Summary: Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral—some people claim that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. This article addresses seven supposed negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. The conclusion is that history bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination.

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When Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.

Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era. Some are even claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”

In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.

Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.

In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind the popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?

“Horrible Living Conditions for Workers”

Were horrible living conditions a result of industrialization? To be sure, industrial-era living conditions did not meet modern standards—but neither did the living conditions that preceded them.

As historian Kirstin Olsen put it in her book, Daily Life in 18th-Century England, “The rural poor . . . crowded together, often in a single room of little more than 100 square feet, sometimes in a single bed, or sometimes in a simple pile of shavings or straw or matted wool on the floor. In the country, the livestock might be brought indoors at night for additional warmth.” In 18th-century Wales, one observer claimed that in the homes of the common people, “every edifice” was practically a miniature “Noah’s Ark” filled with a great variety of animals. One shudders to think of the barnlike smell that bedchambers took on, in addition to the chorus of barnyard sounds that likely filled every night. Our forebears put up with the stench and noise and cuddled up with their livestock, if only to stave off hypothermia.

Homes were often so poorly constructed that they were unstable. The din of collapsing buildings was such a common sound that in 1688, Randle Holme defined a crash as “a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall.” The poet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that in 1730s London, “falling houses thunder on your head.” In the 1740s, “props to houses” keeping them from collapsing were listed among the most common obstacles that blocked free passage along London’s walkways.

“Poor Nutrition”

What about poor nutrition? From liberal flower children to the “Make America Healthy Again” crowd, fetishizing the supposedly chemical-free, wholesome diets of yore is bipartisan. The truth, however, is stomach-churning.

Our ancestors not only failed to eat well, but they sometimes didn’t eat at all. Historian William Manchester noted that in preindustrial Europe, famines occurred every four years on average. In the lean years, “cannibalism was not unknown. Strangers and travelers were waylaid and killed to be eaten.” Historian Fernand Braudel recorded a 1662 account from Burgundy, France, that lamented that “famine this year has put an end to over ten thousand families . . . and forced a third of the inhabitants, even in the good towns, to eat wild plants. . . . Some people ate human flesh.” A third of Finland’s population is estimated to have died of starvation during a famine in the 1690s.

Even when food was available, it was often far from appetizing. Our forebears lived in a world where adulterated bread and milk, spoiled meat, and vegetables tainted with human waste were everyday occurrences. London bread was described in a 1771 novel as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.” According to historian Emily Cockayne, the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected noted that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.”

Water was also far from pristine. “For the most part, filth flowed out windows, down the streets, and into the same streams, rivers, and lakes where the city’s inhabitants drew their water,” according to environmental law professor James Salzman. This ensured that each swig included a copious dose of human excreta and noxious bacteria. Waterborne illnesses were frequent.

“A Stressful, Unsatisfying Lifestyle”

Did stressful lifestyles originate with industrialization? Did our preindustrial ancestors generally enjoy a sense of inner peace? Doubtful. Sadly, many of them suffered from what they called melancholia, roughly analogous to the modern concepts of anxiety and depression.

In 1621, physician Robert Burton described a common symptom of melancholia as waking in the night due to mental stress among the upper classes. An observer said the poor similarly “feel their sleep interrupted by the cold, the filth, the screams and infants’ cries, and by a thousand other anxieties.” Richard Napier, a 17th-century physician, recorded over several decades that some 20 percent of his patients suffered from insomnia. Today, in comparison, 12 percent of Americans say they have been diagnosed with chronic insomnia. Stress is nothing new.

Sky-high preindustrial mortality rates caused profound emotional suffering to those in mourning. Losing a child to death in infancy was once a common—indeed, near-universal—experience among parents, but the loss was no less painful for all its ordinariness. Many surviving testimonies suggest that mothers and fathers felt acute grief with each loss. The 18th-century poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of Its Birth,” by Mehetabel “Hetty” Wright—who lost several of her own children prematurely—heartrendingly urges her infant to look at her one last time before passing away.

So common were child deaths that practically every major poet explored the subject. Robert Burns wrote “On the Birth of a Posthumous Child.” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote multiple poems to his deceased son. Consider the pain captured by these lines from William Shakespeare’s play King John, spoken by the character Constance upon her son’s death: “Grief fills the room up of my absent child. . . . O Lord! My boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!” Shakespeare’s own son died in 1596, around the time the playwright would have finished writing King John.

Only in the modern world has child loss changed from extraordinarily common to exceedingly rare. As stressful as modern life can be, our ancestors faced forms of heartache that most people today will never endure.

“Dangerous Workplaces” and “Child Labor”

Dangerous workplaces and child labor both predate the Industrial Revolution. In agrarian societies, entire families would labor in fields and pastures, including pregnant women and young children. Many preindustrial children entered the workforce at what today would be considered preschool or kindergarten age.

In poorer families, children were sent to work by age 4 or 5. If children failed to find gainful employment by age 8, even social reformers unusually sympathetic to the plight of the poor, would express open disgust at such a lack of industriousness. Jonas Hanway was reportedly “revolted by families who sought charity when they had children aged 8 to 14 earning no wages.”

For most, work was backbreaking and unending. A common myth suggests that preindustrial peasants worked fewer days than modern people do. This misconception originated from an early estimate by historian Gregory Clark, who initially proposed that peasants labored only 150 days a year. He later revised this figure to around 300 days—higher than the modern average of 260 working days, even before factoring in today’s paid holidays and vacation time.

Physically harming one’s employees was once widely accepted, too, and authorities stepped in only when the mistreatment was exceptionally severe. In 1666, one such case occurred in Kittery, in what is now Maine, when Nicholas and Judith Weekes caused the death of a servant. Judith confessed that she cut off the servant’s toes with an axe. The couple, however, was not indicted for murder, merely for cruelty.

“Discrimination Against Women”

The preindustrial world was hardly a model of gender equality—discrimination against women was not an invention of the early industrialists but a long-standing feature of many societies.

Domestic violence was widely tolerated. In London, a 1595 law dictated: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” In other words, no beating your wife after 9:00 p.m. That was a noise regulation. A similar law forbade using a hammer after 9:00 p.m. Beating one’s wife until she screamed was an ordinary and acceptable activity.

Domestic violence was celebrated in popular culture, as in the lively folk song “The Cooper of Fife,” a traditional Scottish tune that inspired a country dance and influenced similar English and American ballads. To modern ears, the contrast between its violent lyrics and upbeat melody is unsettling. The song portrays a husband as entirely justified in his acts of domestic violence, inviting the audience to side with the wifebeater and cheer as he beats his wife into submission for her failure to perform domestic chores to her husband’s satisfaction.

Sexist laws often empowered men to abuse women. If a woman earned money, her husband could legally claim it at any time. For instance, in 18th-century Britain, a wife could not enter into contracts, make a will without her husband’s approval, or decide on her children’s education or apprenticeships; moreover, in the event of a separation, she automatically lost custody. Mistreatment of women, in other words, long predated industrialization. Arguably, it was the increase in female labor force participation during the Industrial Revolution that ultimately gave women greater economic independence and strengthened their social bargaining power.

“Environmental Harm”

While many of today’s environmental challenges—such as climate change and plastic pollution—differ from those our forebears faced, environmental degradation is not a recent phenomenon. Worrying about environmental impact, however, is rather new. Indeed, as historian Richard Hoffmann has pointed out, “Medieval writers often articulated an adversarial understanding of nature, a belief that it was not only worthless and unpleasant, but actively hostile to . . . humankind.”

Consider deforestation. The Domesday Survey of 1086 found that trees covered 15 percent of England; by 1340, the share had fallen to 6 percent. France’s forests more than halved from about 30 million hectares in Charlemagne’s time (768–814) to 13 million by Philip IV’s reign (1285–1314).

Europe was hardly the only part of the world to abuse its forests. A 16th-century witness observed that at every proclamation demanding more wood for imperial buildings, the peasants of what are today the Hubei and Sichuan provinces in China “wept with despair until they choked,” for there was scarcely any wood left to be found.

Despeciation is also nothing new. Humans have been exterminating wildlife since prehistory. The past 50,000 years saw about 90 genera of large mammals go extinct, amounting to over 70 percent of America’s large species and over 90 percent of Australia’s. 

Exterminations of species occurred throughout the preindustrial era. People first settled in New Zealand in the late 13th century. In only 100 years, humans exterminated 10 species of moa in addition to at least 15 other kinds of native birds, including ducks, geese, pelicans, coots, Haast’s eagle, and an indigenous harrier. Today, few people realize that lions, hyenas, and leopards were once native to Europe, but by the first century, human activity eliminated them from the continent. The final known auroch, Europe’s native wild ox, was killed in Poland by a noble hunter in 1627.

Progress Is Real

History bears little resemblance to the sanitized image of preindustrial times in the popular imagination—that is, a beautiful scene of idyllic country villages with pristine air and residents merrily dancing around maypoles. The healthy, peaceful, and prosperous people in this fantasy of pastoral bliss do not realize their contented, leisurely lives will soon be disrupted by the story’s villain: the dark smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution’s “satanic mills.”

Such rose-colored views of the past bear little resemblance to reality. A closer look shatters the illusion. The world most of our ancestors faced was in fact more gruesome than modern minds can fathom. From routine spousal and child abuse to famine-induced cannibalism and streets that doubled as open sewers, practically every aspect of existence was horrific.

A popular saying holds that “the past is a foreign country,” and based on recorded accounts, it is not one where you would wish to vacation. If you could visit the preindustrial past, you would likely give the experience a zero-star rating. Indeed, the trip might leave you permanently scarred, both physically and psychologically. You might long to unsee the horrors encountered on your adventure and to forget the shocking, gory details.

The upside is that the visit would help deromanticize the past and show how far humanity has truly come—emphasizing the utter transformation of everyday lives and the reality of progress.

This article was published at Big Think on 11/19/2025.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Today, I’ll be speaking with Brink Lindsey, an American political writer and Senior Vice President at the Niskanen Center. Previously, he was Cato’s Vice President for Research and a dear colleague. Today, we’ll be discussing his latest book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transformation from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.

I want to start by congratulating you on your excellent book. It is concise, thoughtful, and beautifully written. As a published author, I’m envious of your style, and I really recommend the book to our listeners.

Let’s start with the most obvious question. What is the permanent problem?

I stole that line from the British economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote a fascinating essay called “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.”

That essay came out in 1930 in the depths of the Great Depression, but he was brave enough to argue that this global catastrophe was just a bump in the road in a much longer process of modern economic growth, which he believed would continue until his audience’s grandchildren were grown. By that point, he said that the economic problem, meaning serious material deprivation, would be more or less solved. With that done, he foresaw that humanity’s permanent problem would loom into view: how to live wisely and agreeably and well with the blessings that modern economic growth has bestowed upon us.

He got some specific things wrong. He imagined that by now we’d only be working 15 hours a week, which hasn’t panned out. However, he got the big picture profoundly right, which is that an abundant future was coming, and that moving from tackling the economic problem to the permanent problem would be traumatic for societies. That they would have to unlearn the habits of untold generations.

He imagined that this transition would be, in his words, something like a “general nervous breakdown throughout society.” That phrase struck me as a pretty good description for the predicament that the United States and other advanced democracies have found themselves in. We’re richer, healthier, better educated, and more humanely governed than any people have ever been before, yet economic growth has slowed to a crawl in most advanced economies, class divisions have sparked a global populist uprising against elites and established institutions, personal relationships are fraying, mental health problems are on the rise, faith in democracy is wavering, and widespread pessimism is one of the few things you can get people across the political spectrum to agree on.

So, the thesis of the book is that our predicament amounts to the fact that we are in this no man’s land between mass plenty and mass flourishing. That, having achieved mass plenty, we’ve moved the goalposts of what makes a successful life. It’s no longer just about having food, shelter, and clothing, but meaning, purpose, belonging, and status. While we are providing those conditions for a larger fraction of the population than ever before, for 70 or 80 percent of people, our current way of life is not providing the conditions for flourishing that one would imagine would go with our level of technological and organizational prowess.

So, in America today, things are so good that we are moving to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, but on the other hand, we have a hysteria where people are saying basic necessities like food and shelter have never been more unaffordable.

Can both be true at the same time?

I think we are absolutely materially richer than any society before. People who are discontent with the status quo grope for something quantifiable that has gone wrong, and so they try to make an argument about material decline that just isn’t consistent with the facts. It is true that we are rich enough to take our basic material needs for granted. Nonetheless, we enjoy these blessings with a kind of asterisk, which is that we get them only by spending the bulk of our waking adult lives working 40-hour weeks.

The blessed 20 or 30 percent at the top have an arena for flourishing. They’ve got intellectually challenging jobs that offer a lot of autonomy and scope for creativity, and social status. The rest are in fairly low-autonomy jobs with a lot of scutwork, and they’re one stroke of bad luck away from losing their job and falling into a serious hole. They’re shadowed by both the precarity of their hold on mass plenty and also by the need to spend a lot of their lives in drudgery to pay the bills.

According to Gallup, life satisfaction in America remained pretty much the same between 1979 and 2025. Roughly 80 percent of Americans say they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives, while only 20 percent of Americans believe that America is going in the right direction.

So, how bad is it really, if 80 percent of Americans say that they are satisfied or very satisfied with their lives?

I don’t put much stock in self-assessments of life satisfaction. Psychologically healthy people make the best of things, whatever the circumstances. Plus, happiness and life satisfaction surveys have a lot of cultural variation. Latin Americans seem to report higher life satisfaction given their level of GDP than Scandinavians or Japanese.

What I look at instead is the conditions for a well-lived life. The chances to do work that is challenging, fulfilling, and interesting are very good for a considerable fraction of people, but they’re not so good for the majority. There’s a large divergence there between the well-off and well-educated and everybody else. That’s also translated into diverging odds of even being in the workforce: there’s been a small drop-off in male prime-age labor force participation for college-educated men from the mid-’60s to the present, and a big drop-off in labor force participation for non-college-educated men. There’s been a similar divergence in the odds of getting married and in the odds of growing up in a two-parent home. And finally, in recent years, we’ve seen a divergence in life expectancy. Rather than the poor catching up with the rich over time, they’re now pulling apart.

So, are we doing better than ever before? Sure. But I don’t think that exhausts the inquiry. In a society organized around progress, a purely backward-looking standard of evaluation isn’t dispositive. In some of the more intangible aspects of flourishing, there are warning signs that things are going in the wrong direction.

So, do you have in your mind a sense of what an agreeable life should be?

At least in broad outlines.

In the agrarian age, to quote Hobbes, “Life was poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” but it was not solitary. People were miserable and poor, but they weren’t atomized or alienated. Now, I think it’s a real liberation that we’re not stuck in the same place that we were born, working the same trade as our parents. We can choose our own lives, and that’s a great opportunity. The next question is, “Are we going to develop cultural and institutional supports in these new conditions that will help us to have satisfying lives?

It’s beyond serious dispute that for most people, the most important determinant of the quality of their life is the quality of their personal relationships. And once upon a time, when the world was poor, your face-to-face relationships with other people filled vital practical functions. Your spouse was a partner in economic co-production. Your kids were economic assets. Your neighbors were an insurance policy. The main source of entertainment was hanging out with your friends and talking.

Over time, as we’ve gotten richer, we’ve outsourced a lot of those functions either to the marketplace or the welfare state. Personal relationships with people have become just one consumption option in a sea of expertly marketed alternatives. Learning to live wisely and agreeably and well amidst riches requires cultural and institutional supports that push us to spend our time on what really matters, which is the people who are close to us. We don’t have those, so we’re seeing fraying human connection.

This is cashing out most fatefully in the declining rate of people getting married and having babies. More than half of people now live in countries where the fertility rate is below replacement. That puts the whole demographic sustainability of liberal, democratic, capitalist, cosmopolitan, affluent civilization in doubt.

I want to ask you about the danger of presentism.

When we see a problem on the front pages of newspapers, we tend to extrapolate from it a broader crisis. In other words, we have trouble separating that which is fundamental to our civilization from that which is just a passing trend.

Let me give you a few examples. You write in the book that “we are getting fatter, dumber, and our mental health is deteriorating.” It certainly feels like it, right? But obesity is already declining in the United States because of Ozempic. Increasingly large numbers of young people are switching off social media. Apparently, Gen Z, the newest ones, are the best at that. Suicide rates are falling in rich countries outside of the United States, meaning this may be a particular American problem, or even simply a problem of measurement, rather than a general problem with modernity.

So, are we underestimating human adaptability and technological innovation?

That’s a very good point. We learn over time that some things that we thought were great turned out to be bad, and we put them behind us. Forty percent of American adults used to smoke, and we covered our walls with lead paint. And yes, we’ve got what looks like a deus ex machina for obesity, but the fact that the obesity wave happened at all is a good example of a more general challenge of being rich.

When we were poor, we developed a scarcity-based morality of self-discipline and self-control and resisting temptation out of necessity, but as those material constraints lessened, there was an inevitable and appropriate loosening. People could indulge their desires more. They could, to a greater extent than in the past, follow an “if it feels good, do it” kind of path. Well, it turns out that those qualities of self-discipline and self-mastery are still extremely helpful today, not for keeping you from falling into horrible poverty, but for keeping you focused on the things that really matter, rather than trivial, distracting desires.

Capitalism gives us what we want, and we don’t yet have the cultural supports that make sure it gives us what we want to want.

One set of problems that you identify has to do with the disintegration of personal bonds and the atomization of society.

Now, if I wanted to make grandparents more reliant on their children, to make neighbors more helpful to each other, and to increase church attendance, I would start by abolishing the welfare state, which I think has eroded the kind of mutual, voluntary reliance that people once had on each other.

This might irritate you, but I see the welfare state as an integral part of modern capitalism. Nowhere do we see a complex, technologically intensive, organizationally intensive division of labor without a strong welfare state. It’s possible to imagine such a thing, but it’s also possible to imagine a human being that’s 100 meters tall. If you actually had a human being that tall, he would collapse under his own weight. Plus, the libertarian movement in the United States has made zero headway in knocking back the welfare state, so I think libertarians need some kind of plan B.

The hopeful future I have in mind is more localistic and involves reimbuing our face-to-face relationships with family and neighbors with practical functions, which will allow people to live without the welfare state to a considerable degree. You can imagine a world of small modular nuclear reactors and 3D printing and vertical farming where small communities, with small divisions of labor, could have a degree of material affluence that today requires large-scale divisions of labor. But even in the here and now, if people are living together in communities, they can reassume duties of care that have been outsourced to private enterprise and the welfare state, such as taking care of little kids and elderly people and educating the young.

I wonder what is going to be more effective at driving culture change: appealing to people, or changing the incentives. When the government says, “We can pay for your child to go to a school,” you can opt out, but you will have to pay twice if you want to send your kids to a private school.

At the very least, I think we agree we will need to have competition. We could give the welfare state to the states and let them play around with it so that different jurisdictions can learn from each other.

Yeah. And, even more importantly, on the regulatory side. This is what I call capitalism’s crisis of inclusion, which is the weakening relationship between growth and widespread good conditions for the good life for people.

Meanwhile, though, we have a crisis of dynamism, a weakening capacity of the system to just keep delivering growth and pushing the technological frontier outward. Mancur Olson identified this problem a long time ago, which is that the richer you get, the more people you have with a stake in the status quo. For those people, the prospect of disruptive change is anxiety-provoking because it could knock them off their privileged perch, so they have an incentive to stop change. Also, the richer you get, the lower communication costs are, and the easier it is to band together with like-minded people and throw sand in the gears of creative destruction.

Meanwhile, the knowledge economy has created this large class of knowledge workers who desire to control and rationalize everything in their grasp. When something isn’t working, the solution is to add another layer of bureaucracy and process. Obviously, we’ve got lots of this kind of dysfunction in the public sector, but I think we also see it in the private sector, with the explosion of administrative staff on campus, the HR-ization of corporate life, and also in personal life, with helicopter parenting. These same professionals, on their off hours, deploy their managerial instincts to squeeze every drop of spontaneity out of childhood in the name of safety.

Those impulses are deep-seated, and they have contributed to an increasing drag on our dynamism.

One of the most effective ways to tackle this is inter-jurisdictional competition, allowing different groups to have different rules to limit the exposure of those different rules. Then, if that different set of rules really is producing better results, they can be emulated elsewhere. Beyond that, we’re just ineradicably culturally pluralistic people, especially under conditions of modernity. People are not going to agree with each other on what the good life is. They’re going to have different values. Having us all crammed together under one set of rules makes those value differences really high stakes and combustible and has produced a lot of the dysfunctional politics we’re experiencing now.

Last question.

My view of what living wisely, agreeably, and well may be very different from a guy who is perfectly satisfied living in his basement playing games and smoking a lot of pot. I would find such a life appalling, but who am I to tell this person that they are not living wisely, agreeably, and well?

In other words, aren’t you worried that even if all your hopes come to pass, the future may still contain a lot of people who will not be living wisely, agreeably, and well, just as they are today?

We can talk about flourishing at the individual level and then flourishing at the societal level.

In the book, I talk about projects, relationships, and experiences. Some people are really focused on projects and very light on relationships, and they do fine. Some people are great at cultivating amazing experiences, and they’re not very practical about anything else, but they live well that way. So there are a lot of different ways to have a good life.

At the social level, there’s a little bit less variety. To take one example, you can totally have a flourishing individual life without having children, but you can’t really have a flourishing society unless a certain number of people are having babies. So, I think you can’t have a flourishing society that isn’t a free society where people are the authors of their own lives, but a free society requires the freedom to fail. Some people are just not going to live wisely and agreeably and well.

I think we can create better conditions for people to choose well than we have at present. But that doesn’t mean we need to converge on one way of living well. That would be boring. Getting richer should mean a flowering of variety, not everybody converging on one way of life. And I think a more pluralistic, localistic institutional environment is most conducive to that end.

And it seems to me that living in a pluralistic society doesn’t mean that you are voiceless, that you don’t have a right to express your views about other people’s lives. Pluralism does not require total relativism. I can still say to little Jimmy, “Spend less time playing video games in your room and go out and explore the world.”

Ultimately, if we are going to be living in a pluralistic society where people can choose their values and how they want to live, it should be possible for people to persuade them that some ways of living, such as living up to their best potential, are better than wasting their lives.

This is the ultimate challenge for Homo sapiens: are we cut out for freedom? Are we cut out for being allowed to choose the good? Or are we just such a refractory species that we have to be lorded over?

The dystopian novel Brave New World, I think, is a much better fit with the predicament we’re in right now than 1984. The human spirit is being degraded, not by a regime of fear, but by a regime of cheap pleasures. At the end of that book, there’s this long monologue by the head of the society making this argument that human beings just don’t know what’s good for them and need to be taken care of. I don’t believe that. I have faith that there is a human nature that wants the good, that wants to connect to the outside world, and to other people, and figure things out. And we have the great privilege of living in a very rich, technologically advanced world that gives more people opportunities to do those things. We just need to structure things a little bit better to make it easier to make the right choices.

 

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Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Joining me today is Johan Norberg, a historian, commentator, and my colleague here at the Cato Institute. His books include The Capitalist Manifesto, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, and Open: The Story of Human Progress. His latest book is Peak Human.

Johan, tell me about what inspired you to write Peak Human?

One reason is that we live in a golden age right now, and I would like it to keep going for a bit longer. I think it’s useful to look to history for clues about how you build and maintain thriving, dynamic civilizations.

What do you mean by the term golden age?

I’m glad you asked. I’m not thinking about mighty empires and territorial expansion. I’m thinking about decent, dynamic, and innovative civilizations that grow and prosper. I’m looking at periods where you saw a great many innovations in different spheres of human experience: cultural creativity, scientific curiosity, technological innovation, and economic growth.

You have this great line in the introduction where you say, “If we discard all the achievements of those who came before us because they weren’t sufficiently enlightened and decent, and they weren’t, we will eventually lose the capacity to discern what is enlightened and decent.”

What did you mean by that?

It’s incredibly easy to dismiss everything that wasn’t up to our modern moral standards, but if we do that, we lose the ability to understand progress. Some of these past civilizations, imperfect as they were, were incredibly important stepping stones on the way to the Enlightenment, to individual rights, and to prosperity.

Let’s walk through the different golden ages you focus on, starting with ancient Athens.

In the 4th century BC, Athens was just one among thousands of different Greek city-states. That was a great thing for them, because they could compare what they were doing with others and learn. And the Athenians, partly because of their bad soil, were a trading civilization that ventured outward to find useful things, which created a spirit of curiosity and innovation. They even created this ancient form of democracy that, while it excluded women and slaves, gave a lot of power to the average man.

Along with all these things—democracy, openness, and trade—they began to experiment with new ideas in everything from architecture to theater to philosophy. I would argue that this was the first civilization where we actually see people saying that it’s a good thing to criticize your forefathers and come up with something original. And if you start doing that, you’ll come up with lots of exciting ideas.

What lessons can we learn from Athens?

One obvious lesson, which appears in all of these golden ages, is that without one strong man in charge, you open up the whole system to experimentation; ideas can come from anywhere in the network. You basically crowdsource your ideas and, while you’ll get more bad ideas, you’ll also get more great ideas that people can build upon.

I think that’s an important lesson for us. When we think of how to move on and find something better, do we create a great big plan telling people what to do, or do we simply allow more people to join in the game?

What brought the Athenian golden age to an end?

The very long Peloponnesian War against Sparta started to erode that sense of openness and curiosity. Thucydides, the great Greek historian, talked about how people on all sides became tribalists, constantly thinking about how to search for scapegoats and traitors rather than new trading partners. Obviously, the strongest example is when Socrates was sentenced to death for his teachings. That’s something that happens by the end of most of these golden ages; once they sour on intellectual openness, they try to impose some sort of orthodoxy and force people to think and behave in the same way.

Let’s move on to Abbasid-era Baghdad and the Islamic golden age.

One thousand years ago, the greatest thinkers in Europe got their best ideas from Arabs, who had far superior science and technology. Algebra, algorithm, arithmetic, average—all those terms come from this melting pot of an empire that was built from northern Africa all the way to Afghanistan. It was a huge free trade area with the same set of laws and the same language, but it was also very open to different peoples and religions. In Baghdad, they invited thinkers from other cultures and from other religions to talk about their ideas, and constantly translated their texts in order to benefit from them. They considered themselves the successors to the Greek philosophical tradition.

It is often said that the end of the Abbasid Caliphate was when the Mongols invaded in the 1250s. However, by the time of the Mongol invasion, the Caliphate had already been in decline for over 200 years. It started losing its way internally because of a fear of religious difference. Not fear of Christians or Jews, but fear of different traditions within Islam. The Abbasids built state-funded schools where teachers simply repeated Sunni dogma. The intellectuals who used to have various, diverse benefactors got government jobs on the condition that they left their critical judgment outside. That began to undermine the dynamic, open-minded intellectual tradition of the Arab world. You can actually see how texts on science and on technology begin to decline in the areas that got these state-run Madrasas.

Tell me about Song Dynasty China. It’s been said that they came very close to initiating an industrial revolution.

Karl Marx talked about how, in the 19th century, there were three major innovations that ushered in bourgeois society in Europe: Gunpowder, the compass, and printing. But the Chinese had those 1000 years earlier. They were the most innovative and wealthiest society on the planet.

How did they become so wealthy? Well, you have to focus on the Song Dynasty. From the 10th century to the 13th century, China had a relatively strong rule of law and free market. Farmers had property rights rather than being feudal peasants. They were very innovative; they borrowed new crops from other parts of the world, created new irrigation systems, and even came up with paper money. So much food was produced during the Song Dynasty that the Chinese population doubled. That led to urbanization and the rise of an early manufacturing economy. They produced so much iron and steel that Europe couldn’t compete for several hundred years. They also experimented with new textile machines in order to automate the manufacturing of textiles. It’s possible that if they had continued that path, they might have come up with some of the innovations that gave us the Industrial Revolution.

Unfortunately, this golden age was cut short. There was a period of war against Mongol invaders, then civil strife, and in the 14th century, the Ming Dynasty took power. They very self-consciously styled themselves as the dynasty that would restore stability in a top-down uniform way, and they wanted to halt economic change. They grounded their amazing armada and restricted international trade. They were almost role-playing a nostalgic idea of Chinese culture, and even forced people to dress like they did 400 years previously. People were bound to their local village and to their professions. All this created stability at the cost of hundreds of years of stagnation. In the end, the greatest civilization on the planet became a relatively poor civilization that was ultimately humiliated by Western colonial powers.

Moving on to Renaissance Italy, which was also an incredible era of human flourishing.

After the long Middle Ages, the Italian city-states began to pick up scientific, technological, and business ideas from trade with the Arab civilization. The Pope didn’t like all this trading with the infidels, but the Italians said that trade should be free all the way to the gates of hell, which I think is a very powerful free trade slogan. This combination of new ideas and new technologies, combined with these fiercely competitive city-states, led to a lot of experimentation and social mobility. And when you have social mobility, people want to show their status, and they did that by funding art. There was an intimate connection between this new capitalist wealth and a spectacular cultural flourishing.

How did it end?

It sounds like I’m repeating the Abbasid story, but it was religious fragmentation. Both the Pope and the Protestants began to think that they had the one true religion, and that the only way to create a harmonious, unified society was to ensure we all thought in the same way. This “competitive fanaticism,” as Stephen Davies calls it, started in the early 16th century and created widespread fear and anxiety. The popes, who used to be very tolerant of the Renaissance humanists and their secular ideas, began to think, “We have lost our way. We have to return to something pure, something strong.” So, they began to purge the dissenters like Galileo Galilei. Over a very short period, you move from a very tolerant, dynamic, and open Italian civilization to a battle over fanaticism, and no matter who wins, they start to purge their societies of this tolerance.

That’s a great segue into the next society you feature: the Dutch Republic.

The Dutch Republic was the great European exception. They were crazy: they thought that people should be allowed to believe different things. So even though there was a Calvinist majority, other Protestants were accepted, as well as Catholics and Jews. So, in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Dutch Republic collected refugees and dissenters from all over Europe, and books that were purged and burnt in other places could be published in Amsterdam. Everyone from John Locke to Descartes moved to Amsterdam to develop their ideas.

Everybody else thought that Dutch society would break down in utter collapse. Instead, the opposite happened. The other great European states broke down thanks to civil strife and religious war, and the only place left standing was the Dutch Republic. And it wasn’t just that they had relative peace and stability; they also managed to build the richest civilization on the planet because of their relative openness, free markets, and rule of law.

The success of the Dutch Republic was an incredibly important lesson for Europeans in the 17th century, and I think it was one of the reasons that classical liberalism began to take off. As our dear colleague Deirdre McCloskey points out, for the first time in Europe, there was a sense that it was not bad to be a merchant or producer. Previous European civilizations did a lot of trade and production, but they frowned upon it. They thought that production and trade should be left to slaves and foreigners because a real gentleman should just own land passively and make war. This begins to change in the Dutch Republic.

What led to the downfall of the Dutch Republic?

That’s a very sad story. One of the great recurring themes in history is that fear and anxiety often create some sort of societal fight or flight instinct. When you think that everything is breaking down, you want to hide from the world behind walls or a strong leader. This is what happened in the Dutch Republic in the late 17th century.

Admittedly, they faced difficult prospects. They were being invaded repeatedly by their neighbors, and in 1672, they were invaded by England and France at the same time. It was an existential moment where almost everything broke down. Unfortunately, the panicked reaction amongst the Dutch people, and especially some of the more radical Calvinists, led to this idea that, again, we have to return to some pure orthodoxy in order to protect what we’ve got. They began to purge their universities of independent thinkers, and they started to hand power to a strong man, the Stadtholder William of Orange, whom they wanted to assume total power. In 1672, rioters lynched their previous prime minister, Johan de Witt, and even ate parts of him. The fact that even the sensible Dutch can go that far in times of trouble speaks volumes about human nature when we’re anxious.

Let’s move to the Anglosphere, the last Golden Age featured in your book.

This is a long story: we’ve got the Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the foundations of liberal democracy. But it all starts with a Dutch invasion in 1688. This is the nice ending to the Dutch Republic story: when they feared being surrounded once again in the 1680s by France and England, the Dutch decided to do one last Hail Mary and invade England. However, it’s not a standard foreign invasion; they were invited by the English Parliament; the Whig party wanted the Dutch to protect them against the Stuart monarchs. The Dutch succeeded with this invasion, and many of their ideas were passed on to the English. Ideas about limiting the power of the royalty, property rights, free trade, and free speech.

The rest is history. We get more experimentation, new ideas, science, and technology, and that leads to the Industrial Revolution. It’s not just a British story, of course; it’s a pan-European development, but it is turbocharged in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Then we get it in America as well, and that changes the whole world. The Dutch ideas that had been transplanted into a bigger British body politic were now transplanted into the American one. And after the Second World War, America decided to be the protector and guarantor of a relatively liberal world order, which is based, I would argue, on Dutch ideas.

With this world order, which makes the world relatively safe for liberal democracies, we see for the first time a truly global golden age. Weird peripheries like Sweden or East Asian nations can suddenly get access to the frontier knowledge and technology. We suddenly move from a world where 8 out of 10 people live in extreme poverty to one where less than one out of 10 people live in extreme poverty. Despite all the problems today, we live in history’s greatest golden age.

How do we ensure that our current golden age doesn’t end?

The first thing is to learn from our mistakes. First, don’t take progress for granted. We take wealth and freedom for granted because we happen to have been brought up in an extraordinarily prosperous world. But that wasn’t the rule throughout history; it has to be fought for. We have to fight for our institutions if we want to continue enjoying their results.

The second lesson is that we have to learn how to count to ten when we’re anxious. As Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian, put it, there are two different mindsets: the Athenian mindset of going out into the world to learn or acquire something new, and the mindset of staying at home to protect what you’ve got. If you do that, you tend to lose what you’ve got because it’s not there. Knowledge, technology, and ultimately wealth are not like piles of gold that just lie around; they have to be constantly regenerated. If we become like Spartans and try to protect what we’ve got by ending openness, trade, migration, and the rule of law, we will lose what we’ve got, as we’ve seen throughout history.

You also have a prediction in your conclusion that future golden ages might be more diluted than in the past.

What sets this time apart from all the others is that we have more golden age eggs in different baskets.

Historically, when Rome or Baghdad collapsed, you could really talk about the end of civilization. You lost knowledge that was only rediscovered thousands of years later. Today, we live in a global civilization, not just when it comes to our values or ideas, but in terms of access to the latest knowledge about science and technology. Even if we failed and stopped producing stuff, others would pick up the torch, and in a way, that’s a relief. We won’t see the complete end of civilization this time around unless we do something really bad.

This also means that I have a hard time thinking that some part of the world could just speed ahead of everybody else, because we can imitate ideas so much faster than we could in the past. The only question is, what do you do as an individual, as a business, as a city, or as a nation? Are you open to those ideas? Are you constantly comparing notes and benchmarking, or do you shut your mind off to all that stuff? That will decide whether or not you help create a golden age, not where you happen to be placed geographically.