Finish The Industrial Revolution, Or Bust
Do you love something historically-unusual about today’s culture? Like maybe democracy, rock music, gender equality, cosmology, or open inquiry? Enough to work to help it last long into the future? If so, read on; if not, this essay isn’t for you.
The Bible tells of how, freed from slavery in Egypt (~1270BC), the Israelites reached the promised land in a bit over a year, but then turned away out of fear, and wandered 40 more years before entering. Humanity is now doing something similar. A few centuries ago, we saw great promise but also threats in industry, so we put only one foot there, leaving the other in our ancient system of tradition and cultural evolution.
Alas this won’t work. We could stay standing either with both feet in culture, or with both in industry, but with our feet split civilization will soon fall. Most likely to be replaced by insular religious groups the Amish or Haredim, who will then discard most historically-unusual features of today’s world mono-culture. So to save such features, we must try to move our other foot into industry. Or bust. Let me explain.
The biggest change humanity has seen in at least 10Kyrs was the “industrial revolution” in the last few centuries. Its core cause was our finding better ways to organize and optimize effort. These included (a) math in accounting, engineering, and science, (b) new ways to structure hierarchical and professional organizations, and (c) capitalist societies. The peak in industrial optimization has been big competing for-profit orgs seeking to max key numbers that drive customer choices, in areas where professionals found powerful formal abstractions. Numbers like the cost of cloth, the strength of steel, or the speed of cars.
We have allowed many modern choices to be set by such powerfully-optimizing industrial orgs. Which is why we are rich and powerful. But even in the rich most industrialized West we retain two other spheres of life which are each just as large as this industrial sphere.
One non-industry sphere is where we LARP industrial styles of specialization, procedure, and formality, but don’t actually release much of the power of industrial optimization. For example, in academia and medicine we let prestigious professionals judge quality, which results in great inefficiently and rising spending. And in much of law and government we mistakenly trust prestige, specialization, and process to work without capitalist incentives, and even to well-regulate the capitalists. We have numbers to use to let industry optimize such areas, but don’t let them.
The other non-industry sphere of life is where we pointedly resist industry-style optimization. A century or two ago we saw huge productivity gains in shipyards, plantations, and factories. But saw also how they cut individuality, variety, and enchantment, and fostered inequality, regimentation, and instrumentality. So we have worked to limit the scope of what we’ve called “totalitarian” “dehumanizing” industry.
Socialist and communist regimes tried to cut out only the capitalism part, and most other regimes have limited industry via redistribution and regulation. The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices, even as modernism LARPed industry levels of change as “innovation”. And “little boxes” ridicule, and laws, have pushed ordinary folks into spending their increased wealth on variety, instead of cost-effective industrial dorm-like lifestyles.
Alas, we have been accumulating a cultural deft, and our behaviors in these non-industry spheres become more maladaptive. Before industry, the main way humans kept their behaviors adaptive was via cultural evolution, which required high cultural variety and selection pressures, and low rates of environmental change and internal cultural drift. But modern industry (a) increased rates of social environment change, (b) increased travel, talk, and trade, which has cut cultural variety, and (c) caused far higher levels of wealth, health, and security, which has cut selection pressures. In addition, the modernism cultural turn induced far higher rates of cultural drift.
So we face a stark choice. We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc. For a while the world loses industry, and when that maybe later returns it is without most of what we cherish about our current world culture. And then it likely falls as well later. Like the Israelites staying away from the promised land.
Or we can try to enter that promised land, by applying industry more to the life areas which we have so far blocked, accepting that will also change and sometimes destroy things we now like about our lives in those areas. Such as by freeing capitalism more to run academia, education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.
Or you might change your mind about my first questions above, and decide that you don’t actually much care about the distant future. I don’t have good news here; you can either use this info to better choose carefully, or stick your head in the sand.
Oh, and if you think AI will save us, ask yourself: why would an AI culture modeled after human culture better avoid the problem of a broken cultural evolution process?
"[W]e have been accumulating a cultural debt, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly maladaptive."
There seems to be a deeper issue here, but perhaps it is being driven by the institutional distortions you describe. Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards and discipline, in favor of a self-indulgent and increasingly destructive fixation on individual comfort and pleasure and convenience. This makes producers a LOT of money, but it leads to a shallower and emptier life for individuals and it drives the dissolution of communities (which used to enforce norms and help socialize children). Food, entertainment, education, spending, mental health, etc. - in each of these areas and more we have collectively abandoned the recognition that discipline and moderation and modesty are important. We have removed judgment, shame, and expectations as dominant cultural forces... and I suspect that we have one this so that peddlers of distraction and addiction can more easily profit from our cultural decay and our individual unhappiness.
The problems are so vast and confusingly interlinked that I struggle to describe them all (status-seeking among the elite, cowardice among professionals and bureaucratic employees, enshittifcation, feminization, etc.) but they all seem to revolve around this drive to elevate the fickle and pathological desires of the individual above the long-term benefit of the group.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-war-on-norms
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-primacy-of-subjectivity
Did you write "The biggest change humanity has seen in ten thousand years" specifically because you think (as I do) that the neolithic package was bigger? Just curious.
I rank the Enlightenment as more-important than the Industrial Revo, which was just a (probably inevitable) result of the Enlightenment. But I use the term to encompass multiple Enlightenments, including (to a lesser or greater extent) those of Phoenicia, classical and Hellenistic Athens, medieval Venice, Viking Iceland's Althing, the Haudenosaunee, the transition of Sephardic Jewish finances from Ma'arufiah (a medieval clientage system in which high-status rabbis protected the monopolies of their clients) to the Letra de Cambio ("bill of exchange"; rabbis adjudicated standardized financial contracts), the Dutch Republic, and the British and part of the French Enlightenment.
(Yes, part of the left and of the right both hate the Jews today because the Jews were key in starting the post-dark-age European Enlightenment.)
All unenlightened civilizations attribute all agency to some analog of a "soul": an atomic essence which cannot be usefully analyzed reductively. Real agency includes the movement of animals and machines; legal systems; the invisible hand of a free market; the checks and balances in the Constitution; Darwinian evolution; self-organizing systems such as hurricanes; and the energy-minimizing hillclimbing performed by neural networks in the brain and in LLMs to organize networks in ways that ground the meanings of words in sense data. Apocryphal souls invoked to explain such agency include all gods; the "General Will", "class consciousness", or "spirit of the Volk" that leftists invoke to pretend good people will always agree; and the magical power of words to connect your mind directly to a transcendental Platonic Form, or to cause something to happen ("Let there be light!", "Abracadabra!").
(Yes, Nazis are leftists. The "left" was defined on two occasions: during the French Revolution, and in the break between left and right Hegelians. In both cases, "right" meant conservatives, while "left" meant radicals who wanted to eliminate an oppressive class, after which society would magically become healthy. The Jacobins wanted to eliminate aristocrats, the Hegelian left wanted to eliminate priesthoods; Marx wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews (see his "On the Jewish Question"); and the Nazi left wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews plus other non-Aryans. 90 years of dedicated revisionist history by leftists trying to conceal their initial infatuation with fascism cannot change this fact.)
So unenlightened cultures see the solution to every systemic problem not as fixing the system--because they don't grok what a "system" is, or believe it has any agency beyond the will of the people who built it--but as either to put the right people in charge, or to tear the system down in the presumption that the state of nature is always better than being ruled by a "mere machine" (which in their imaginations becomes the malicious daemon Moloch). Leftist complaints today about "the system" and "systemic racism", based on Foucault's understanding of all governmental systems as nothing but the reified will of the ruling class, are a perfect example. (Foucault, like all post-modernists, always misunderstood the Enlightenment and science because he assumed they must be Aristotelian.)
Aristotle, providing what he thought was an exhaustive list of the different kinds of government, differentiated them only by what sort of people were in charge, not by mechanisms such as trial by jury, appointment to office by lot or election, etc. Enlightenment cultures see the government as the set of mechanisms which order it, which determine collectively how power is allocated. Aristotle saw it the other way around: a city's soul or essence was the group of people in charge, or the "politeia". (Isocrates much earlier called the politeia the "soul of the city" (psyche poleos).)
To Aristotle, the soul of a city came first, and mechanisms of government emerged to serve that soul. So even though he studied the laws of different cities intensively, he didn't see the nature (essence) of a city as emerging from its laws, but the laws as emerging from the city's essence, which was simply the set of people in charge. This is a classical soul-based understanding of government.
(We see the same backwards view of causation in the classical understanding of word meaning, which was that you must begin by defining your terms, as contrasted with the scientific understanding that you must begin with observations, and make up words as labels for your observations as you go. The classical view sees a word's meaning as inherent in its pre-existing eternal soul; the scientific view sees the word's meaning as emerging from the actions of the system being observed.)
(The transition from soul-based to mechanism-based thought is encoded in the use of the word "Constitution" to mean the laws describing a government's mechanism. Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's /politeia/ into Latin in the early 1400s as /constitutio/, which then meant the parts making up the human body, and corresponded to Aristotle's meaning. But by the time the US Constitution was written, a nation's "constitution" referred not to who ruled, but to the machinery of government, which is now seen as the phenomenon, not the epiphenomenon. The word's etymology means the soul of a nation, but we understand it as its legal machinery.)
Unenlightened cultures, who see a culture as having an essence with the atomic and eternal nature of a soul, see cultures not as evolving, but as being founded, and then running downhill until they collapse, as in Greek myth, Christianity, Oswald Spengler, and Tolkien. Good government is the continual fight to impose order on chaos by an endless cycle of trying to give more power to more-virtuous people. The pre-Enlightenment meaning of "chaos" was the combination of "randomness" and "emptiness", and with few exceptions (such as Viking mythology), chaos was strictly bad.
(Yes, Loki is an interesting Marvel character because Iceland had a political system of checks and balances.)
The greatest discovery of the Enlightenment was how to harness the power of chaos, which now has the late-20th-century mathematical meaning of the thin border between order and randomness. This applies to building machines with many moving parts, to governments with checks and balances, and to the distributed decision-making of a free market. This harnesses for our own purposes the very same agentive power which caused life to evolve.