More on the Human-Built World

This is my second posting on reading Thomas Hughes Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. (Click here to see the first.) The third chapter of the book is titled "Technology as Machine". In that chapter, Hughes extracts a number of public intellectuals writing about technology and society/culture during the Second Industrial Revolution -- from 1880 to the end of the 1920s. The writers discussed are primarily from the United States and Germany, countries that were among the most technologically advanced at the time, but that differed significantly in culture. The Second Industrial Revolution was marked by the spread of electrification and  of the internal combustion engine in vehicles, phenomena that must have been observed by most Americans and most Germans. I would note however, that some observers thought that at the end of the 1920s the average patient visiting a doctor would be worse for the visit -- the revolution in medical technology had not yet occurred.

While Hughes has provided a valuable historical survey of thinking at the time, the effect on me was quite negative. The authors he considers were obviously men of considerable intelligence and learning, widely respected in their own time. Not only did they disagree widely among themselves, but they all seem to have been wrong in important respects in their predictions of the impact of technology. I note that the discussion also demonstrates "temporal relativism". That is, many of the authors display values (which they clearly must have believed to be widely shared) which are not widely shared today.

I don't know whether Hughes missed it or chose not to emphasize it, but the thinking of the time seems to have ignored the fact that in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century the Second Industrial Revolution, like the original Industrial Revolution, had not reached most of the world's population.

I have also been reading Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan. In the book she writes about the popular interest in history, defending the role of professional historians, and complaining about not only those who deliberately falsify or misuse history, but also about the authors of popular histories who in spite of not knowing enough history and making errors in their texts, are increasingly widely read. In the text, MacMillan also makes a large number of brief references to historical events and/or interpretations. The book, like that of Thomas Hughes discussed above, leaves me impressed not only by the amount of false history in the average mind, but by how often very good historians seem to have misperceived major trends or misinterpreted the meaning of those trends. What chance have we to do better now?

I have finished four chapters.

• "The History Craze" in which MacMillan seeks to convince the reader that there is a lot of interest in the past. Surprisingly, she does not tell us whether there is more or less interest in the past now than in the past. I also am not sure that kids confronting history in school are necessarily interested in it, nor that those interested in tracing their own genealogy are interested in history in any larger sense. As I look at the material covered in the History Chanel, the Military History Chanel, and the Biography Chanel I wonder whether the interest is general or limited to certain periods of history in certain locations (have you ever tried to find good histories of ancient Africa?).
• "History for Comfort": The theme of the chapter is that we often seek to read history to obtain comfort, and I suppose that may explain why history of events in which our ancestors behaved well or even heroically are so popular. Of course, there is nothing wrong with taking comfort from consideration of happy or successful times in the past, but there is a danger that in so doing one will bias ones understanding of the world and the challenges it presents.
• "Who Owns the Past": While MacMillan says we all own the past (perhaps implying that no one owns it), she clearly believes that those who have the best claim are those who study it carefully, preferably academically trained to do so, and who convey their findings honestly. She makes an important plea for professional historians to write history that is not only accessible to the intelligent reader, but also likely to attract wide attention to relevant history.
• "History and Identity": MacMillan does not say so, but our identities are determined in significant part by the culture we inherit, and that culture has evolved over time in response to historical events and trends; thus one better understands one's identity by understanding how its cultural components resulted from the history of one's society. She seems more interested in the manipulation of identity of nations, ethnic groups, and other groups (religions, genders, etc.) by the use and misuse of history. Clearly Hitler and the Nazis provide an extreme example of misuse of a meretricious historicism for propaganda. Equally clearly, MacMillan values historical fact per se, and I suspect she would promulgate the truth especially when it challenges widely held ideological concepts. I wonder however whether founding myths can not play a useful role for some social purposes such as nation building in tribal societies, or whether it might be useful sometimes to emphasize virtues and whitewash defects in founding fathers to encourage faith and adherence to social institutions.

The first rule of the hard sciences is not to believe an experimental result until it has been replicated and replicated again. Unfortunately, while we may interpret history as repeating itself, we can not replicate historical events under controlled conditions.

The hard sciences are like history, however, in that scientists like historians have often been wrong.

Looking at the history of technology, I find some comfort in numbers. It is clear that people are living longer today than 100 or 200 years ago. There are more people who live comfortably, and a smaller percentage of people who live in dire poverty. We can chart the trends, and have some confidence that they will continue for at least a limited time in the future, remembering of course that people believed the stock market trends of the 1920s would continue right up to the crash.

I suppose the lessons of Hughes and MacMillan are to seek truth, to believe evidence, to be humble in ones pretensions towards wisdom, and to help beliefs conditionally. Scientists believe theories that have strong support, distrust new data until it has been replicated, and always hope for the conventional wisdom to be demonstrated wrong and thus to allow exciting new intellectual opportunities. Not a bad habit of thought. Still, in the real world, it may be best to act as if we believe in global warming, anthropogenic decimation of biodiversity, and other environmental problems since such actions can help avoid those very problems.