs and three-color traffic lights were introduced in the 1910s, the striped “zebra” crosswalk in 1951.⁹ Ancient writing systems lacked features we consider obvious, such as capitalization, punctuation, or even spaces between words.¹⁰ Many household items solve problems that we forget anyone ever faced: matches, invented in the early 1800s, could light a stove with much less trouble than flint and steel (although even this is now made obsolete by gas and electricity); the ballpoint pen, invented in the 1930s, saved many clothes and tablecloths from spilled ink; the can opener was not invented until a few decades after the food can—previously, cans had typically been opened with hammer and chisel.¹¹

We forget the intense isolation of the past; for us, living in a world of instant global communications, it is almost impossible to grasp. The average medieval villager never traveled more than dozens of miles from home.¹² Even in 19th-century America, in rural areas, “the overwhelming impression from today’s perspective is isolation. … Poor transportation kept farmers from social gatherings with those beyond a radius of a few miles reachable by horse and buggy … Many members of farm families never traveled outside the county in which they were born.”¹³ To journey long distances was epic: as late as the 1860s, to go from New York to San Francisco, whether by land or sea, took six months, and the travelers were risking their lives.¹⁴ News traveled slowly, sometimes with tragic consequences: the Battle of New Orleans, where over 2,000 people died, was fought after the treaty to end the War of 1812, because word of the peace had not yet reached the combatants.¹⁵ And if travel and communication were severely limited before the 20th century, so too was access to knowledge, art and culture in an era when even public libraries were not common and the average person received only a few years of formal schooling.¹⁶

We forget how dangerous, unstable, and frightening the world used to be. Famine was common through all of history before modern agriculture: historian Fernand Braudel says that “famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man's biological regime and built into his daily life.”¹⁷ Disease was rampant. In cities, smallpox was an accepted fact of life: one 18th-century observer likened it to “a thorny hedge through which all must pass, and some die, to reach a field of safety.”¹⁸ When epidemics struck, bodies were removed by the cartload; during the worst times, “when the hearses came round to remove the dead, the coffins were so numerous that they were put on top of the hearses as well as the inside.”¹⁹ Infant mortality was so high that some cultures would not even name a newborn until it had survived some weeks or months.²⁰ Great fires often swept through cities. With only horse-drawn, steam-powered fire engines fed by inadequate municipal water systems, little could be done against a large blaze; sometimes tens of thousands of homes were destroyed.²¹ Our lives are tremendously safe and secure compared to the past.

We live in an amazing world, and we should stop taking it for granted. We should never forget how difficult, dirty, and dangerous life was for most people who ever existed. And once in a while, we should look at our world with a sense of awe and wonder that humanity could ever create it. We should look at the world with gratitude to those who came before us, and especially to the scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs who labored, struggled, and fought to build it. This world and the standard of living we enjoy are the gift they left us. We can never pay it back. But we can pay it forward: we can keep progress going, and build an even better world for the generations to come.

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Parts of this chapter were adapted from the essay “Progress studies as a civic duty.”

For more about The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, including the table of contents, see the announcement. For full citations, see the bibliography.

1. McCloskey, “The Great Enrichment”; Deaton, The Great Escape; Radelet, The Great Surge; Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth; Bernstein, The Birth of Plenty; North, The Rise of the Western World; Bronkwski, The Ascent of Man.

2.  Our World In Data, “GDP by World Region,” “Extreme Poverty,” “Life Expectancy,” “Literacy Rate.”

3. Miralles, “History of the King-Pine.”

4. University of Chicago, “Tyrian purple”; University of Michigan, “Ancient Color.”

5. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 299.

6. Britannica, “Zipper”; Brown, “The Paper Clip”; Caballar, “Safety Pins”; Scanlon, “Rubber Bands.”

7. DeLuca, “Popping Open a Can”; Lemelson-MIT, “Nathaniel Wyeth, The Plastic Soda Bottle”; Robertson, “The Paper Beverage Carton.”

8. Library of Congress, “Toothbrush.”

9. Longfellow, “Building Roads”; Gordon, American Growth, 158; Eschner, “Crosswalk.”

10. Kemmer, “History of English”; Wikipedia, “English-language spelling reform. ”

11. Britannica, “Match”; Dowling, “Pen that Changed Writing”; Eschner, “Can Opener.”

12. Bloch, Feudal Society, Vol 1.

13. Gordon, American Growth, 60, 163, 266.

14. Ambrose, Nothing Like it in the World, Chapter 2.

15. Britannica, “Battle of New Orleans.”

16. Goldin, “Education and Income.”

17. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 73.

18. Boylston, Defying Providence, 142, quoting the 1746 charter of a London smallpox hospital.

19. Johnson, The Ghost Map, 109, quoting the London Observer.

20. Bugos and McCarthy, “Ayoreo Infanticide.” When a child did die, names were sometimes recycled to use for the next baby (Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 94-97).

21. Wikipedia, “List of town and city fires.” See for example Hangzhou 1132 and 1137, Moscow 1752, Kyoto 1788.