Introduction

The Industrial Revolution changed the world. In some ways, the changes have been good. In some ways, they haven’t been. The changes are more than just HVAC units and electricity. The Industrial Revolution changed the world because it took productive work out of the home and took it to the factory or the market. Historian Will Durant says, “The Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house not men but machines.”[1]

The Industrial Revolution was a period during which predominantly agrarian, rural societies in Europe and America became industrial and urban. Historians usually talk about two Industrial Revolutions, the first dating from 1760-1830 and the second dating from 1870 – 1914. Before the Industrial Revolution, manufacturing was done in people’s homes, using hand tools or basic machines. But there was a shift to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories, and mass production of consumer goods in addition to improved systems of transportation, communication, and banking.

Many of the comforts of modern life came from innovations during the Gilded Age — electric lighting, public sanitation, blueberries in December, railways, and telecommunications; just to name a few. There was also increased prosperity. Economist Robert Higgs documents that from 1869 to 1908 the US capital stock went from $27 billion to $165 billion.[2]

Analysis of the Industrial Revolution trends in an ideological direction. The Left criticizes the Industrial Revolution because it wasn’t sufficiently socialist. The Right defends the Industrial Revolution because it expanded capitalism. In truth, a different analysis is needed. The Industrial Revolution produced three ironies for modern life.

First, modern life spurred urbanization and urbanization spurred loneliness.

Ben Sasse explains that “At the end of the Civil War, more than 80 percent of Americans still lived in and around farming communities. But then the big tools of industry became irresistible magnets pushing Americans into cities. By World War II, 60 percent of Americans lived in urban areas.” Today, less than two percent of Americans are farmers. New technologies transformed agriculture and manufacturing. Even though a drastically fewer percentage of Americans are farmers today, United States agricultural output has been increasing. Substituting technology for labor means farmers can produce more crops than ever before, in less time.[3]

As modern technologies emerged and industries developed, people were pushed from the farm into cities with their giant factories. In his book, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind’s Greatest Invention, Ben Wilson writes, “One of the major changes that has assailed the planet in the last three decades is the starting way in which major metropolises are pulling away from their countries. The global economy is skewed towards a few cities and city-regions: by 2025, 440 cities with a collective population of 600 million (7% of all people) will account for half of worldwide gross domestic product. Single cities in many emerging markets such as Sao Paulo, Lagos, Moscow, and Johannesburg on their own produce between a third and a half of their nation's wealth. Lagos, with 10% of Nigeria's population, accounts for 60% of the nation's industrial and commercial activities; if it declared independence and became a city-state, it would be the fifth richest country in Africa. In China, 40% of the country's entire economic output is generated by just three megacity regions. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, we are seeing a return to a situation common for most of history--the outsized role of the supercity in human affairs.”

People moved to cities thinking they would get financial opportunities, culture, and status. But when they left the small town where everyone knew their name, they went to a big city where friends were few and far between. The anonymity of the city was then and is now a soul-crushing alienation from who God made people to be. Will Durant explains, “Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex; economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later; children no longer were economic assets; marriage was delayed; premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were ‘emancipated’—i.e., industrialized; and contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village; he could hide his sins in the protective anonymity of the city crowd.”[4]

It’s important to understand how constant crowds make people feel lonely. Consider two people. One stands upon the unchanging expanse of the desert. The other stands with a multitude of people he doesn’t know. Why does the second person feel lonelier than the first? It’s because the person alone in the desert maintains a sense of his significance. This is what nature does to you. When you are in nature, you are relating to the space around you. You relate by discerning things such as beauty, size, proportion, and meaning. You sense your significance, even if it is a reminder of how small you are compared to the vast desert. The person among the crowd loses his sense of significance because of the monstrous impersonality of the multitude. It supplies a sensation of pure aloneness that is quite unlike the person in the desert. When standing amid the teeming swarm, people lose awareness of themselves as an individual. When hundreds of strange bodies surround you unknowingly, when the hundreds of eyes look not at you but through you blankly and without recognition, when the voices speak above and around you rather than to you, true aloneness is achieved.[5] The phenomenon of being constantly surrounded by people but always lonely started with the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution.

Second, machines are supposed to save time, yet they have killed time.[6]

Machines are slave substitutes. When you own machines, you own slaves. Machines do most of the work for you. Computers, dishwashers, cars. In the nineteenth century, people washed clothes on a scrubbing board and made supper on a coal stove. Now people push buttons and their clothes are clean and their food is ready. All these new machines were supposed to give people more time, more leisure, and more vacation. Yet your great-great-grandmother had more time to talk to her daughter than mothers today. Why?

The question of “why” is one of the most important questions in the modern world. Peter Kreeft, summarizing Blaise Pascal, suggests an answer:“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”

We use time-saving technology and fill our lives with distractions. We want these distractions because they distract us from the one person we are constantly trying to escape. Ourselves. If you took the time to know yourself you would discover a giant hole. Kreeft explains:“If you are typically modern, your life is like a rich mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself.”Or as Pascal puts it:“If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”

Modern people have overdosed on slave substitutes. Instead of machines saving time, the modern person is constantly running around asking, “Why are we so busy? Where did the time go? Why doesn’t anybody have any time today?”

Third, machines are supposed to reflect man’s greater understanding of the world. They often reflect something very different.[7]

Because of the Industrial Revolution, our knowledge of God’s world—let’s call it nature—has shrunk. Sure, now we can explain the material world using machines and scientific instruments. But what is the result? A changing behavioral pattern. Will Durant explains, “The progress of science raised the authority of the test tube over that of the crosier; the mechanization of economic production suggested mechanistic materialistic philosophies; education spread religious doubts; morality lost more and more of its supernatural supports.”[8] Nature now appears empty, purposeless, and meaningless.

Machines fix all our problems, so who needs God? When people live functionally as if there is no God, then they are like cosmic orphans with their smartphone as the foster parent. The few people today that still go out into the backyard and look up at the stars say they are looking out into the darkness, the emptiness, and the silence. The ancients, however, lived under the stars. Every night they huddled around a tiny campfire surrounded by the howling darkness of the night and they didn’t look out into the darkness. They were looking in.

Peter Kreeft says, “They felt like they were looking in, like children sneaking halfway downstairs from their bedroom to eavesdrop on their parents’ New Year’s party in the living room.” To look in is to see the night sky as a dark curtain and the stars as holes in this curtain through which you get a glimpse of the magnificence of God. C.R. Wiley says, “Once, when people looked at the world, they believed they could see invisible things. When gazing intently at something that they could see, they believed they could discern the outlines of something they could not—like seeing the outlines of a body beneath a sheet. To this way of thinking the whole visible world is like a poem. Every tree is a metaphor. And even people are fantastically metaphorical; they are images of God.”[9]

In the ancient world, people saw nature as full. Now people see it as empty. The change is catastrophic for the soul. The difference is between living and dying. The difference is between mother or machine. The difference is between full or empty. The modern world has electric lighting, computers, and the internet. There are color TVs and comfort and leisure and air travel. But as Abraham Kuyper once observed, when technology triumphed over nature, people’s dependence on God was radically reduced.[10] God created people to depend on Him. Machines convince people they don’t need to depend on God.

Conclusion

In the curiosity and inconsistency of the modern world, everyone needs a shock of sanity. On the one hand, homesteading is a trendy response to the modern world. It may be fruitful if we acknowledge that the ironies of modern life won’t magically reverse themselves. We shouldn’t long to go back to a previous era. Think of how bad everyone smelled before the implementation of daily hot showers. Remember the mortality rate before modern surgical techniques. Appreciate how radar technology helps predict dangerous weather. On the other hand, the modern city is an unmanageable something full of brilliant blanks. Those duly called to live in a city need to be on special guard against the trappings of “progress.”

We all live in the odd atmosphere of cutting-edge irony. Since we can’t snap our fingers and erase the changes, we have to learn to be faithful in the twenty-first century, both the urbanite and the homesteader. They can each start by shaking off the dangerous and dreamy sense that whoever lives differently is inferior. The mistake of the city dweller is to think they are escaping the old way of life in favor of the new, forgetting that gathering in large masses is as old a fashion as Babel itself. The mistake of the homesteader is to think they are living and everyone else is dead, forgetting that existence in subsistence is as old a path to early mortality as life itself.

Just because the best and most precious things in the world existed before the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean we should poo-poo cities. Just because men travel faster now doesn’t mean we should surrender to the rapid spiritual changes wrought by industrialization. Modern ironies make our spiritual senses grow dimmer. People don’t wander into good and hearty faithfulness. For that, people need to live with a daily purpose received from above. In the ordering of family life, this means restoring a moral superstructure to the home where production is exalted over consumption, the hearts of fathers are turned to their children and children to their fathers (Mal. 4:6), and households are built to nurture not machines, but the souls of the redeemed. 

[1] Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 39.  

[2] https://sovereignnations.com/2019/01/21/defense-gilded-age/#EcsEOKrG1r8X6mdE.99

[3] Ben Sasse, Them: Why we Hate Each Other—And How to Heal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 48-52.

[4] Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 39.

[5] John Williams, Nothing but the Night (New York: New York Review Books, 1948), 65.

[6] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1993), 167ff.

[7] Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 1993), 136ff.

[8] Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 39.

[9] C.R. Wiley, Man of the House: A Handbook for Building a Shelter That Will Last in a World That Is Falling Apart (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2017), 11.

[10] James Bratt, Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 336.