The Lives We Won't Give Up
We mourn what we've lost to modernity, yet we won't surrender what replaced it.
Jeff Giesea posted a note on Substack that sums up much of the modern cross-pressurization we all face.
I love reading about and writing about how the shift to industrial modernity has fundamentally reshaped human societies.
For example, we read about how the advent of the automobile fundamentally changed community. Whereas in the pre-automobile age, we likely attended a neighborhood church, now that we have cars, we can seek out the church that’s most congenial to our own tastes. The car broke unchosen bonds and created a more consumerist society.
We also sense in visiting the great European cities like Paris that it was only possible to create them in the world before the car. The automobile led to urban decline in the US, and the rise of a suburbia that even its staunchest defenders will acknowledge lacks the charm of traditional cities. Unlike cities, these are also socio-economically stratified, something with profound social consequences. In a book review for Hedgehog Review, for example, I note the way suburbanization of Catholics switched the parish organizing principle from ethnicity to economics.
But whatever we’ve lost with the automobile, few of us are willing to revert to life without a car. Even those of us like myself who love cities and spent years living in them without owning one, urban life today is totally dependent on motor vehicles (such as for all the logistics necessary to urban life).
Similarly, we bemoan the decline of air travel from the elegance of a bygone era. But few of us are willing or able to pay the ticket prices to enjoy that level of experience (or endure the cigarette smoke that went along with it).
We see that with industrialization, the household was stripped of much of its productive function, reducing it to a highly fragile consumption cooperative in which the main thing holding marriage together is the emotional bond between husband and wife.
There are lots of people who want to recover what seems to be a more healthy or wholesome life of a productive household. But while some people are trying out homesteading, it’s extremely rare that anyone wants to truly disconnect from modern society. And it might be all but impossible in any case because there’s no ecosystem for doing so.
And, as Jeff Giesea’s note suggests, in past eras like the 1950s we had much thicker community. People hung out at their bar, played in their bowling league, staffed volunteer associations, were engaged at their church, had friends they saw regularly, etc. But that thick community came at a high cost in personal autonomy and privacy. No matter how much we keenly feel the loss of that community, we aren’t ready to give up our freedom to have it.
The same goes for technology. We all saw the negatives of mass media, then social media. Everybody bemoans the fact that we are all staring at our phones. Or fear what AI might do. But we mostly go all in on it.
I don’t think, given the choice, any of us would go back to living in the 1870s or the 1950s or even the 1980s. Life today has too many superior things about it, and we are too deeply enculturated into today’s world to truly even want to choose a previous option. The Amish have done it to some extent, but I notice that few people are converting to become Amish.
What we do instead are things designed to sand the rough edges off society, without fundamentally rejecting or challenging it. We invite neighbors over for a porch party or something like that - a wonderful thing to do - but mostly live embedded into the same world as everyone else in our socio-economic grouping.
In the end, we end up torn. I write here often about the downsides of today’s world, but am still captivated by the possibilities of AI.
I think this cross-pressurization is inescapable. Being willing to recognize it and live within that tension is part of taking a mature approach to 21st century American life.
Re: I don’t think, given the choice, any of us would go back to living in the 1870s or the 1950s or even the 1980s.
The 80s? Maybe. That's a time I remember--I was a teenager through most of it.
But one thing to be very clear on: giving up modern (post industrial revolution) technology wholesale, across the board everywhere means the deaths of billions.
Good piece. I think this is generally true. Two exceptions I would have with it:
1. Something needs to be said about coordination problems. I don't want to give up my smartphone if I'm the only one doing it. But would I prefer to live in a world where smartphones were never invented, or one where the entire world agreed to unmake them? It's at least a tougher question, though it could only ever be a hypothetical, fantasy scenario. Even entering into a voluntary community where everyone forsakes technology is very different from abolishing them from the planet, because now you're an outsider trying to make do in a world built around technology you refuse to use.
2. Point taken that I wouldn't want to live in the 1890s. But I think there is a strong case for preferring the decade of the 2000s over everything that came after.
The 2010s were a decade of cultural degradation, accompanied by a stagnation in the advance of consumer conveniences. In that decade, we saw the beginning of Internet deterioration: en**itification. Much of the consumer surplus of the early Internet was harvested in the form of SaaS profits. Social media became more dominant while simultaneously degrading in consumer experience; Facebook went from an ad-light place where your friends posted, to a site dominated by ads and "suggested content." The 2010s were when the Internet began to break through more clearly into the real world, when people could no longer log off. Woke was one of the first consequences.
Meanwhile, for the first time since the rise of consumer electronics in the 1970s, these conveniences saw no meaningful improvements in the decade of the 2010s: cell phones, PCs, and game consoles were all fully mature technologies by 2011-2012; further improvements were incremental and difficult to notice. Netflix streaming circa 2011 was already very good, and an amazing value, never to be replicated.
I'm more optimistic about the 2020s so far. Maybe AI will prove to be a disaster in the end. But so far it is at least not an *unmitigated* disaster, which is more than can be said for the 2010s.