Technology, the progressive mind, and a white suit
One of the things I’ve often wondered is why the left sometimes seems to be against technological progress. In my short lifetime, I’ve seen leftist movements against all sorts of technological innovations that have absolutely changed the world. Stretching from the Luddites of the early 1800’s to today’s Green movement and its war on just about everything, the liberal left has displayed open hostility towards much of the technology that I think has made the world a much better place, but the why of the problem is never mentioned.
Why do “progressives” hate planes, anything bigger than a Soapbox Derby car on the highway, Wal-Mart’s efficient and low cost management plan, incandescent light bulbs, and just about every other major modern marvel or innovation?
Did you ever see the movie “The Man in the White Suit“? It’s a film from 1951 starring Alec Guinness, in which Mr. Guinness plays a crack pot inventor named Sidney Stratton who lives in a slum where all of his neighbors are textile workers. The guy works feverishly in his lab, trying to perfect a type of thread which never gets dirty, never wears out, can only be cut with a blowtorch, and is pretty much all around indestructible. He destroys lab after lab, loses job after job, until he finally hits upon the right chemical process for manufacturing the material and develops his masterpiece.
Sidney immediately begins thinking about how much his invention will mean to the world, and his financiers begin thinking about how they are going to make a killing selling the stuff. They arrange a news conference to announce this marvel to the world, and Sidney goes and gets a suit made of the material he has created, the white suit from the title.
Overjoyed, he wears his white suit out to show to his working class friends, only to find that they are dismayed at the idea, skeptical of its future, and worried for their own future in the mills if everyone starts wearing clothes that never wear out, with one of the friends quipping that the material would never see the light of day, just like all of the other mythical inventions we’ve all heard about, but never seen, like the 80 mpg carburetor or the razor that never dulls. Which is humorous because, at the same time, the wealthy leaders of various fabric companies have come together and they attempt to pressure Sidney’s backers into burying the material because of the losses their industries would take if people started buying less clothing.
Far from bringing about the happiness he’d hoped, Sidney’s invention sparks a Union strike, gets him kidnapped twice, and ends up with him being chased down by several bloodthirsty mobs of wealthy and working class citizens alike. The touchstone moment for Sidney is when he stumbles upon an old, poor, dirty, washer woman with a load of clothes. She despises him and his invention, asking how she’s supposed to keep on earning a living with his miracle cloth on the market. Having lost the faith of the very type of person he most wanted to help, the dejected Sidney wanders off to be overtaken by the mob when a molecular instability turns his suit into fluff, calming the mob and allowing him to go free.
That movie encapsulates the way I’ve thought about the liberal aversion to technology for several years. The invention Sidney created had the effect of pulling all of the various classes together. The wealthy were just as angry as the working class, and both groups were working towards the same ends, for the same reasons. Of course, to a political ideology which thrives on class warfare and identity politics, such a thing is certainly not tolerable! Therefore, I believed, the left attempted to suppress technology in order to keep things the way they were, with the imagined hostility between classes simmering merrily on the fire for political reasons.
But I have recently reconsidered that position.
I have thought more and more about the washer woman Sidney bumped into and her reaction. Most specifically, I have pondered her question “What am I to do if clothes no longer needed to be washed?”
In some of my previous posts I’ve discussed technological advancements which have bettered mankind and forced great societal changes, mentioning that none are bigger than the invention of the tractor, which freed countless multitudes from the droll drudgery of working the fields and generated the workforce required to carry out the Industrial Revolution’s manufacturing. But I had never paused to consider the life of the people who lived through its introduction. I have never stopped to consider the real reason the Luddites destroyed machines, I just laughed at the ignorant apes running around with their clubs destroying “magic boxes” in fits of superstitious rages.
But think about how their lives must have been turned upside down. Their entire life’s worth of experience and their entire reality, made worthless and obsolete in just a couple of years. Many, many people were all of a sudden in a competition for which they had never prepared, losing comfortable, known lives to lives of worry, searching for work that they are qualified to do. The fact that your father was the foreman for the farm hands meant nothing inside of a factory in a city. That you knew how to hoe a row like a madman didn’t matter in machine shop. This was the new reality for many people, a reality that demanded that they cope, change, and adapt.
And that, I have come to believe, is the real reason the left dislikes technological advances as much as they do. It has nothing to do with class warfare, identity politics, or politics, and it has everything to do with the fact that a technological innovation is the ultimate celebration of the supremacy of the individual, the antithesis of the collectivist mindset of the modern progressive.
Consider what a technological innovation requires. It takes a certain genius working towards a personal goal to produce a new product, especially one which changes the whole world. It takes an individual with great personal business savvy to market it successfully. And once it has performed its change, it requires the affected individuals to react and adapt, with the result being that the fittest make it and the weakest do not, and the new winners and losers may not be the same as the old winners and losers.
For a single example: Computers required that secretaries who were proficient at using paper filing systems now had to learn an entirely new method of managing data. Some of the best secretaries under the old system were some of the worst under the new system. Some were able to adapt, some were not, and the labor pool changed dramatically.
A technological advance requires individual response and creative thinking on the part of those who are initially negatively affected if they wish to keep their current status, or move up in the world. And this is what upsets the progressive mind so much.
People who play class warfare and identity politics do so because they don’t want to take responsibility for their own lives and choices. They essentially state that their reality is the way it is, not because of their individual choices, but because of something more or less outside of their control. “Oh, I’m poor because my family is poor and the rich try to prevent the poor from making any money!” or “I didn’t get that job just because I’m a woman!” with never any of the necessary self evaluation that the maturation process requires. These are nothing more than cop outs made by people who are incapable or unwilling to try to make a better life for themselves.
So you get Mr. Sidney’s washer woman. Rather than think about the possibilities which have opened up, she weeps for the stale, boring routine of yesterday, crying for someone else to tell her how she is to live without ever trying to take a stab at it herself. Rather than look for ways she can use Sidney’s invention to make her life better, she whines and cries about how she can’t keep on living the old, boring, poor life she now has to lose.
Technology requires individuality, it requires individuals getting rewarded for their ingenuity and labor, it requires effort on the part of the rest of us to fit the new wonder into our daily lives and make it common place. For the group of people who despise personal achievement and relish the anonymity of group identity, this must seem the worst sort of tyranny.
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I’m disagreeing, but just offering a little different take.
I don’t see the difference between individualism and collectivism. Rather, I see it as the difference between community and collectivism. The difference is that in genuine community, we each share responsibility, each need to take personal initiative to care for the welfare of the whole, and that from our collaborative interaction, new ideas and their implementation happens.
In the collectivist approach, there is no shared responsibility, no openness for individual initiative, and no ground for a shared understanding the commonweal.
I watch the film just last week. While Sydney’s innovation was based on his idea, he did not ultimately develop it by himself. He had an assistant. In effect, they had a little, micro-community as the worked together to create the new material.
In other words, none of succeed totally on our own. We are products of the help and support of others. Those instances where the lone individual succeed, I believe, are really exceptions, and not the rule.
Thanks for a great piece. I enjoy reading your blog.
That’s an interesting premise. That the left is anti-science and not the right.
Recent polls have shown that close to half of Americans believe the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that evolution is “just a theory” and a false one at that. It’s a pretty staggering and disheartening figure
There are of course people of different political stripes among these creationists. But which way do you think a distinct majority of those people vote?
Deriving energy by the controlled oxidation of organic material is a pretty old technology. Several hundred thousand years old. Deriving energy through chemical processes that occur when crystalline silicon absorbs photons of light is much more advanced technology than igniting hydrocarbons.
Do conservatives tend to champion the higher or lower tech approach?
Conservatives often speak of a “controversy” regarding the issue of global warming and climate change, but if you were, hypothetically, to give a test of basic scientific and mathematical literacy to people, and then exclude all people who did not grasp basic concepts in science, who did not know the first thing about chemistry, and then survey only those who actually understand scientific principles, and, in particular, those scientific principles directly pertaining to atmospheric chemistry, do you think there would be a controversy or, rather, an overwhelmingly consistent consensus?
Fetal stem cells hold great promise for enormously significant medical applications. Is it conservatives or progressives who have done everything they could to prevent this technological progress?
Conservatives are certainly quick to find innovative ways to use science to make money, I’ll give you that. And the driving force of the promise of personal gain has certainly inspired innovation. There is no denying that either. But when science threatens their pocketbook, many conservatives are more than happy to throw science out the window and will knowingly, willingly and without reservation deceive and lie as long as it benefits them. The scientific method of basing conclusions on evidence is not sacred to them. Science is just a tool to make money.
To say that there is a liberal aversion to technology is one of the more absurd things I have ever heard. The two most blatant and egregious examples of wholesale, mass denial of scientific reality–the denial in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence of global warming and of evolution, are predominantly led by conservatives.
@ Mr. Breslin:
I’m reading my way through your response, but I wanted to comment specifically on your opening statement.
“That’s an interesting premise. That the left is anti-science and not the right. ”
Is easily observed when you consider the idea that in science, unlike in Mr. Al Gore’s world, the debate is never over. Science is all about trial-and-error, peer review, and numbers of trials. We find out all the time that things we assume are sound, scientifically speaking, are not sound once our knowledge has increased. Observe the oft cited “Flat Earth” belief and the less cited “Euclidean geometry”.
The last group of people claiming that the debate was over was the Holy Inquisition, an arm of a religious movement, and the guy they were trying to shut up was Galileo, the scientist who wasn’t right, but was making a step in the correct direction.
Food for thought, eh?
Mr. Breslin,
1) You are assuming that I think that the Republicans are less liberal, in today’s terms, than the left wing of the Democrat Party. I don’t see much difference between the two, to be honest with you. Republicans want to legislate everything that happens in your bedroom, Democrats want to legislate everything that happens in every other room in your house. Two sides of the same coin.
The problem, as I will demonstrate later in this response, is that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have switched meanings in modern use.
2) “There are of course people of different political stripes among these creationists. But which way do you think a distinct majority of those people vote?”
Seeing as 83% of the people in this country consider themselves Christian, I think you’re going to have a really hard time demonstrating to us that there aren’t a large chunk of people voting Democrat who don’t also believe in creationism.
Church goers who also belong to a racial minority, or are Southern FDR Democrats like my grandparents, break that stereotype all to pieces.
3) “…do you think there would be a controversy or, rather, an overwhelmingly consistent consensus?”
When disagreement means that you’re not going to get any government grant money, there’d better be some consensus.
But even with that threat hanging over their heads, there are literally thousands of scientists out there who question the religion of AGW. Modern day Galileos.
Can I ask you a follow up question? If you take all of those “experts” and poll them on voting preference and political ideology, wouldn’t you also find a consensus? Are you going to take that sample bias into account when you display the results?
4) Now, I am not a creationist, so I agree that creationists can get a bit overzealous in their beliefs, but can you prove evolution? Not natural selection, but actual evolution?
Can you tell us at what point in time two dinosaurs got together and produced offspring that wasn’t also a dinosaur? How about showing us how a horse was naturally born as the result of two not-horses mating? Why don’t we see two cats mating and producing something that is not a kitten?
Would it be outside of the realm of possibility that an alien race seeded life onto this planet, life that had been pre-engineered? With the millions, if not billions, of other planets that must support life in this galaxy, is it not possible that a more advanced alien life form seeded pre-engineered organisms onto the Earth? Can you prove that they did not?
Can you demostrate to us how a planet which started as a molten ball of rock and metal, and will end as a frozen hunk of ice before being consumed when its star collapses, is in danger of heating up too much as time moves forward?
Because on the scatterplot of Earth’s yearly temperature readings, that line of best fit certainly has a negative slope, my friend.
Conclusion:
I see a “liberal” (modern use) as someone who wants to use a powerful government to force others to do something, whether there is reason for it or not. Liberals are the people who want to control others. They’re the ones who silence debate, whether they vote GOP or Democrat. Notice that I never once mentioned either of the two main political parties in my post. That was for a reason.
Look back to my description of the movie’s plot.
The people who are after Sidney are all trying to control him for their own profit, and they’re both workers AND capital, the stereotypical GOP and Democrats. All of these people are liberal, in my worldview and using the modern definition of the term. It doesn’t matter that they fall into arbitrarily set class lines in some imaginary Marxist struggle, their ends are exactly the same: They want to squelch advancement to preserve their current life.
And that used to be the definition of a conservative. Someone who wanted tight government control of everything to keep things “sustainable” or “normal”. Liberals were the people who advocated for free markets and free minds.
And it is this power hungry class that will not tolerate questions and debate. It is this class of people who stifle innovation because of its threat to the world as they know it.
Isn’t that the stance of the global warming crowd? “Oh my gosh, a bunch of scientists who have been 100% totally wrong in the past and have been caught trying to halt debate now so that their views cannot be questioned are claiming that an examination of just the last 30 year’s worth of data indicates that the long term temperature of the Earth is changing, even though we know that it changes naturally, in a cycle! We’re all going to die!!!”?
A large group of scared people reacting to a possible crisis put forth by other, discredited people, and trying to get the government to prevent it from happening? “Liberals” using today’s definition of the term.
Think your theories are interesting. Loved the movie “Man in the White Suit” and haven’t seen it in years. Also loved Guinness in another world turned on its head movie, “Heavens Above” about a pastor who tries to do good and ruins everyone’s lives, in an hilarious way, of course. I think you might enjoy the movie “Local Hero”, which deals with similar themes and is also very funny. My favorite character is the Russian seamen who sneaks into Scotland to invest and sings “Rhinestone Cowboy”.