When I think of the unbroken chain of generations leading to our time and of everything they have built for us, I am humbled. I am overwhelmed with gratitude; shocked by the enormity of the inheritance and at the impossibility of returning even the smallest fraction of the favour.
~Toby Ord, The Precipice

Progress is our escape from the status quo of suffering, our ejection seat from history.
~Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

In my June essay “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers,” I examined the curious phenomenon of anti-Western self-loathing as a supply-side effect. People everywhere like to complain about their life (the demand side), but only free societies offer abundant opportunities to do so with impunity (the supply side). As a result of this asymmetry, free societies become victims of their own success, subject to relentless self-criticism in a way that unfree societies largely are not.

But there is a more literal sense in which the hand of modernity feeds its critics. When the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his diatribe against the pursuit of knowledge, science had yet to deliver tangible benefits to ordinary people. In the 17th century, visionaries like Francis Bacon were predicting that the accumulation of knowledge would eventually improve the conditions of human life, but at the time, most people still lived in abject poverty, children died in droves, farmers relied on muscle power and draught animals, and even the wealthiest king could succumb to a simple infection that is now treatable with cheap, insurance-covered antibiotics.

The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers

When Westerners hate the West.

QuilletteMaarten Boudry

By the mid-to-late 19th century, however, the hand of industrial modernity began feeding everyone at an ever-declining cost. This food surplus, in turn, created new opportunities for intellectuals to make a career out of biting it (the supply side again). One of the earliest and most famous examples was Karl Marx. While he railed against the evils of capitalism in hefty tomes, Marx survived on handouts from his wealthy comrade Friedrich Engels, who in turn got his money from his father’s cotton factories in Manchester. In other words, Marx was living off the profits of the very capitalist system he was denouncing. As historian Niall Ferguson put it in his 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest: “No man in history has bitten the hand that fed him with greater gusto than Marx bit the hand of King Cotton.”

At least Marx also appreciated the accomplishments of bourgeois capitalism and modernity at large—he just believed it was a transitional stage of human societies. As people grew increasingly prosperous and accustomed to prosperity, however, they began to forget the misery from which their ancestors had escaped. This gave rise to a quintessentially modern phenomenon: indulging in romantic fantasies about the blessings of a primitive and pre-modern life, without turning down the nourishments and comforts bestowed by modernity.

Perhaps the earliest practitioner of this hypocrisy was the American philosopher and nature enthusiast Henry David Thoreau. In his celebrated book Walden, Thoreau describes the life he spent as a recluse in a humble cabin in the wilderness, creating the impression that he was completely self-sufficient and cut off from civilisation. In reality, he could walk from his cabin by Walden Pond to his home in Concord in twenty minutes, a journey he made on a regular basis to dine with friends and enjoy the cookies his mother baked with industrially produced sugar and flour.

Walden Pond was anything but “wilderness.” During the summer, the place bustled with picnickers and day-trippers; in winter, it filled with skaters and icemen. Thoreau received frequent visits from his sister and friends, and he hosted gatherings of up to thirty people, who brought him unspecified amounts of provisions. This wealthy, Harvard-educated intellectual also relied on industrial printing presses and modern transport networks to spread his Puritan sermons against civilisation to the world at large.

You Can’t Understand Poverty

In Pulp’s Britpop classic “Common People,” a privileged art student from a wealthy Greek family (rumoured to be the current wife of radical left-wing economist Yanis Varoufakis) asks the working-class singer what it’s really like to live the life of “common people like you.” The song is a biting critique of what we would now call poverty tourism. “Pretend you’ve got no money,” Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker begins dryly, before relating what it means to live in a shabby home and worry about making it through the end of the month. But the young lady seems to find it all very amusing, and in the end Cocker despairs that she will never get it:

But still you'll never get it right,
’Cause when you're laid in bed at night,
Watching roaches climb the wall,
If you called your dad he could stop it all.

Can anyone ever truly understand poverty without having suffered it? Even the narrator of that song would struggle to grasp what absolute poverty as defined by the World Bank means—the miserable predicament of nearly all of humanity before 1800. We should all be grateful that we will never understand poverty, but the problem is that this ignorance provides fertile ground for romantic illusions. Millions of well-fed Westerners gush about the simple life of medieval peasants (no smartphones! organic vegetables from your own garden!) or the nomadic life of hunter-gatherers (no material possessions! living in harmony with nature!). Those who extol the virtues of pre-industrial farming without fertilisers or mechanised tractors are those who never had to survive on it.

It takes a privileged 21st-century degrowth scholar like Jason Hickel to imagine that medieval subsistence farmers were “quite happy,” enjoying “abundant commons” and never having to work for wages. And it takes a well-fed climate activist like Greta Thunberg in a well-heated house filled with fossil products—the cement in the walls, the steel in the girders, the aluminium in their laptops, the hundreds of plastics in their appliances and clothes, the food in their refrigerators, the glue with which they affix themselves to paintings—to lecture the world about its “addiction” to fossil fuels. Industrial modernity produces the calories that allow us to indulge in such anti-modern fantasies, as economist Noah Smith observed:

With their bellies full of industrially grown sugars, they wander through pleasant fantasies of an imagined past—pastel-colored worlds filled with noble savages, happy indolent peasants, and glossy 1950s advertisements.

In a capitalist society, the greater the surplus production, the more career opportunities exist for anti-capitalist intellectuals to revel in such fantasies, secure in the knowledge that thousands of market-tested machines will meet their material desires, and that they can freely sell their anti-capitalist tracts in bookstores, competing openly with other anti-capitalist authors. 

The Invisibility of Progress

Some of modernity’s blessings are so obvious that even the biggest curmudgeons must grudgingly acknowledge them. In his 2003 book Straw Dogs, even the arch-pessimist John Gray admitted that flush toilets and dental anaesthetics are an “unmixed blessing” of modern life. When anti-modern academics extol earlier ages from the comfort of their well-heated lecture halls, I suspect they are partly disingenuous. Few people would be prepared to step inside a time machine and trade their modern life for any previous era.

Still, progress tends to erase its own tracks, as I noted in my piece on “The Seven Laws of Pessimism.” Vaccines work so well that we forget how terrible the diseases they nearly eradicated once were. Food has become so abundant and cheap that we can no longer grasp what it means to starve to death. Peace and prosperity have become so normal that we forget that poverty and war were the norm for most of human history.

The Seven Laws of Pessimism

If life is better than ever before, why does the world seem so depressing?

QuilletteMaarten Boudry

We are all a bit like the little fish in David Foster Wallace’s story who wonder: “Water? What’s that? Never heard of it.” The infinitely complex machine of industrial modernity is always humming in the background, quietly and unnoticed—until something goes wrong and you have to call the plumber. As engineering professor Deb Chachra notes in How Infrastructure Works, a good definition of “infrastructure” is simply “all of the stuff that you don’t think about.”

With a flick of a finger on the wall, we control giant turbines dozens of kilometres away, sending an instantaneous stream of electrons into our living rooms. With another simple gesture, we summon clean and chemically purified water, regularly inspected by benevolent authorities. With a few mouse clicks, we command a globe-spanning colossus, delivering our favourite trinkets via massive container ships. And with a simple push of a button, our bodily excreta vanish out of sight, channelled through intricate sewage systems and treatment plants, so we never have to think about them again.

A small but striking example of the invisibility of progress comes from Hans Rosling, one of the patron saints of the progress movement. During a visit to a private hospital in Kerala, India, his group was waiting by the elevator for a student who had arrived late. Just as they decided to press the elevator button and go ahead, she rushed down the hall and stretched out her leg to keep the elevator doors from closing. But the doors didn’t reopen, they simply crushed her leg and then the elevator began to move up. Luckily, the Indian host hit the emergency button, and they managed to pry the doors back open. He turned to Rosling and said: “I have never seen that before. How can you admit such stupid people for medical training?” But she wasn’t really stupid, she just naively assumed that any elevator includes a sensor that reopens the doors if something is in the way. I might have made the same foolish mistake under the same circumstances.

Even if we try to remind ourselves of all the invisible blessings of modernity, we will still under-appreciate them. You can look at Our World in Data graphs about the decline of poverty and disease until you’re blue in the face, but it remains abstract knowledge and never fully registers. At some level, even the most ardent believer in progress tends to undervalue it, because the horrors we have escaped are almost beyond comprehension. I’m a big fan of the blog series “The Grim Old Days” pubished by Human Progress, which walks us through a historical House of Horrors while you recline on a comfy sofa, sipping a latte macchiato made with ingredients from across the globe.

I’ve been reading about human progress for years, and yet I am still discovering new ways in which the past was more horrific than I ever imagined. One post about the “Worst Ways to Cure Everything” discusses the early-modern craze for ground-up corpses, steaming with vaporised mercury, and the reuse of “everlasting pills” recovered from latrines and handed down as family heirlooms. Or see if you can stomach the story about medieval famines in which the starving rip open the stomachs of the dead or dying to “draw at the entrails to fill their own bellies.”

What to Do About It?

So what can we do to combat our ignorance and under-appreciation of progress? The war in Ukraine has reminded Europeans of the privilege of living without conflict, and of the tremendous success of the European project in eliminating the possibility of war between European nation-states. Still, we can’t start a war once in a while just to impress upon people the value of peace.

Some TV shows attempt to recreate the experience of living with the primitive technology of earlier ages. One early example—and a precursor to reality TV—was the 1978 BBC series Living in the Past, which recreated an Iron Age settlement where volunteers “sustained themselves for a year, equipped only with the tools, crops, and livestock available at that time.” Other examples include the 2005 series Tales from the Green Valley, in which historians and archaeologists lived and worked on a 17th-century Welsh farm using only period tools and methods, and the self-explanatory Channel 4/PBS series The 1900 House. In his new book The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford proposes that an education in “industrial literacy” should include hands-on activities from the pre-industrial past, giving children first-hand experience of life before modern technology. To drive the point home, Crawford also suggests a touch of self-mortification: “They could try going a day eating only food they had grown themselves, wearing only clothes they had sewn, or using light only from candles they had dipped.”

And yet, though valuable, such sobering lessons barely scratch the surface of what life was really like in the past. As Michael Magoon has noted, if TV producers truly wanted to recreate historical living conditions, participants would be permanently malnourished, infested with lice or tapeworms, have rotten teeth, freeze to death in winter, slowly starve during bad harvests, live amid unbearable stench, and watch half their children die. Nothing even remotely close to these horrors would be suitable for television—not even in the 1970s. It’s just poverty tourism without skin in the game. As a result, the average viewer probably comes away thinking that life back then “wasn’t so bad,” with its simplicity and sense of community.

What else can we do to boost our imagination? Eliezer Yudkowsky, in a gem of an essay for Less Wrong titled “Mundane Magic,” suggests a method for transforming the ordinary into something wondrous as a way of cultivating gratitude: make “a list of abilities you have that would be amazingly cool if they were magic, or if only a few chosen individuals had them.” Yudkowsky focuses on our biological endowments, with examples like this:

Vibratory Telepathy. By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts. As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates.

But the point can easily be extended to technological invention:

Telekinetic fire. By flicking a switch on the wall, you can instantly summon a clean, odorless fire that lights up an entire room.

Magic fountain. A simple knob produces an inexhaustible stream of pure water at any temperature you desire.

It takes some mental effort to feel genuine amazement at the mundane, and even then, the sense of wonder will always be transient. In Louis CK’s famous routine about flying, he rants about the spoiled brats we have all become, complaining about malfunctioning Wi-Fi or flight delays:

Oh really, what happened next? Did you fly through the air incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?! [...] Everybody on every plane should just constantly be going: “Oh my God! Wow!”

He’s right, of course, but no one can sustain that level of childlike excitement all the time. Inevitably, there comes a point where you simply take flying for granted and start complaining about bad Wi-Fi or seats that don’t recline far enough. Or if you’re a progress aficionado and you read J. Storrs Hall’s Where’s My Flying Car?, you might grumble that cruising speeds haven’t increased in fifty years, that we never got the supersonic flights we were promised, and that we still waste time traveling to crowded airports—squeezed like sardines with sweaty and overweight people—instead of taking off from a VTOL (Vertical Take Off  and Landing) right on the roof of our own home.

Cultivating Gratitude

I was raised Catholic in Flanders, and although I’ve been an atheist for three decades and I don’t hold an especially favourable view of religion, I’ve retained one moral value from my upbringing: gratitude for life’s blessings. Before every meal—especially when my devout grandmother was around—we would hold hands and thank the Lord for the food on the table. I still cherish that spirit of gratitude. Today, many of us seem to have lost it, mindlessly wolfing down fresh and delicious produce of which our ancestors could only dream. My Catholic grandmother also had a sharper sense of gratitude because she had endured rationing during the Second World War.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett once wrote a beautiful essay called “Thank Goodness” after recovering from a double bypass operation, in which he expressed his deep appreciation for modern medicine, for kind doctors and nurses, for medical insurance and healthcare programs. If you’re an unbeliever and feel no compulsion to thank a supernatural being for your food, why not thank human ingenuity as a kind of secular prayer—the inventors of assembly lines, artificial fertilisers, diesel engines, and container ships? Thank the invisible hand of the market rather than an invisible creator. As Michael Magoon writes:

Coming to a deeper understanding of how our ancestors created progress and kept it going can give us a sense of gratitude. Our ancestors worked really hard, and we are all beneficiaries of their efforts.

Take a look at a stack of ordinary pineapples in the supermarket through the eyes of someone from earlier centuries. Not so long ago, pineapples were an exotic sensation in Europe, and they were so prohibitively expensive that they were displayed as luxury items rather than eaten, or rented by the hour. For a while, there was even a pineapple craze among architects, as the shape of the fruit was used to “decorate everything from sports trophies to cathedrals.” Now we’re so blasé about pineapples that we buy them pre-chopped in fruit salads and barely notice their presence.

As late as 1989, Boris Yeltsin, visiting the US as part of a Soviet delegation, toured a Randalls supermarket in Houston, Texas, and was profoundly shaken. The sheer abundance, variety, and affordability of all that food shocked him. Nothing like it existed in Moscow, with its scarcity and long food queues. In his later biography, Yeltsin wrote about that life-altering experience:

When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it. 

Presumably, the shock wore off eventually even for Yeltsin after the Wall fell. But with a bit of imagination, we can see the supermarket shelves through Boris Yeltsin’s eyes and be eternally grateful for modern technology and capitalism.