Nearing the end . . .

This has been the longest set of blogs on one topic since I began to write several years ago. The reason is that it touches on so much of what's wrong today in American society. We don't know history, we have walked away from a Christian faith, we downplay all the wonderful achievements of the West,  we play up multiculturalism to the point that the young see nothing special about our society, we don't realize how much good has come from the connection of Christianity to the West. So let's get back to Rodney Stark and his book How the West Won.

The last section of his book deals with the age of modernity, which he dates from 1750 to the present  time. Between 1750 and 1850 people witnessed an era of immense and stunningly rapid progress which began in Britain, with a wave of inventions and innovations that transformed nearly every aspect of life. What soon became known as the Industrial Revolution continued and spread, allowing people to enjoy in the West the standard of living only dreamed of in the past. But in fact modernity has helped nearly everyone. For example, he mentions that an infant born today in the Republic of the Congo can expect to live 25 years longer than a baby born in France in 1800.

Of course, Stark recognizes that the Industrial Revolution brought problems. But he says critics have imagined that there was some previous utopia wherein no one hungered or shivered and had a quiet, intimate family life. In truth, life in preindustrial rural villages was terrible. People knew nothing of the world, most families had no privacy living in one-room shacks, no one ever bathed, people went to bed hungry, people lacked adequate clothing, most lived by doing backbreaking labor, half the children did not live to the age of five, and people were often old and toothless by the age of 40. 

What were some of the evils of industrialization? Stark  mentions child labor, and it is true that in the early days the Industrial Revolution did exploit children to labor in factories. But he says we need to realize the Industrial Revolution did not initiate child labor;  it ended that. Children from earliest times had labored long and hard. But by gathering child laborers in the factories, industrialization made them visible, which shocked genteel sensibilities to such an extent that governments began to pass laws to reform and eventually to end these practices. 

Another evil of industrialization Stark covers is the fear of technology that genteel souls reacted to. This hatred and fear of technology can be traced back to intellectuals who visited the earliest factories and were revolted by the fast-moving machines restricting human action. They found it dehumanizing. But many of them had never done physical labor themselves and therefore failed to comprehend that  factory work was actually less physically demanding than the traditional forms of labor. Field hands flocked to the factories for better pay and for less grueling work. Stark says economists have demonstrated that the Industrial Revolution did not displace many skilled craftsmen. It's true the technology replace some skilled occupations, but it created many more skilled jobs than it eliminated.

OK, this is a good place to stop.