Second, we should beware of utopian idealism. Utopians compare the present with what might be called the future perfect, not the past imperfect. Instead of seeing the present as a vast improvement on the past, they see the present as failing to live up to some sort of an imagined utopia.
Unfortunately, the world will never be a perfect place because the human beings who inhabit it are themselves imperfect. Today, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of a powerful new utopian movement. But few people in foresaw the destruction brought on by communism and Nazism. When it comes to global standards of living, human history resembles a hockey stick resting on its side, with a long straight shaft and an upward facing blade.
For most of our existence, progress was painfully slow resembling that long straight shaft. At the start of the 19th century, however, the speed of human progress rapidly accelerated resembling that upward facing blade. What was responsible for that acceleration? Many books have been written on this subject and it is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a full answer. That said, few scholars deny the central role played by two forces that are routinely demonized: industrialization and globalization.
First, let us look at the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution had many contemporary critics. But things should be kept in a proper perspective. Increased productivity of workers led to greater competition for workers, and factory owners started taking better care of their employees. Working conditions improved and work injuries declined. Another major criticism of the industrial revolution concerns the spoliation of the environment and exploitation of natural resources.
And was Jerusalem builded here Among these dark Satanic mills? The reality, alas, was much less appealing. Agricultural production was labor intensive, but productivity was very low. Before the arrival of machines powered by steam and combustion engines, agriculture depended on much less efficient human and animal labor. People and animals had to be fed, which meant that most of the calories produced on the farm were immediately consumed by the laborers.
Prior to the industrial revolution, there were no synthetic fertilizers, such as nitrogen, and crop yields were much lower than what they are today. As a consequence, more land was required to feed people and pack animals.
Land clearing was usually accomplished by burning of forests. Yet more trees were cut down to heat houses and cook food. Environmental damage aside, a major reason for switching from wood to coal was the simple fact that there were very few trees left. Amongst other things this gives rise to increased mobility of capital, faster propagation of technological innovations and an increasing interdependency and uniformity of national markets.
Contrary to the common misperception, globalization is not a new phenomenon. Clearly, trade has been fundamental to the process of globalization from antiquity.
But why do people trade? Trade delivers goods and services to people who value them most. Trade, to use economic jargon, improves efficiency in the allocation of scarce resources. Another reason for trade is the principle of comparative advantage. The gains from trade follow from allowing an economy to specialize. If a country is relatively better at making wine than wool, it makes sense to put more resources into wine, and to export some of the wine to pay for imports of wool.
A country does not have to be best at anything to gain from trade. The gains follow from specializing in those activities which, at world prices, the country is relatively better at, even though it may not have an absolute advantage in them. Because it is relative advantage that matters, it is meaningless to say a country has a comparative advantage in nothing.
The term is one of the most misunderstood ideas in economics, and is often wrongly assumed to mean an absolute advantage compared with other countries. Moreover, trade allows consumers to benefit from more efficient production methods. For example, without large markets for goods and services, large production runs would not be economical. Large production runs are instrumental to reducing product costs. For example, early cars had to be individually hand crafted.
Lower production costs, in other words, lead to cheaper goods and services, and that raises real living standards. Besides better resource allocation, and greater specialization and economies of scale, trade encourages technological and cultural exchanges between previously disconnected civilizations. It is for those reasons that great commercial cities like Florence and Venice during the Renaissance, and London and New York today, also tend to be centers of cultural life and technological progress.
The development of the steam engine and the opening of the Suez Canal in the 19th century made seafaring faster and cheaper. The volume of traded goods greatly increased. Through the process of price convergence, prices fell and consumers benefited. The gold standard and the invention of the telegraph — and later telephone — also allowed for massive transfers of capital. Attracted by higher profits, capital flowed from more developed to less developed countries, thus stimulating global economic development.
The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth. This earlier era of globalization ended with the outbreak of World War I and the concomitant disruption of world trade. By some estimates, globalization did not reach its pre—World War I levels until the s or even s. In fact, it was the s that marked the beginning of the period of globalization that we live in today.
As we can see, Europe and America, and, later, other regions of the world, experienced previously unimaginable improvements in standards of living. The process of rapid improvement that started in the early s continues to this day. Accordingly, historical evidence makes a potent case for optimism. If… you say catastrophe is imminent, you may expect a McArthur genius award or even the Nobel Peace Prize.
The story tends to go something like this: Inventors, economists, and statesmen in Western Europe dreamed up a new industrialized world. Fueled by the optimism and scientific know-how of the Enlightenment, a series of heroic men—James Watt, Adam Smith, William Huskisson, and so on—fought back against the stultifying effects of regulated economies, irrational laws and customs, and a traditional guild structure that quashed innovation.
It was a long and difficult process, but this revolution eventually brought Europeans to a new plateau of civilization. In the end, Europeans lived in a new world based on wage labor, easy mobility, and the consumption of sparkling products. Europe had rescued itself from the pre-industrial misery that had hampered humankind since the dawn of time.
Cheap and abundant fossil fuel powered the trains and other steam engines that drove humankind into this brave new future. The net result has been increased human happiness, wealth, and productivity—the attainment of our true potential as a species.
Sadly, this saccharine story still sweetens our societal self-image. Indeed, it is deeply ingrained in the collective identity of the industrialized world. It makes it difficult to dissent from the idea that new technologies, economic growth, and a consumer society are absolutely necessary.
To criticize industrial modernity is somehow to criticize the moral advancement of humankind, since a central theme in this narrative is the idea that industrialization revolutionized our humanity, too. The proponents of the Industrial Revolution inherited from the philosophers of the Enlightenment the narrative of human read: European progress over time but placed technological advancement and economic liberalization at the center of their conception of progress.
This narrative remains today an ingrained operating principle that propels us in a seemingly unstoppable way toward more growth and more technology, because the assumption is that these things are ultimately beneficial for humanity. But what they do oppose is the dubious narrative of progress caricatured above.
Have the fossil-fueled good times put future generations at risk of returning to the same misery that industrialists were in such a rush to leave behind? But what if we rethink the narrative of progress? It is the ultimate predator, able to eat birds of the air, all other animals on the earth, and fish and shellfish from the sea.
The bones of the very first humans are found with tools besides them. The fact is that we cannot think of Homo sapiens without tools, no matter how primitive: flaked stones, axe handles, and later bows and arrows. Human evolution is a matter of co-evolution of man and machine. The discovery and domestication of fire was a major step, followed by many other advances in the amount of energy at human disposal.
A bad conscience on the part of many Westerners, commendable in some ways, and an overdose of reflectivity on the part of intellectuals may account for this attitude. Clearly, if we look at science and technology there has been progress, in the sense of humans gaining greater control over their environment by means of tools and machines; these, in turn, facilitate greater scientific understanding.
A major reason for rejecting this fact is, or so it is claimed, that such accomplishments are not seen as accompanied by moral progress. Many see drones as worse than spears. Artificial satellites may enable computer connections, but they may also lend themselves to nefarious military use.
Swift was hardly a romantic, but Romanticism had affinities with his stance. A counterpart of the acerbic Swift was the lachrymose Rousseau. There is a utopian quality to Rousseau's vision, although it looks to the past rather than the future. In short, he denied the idea of progress, hook, line and sinker. He threw out the baby with the bath.
He was wrong. In this book and in his Novum Organum he described how knowledge beyond that of the ancients had taken place and outlined the method and the needed institutions by which further advances could be made. Subsequently, the historical record has proven that Bacon was right. Has progress taken place in other spheres? Art is reflective of the society in which it is produced.
In principle, then, ancient African art is as advanced as twenty-first-century Western art. However, connoisseurs make distinctions between better and lesser pieces of African sculpture; and modern artists such as Picasso have borrowed heavily from the African examples. Arguments can also be made in terms of increased complexity; but this is a landmine. In short, the issue is an ambiguous one. The case for literature may be a stronger one at first blush.
This is hardly a strong argument. War, that is, organized violence, is intimately and increasingly linked to technology and science. Example after example could be given in regard to land, air and sea operations. Some of the money goes to pure research; a large part to applied research. In our globalized world, satellites and drones go whizzing above us in the sky.
The work of the German sociologist, Norbert Elias, and subsequent proponents of his work bear heavily on our account. Elias is concerned in his Civilizing Process and his The Court Society to ground his theory of figurations in precise historical detail.
He describes how violence has become more and more concentrated in the hands of larger state units, which seeks a monopoly of it within its own borders, and who then wage war against similar entities. Going further back in time, Johan Goudsblom, a student of Elias, examined the way a military caste formed at the time 10,, years when agriculture, facilitated by fire clearing the land, first developed. Fixed settlements, gradually becoming cities, required a specialized military caste to defend themselves.
Even earlier a priestly caste emerged. It was the priests who claimed that knowledge. Looking at the skies, they could also claim that their knowledge came from the gods. In any case, that knowledge was advanced knowledge. Progress in this sphere was evident. But what of the moral sphere? I want to make the case that progress has also occurred in this realm. Think of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery though pockets still exist. A condition of humankind for millennia, it was declared illegal and the trade abolished by the British in the nineteenth century.
It did require a Civil War in America before it could be truly said that it had been vanquished. Still, a landmark had been reached in human history. Mill was too optimistic. It has been a long drawn out fight, even in the so-called advanced countries, and markedly less successful in other parts of the world, especially in the Islamic Middle East.
The banner, however, had been hoisted and the battle continues. The rights of women have been part of the larger struggle for human rights. This is a monumental step for humankind. It comes from a Hegelian-like moment when the concept of humanity comes down from the heavens and begins to manifest itself on earth. It begins at the dawn of the computer age. Up until the end of World War Two most historians thought of the previous years under the rubric of Modernity. It was a professional concern, the word hardly known or used by most lay people.
After , however, a new periodization came into currency: globalization. In this case, the general public knew and used it in everyday life. It marked a new era in human existence. It was characterized by a number of factors, even though economists saw it through one eye, as characterized solely by the world-wide extension of the free market.
The economic did comprise an important part of the story. It was only one part of the elephant, however, with other parts being just as, if not more, important.
A concatenation of factors were, and are, at play. I want to address them under the heading of the concept of Humanity. In the Nuremberg Trials took place. They mark a momentous moment in history. Often overlooked is the fact that for the first time in human history aggressive war — organized violence — was declared a crime.
It is hard to exaggerate this shift in attitude in regard to humankind. It is as if the nature of the species had changed.
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