Why the Anti-Promethean Backlash?

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Roots of Progress Institute founder Jason Crawford recently hosted me at an Interintellect salon. Our topic was the relation between glamour and progress, inspired by my Works in Progress article. At one point Jason asked a provocative question: Why did the anti-Promethean backlash happen when it did? Earlier periods of technological and economic progress, he noted, had produced demands for more progress, not less. What was different about America circa 1970?

In the WiP article, I point to a combination of complacency among those who’d grown up amid postwar plenty and dissatisfaction with technocratic overreach. But why the complacency? Why not a demand for even more? My article didn’t consider that question.

Brink Lindsey, who coined the term anti-Promethean backlash, cites two possible explanations. First, “as economic security spread throughout the populace, priorities shifted from physical security and material accumulation to self-expression and quality of life.” Second, “as people acquired more, they had more to lose, and accordingly began worrying more about holding on to what they had.” The result was the backlash, defined as “the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world.”

The first explanation entails a shift toward intangible experiences—lots of travel and dining out—and a turn away from the mass-market drive to “not bad” goods to everyone. That certainly happened. (I even wrote a book about one aspect.) But you’ll be hard pressed to detect low demand for physical security or less stuff in either election results or market trends. If anything, heightened concern for physical security, aka “safetyism,” is a major driver of the anti-Promethean backlash. As for loss-aversion, the empirical relationship to income is, as best I can tell, murky. My intuition is to think that if you’re on the material edge you’d be more loss-averse rather than less. But poor people do play the lottery more, so maybe Brink’s right. Either way, I don’t think his explanations fully explain the timing. Why 1970 instead of, say, 1950?

Megan McArdle recently took up the question from a different angle, inspired by reading Emily Post’s 1916 book about driving across America, By Motor to the Golden Gate, The condition of Post’s trip, often on heavily rutted dirt roads, were horrendous. But Megan was most struck by “the incredible optimism and wild ambition that runs through Post’s America. The Midwest, particularly, seems to be in the middle of a youthful growth spurt, with cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.” (Emphasis added. I will return to this point.)

Our longing for that lost sense of optimism, Megan argues, shapes contemporary politics. On both left and right, activists “are asking why we can’t recapture the spirit of an age when America felt young and hopeful and capable of doing extraordinary things.” The reason we don’t feel that way now, she suggests, is that we’ve been too successful. Indoor plumbing is exciting when you get it, a third bathroom nice but not life-changing. The same is true for highways, bridges, railroads, and dams.1 “The political trade-offs are now harder, because we’re chasing incremental improvements, not life-altering change,” she writes. Youth, hope, and extraordinary achievement belong, in this gloomy analysis, to developing countries, China in particular.

I’m more optimistic, because Jason’s question pointed me to something I hadn’t previously considered. My first instinct, as a student of English literature, was to say that Jason was wrong. The 20th-century anti-Promethean backlash wasn’t unique. The Industrial Revolution generated one as well.

Victorian England produced many influential writers and artists, including John Ruskin, William Morris, and Augustus Pugin, who deplored modern industry and promoted an idealized medievalism. Their ideas left a permanent mark on intellectual life but had little immediate effect on the pace or direction of industrial change.2 Medievalism sold as a style but not as a political agenda.3 Its legacies were primarily aesthetic, realized in Gothic revival architecture, Arthurian poetry, pre-Raphaelite painting, and the British Arts and Crafts movement. The social criticism that actually transformed Britain demanded more for working people—political power and material abundance for the masses, not a return to feudal roles or an end to factories and machine-made goods. As long as a significant proportion of the population lived in material deprivation, the salient debates were over how to distribute the fruits of Promethean industry, not whether that industry was a good idea.

Besides, Jason wasn’t asking about the Old World. The United States lacked even Britain’s intellectual backlash. Americans who objected to industrial progress remained niche players, idealizing the ante-bellum South.4 There was plenty of dissatisfaction and conflict, of course. We had labor strife and muckrakers; socialists, anarchists, and populists; Edward Bellamy and the National Grange. But medievalism was confined to wallpaper and architecture, often installed or financed by industrial magnates. Feudalism wasn’t on the American agenda. What was different here? And what might it tell us about 1970?

As I talked to Jason, several things suddenly came together: the Old World vs. the New, multiple conversations with young people at the Progress Conference, and a passage from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark:

She had often heard Mrs. Kronborg say that she “believed in immigration,” and so did Thea believe in it. This earth [the midwestern prairie] seemed to her young and fresh and kindly, a place where refugees from old, sad countries were given another chance. The mere absence of rocks gave the soil a kind of amiability and generosity, and the absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a wider range. Wire fences might mark the end of a man’s pasture, but they could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks sang—and one’s heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there. It was, somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air which had never been sung in the world before.

That’s the spirit of the midwestern growth spurt, of “cities springing up out of the prairie full of vim and vigor and plans for the future.”

I did some mental arithmetic and suggested a hypothesis. The young Americans who proved so receptive to anti-Promethean ideas in the 1960s and 70s—those born starting from the late 1920s onward—weren’t just richer than previous generations. They were the products of the country’s four decades of restricting immigration. Instead of an America renewed by people looking for another chance, they had grown up in a more complacent society. These immigrant-deprived generations were much more likely than earlier generations to embrace and amplify anti-Promethean ideas, providing a mass of public support.

Later, I found remarkably congruent statistics. Nineteen seventy marked was the first Earth Day.5 It was also the year in which the percentage of the U.S. population made up of immigrants reached its nadir, with the total number of immigrants at the lowest point in a century.

Internal migration, which surged after World War II, had declined as well. The “Second Great Migration” of blacks from the South ended around that time. Domestic migration to California, arguably the vanguard of the anti-Promethean backlash, peaked in the late 1950s, then declined significantly, occasionally turning negative. The resurgence in the 1980s, which was accompanied by large-scale international immigration, set off a “growth control” movement that resulted in new building restrictions.6

Hans P. Johnson, “Movin’ Out Domestic Migration to and from California in the 1990s,” Public Policy Institute of California, August 2000, available here.

The anti-Promethean backlash arose when America was most like a normal, settled country rather than a nation of strivers seeking a better life. It intensified when the people who accepted the more static America tried to preserve it by legally restricting “human mastery over the physical world,” from power plants to housing construction.

My unscientific observation is that the progress and abundance movement is full of the children of immigrants. We seem due for a turnaround.

Virginia Postrel

Dynamist Blog

Why the Anti-Promethean Backlash?

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