A Conservative Reaction to the Industrial Revolution
A Conservative Reaction to the Industrial Revolution
In this essay, I attempt to understand a conservative’s possible perspective on the Industrial Revolution in general, so I try to encapsulate the big picture in what follows. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, people all across the world have been gradually drawn away from their primary food source, but also from many other kinds of sources. Before this momentous event, the vast majority of families in Europe lived agrarian lifestyles, directly or indirectly involved in producing or supporting the production of food, but by the end, the situation would be reversed. Now, we live in a society where most people are completely cut off from that source, dependent upon strangers running agricultural corporations to ship food to their local supermarket to survive. But food is not the only “source” (which I mean in the sense of “life sustaining or generating thing”) severed from us by the Industrial Revolution. During the processes of urbanization and industrialization, men and women were separated from each other, and children separated from parents. People in general were separated from their natural environments and corralled into increasingly filthy and polluted cities, and all of this was done without their consultation, without their votes. The wealthy elites of their society-- aristocrats, merchants, industrialists alike, made these choices for everybody else because they were really the only ones to benefit from it. And not only was industrialism and urban development a cancer upon the once rich landscape of a place like England, sucking the place dry of every commonly-held forest, field, river, and every other resource that used to sustain life for the local population, but it has spread its countless probosces out across the world to suck other people and lands dry as well.
The care for and cultivation of land as a means for survival was the source of a virtuous and healthy life for the vast majority of families in Europe prior to the industrial revolution. This source of wealth and virtue was not reserved solely for the upper class, but was also attainable for the lower classes as well, and most people lived in rural areas tending strips of land that were in their families for generations. This instilled within them the sense that they could rely on, and expect performance from, themselves alone.
And yet, survival in this way is not a solitary project. ‘The family’ and ‘the community’ were concepts with real meaning to them, because the effects were tangible and evident to the senses. A good family, which cooperated and functioned harmoniously, would fare better working on the farm than a discordant family. The same applies to rural communities at large, and to social relations between them. Factories and workhouses tore husbands from wives, and children from parents, with each being assigned differing atomized tasks around the facilities. In a certain sense, it made families somewhat obsolete. Families were once necessary nuclei in the process of sustaining life on the land, but with industrialization that nucleus shifted to the workhouse and for the first time different demographics could be separated and brought into conflict with one another as distinct entities with different interests. The separation of children from their parents was another effect of this process, and the result was the separation of children from the people who are most personally invested in their upbringing: their parents. From this point forward, the State, and the wealthy parties in control over it, were made responsible for the education of the young. Those who promote the industrial revolution see the introduction of State-run schooling as “progress”, but to those who value the natural primacy of the family, this separation of children from their traditional source of knowledge, customs and culture, was a tragedy that has helped lead us to the desperate situation we are in today, where hundreds of millions of people’s lives depend upon a tiny fraction who are in charge of things like agricultural and shipping corporations today.
Advocates for the Industrial Revolution may point to facts such as the rise in population and the new capacity to mass produce cheap goods as proofs of its beneficial effects. However, this increased capacity came at an incalculable cost to our natural environment and its resources. First, the homelands of the first people to be industrialized (i.e. Europe) were scoured for every available tree, every lump of coal, and every vein of iron. Many villages were reduced to mere cogs in support of this vast resource stripping machine. The “moral economy” prior to this was interested in preserving a balance with nature by utilizing renewable resources as much as possible, but the new industrial, capitalist economy was interested in efficiency and profit alone. These industrialists were not locals who depended upon a certain environment to live, and so the efficiency with which they stripped the land of its resources only translated to profit in their minds.
What all of this “efficiency” made possible, and inevitable, was the need to spread out and find new untouched lands to be strip mined for all it had to offer. This exponential growth could only be sustained by grabbing up new land, and the capability for mass manufacturing provided the means to sustain itself. The mass manufacture of weapons, bombs, transport, and of course, dependent human beings who would be willing to go off and fight in endless wars overseas, was what made imperialism and colonialism possible. The European people are often seen as responsible and blamed for these actions of colonialism and imperialism-- dominating native peoples across the world, ruining their ancient traditional ways of life, stealing all of their resources and leaving their countries poor and polluted-- but really the local commoners of Europe were the first victims in the world of just such a thing. They did not choose this completely new way of living, it was forced upon them by their greedy rulers and wealthy, international interests that had no interest whatsoever in preserving the renewable resources and way of life in Europe. And without plundering the wealth of Europe, and creating a vast dependent class of apartmented workers, the rest of the world may have never suffered under imperial or colonial rule.
It seems everything would have worked out a lot better for everyone if the industrial revolution never happened (except, of course, the wealthy industrialists-- the “1%”, as they are called today). Even if we consider the worst-case scenario and imagine that giving up the Industrial Revolution means giving up all the technology that was developed since then, it would still be better because at least the family wouldn’t be bereft of its natural significance, and the majority of people wouldn’t be dependent for survival upon strangers who really don’t care about them personally, and the natural richness and beauty of Europe would still be around, and there wouldn’t have been world-wide imperialism, colonialism, oppression, and slavery that only fattened the unscrupulous industrial elites… and I’d trade central air conditioning or cheap automobiles for that world any day.