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Technology, Not Thought, Drives Most Moral Development
Preface
In a recent thread on the Enlightenment, I noted I thought moral change was driven not by thinking, but by technology. As you might imagine, this met with some pushback and I thought a full response was warranted.
Morality in society is driven by what is possible. I can use many examples, but I am going to focus on three:
Slavery
Child Labor
Women’s Equality
The best estimate we have is that half the people who have ever walked this earth lived before the dawn of history and agriculture. That will change this century. Still, for today, half of human beings lived as hunter-gatherers, moving about in tribes of 100-200 individuals or so. Humans being born, living, loving, laughing, crying, and dying in a world that changed little from generation to generation. Their technology was primitive, with fire, stone, and wood. Of course, these humans did some amazing things. Somehow, ancient people crossed the Pacific Ocean and colonized Hawaii and Easter Island. Humans wandered across every land bridge and colonized the world. We are amazing creatures. We also tend to think of “our tribe” as the only “true” humans.
There are so many examples of this in history (once it starts up) that we have to believe this was the norm in the past. Humans seem naturally tribal. My tribe is worth altruism, support, and care. The other tribe is not entitled to any of that, and they may be the enemy. The idea that all human beings are of the same value is, let’s face it, a pretty inhuman concept. Really, can a tribe that does not eat fish really be fully human? What about those guys over there who cannot even drink milk? You see how it goes. Humans pick up on superficial differences to make points. I joke about food taboos, but these are exactly the sorts of things groups seized upon to make their lines demarcating themselves from others.
With the advent of cities, driven by the revolution of agriculture, things changed. Now, somehow, humans had to figure out how to get along with strangers. Dunbar’s number of about 150 individuals we can know gets breached and we are in new territory. It was the technology of agriculture and that changed things. We had to get along as strangers, so the idea of a supertribe was mandatory to get along. People had to say, “I am not just part of this 100 or so people, but I am a member of Ur, the great city. The other people of Ur or my kin and they have value too, though not as much as my family. What is important is they are not those people in Babylon.”
Slavery
It is hard to talk about slavery at all in 2022, which is in and of itself a sign of our detachment from history and hardships. Slavery has been endemic to Mankind since the days of early agriculture. Once societies moved from the paleolithic, hunter-gatherer lifestyles and into farming, they discovered a need for someone to farm. While agriculture provides more food and more stability, there is some evidence it also ushered in longer working days and certainly required more energy for creating food. Even in the early days, there was enough surplus for a small number of people to have lives not devoted to the acquisition of food. We call this Civilization.
Now that more people could be fed, it made sense to produce as much food as possible. The only way to make more food was through the use of Mankind’s first renewable power source: muscle power of humans and animals. Animals are clearly in bondage to humans. It is a small leap to put other humans into bondage as well, especially if they are of “The other” and maybe not as human as you are in the first place. In short, it is an easy jump from planting to forcing others to plant for you. After all, those other people are not as of much value as your people are anyway.
Slavery, in some form or another, has therefore been with us for 10,000-plus years. It cropped up in all human societies with agriculture around the world. The West only moved against slavery in the past two centuries, less than 2% of the time since the agricultural revolution. By the time that happened, every philosophical idea used to counter slavery already existed. Yes, it was Christians who turned on slavery. It was also Christians who had spent the previous 1,500 years before that happily engaged in it. Yes, it was the West itself, with ideas of the rights of people, ideas that dated back to Rome and Greece. Yet, those same people engaged in the practice of slavery. While some might argue that chattel slavery is fundamentally different than some ancient practices, I disagree. Chaining someone to oars and making him row until he dropped dead or leaving him to burn in a ship is not honoring that man as a person. The reality is, all slavery is wrong as it robs people of their God-given rights to self-determination. Chattel slavery may be its worst form, but it is a lie to think that suddenly came about with European expansion. Slavery is a normal part of civilization throughout history. Therefore, we have to ask, just what changed in the Christian West to make people decide that slavery was antithetical to Natural Rights and Christ’s teachings. The answer is clearly technology.
As I said before, what drove the existence of slavery was the demand for more muscle power. For most of Mankind’s existence, that has been the only real power we have had. Yes, water mills and windmills and sails have all been around, but the work they did was minor compared to the blood, sweat, and tears throughout the ages. That all changed with the industrial revolution. With the burning of wood and then fossil fuels to power machines, far more work could be done. Slavery was no longer needed to maintain as many people outside of farming. In 2022, modern nations don’t need slaves because we have machines that do it all for us. We don’t need servants either. Even the poor have time freed from mundane tasks such as washing clothes and extensive meal preparation because of our machines. Electricity from the wall is magic we take for granted. Slavery fell out of fashion.
I would be remiss if I left a discussion on slavery and technology without mentioning the technology that kept it alive, the Cotton Gin. Slavery was dying as uneconomical in the South. Everyone thought it would just fall off. Then technology changed and the morals on the ground changed, and slavery was just back on. The industrial revolution was not all one direction!
Child Labor
Child labor is one of those things that people of the 21st Century look at and feel their stomach turn. Children should have fun lives, get to enjoy their childhoods, and have some time to grow up. This is not something people felt until the middle of the 20th Century in the West. For most of the history of civilization, children could be and were economic assets. Children worked on the farm early. This has been the way from the old days. Yes, child number five might get more of the childhood as we understand it, but if you were first born, for most people, life was working that farm. With industrialization, children could be put to work in factories, and they were. This made a lot of sense for lower-income families, as it put more money into the kitty. Today, around the world, children work in factories and their families are darn happy they get the money.
Of course, for 21st-Century Americans, it is illegal, and we find it abhorrent. I mean, not so abhorrent we don’t buy cheap things made by children in horrible situations in other nations because that is what free markets are all about. We just don’t want it for our kids in America. But I digress. What has happened is technological progress. Even the poorest of Americans have enough to eat, a place to stay, and access to resources that most humans throughout history would have called paradise. (Homelessness is its own subject and not addressed here, but let’s be honest, in America no one is in danger of starving to death). Poverty in America is not poverty as it has been understood. There is simply no reason for families to have their five-year-olds work to support the family. Indeed, we believe in this so strongly, we will give you more aid for your children. Is that civilized or what? We are rich enough and technologically advanced enough that having young children work no longer makes sense. So we can condemn it (just keep those cheap products coming from China).
Women’s Equality
As we have seen, humans have not tended to see even other humans as moral equals. This has been demonstrated even more so between men and women. Until the 20th Century, women were second-class at best and property at worst. What happened in the 20th Century was not just a sudden surge of enlightenment. As we saw with slavery in the industrial revolution, we see a diminishment of the importance of muscle power. This lowered the relative value of a man. As the wealth of all has increased, civilization can actively take people from farming and put them into providing security. Women no longer need “their” man to protect them from other men because we can outsource that particular function.
With the rise of jobs without high requirements for muscle power, women’s ability to provide income for the family outside of running the home increased. Early on, this might have been working in mills, but this growing economic power helped to give women a seat at the table for their own political power. While (all) women in 1700 were not property in America, they sure did not have the political power of men.
Of course, women also benefited from the rise in medical science in the 20th Century. Before modern obstetrics, women did not live longer than men on average. Our big-brained heads being passed through our upright bodies have long been a design flaw in the form of Homo sapiens. Today, death in childbirth is far less likely. If not dying is not increasing one’s power and value, I don’t know what is. Other technological improvements include little things like pads and tampons to manage menstruation. Guys, this is no small thing in modern technology to liberate women. And as long as we are talking babies and periods, let us come to the biggest technological change since Mankind started planting food: birth control.
Throughout history, humans have sought effective birth control because sex is a lot of fun and it leads to babies. In the 1960s, “The Pill” was upon us and it heralded the sexual revolution. Women could control conception for the first time. (Though the Romans may have had a plant they could use. We can’t be sure as they used it to extinction.) Women could both enjoy sex and delay pregnancy. Thanks to medical science, abortion could be performed safely as well (a big change from millennia of unsafe abortion and outright infanticide). This allowed women to live the lives of men if they choose. Society adapted, and in the 1970s, the world changed for us. Traditional norms were being overturned. None of this would have happened without the technology to support it. Today, we are engaged in a great experiment of the past 60 years to see if men and women can work side by side, which is not how human beings have ever operated before.
Conclusion
Technology has altered human thought and human behavior. The first half of Humanity, when it was static, culture seems to have been static. It was with the advent of agriculture that things started to change, and people were even able to try out new ideas and concepts. With increased technology came more opportunities for experimentation and change. This has only accelerated. We attempt to find a moral framework to cope with the power and knowledge that we have today.
Future technology will cause different changes. An example is abortion. Part of the success of the pro-life movement has been the advent of pictures of babies in utero that are clearly babies. When we develop artificial wombs that any embryo or fetus can be transferred too, what of abortion then? I think the pressures against abortion will be much higher then. I wonder what other ethics and morals will change with what the future brings.
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The influence between technology on the one hand and philosophy/culture/religion, on the other, goes both ways. For example, the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t pursue the development of labor-saving technologies to the degree they could have, because (a) slaves were available cheaply, and (b) working on practical things was considered inappropriate for people of high status.
Some medieval monastic orders made great strides in the practical application of waterpower. It has been argued that the fact that Jesus was a carpenter helped to overcome the prejudice against practical work. (Are there any other major religions whose founder was a working man, rather than a scholar or military leader?)
See Stronger than a hundred men, a history of waterpower by Terry Reynolds.
Well, attire alone can account for differentiating friend from foe. I doubt people — who could comfortably travel no more than 30 miles a day by foot (3 mph on foot for 10 hours) — regularly, or ever, ran into people physically unlike themselves. So it would come down to attire, jewelry and cosmetics.
People usually intermarried within a few miles of their own village, so racism would hardly exist. Once agriculture was developed, with pack animals carrying their own foods and with their need for water, and ridable horses and camels and such were domesticated, then people could travel at most a hundred miles a day (on horse, 10 miles an hour trot for 10 hours — for camels running 8 or 9 mph for 10 hours) but this still limited significant racial distinctions.
I think the big deal with Him is being the Son of God.
Post is up on RushBabe49.com. I linked to your site.
https://rushbabe49.com/2022/10/15/guest-blogger-bryan-g-stephens-on-technology-driving-moral-development/
Writing and literacy.
I thought that too, up until I realized that our most recent riots seem to feature people who don’t have anything more important to do.
The golem either works productively or plays destructively.
I think Jesus’ morality, as he himself sums up perfectly, is love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Even love your enemies.
Its why Christianity (and before that, the faith of Israel) works regardless of technology. It’s less about the circumstances you find yourself in and more about how you handle those circumstances.
I thought a bit more, Bryan, and while I agree with you on the moral value questions of slavery, women’s rights, and other social organization morality, I don’t agree with the premise all the way down.
And I think the crux of it is this: do you view the other person as a valuable creation of God and technology affects how we handle those people? Or do you view them from a utilitarian perspective, in which case their value is tied up in what they can contribute.
I’m not going to investigate it very thoroughly, but I’m betting the value wrt women and children starts dropping precipitously with the rise of atheism. That’s when chattel slavery enters the chat.
Thank you.
Atheism itself is an outgrowth of technology and Christian tolerance.
You should investigate. I think your premise will be rejected.
But was that the case in the example that I gave?
“Technology has altered human thought and human behavior. The first half of Humanity, when it was static, culture seems to have been static. It was with the advent of agriculture that things started to change, and people were even able to try out new ideas and concepts. With increased technology came more opportunities for experimentation and change. This has only accelerated. We attempt to find a moral framework to cope with the power and knowledge that we have today.”
This is the same mindset that I see in @iwe post today on his interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament (first five books =Torah). You say we attend to find a moral framework for modernity, which always changes, so we will always be looking for a new moral framework to fit. Technology can alter thought, but it can also manipulate thought to fit trends. We see this with the Trans movement and LBGTQ+, the save the planet movement and how morality has changed to fit the desire of the moment.
You can read Klaus Schwab’s book The Fourth Industrial Revolution and see it unfolding with the World Economic Forum’s plans, which (and he states) means no traditional views of God – faith – religion will work and have to be changed. The trans-humanist movement has no moral framework and that’s the purpose. That’s why the slippery slope keeps extending farther and farther and we can’t believe how far off the cliff we’ve gone. No ethical boundaries, but twisted ones to fit modern man. Power and knowledge are great if the foundation that God laid out for us are followed. His message doesn’t change.
I’m think specifically the Christian west.
There is a massive hiccup in the continuum from Rome and the early church to the 19th century where slavery and women are concerned.
The Holy Roman Empire was moving away from slavery. Chattel slavery began in the 18th century? Or 17th? When an indentured servant was forced into slavery for life.
The idea of the cotton gin is only possible against the greater Industrial revolution. With its advent, slavery in the South was given new life. The morality of slavery was reinforced instead of being diminished.
Yes, we find a moral framework for modern technology. Communism, for instance, is a response to the working conditions of the industrial revolution. It was wrong, of course, it could not exist before steam engines.
I would not argue God’s message has changed. I would say our understanding has. The Torah is different than the Gospels. Turn the other cheek is a far cry from the military conquest of the Promised Land.
Chattel slavery goes all the way back to the earliest civilizations. Early tribal warfare (including pre-Columbus Americas) included slaughtering your defeated enemy’s men and boys and enslaving the women and girls.
Greece and Rome both included chattel slavery. And early Israel (which is why the Old Testament placed limits on slave owners). Many civilizations used multiple forms of slavery. The idea that chattel slavery is relatively modern is a modern conceit.
Rome allowed their slaves to buy their freedom. Slavery for Israel was not a permanent situation unless by choice. Indentured servitude was very common.
So perhaps you and I are treating chattel slavery differently. I think it’s a type of slavery. Do you think it is slavery in general?
Slavery has been around for eons, but it wasn’t treated the same way in all time, places, and cultures.
Excellent post, Bryan.
The idea that technology affects moral norms isn’t just held by conservatives. Many liberals and progressives embrace that idea as well.
They seem to want to eschew the physical. That’s not new either, plenty of religious movements through history have tried. The Catholic Church has monasteries whose monks and nuns dedicate almost every waking moment to prayer. I watched a documentary of an order where the monks actually had servants who fed them, so they could remain in their cells in prayer. The ultimate introverts.
But the present movement by progressives is utilizing technology. One seemingly benign example is Mark Zuckerberg’s project to create a virtual universe, which in essence an attempt to escape the physical. And I’ve read sci-fi that extends this further with personalities residing on a computing environment, thereby “escaping” death. The Matrix is a big example. I believe that that is Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal.
I would say that the present trans movement which includes sexual organ surgery on minors is an attempt to ignore the physical, though not quite escape it.
And there is also the use of technology to control society. Look at China’s social credit scoring, and how they have leveraged Covid to force their citizens to adopt it.
Birth control technology has also affected morality. It doesn’t seem to be all to the good.
After an unprecedented increase in the world population in the last 100-150 years, population is starting to decline, without “benefit” of pestilence or famine or even war (so far), though we don’t seem to be out of the woods regarding the threat of a catastrophic world war.
Ironically, nuclear weapon technology has kept us from industrial war of the World War I and II type, but that may be coming to an end. But what kept us from that type of war was the fear of nuclear weapons, not the love of peace.
Base human nature hasn’t changed. And it’s just straining to get out. Something progressives want to ignore.
Right. Being civilized doesn’t mean that we no longer have the same impulses as our preliterate ancestors. It means tempering and controlling those impulses.
The term “chattel” means “ownership”, that is, property. Rome allowing slaves to buy out highlights that it was chattel slavery. And it apparently was up to the owner to set the price–perhaps impossibly high. Indentured servitude was servitude with a contractual time limit, but could also, in many cases, end early for a fee. Contracts are a form of property, after all.
Serfdom is also involuntary servitude, much like chattel slavery, but permanent and not for individual sale. In most cases, that permanence could not be altered by the master, either–the serf had claim to his place on the land or in the manor.
All of these are slavery, in my mind, as the master controls the person’s daily life and range of allowed actions, with no recourse.
Gonna fight you on this one; individual action and group action are inherently different, even if you aren’t tribal.
Very interesting post and discussion.
I would just like to clarify that morality doesn’t “change.” The “moral” innovations we’re seeing today are the antithesis of morality. Slavery was always wrong (it was different from 18th century chattel slavery in the OT, but it was part of the human experience going way back and continuing in places today, for sure. The OT doesn’t advocate for it, but acknowledges the reality of it). Aborting babies is always wrong. Mutilating sexually confused people is always wrong (and doctors should be prosecuted under the law (call your (R) representatives), imo).
Morality is God’s natural law (and explicit laws in the Big 10) based on the premise of the infinite dignity of every human person as made in the image and likeness of God and best understood as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” If you would prefer not to have been aborted, don’t abort. If you’d rather not be someone’s slave, don’t enslave anyone. If you’d rather someone help you with your sexual confusion rather than castrate you and set you up for years of physical and mental suffering (with a high likelihood that you’ll kill yourself once you’ve decided you can’t take it anymore), don’t mutilate anyone. That some social enforcement or violation of the moral law happens in society as we “progress” (sneer quotes intended — not all change is improvement) should not be understood as morality “changing.” Morality is constant. It’s our understanding and actions that either align with it or violate it. As godlessness increases, we’ll get more and more of the latter.
I think slavery is wrong.
And I thunk without technology, we would still have it. You could not have empires without it.
In a way, all these distinctions are special pleading that x-group didn’t practice slavery-slavery and are thus not as bad as American citizens 1776 – 1865.
The facts on the ground for the average slave on the street were that someone else was going to tell you what to do and hurt you if you didn’t, and that this was going to go on for the foreseeable future; serf, slave, or indenturee. These systems were inherently corrupt and corrupting. And at the time, convenient.
Just want to say that’s not what I had intended to do and not what I actually believe.
But it looks like the language I was using was heavily influenced by my generational age.
I think in the context of Bryan’s post, morality changes because the options change. If today someone asked, “Is it moral to let someone suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease?” Our answer would be that there is no alternative. In a hundred years there may be a simple cure and we will answer the question with No.
For a poor family in the third world it is not immoral to take their ten-year old out of school so that they can work and help support the family. It’s either that, or the family goes hungry. For a family in 21st century America to do that would not be moral because it is not necessary to prevent hunger.
Not to put words in Bryan’s mouth, but I think his point is that as one’s options change, so do their moral standards.
This was aimed broadly and fired as I was regally seated on one of my best hobby horses. It’s a human tendency. Never was much for humans myself.