September 8, 2007
The Old Order Passeth III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST Fredric Smoler wrote, “According to Mr. Gordon’s account . . . the decline of the share of world population engaged in agriculture means a chance at abundance (rather than subsistence) as the fate of most of the species. If this is true—and I think it is—it is of course not the only possible majority fate. Hordes of unemployable paupers living in urban slums is also a possible fate, but Mr. Gordon surely knows that.” Indeed I do. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England that is exactly what happened. The enclosure movement, where the landlords tossed out the peasants and brought in sheep—which were both more profitable and much less likely to get uppity—turned many of the displaced peasants into roaming hordes of paupers, often pushed from one parish to another. (Parishes were in charge of what today we would call welfare, so they each sought to make it the next parish’s problem.) One result of this, happily for this country, was the migration of the most ambitious and daring of these displaced workers to the new North American colonies, a fact that has enriched this country ever since. Toward the end of the seventeenth century and especially in the eighteenth century, the English trading and, increasingly, industrial economy began to expand quickly and was able to absorb more of these displaced workers. But many ended up in urban slums anyway, although I doubt the unspeakable urban slums of Dickens’s England were much if any worse than the unspeakable rural slums of Fielding’s England had been a century earlier, just vastly larger. The transition from a rural, agricultural economy to an urban, industrial one ended up making it possible for a much larger percentage of the English population to live above the poverty level, today essentially everyone. But it was a long process with many dislocations and individuals who were made worse off, sometimes far worse, in the short term. It was a good thing in the long term, but, as Lord Keynes explained, “In the long term we are all dead.” Mr. Smoler writes, “We are eerily sentimental about the rural past. We have a tendency to imagine rural life as virtuous and just, with the city as the zone of corruption and wretchedness. This is perverse sentimentality held with remarkable tenacity, and it affects people who ought to know better.” I entirely agree. If you would like to be disabused forever of this notion of an idyllic rural past, I would recommend Michael Lesy’s remarkable Wisconsin Death Trip. It consists mostly of often grim photographs taken in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, by Charles Van Schaik between 1890 and 1910, along with clippings from the local newspapers about barn burnings, madness, alcoholism, bank failure, murder, armed gangs, you name it. It is not the world depicted by Grandma Moses. This nostalgia for a picket-fence and vine-covered-cottage rural past that had never, in fact, existed, began in the middle third of the nineteenth century, as the pre-industrial age was beginning to vanish from human experience with the introduction of new technologies such as the railroad, steamboats, telegraph, mass media, and running water. People previously had lived in a world in which technological change had been glacial. Someone born in, say, 1800, grew up in a world that would have been familiar to his parents, grandparents, even great grandparents. To be sure, politics changed and fashions (for those who could afford to be fashionable) changed, but the way the world worked did not. The steam engine and the Industrial Revolution changed that, and the early Victorians found themselves living in a new age, one they thought of as “an age of chaos . . . [a] heaving tumbling age.” People began to long for “the good old days” (the phrase was coined in 1844), which they remembered nostalgically, not accurately. Today we are in the midst of a technological revolution, induced by the microprocessor, that is even more profound. But it has not, at least not yet, produced a similar nostalgia for the industrial era. I detect no longing for the good old days of air pollution, labor strife, and operator-assisted long distance. I suspect the reason for that lies with the fact that the Industrial Revolution not only changed the world profoundly in the course of a single lifetime but also greatly accelerated the rate of change. Every generation since that first, early Victorian one has lived to see the world made new. I can remember my grandmother telling me about the first time she ever used a telephone. My grandfather, born in 1881, grew up in a horse-and-buggy world lit by kerosene, and yet he and I watched television together as Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon.
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