Prisoners of Progress

For all the badmouthing I do about gross materialism, I am simply apeshit about all of the amazing crap we humans have made via the Industrial Revolution!

— Nick Offerman

An antique engraving graces our family-room. It's one of my favorite possessions.

The engraving depicts the birthplace of George Stephenson, the English engineer who, according to the engraving's caption, "devoted his powerful mind to the construction of the locomotive." A Victorian family gathers in front of the lowly cottage, there to celebrate "the commencement and development of the mighty railway system."

Stephenson was a hero to the Victorians, an innovator akin to Bill Gates or Steve Jobs today. His 1813 invention "induced the most wonderful effects, not only for this country, but for the world," the engraving says.

Railroads made it possible in the 19th century for people, products and raw materials to move overland great distances, and to do so cheaply and rapidly. 

We're so callous in our time, we complain when Amazon's free delivery service runs a day late. How absurd is that?

'Tis the season for mass consumption: for mornings, noons and nights at the mall; towers of empty boxes at the curbside; trashcans overstuffed with trees and wreathes and plastic packaging; trips to southern beaches; gifts for people you don't even like.

Can this way of life possibly be sustainable?

Whether it is or isn't, one thing's for sure: we're all prisoners of progress.

By that I mean to say what the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger said so well in his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology."

Heidegger believed the Industrial Revolution marked a radically new age for the human race: a time in history when nature has come to mean resources; and to be to mean to be consumable.

The absolute power of technology, Heidegger said, swamps the human being, because technology reveals all existence—the universe—to be no more than "raw material." 

Everything is inventory, stuff, crap. Crap to be extracted; crap to be requisitioned; crap to be assembled, packaged, shipped, opened, exchanged, consumed; crap to be discarded.

Technology "attacks everything that is," Heidegger said, "nature, history, humans, and divinities.”

And just as the railroad shrinks distance, technology shrinks mankind. 

It boxes us in and makes us pygmies, constricting our experiences to "brand experiences" and denying us connections to things as they once seemed: sources of wonder.

Today, we no longer wonder. We only want and want and want.

What a paltry fate.

Note: You can read more about Heidegger's thoughts on technology in my essay here. I also recommend Nick Offerman's fun new book, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play.

Above: The Birth-Place of the Locomotive. Published 1862 by Henry Graves & Co., Publishers to the Queen, London.