Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

To be sure, the industrialization of the developing world, like the Industrial Revolution two centuries before it, has produced working conditions that are harsh by the standards of modern rich countries and have elicited bitter condemnation. The Romantic movement in the 19th century was partly a reaction to the “dark satanic mills” (as William Blake called them), and since that time a loathing of industry has been a sacred value of C. P. Snow’s Second Culture of literary intellectuals.⁴¹ Nothing in Snow’s essay enraged his assailant F. R. Leavis as much as this passage:

It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.⁴²

As we have seen, Snow was accurate in his claims about advances in life and health, and he was also right that the appropriate standard in considering the plight of the poor in industrializing countries is the set of alternatives available to them where and when they live. Snow’s argument is being echoed fifty years later by development experts such as Radelet, who observes that “while working on the factory floor is often referred to as sweatshop labor, it is often better than the granddaddy of all sweatshops: working in the fields as an agricultural day laborer.”

When I lived in Indonesia in the early 1990s, I arrived with a somewhat romanticized view of the beauty of people working in rice paddies, together with reservations about the rapidly growing factory jobs. The longer I was there, the more I recognized how incredibly difficult it is to work in the rice fields. It’s a backbreaking grind, with people eking out the barest of livings by bending over for hours in the hot sun to terrace the fields, plant the seeds, pull the weeds, transplant the seedlings, chase the pests, and harvest the grain. Standing in the pools of water brings leeches and the constant risk of malaria, encephalitis, and other diseases. And, of course, it is hot, all the time. So, it was not too much of a surprise that when factory jobs opened offering wages of $2 a day, hundreds of people lined up just to get a shot at applying.⁴³

The benefits of industrial employment can go beyond material living standards. For the women who get these jobs, it can be a liberation. In her article “The Feminist Side of Sweatshops,” Chelsea Follett (the managing editor of HumanProgress) recounts that factory work in the 19th century offered women an escape from the traditional gender roles of farm and village life, and so was held by some men at the time “sufficient to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.” The girls themselves did not always see it that way. A textile mill worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, wrote in 1840:

We are collected . . . to get money, as much of it and as fast as we can. . . . Strange would it be, if in money-loving New England, one of the most lucrative female employments should be rejected because it is toilsome, or because some people are prejudiced against it. Yankee girls have too much independence for that.⁴⁴

Here again, experiences during the Industrial Revolution prefigure those in the developing world today. Kavita Ramdas, the head of the Global Fund for Women, said in 2001 that in an Indian village “all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and relatives, pound millet, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children.”⁴⁵ An analysis in Bangladesh confirmed that the women who worked in the garment industry (as my grandparents did in 1930s Canada) enjoyed rising wages, later marriage, and fewer and better-educated children.⁴⁶ Over the course of a generation, slums, barrios, and favelas can morph into suburbs, and the working class can become middle class.⁴⁷