revolution and redemption
Scholars believe the first seven centuries of the second millennia to be a period of slow fermentation in which materials, essential knowledge, and technical philosophies began to coalesce around certain hubs of industry. What came next transformed human history forever. Industrialists of this era launched a revolution that reached every part of society and learning. Sigfried Giedion, a historian and architecture critic from the twentieth century, said this of that period:
“Invention was a part of the normal course of life. Everyone invented. Every entrepreneur dreamed of more rapid and economical means of fabrication. The work was done unconsciously and autonomously. Nowhere else and never before was the number of inventions per capita as great as in America in the 60’s of that century.“
With key ideas in place, inventors took the matter of shaping history into their own hands and introduced technology that was the bedrock of society for the next two centuries of growth. The assembly line and manufacturing processes, coal engines and automotive transportation, steel-making and the creation of skyscrapers- every part of our modern day environment was generated in a scant two hundred years of innovation and growth. Ford, Vanderbilt, Taylor, et al. These built the world as we know it.
An accelerated pace of scholastic and globalized friction has brought us into a new inflection point in history. The digital, biomedical, and AI revolutions have teed up what will be our next great reshaping. Our technical waters and spirit of innovation is the most favorable environment since that long gone revolution.
What powered upheavals of the past was a clear commercial incentive. “How does this stimulate economic growth? Where does this get our bottom line (says the devout capitalist)?” Writers like Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey seen “growth” in their time and said “an infinitely greedy sovereign is afoot in the universe, staking his claims,” and “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
We must have a greater incentive than this kind of limitless gain.
Berry tells us to look the the land, Abbey to look within. Both to save those parts of the world that are undervalued, written off, and incapable of producing for themselves. Technological innovation is not the path to this kind of redemptive growth, but rather human innovation, on the scale of individual virtues and character-training. We cannot innovate our way out of our problems. The road lies through the path of hard introspection and the realization that the world can only change if we change ourselves to aid it.
