IX. Industrial Stupidity

With the defeat of Napoleon, European powers deluded themselves into thinking they had defeated the Revolution, turned the clock back and restored monarchy forevermore, and indeed there followed a period of peace and oppression with only relatively minor spats among rulers and classes. During this time, the cultural basis of the Establishment was completely altered by the Industrial Revolution, which was so overwhelmingly successful in its own terms of material production that it redefined the Western way of life. As during the Renaissance, believers and thinkers were displaced by doers as the shapers of civilization, and although intellectuals framed thoughts and defined ideas which guide our world today, philosophical issues in general were shelved in favor of pragmatic concerns. Machines and technology imposed their values on the way people worked, fought, felt and thought.

Specifically, life was reshaped primarily by the immediate, practical effects of newly invented sources of power applied to the means of producing goods, with no one much concerned about ethics or even concrete, long range problems like pollution and overpopulation. Worse yet, as its power and technological control over the environment increased, Western Civilization hardly hid its shallowness. It dominated the world without endearing itself to anyone, as materialism ran rampant without any guiding schema. There were many specific triumphs of engineering and organization, but the overall, net effect seemed somewhat pointless because for all its ideas, the West had no intellectual unity or humanitarian goal. The underlying belief was that technology and science would bring progress, and they did, if progress is measured in the quantifiable terms of increased amounts of technology and science.

The cost of this progress was an escalation of the callous arrogance toward other people and the haughty indifference toward the environment which had long characterized the West. With industrialization, the search for markets and raw materials made Western stupidity a global aggravation. There were extended conflicts between the young, vibrant European culture and listless, handcrafted civilizations (like India and China) as well as a concerted attack on the earth's nonrenewable resources. Unfortunately, the easy, early victories of the scrutable Westerners made them feel contemptuously superior to both other peoples and nature.

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