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 ^[1]“?  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.