Industrial Civilisation Part 1: Was It Worth It?
Assume for the moment that us climate change doomers are correct, that our industrial civilisation will have collapsed and disappeared sometime in the next, oh, let’s say 30 to 50 years, to be generous. The remaining billion or so humans are living as hunter-gatherer tribes, or, to be more optimistic, like in pre-Elightenment Europe. Now let us consider the question: Was industrial civilisation and scientific advancement worthwhile, or would humanity be better off if it had never happened?
Clearly many (privileged) people today live in comfort, with convenience, security, good health, and riches as never seen before in the history of humanity. But those of us so privileged make up only a small part of the earth’s human inhabitants. What about the billions who live in poverty? What has civilisation brought them, except hunger, want, ill health, and insecurity? Is industrial civilisation worth it if it makes a small fraction of humanity insanely rich and comfortable, if it is at the expense of the rest of humanity? (Not to mention the animal and plant inhabitants of the planet.)
Some will argue that being poor in Mississippi today is still much better than being a poor serf in the Middle Ages. Maybe so, though we have few reliable records of how that poor serf lived, because, I mean, who cares? The poor are not worth our interest or worth being documented for the record, are they? At least not in our civilisation. But even if that serf was worse off than our poor Mississippian, it’s not a contest. One of Viktor Frankl’s lessons from his time in a Nazi prison camp, as laid out in his classic work “Man’s Search for Meaning,” is that your suffering is as bad to you as my suffering is to me, even if some objective scale would measure one as worse than the other. Suffering is suffering and joy is joy.
Is industrial civilisation worth it if it makes a small fraction of humanity insanely rich and comfortable, if it is at the expense of the rest of humanity?
Industrial civilization has allowed the human population to grow to 8 billion, with much less disease and hunger than was found 100 years ago. Isn’t that a wonderful and worthwhile achievement? Here’s something that struck me as kind of funny: I just read a book titled “Road to Survival” by written in 1948 in the wake of WWII, wherein the author, ecologist William Vogt, foresaw the resource shortfalls that are beginning to destroy our civilization. I had to chuckle wryly when I would read such statements as (paraphrased), “Unfortunately, improved healthcare eradicated much disease in such-and-such a country, allowing their population to grow in excess of the capacity of their land to feed them.” It seems an unusual viewpoint that improved healthcare may be unfortunate, but maybe it is a viewpoint we need to have. Has growing the human population to 7.75 billion and rising really a good thing, or is it, too, unfortunate?
How what about the amazing advances in science that industrial civilisation enabled? Gaze in awe at how much we now know about how our universe began, how the stars and planets formed, and how life evolved on our planet, eventually creating us? How much we’ve learned about our own bodies and disease and ageing, and even about the most complex object in the universe, the human brain? How we understand DNA and can even customize it to store the bible, or to create pigs that can grow organs transplantable to humans? How about physics’ standard model that describes and explains the very smallest constituents of matter, and how we’ve begun to harness mysterious quantum effects to build computers that can break complex cryptography codes in seconds? As well as create perfectly secure communication channels that no man or machine can ever hack? How we can think about ourselves thinking about ourselves thinking about ourselves thinking about the universe itself? Knowledge is great, but what good is it if we don’t use it to build a world where everyone is healthy, secure, and happy? Scientists use scientific breakthroughs to make further scientific breakthroughs, that’s their job; but whose job is it to apply the knowledge on a human, social level? I suppose it’s the job of our political systems, but they sure aren’t on it.
And then there is the wonder of the Internet. Well, I’ll just say one word: Facebook.
But what about humanity’s expansion to the stars? So that the species may live for millions, nay, billions of years, and populate the planets, and meet other intelligent life? Suppose it is possible that we could some day achieve that. Is perpetuating this industrial civilisation necessarily a good thing? Or maybe that, too, would just be unfortunate.
Industrial civilisation has not led us to build a utopia on earth, and is unlikely to lead us to build one in space. It seems to have only amplified our baser instincts with war, conquest, colonialism, and exploiting our fellow man for selfish, greedy gain. Inevitably, it would seem, it has led to its own demise via climate change and overpopulation.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, whether you agree with it or not, that industrial civilisation has not been worth it. Where in history should we have stopped further industrial development in order to live in as close to a utopia as we can? Mabye in the 1950’s? Happy Days, a growing middle class, a booming economy, strong nuclear families. Is that when America was great? Hell no! There were still too many people who did not share in the benefits seen by mainly white Americans. Still too much poverty around the world. Too much degradation and exploitation of too many of our fellow humans. Racism.
Maybe we should drop back further to the pre-United States America. A new land being conquered. An abundance of resources to be exploited. Life in the American and Canadian colonies could be alright. Those who expanded westward in America often had it rough but they maybe savoured the challenge and sense of accomplishment or at least the FREEDOM. But it wasn’t so great if you were an indigenous American, whom the white man was wiping out with guns, germs, and steel. And, while some of the rest of the world benefitted by trading for American resources, colonisers were also raping large parts of the world. Also, slavery. Overall, not such a great time for humanity.
Let’s try the Middle Ages, pre-Enlightenment Europe. We still had the comfort of our religious beliefs, before science began to chip away at it. Living in castles seems pretty cool. (They actually were very cold and drafty.) But most people didn’t live in castles. Most folks were those miserable serfs we talked about before, exploited by the people who did live in castles. And there’s the Black Death.
Cutting to the chase, it was agriculture that was man’s original sin. Once we could grow and store excess food, some men built castles and exploited us for it. Hierarchy began, and wealth inequality split man from man. In addition, living in close proximity with domesticated animals is what spawned much of the disease that has plagued man throughout the history of civilisation. The best civilisation is no civilisation! (Ref: “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States,” by James C. Scott.)
Yes, I am claiming that humanity would be better off it had continued to live in small hunter/gatherer bands as it did successfully for hundreds of thousands of years. The longevity of this lifestyle alone proves the point. Some will argue that life back then was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’’ as Thomas Hobbes put it in the 1600s. Perhaps. But look how the Native Americans lived for hundreds of years before the arrival of Chris Columbus. It was not a bad life. Look at the remote tribes, untouched by human civilisation, that anthropologists have studied. They are not unhappy people. They tend not to be sickly. They seem to love their lives and their tribes. Maybe that is the best way for humans to live: in small tribes, in harmony with nature and our environment.
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. — Rousseau 1754
Now I’m not saying that we should abandon industrial civilisation tomorrow and go live in the forests and jungles and savannahs. I am a child of modern society, and I would not make it a month without a grocery store and a car. No, we have to play out the hand we’ve dealt ourselves. There is no going back to hunter-gatherer bands, at least not without the very most calamitous possible outcomes of climate change or nuclear exchange. We’re on a path to muddle through or to collapse and build it all up again. Maybe we will eventually populate the stars. But we could perhaps take some lessons from our hunter-gatherer forbearers as we shape our society for better survivability and sustainability, and, I hope, much more compassion for our fellow man and our fellow animal, plant, river, ocean, and soil brothers and sisters as well.
—Lannie Rose, 10/2022
