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 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 ten thousand years 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 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 could let industry optimize such areas, but don’t.

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 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 far more cost-effective industrial-style living arrangements.

Alas, we have been accumulating a cultural deft, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly 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, replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc. For a while the world loses industry, and when that later returns it would be without most of what we cherish about our current world culture. And then it likely falls as well later. Like the Israelites turning away from the promised land.

Or we can try to enter that promised land, by applying industry more to the life areas where we have so far blocked that, accepting that will also greatly change and sometimes destroy many things you now like about our lives in those areas. Such as by freeing capitalism more to run 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?