The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.”
— Wendell Berry
The various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the results of the ongoing revolution of applied science known as “technological progress.”
This revolution has provided the means by which both the productive and the consumptive capacities of people could be detached from household and community and made to serve other people’s purely economic ends.
It has provided as well a glamor of newness, ease, and affluence that made it seductive even to those who suffered most from it. In its more recent history especially, this revolution has been successful in putting unheard-of quantities of consumer goods and services within the reach of ordinary people.
But the technical means of this popular “affluence” has at the same time made possible the gathering of the real property and the real power of the country into fewer and fewer hands. Some people would like to think that this long sequence of industrial innovations has changed human life and even human nature in fundamental ways.
Perhaps it has—but, arguably, almost always for the worse. I know that “technological progress” can be defended, but I observe that the defenses are invariably quantitative—catalogs of statistics on the ownership of automobiles and television sets, for example, or on the increase of life expectancy—and I see that these statistics are always kept carefully apart from the related statistics of soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, and so forth.
That is to say, there is never an effort to determine the net result of this progress.
The voice of its defenders is not that of the responsible bookkeeper, but that of the propagandist or salesman, who says that the net gain is more than 100 percent—that the thing we have bought has perfectly replaced everything it has cost, and added a great deal more: “You just can’t lose!” We thus have got rich by spending, just as the advertisers have told us we would, and the best of all possible worlds is getting better every day.
The statistics of life expectancy are favorites of the industrial apologists, because they are perhaps the hardest to argue with. Nevertheless, this emphasis on longevity is an excellent example of the way the isolated aims of the industrial mind reduce and distort human life, and also the way statistics corrupt the truth.
A long life has indeed always been thought desirable; everything that is alive apparently wishes to continue to live. But until our own time, that sentence would have been qualified: long life is desirable and everything wishes to live up to a point. Past a certain point, and in certain conditions, death becomes preferable to life.
Moreover, it was generally agreed that a good life was preferable to one that was merely long, and that the goodness of a life could not be determined by its length. The statisticians of longevity ignore good in both its senses; they do not ask if the prolonged life is virtuous, or if it is satisfactory.
If the life is that of a vicious criminal, or if it is inched out in a veritable hell of captivity within the medical industry, no matter—both become statistics to “prove” the good luck of living in our time. But in general, apart from its own highly specialized standards of quantity and efficiency, “technological progress” has produced a social and ecological decline.
Industrial war, except by the most fanatically narrow standards, is worse than war used to be. Industrial agriculture, except by the standards of quantity and mechanical efficiency, diminishes everything it affects. Industrial workmanship is certainly worse than traditional workmanship, and is getting shoddier every day.
After forty-odd years, the evidence is everywhere that television, far from proving a great tool of education, is a tool of stupefaction and disintegration. Industrial education has abandoned the old duty of passing on the cultural and intellectual inheritance in favor of baby-sitting and career preparation.
After several generations of “technological progress,” in fact, we have become a people who cannot think about anything important. How far down in the natural order do we have to go to find creatures who raise their young as indifferently as industrial humans now do?
Even the English sparrows do not let loose into the streets young sparrows who have no notion of their identity or their adult responsibilities.
When else in history would you find “educated” people who know more about sports than about the history of their country, or uneducated people who do not know the stories of their families and communities?
You can find this brief essay in Wendell Berry’s remarkable book—The Art of the Commonplace.
If you enjoy Wendell Berry’s poems, check this gem out.