Guardian writer Simon Jenkins apparently has the impression that the age of technological revolution is 100 years dead.
While I realize that this sort of journalism is meant to be provocative and entertaining and (probably) not necessarily entirely serious, I have come across similar sentiments expressed quite sincerely. This view—that we are languishing in a cul-de-sac of stagnation rather than actually making significant progress—perhaps represents the view at the opposite extreme of the one noted in Yesterday’s Future.
This dichotomy between ridiculously overblown futurecasting and cynical schadenfreude directed at anyone who so much as expresses a glimmer of excitement at the prospects the future may hold, perhaps, says much more about the nature of journalism than the nature of progress. Real progress simply isn’t interesting enough to a sufficiently broad audience to make writing about it in the popular press worthwhile. Plus, different people seem to hold different definitions of what actually constitutes “progress”. Simon Jenkins asserts, inspired by David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old:
I rise each morning, shave with soap and razor, don clothes of cotton and wool, read a paper, drink a coffee heated by gas or electricity and go to work with the aid of petrol and an internal combustion engine. At a centrally heated office I type on a Qwerty keyboard; I might later visit a pub or theatre. Most people I know do likewise.
Not one of these activities has altered qualitatively over the past century, while in the previous hundred years they altered beyond recognition.
It seems that Jenkins might actually be referring to
cultural evolution rather than technological evolution here in his denial of progress, and in that sense, he might be at least partly correct (but only partly—I’ll get to that later on). It is true that the numerical majority of people in the world probably share many of their lifestyle practices with individuals who lived in the Victorian era. Nevertheless, the means by which those practices are accomplished
have changed as a result of technological evolution. And that is what I would definitely consider to be “progress”. Moving into the future is not about
abandoning all vestiges of the past and of our former selves, but rather, increasing the sheer range of means by which various lifeways can assert themselves and by which various tasks can be accomplished.
Nevertheless, I agree with Jenkins that there’s at least a bit of wariness warranted when approaching the aforementioned ridiculously overblown futurecasting that has long graced the centerfolds of publications like
Popular Science. No, we are not living in the Jetsons’ world, aloft in plastic domes and zipping along in our flying cars—and no, we cannot assume that every new idea is going to result in a dramatic rearrangement of life-as-we-know it, or that having a computer means you’re one step away from a self-assembling nanotech-borne utopia capable of instantiating your wildest imaginings at the twitch of an eyelid.
But—we
are embedding intelligence into our documents, accessing
mind-bogglingly huge stores of information with a few button-presses (shades of Star Trek’s oracle-esque computer come to mind here), and
operating on patients remotely using robotic surgeons.
To suggest that search engines, new lifesaving medical technologies, and data-processing hardware and software have not, at least in some sense, revolutionized reality is to speak with a peculiar kind of ignorance. It is certainly important to avoid unbridiled neophilic hype (particularly when overconfidence in certain areas could lead to complacency and, eventually, disaster), but it is possible to do this without insisting that we are in “stasis”.
The sort of revolution that is actually occurring doesn’t look like the revolution that ushered in the Victorian age for a simple reason—because we’re not living in pre-Victorian times anymore. We are most definitely (as Jenkins points out) holding onto those aspects of Victorian culture and innovation that “work”, despite the periodic upsurges in overinflated enthusiasm regarding ideas that don’t end up panning out over the long term. One hundred years from now, we will almost certainly be able to look back on this present era and identify the “revolutionary” factors far more clearly; just as only the most robust of all the Victorian inventions have managed to stand the test of time, so too will be the case for the machines and social mechanisms of today.
Now, back to the idea of cultural evolution. Have people’s lives, in general, changed as dramatically between Victorian times and now as they did between pre-Victorian and Victorian times? Perhaps not superficially. But attitudes have shifted considerably in deep and profound ways that must absolutely be acknowledged by any responsible historian, particularly with regard to attitudes surrounding women and minorities.
Racism now prompts repugnance in most of those who consider themselves to be civilized—whereas during Victorian times,
it was accepted as a matter of course. In modern, industrialized nations, the very idea of having separate schools or public restrooms for members of different races is now abhorrent.
Sexism is dying a similar death—though it can certainly be easily observed that there are particular biological differences between men and women, these differences are no longer used as a basis for insisting that women are “child-like” and incapable of working in scientific fields, voting, or holding office. Contraceptives are cheap, widely available, and considered innocuous by all but the most extreme of religious fundamentalists—women now have the choice of when and whether to become mothers; females are now basically as free as males are to self-define their identity.
Homosexuality, long considered an abominable disease, was
removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973—and even over the course of my own lifetime so far, I’ve seen homophobia become less and less acceptable in polite and intellectual circles.
Perhaps if you’re a member of the female gender or a minority group of any kind, it’s a bit easier to look back on the Victorian era (and even the world of just a few decades ago) and thank whatever variables prompted your existence in the modern era that you weren’t born when people like you were treated as sub-persons.
My femaleness and autistic characteristics would have led to all sorts of unwarranted assumptions being made about my abilities and subjective mental landscape; I experienced discrimination even growing up in the “enlightened” 1980s and 1990s, and I can scarcely imagine what would have become of me if I’d been around in the 1800s or 1900s. I’d probably be a mother several times over by now, or lobotomized and chained up in a closet somewhere (or a ghastly combination of both!). The fact that I’m neither perpetually pregnant nor soupy-brained from the persistent prodding of nosy cranial needles means a lot to me. Sure, I drink coffee, and get my hair cut with scissors the way people did 100 years ago, but that doesn’t mean you can compare my life to a Victorian one and expect it to have any kind of deep accuracy.
And swinging the pendulum back to specifically technological evolution again, the fact that people can order coffee over the Internet and brew it using a microchip-controlled automatic drip pot
is significant. Jenkins may assert that “Amazon and eBay have replicated but not replaced the retail market.”—but they don’t
need to have replaced the retail market in order to represent significant accomplishments in changing how people think about and acquire products.
And one area of technology that seems completely untouched by Jenkins is that of medical advancement; both infant and elder mortality have dropped hugely since the Victorian era, thanks to the advent of such things as vaccinations, widespread sanitation, and the establishment of the gerontological field. The average lifespan has
practically doubled since the Victorian era, and may be extended even further in the coming decades if
recently established efforts are even moderately successful.
So, while it is certainly true that we cannot afford to lose sight of the present in the throes of rapturous futuristic daydreams, part of keeping the present in mind is observing the present accurately. And there’s a lot to support the notion that the reality of the present is one that our Victorian ancestors could not have easily anticipated.
Anne Corwin was an IEET intern 2006-2007, and is an engineer and technoprogressive activist in California. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association, and is active in the longevity movement through the
Methuselah Foundation and in the neurodiversity movement addressing issues along the autism spectrum. Ms. Corwin writes the blog
Existence is Wonderful and produces a related
podcast.
IEET Blog