The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days”
Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene — it was filthy, violent, and short. The Industrial Revolution was imperfect, but it was progress.
Below is an excerpt from a recent essay I wrote for “The Engine of Progress,” a special issue of Big Think.
When Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, declared in 1995 that “the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he was voicing a sentiment that now circulates widely online.
Rose-tinted nostalgia for the preindustrial era has gone viral, strengthened by anxieties about our own digital era, with some claiming that modernity itself was a mistake and that “progress” is an illusion. Medieval peasants led happier and more leisurely lives than we do, according to those who pine for the past. “The internet has become strangely nostalgic for life in the Middle Ages,” journalist Amanda Mull wrote in a piece for The Atlantic. Samuel Matlack, managing editor of The New Atlantis, observed that there is currently an “endless debate around whether the preindustrial past was clearly better than what we have now and we must go back to save humanity, or whether modern technological society is unambiguously a forward leap we must forever extend.”
In the popular imagination, the Industrial Revolution was the birth of many evils, a time when smoke-belching factories disrupted humanity’s erstwhile idyllic existence. Economics professor Vincent Geloso’s informal survey of university students found that they believed “living standards did not increase for the poor; only the rich got richer; the cities were dirty and the poor suffered from ill-health.” Pundit Tucker Carlson has even suggested that feudalism was preferable to modern liberal democracy.
Different groups tend to idealize different aspects of the past. Environmentalists might idealize preindustrial harmony with nature, while social traditionalists romanticize our ancestors’ family lives. People from across the political spectrum share the sense that the Industrial Revolution brought little real improvement for ordinary people.
In 2021, History.com published “7 Negative Effects of the Industrial Revolution,” an article reflecting much of the thinking behind this popular impression that industrialization was a step backward for humanity, rather than a period of tremendous progress. But was industrialization really to blame for each of the ills detailed in the article?