This month children across the US will dress up as Pilgrims and Native Americans to honor Squanto, an Abenaki chief, who taught the Europeans to plant maize and kept them from starving. But here is the rest of the story.
The Pilgrims had first sailed to the Dutch Republic to escape persecution in England. They remained there ten years but weren’t happy. They refused to learn the Dutch language because they wanted their children to retain their English culture. Lacking language and work skills (They had been farmers in England) limited them to labor in textile mills for what they considered low wages. But their children learned the Dutch language and absorbed Dutch culture. So, they set sail for the New World.
Tesla vehicles are being assembled by robots at Tesla Motors' factory in Fremont, California, July 25, 2016. | REUTERS/Joseph White
Are you looking for something beyond Mom, apple pie and football to be thankful for this holiday? Let’s thank God for the Industrial Revolution.
Sure, it’s one of the most maligned periods in human history. Socialists claim it trapped workers in wage slavery. Marx asserted it alienated laborers from the product of their labor, to which he attributes all the evils of mankind from flat tires to broken bed springs, and business owners stole the wealth that workers created by keeping the profits.
Others portrayed pre-Industrial Revolution Europe as idyllic with plump farmers happily raising families in the clean air of the countryside. The Industrial Revolution destroyed that paradise. Today, environmentalists complain that industrialization is destroying the climate, depleting resources and killing off animal species. That’s all fake history.
The truth is that before the Revolution, Europe was as poor as Haiti is today and people lived no better than the average person 10,000 years earlier. Life was short and brutal. Most children died before reaching adulthood. According to Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel in his classic book The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, the continent grew enough food to provide calories for only 80% of workers. The other 20% consumed only enough calories to walk a short distance where they could beg for more.
Check out the hockey stick graphs of per capita GDP (a measure of living standards) available on the internet. Here is one. Most graphs begin in the year 1000 AD, but the best economic historians, such as Angus Maddison, demonstrate that little improvement in living standards took place between prehistory and the Industrial Revolution.
It doesn’t take a great deal of thought to understand why living standards didn’t improve. Farming determines how many people live in cities because city dwellers can eat only the surplus that farming families grow and don’t eat. Cutting edge farming technology in early human history was a team of oxen. In 1800, it was still a team of oxen, although horsepower was being introduced. Did you play the video game The Oregon Trail? What dragged the covered wagons over the plains? Oxen!
Life changed abruptly in the 17th century Dutch Republic. Dutch Protestants implemented the economic principles that Catholic scholars from the University of Salamanca, Spain, had distilled from the Bible. They did so because they had recently won independence from Spain after an 80-year war and saw their nation as the new Israel. So they wanted to establish a government based on Biblical principles. They sought to keep the seventh commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” by limiting government power and establishing free markets.
The Dutch didn’t anticipate that the change would make them richer. No one at that time thought it was possible to improve living standards. After all, they hadn’t changed in over 5,000 years. But they did. The Dutch launched the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in human history, standards of living began to grow rapidly as the graphs show, first in the Dutch Republic, then England, the US and Western Europe.
The West left behind millennia of cycles of famine and mass starvation that the rest of the world continued to suffer from for centuries longer. Westerners today are 30 times wealthier than our ancestors in the 17th century. That’s close to a 3,000% increase. Greater wealth bought better health and longer lives. The planet could support more people, too. In 1900, the planet could feed a mere one billion people. Today, we feed almost eight billion so well that obesity is a problem.
Adam Smith praised the Dutch government in his classic The Wealth of Nations as having most fully implemented the system of natural liberty. That system became known as capitalism. Critics point out that capitalism hasn’t solved all problems in the world today. We still suffer from war, crime, violence, poverty, and racism. Wealth is not evenly distributed.
But the Dutch never intended their system to solve all of humanity’s problems, nor did they think humans could. God could, but not humans. They had one object in mind, to establish a government on Biblical principles and so please God.
Atheists fabricated the nonsense that the state can perfect human nature because people are born good and turn bad only because of oppression. Atheists set up the state as an idol in place of the Christian God and attributed to the state all of God’s power to recreate paradise on earth. History for the past 150 years has proven them wrong.
So, if you enjoy central heat and air conditioning, the high-definition smart TV on which you will watch the University of Oklahoma football team play against Oklahoma State, or the Ford F-150 in your driveway, or any of the many material blessings of living in the richest nation on the planet and in the history of humanity, you must thank God for the Industrial Revolution.
The socialist who claims to be an evangelical, Jim Wallis, posted an article in his Sojourners magazine recently encouraging families to debate politics while trying to digest turkey and dressing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. Here is a portion:
A sad reality in the past year or more has been our ongoing struggle to engage in difficult conversations — with our longtime friends, with coworkers, or even with family members across the Thanksgiving table. We’ve always had differences around social and political issues — racial justice, immigration, religious identity, health care, guns, etc. — but those divisions are starker than ever. Our traditional and social media have become so fragmented and polarized that we find ourselves practically inhabiting a different reality than those we disagree with; we only really hear or engage with the perspectives of those with whom we already largely agree. This is not a tenable situation for our country — or for our families. If we are to maintain meaningful relationships, we need to actively engage in difficult conversations with people we disagree with and find some common ground for the common good.
I believe that there are moral issues, values choices, and faith matters that lie just beneath the political headlines. Conversations around those — leading to action — can get us further than our political debates. I also believe there are two great hungers in our world today: the hunger for spirituality and the hunger for justice, and the connection between the two is absolutely vital now.
Socialists like Wallis want to politicize every aspect of life. Socialists should put on the left pant leg first, and condemn as racist everyone who does the right first. Socialists should brush their teeth from left to right and those who go the opposite direction are guilty of hating the poor and wanting them dead. The left hates all police so the right has to defend them even if they’re guilty. The right supports the military so the left feels compelled to trash it.
