🌐 How an Up Wing change in culture created the modern world
Also: Quick Questions Flashback with … alt-history author Helen Dale
Quote of the Issue
“With an open mind and a generous heart, dear friends, I believe you will tilt toward a humane true liberalism. Welcome, then, to a society held together by sweet talk among free adults rather than by coercion applied to slaves and children.” - Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All
I have a book out: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! ⏩🆙↗⤴📈
The Essay
🌐 How an Up Wing change in culture created the modern world
It matters deeply how our culture imagines the future. It’s why I write so much about Hollywood’s damaging dystopian obsession. For most of history, as I explain in The Conservative Futurist, humanity viewed the future as mere repetition of the past, with little expectation of change, much less progress. When in doubt, defer to the wisdom of the ancients. They’ve seen it all.
But between the 16th and 17th centuries, skepticism about ancient wisdom grew, fueling the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Enlightenment. If the wise men of old didn’t know about the New World or gravity, what else were they ignorant of? This profoundly imporant shift led to a revised belief in the potential for scientific and technological research to transform the human condition, marking a significant Up Wing cultural evolution that helped launch modernity. This new societal mindset where scientific knowledge is used to improve human life was championed by Enlightenment figures such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.
As economist Joel Mokyr explains in the brilliant A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy: “The fundamental belief that the human lot can be continuously improved by bettering our understanding of natural phenomena and regularities and the application of this understanding to production has been the cultural breakthrough that made what came after possible.”
Connection = progress
Initially, the emergence of an Up Wing culture took place among the learned of Europe — astronomers, chemists, clergymen, doctors, engineers, and mathematicians. This transnational “Republic of Letters” — they connected through letters delivered by trusted intermediaries such as friends, diplomats, and merchants — among this literate elite of fractured Europe promoted the free exchange of new ideas and observations about the natural world. But eventually this Up Wing philosophy about the possibility of progress diffused to the wider population, especially the artisans and tinkers who would have to invent and build a better tomorrow.
Mokyr’s work is a key inspiration for the fascinating new working paper “Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis” by Ali Almelhem (World Bank), Murat Iyigun (University of Colorado at Boulder and IZA), Austin Kennedy (University of Colorado at Boulder), and Jared Rubin (Chapman University). The researchers attempt to find quantitative evidence of this shift in thinking about those craftsmen whose contributions were critical to Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
Words matter
Using the extensive Hathitrust Digital Library, which spans English works from 1500 to 1900, the researchers employed a machine-learning model to detect prevalent themes in these texts. They categorized the content into three areas: science, religion, and political economy, and specifically tracked the use of progress-related terms such as "advance," "improvement," and "betterment" within scientific writings. Their findings revealed an uptick in such language during the Enlightenment, notably in works at the intersection of science and economics. This neatly aligns with Mokyr's hypothesis about an evolving scientific mindset towards progress. (The study also distinguishes this trend from mere optimism about the future.)
After 1750, texts combining science and economy started reflecting more industrial and progressive themes, indicative of a cultural shift towards a progress-focused attitude in scientific and industrial realms. Again, this supports Mokyr's views on the importance of cultural influences on industrialization. For example, according to the paper, Martin Clare's 1735 book on fluid mechanics and Edward Saul's work on barometers both aimed to make science accessible and useful for the masses, highlighting its practical benefits. Similarly, 19th-century railway literature, like George Stephenson's report, underscored industrial advancements' potential to enhance welfare and economic growth.
From the conclusion:
First, there is little overlap in scientific and religious works in the period under study. This indicates that the “secularization” of science was entrenched from the beginning of the Enlightenment.
Second, while scientific works did become more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment, this sentiment was mainly concentrated in the nexus of science and political economy. We interpret this to mean that it was the more pragmatic works of science—those that spoke to a broader political and economic audience, especially those literate artisans and craftsmen at the heart of Britain’s industrialization—that contained the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s economic rise.
Third, while volumes at the science-political economy nexus were progress-oriented for the entire time period, this was especially true of volumes related to industrialization. Thus, we have unearthed some inaugural quantitative support for the idea that a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British Industrial Revolution and its economic takeoff.
Next up: Using the same method of textual analysis to analyze the idea, also argued by Mokyr, that European political fragmentation and competition among sovereigns, combined with the Enlightenment's emphasis on freedom of thought and expression, created a fertile environment for ideas crucial to economic development. Future research is planned to use textual analysis techniques on a collection of English-language works to see if they increasingly reflect freedom of expression and thought leading up to Britain's economic rise.
Similar methods could be applied to works in other languages, such as Dutch, where similar trends are expected based on economist Deirdre McCloskey's work. Additionally, the period saw Spain's economic decline and its role in the Counter-Reformation, suggesting an intriguing area for future research to explore how these economic and political changes influenced cultural attitudes towards progress and science.
We need another cultural shift — just as we had 500 years ago — one that moves us beyond the past half-century of Down Wing, anti-growth, anti-technocapitalism, environmentalist fear. We need again to to appreciate and promote the upside potential of the tools we create. We can discover, invent, create, and build a better world. It’s a theme I hope to hit even harder in the coming year.
Q&A
↩ Quick Questions Flashback with … alt-history author Helen Dale
In one of my first Faster, Please podcasts, I chatted with author Helen Dale about her two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. The books are build around the alt-history premise that Roman Empire experienced its own Industrial Revolution. That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. As I wrote back then: “Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.” Here are some highlights of that great conversation:
1/ Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?
There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.
And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.
And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was, rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.
To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee’s quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.
2/ As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.
Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn’t use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There’s just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn’t work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that’s a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country’s wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don’t get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.
So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset’s case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.
3/ The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.
Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a shit.
And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it’s uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”
4/ This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?
All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.
I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.
What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.
And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done.
5/ In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?
Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.
A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate’s, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”
6/ Is this a world you'd want to live in?
Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don’t write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.
But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal.
But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.