Technology and the triumph of pessimism

One of the bestselling novels of the 19th century was a work of what we’d now call speculative fiction: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887. Bellamy was one of the first prominent figures to recognise that rapid technological progress had become an enduring feature of modern life — and he imagined that this progress would vastly improve human happiness.

In one scene, his protagonist, being transported from the 1880s to 2000, is asked if he would like to hear some music; to his astonishment, his hostess installed a speakerphone to let him listen to a live orchestral performance. And he suggests that having such easy access to entertainment would represent “the limit of human felicity”.

Well, over the past few days I’ve watched several shows on my smart TV and also watched several live musical performances. I find access to streamed entertainment a major source of enjoyment. But the limit of felicity? Not so much.

I’ve also read recently about how both sides in the Russia-Ukraine war are using precision long-range missiles — guided by more or less the same technology that makes streaming possible — to strike targets deep behind each other’s lines. But the larger point is that while technology can bring a lot of satisfaction, it can also enable new forms of destruction.

My reference to Edward Bellamy comes from a forthcoming book, Slouching Towards Utopia, by Brad DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The book is a magisterial history of what DeLong calls the “long 20th century”, running from 1870 to 2010, an era that he says — surely correctly — was shaped overwhelmingly by the economic consequences of technological progress.

Why start in 1870? As DeLong points out, and many of us already knew, for the great bulk of human history — roughly 97% of the time that has elapsed since the first cities emerged in ancient Mesopotamia — Malthus was right: There were many technological innovations over the course of the millenniums, but the benefits of these innovations were always swallowed up by population growth, driving living standards for most people back down to the edge of subsistence.

There were occasional bouts of economic progress that temporarily outpaced what DeLong calls “Malthus’ devil” — indeed, modern scholarship suggests there was a significant rise in per capita income during the early Roman Empire. But these episodes were always temporary.

Around 1870, however, the world entered an era of sustained rapid technological development that was unlike anything that had happened before; each successive generation found itself living in a new world.

As DeLong argues, there are two great puzzles about this transformation — puzzles that are highly relevant to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

The first is why this happened. DeLong argues that there were three great “metainnovations” (my term, not his) — innovations that enabled innovation itself. These were the rise of large corporations, the invention of the industrial research lab and globalisation. More important, however, is the suggestion — from DeLong and others — that the engines of rapid technological progress may be slowing down.

The second is why all this technological progress hasn’t made society better than it has. One thing I hadn’t fully realised until reading Slouching Towards Utopia is the extent to which progress hasn’t brought felicity. Over the 140 years DeLong surveys, there have been only two eras during which the Western world felt generally optimistic about the way things were going. (The rest of the world is a whole other story.)

The first such era was the 40 or so years leading up to 1914, when people began to realise just how much progress was being made and started to take it for granted. Unfortunately, that era of optimism died in fire, blood and tyranny, with technology enhancing rather than mitigating the horror.

The second era was the “30 glorious years”, the decades after World War II when social democracy — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed off by labour unions and a strong social safety net — seemed to be producing not Utopia but the most decent societies humanity had ever known. But that era, too, came to an end, partly in the face of economic setbacks, but even more so in the face of ever more bitter politics.

It would be silly to say that the incredible progress of technology since 1870 has done nothing to improve things. The progress that brought us on-demand streaming music hasn’t made us truly satisfied or optimistic. DeLong’s book, nevertheless, definitely asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way. ©2022 THE NEW