Seeker Blog

I’ve never been one to hanker for days of yore when life was simple, teeth were rotten, and lifespans were short. I remember thinking this way at least as far back as junior high school, when I read an essay by Isaac Asimov on the subject. He recounted having encountered somebody who said that he wished he lived in ancient Athens, to whom Asimov replied “Why would you want to be a slave in the Athenian silver mines?”, or words to that effect. His point was obvious — unless you are an aristocrat, there really is no better time and place than modernity.

I love modernity too… A fine essay on “the universal social solvent”

…Many Westerners, including most modern leftists (as opposed to the original Marxists), do not believe in “progress” in the sense that they believe that the human condition has changed rather than progressed. Worse, they often regard change as a bad thing, usually for reasons that strike me as romantic rather than thoughtful. This leads them to be cavalier about the value of such things as economic growth, the spread of technology, and the modernization of social institutions in the parts of the world that have not yet modernized. That leads them to campaign for social and economic policies that propose to slow down progress. Opposition to the idea of progress unites anti-globalization activists, “hair shirt” environmentalists, and ideological anti-Americans. This thinking explains, for example, why many left-wing environmental activists advocate solutions to climate change that will obviously crush economic growth.* They just do not value it.

Yes, modernization is — as a professor of mine once said — “the universal social solvent.” He meant that it blows apart traditional societies, and in that something is certainly lost. So much more is gained, though, that we should fight tooth and nail to sustain progress rather than put an end to it.
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*In Princeton, the door-to-door environmentalists argue for this overtly. Last summer the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group people came to my door arguing that climate change was a huge problem and that we needed to take strong steps to deal with it. A popular argument, to be sure, even if there is room to debate. Then it got weird. They were garnering signatures for a petition that included, in the fine print, elimination of nuclear power. I quizzed them on the apparent inconsistency in this demand, and the activist cheerfully explained that the point was that the United States had to revert to a “simpler” way of life. The problem, apparently, was less the source of the energy than the consumption of it at all.