My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress
By Johan Norberg
Sometimes when I talk and write about the importance of science, technology, and entrepreneurship to human opportunity and living standards, people ask me why I seem so obsessed with progress.
There is a simple reason: I did not use to believe in it.
When I was around fifteen, I shared many of the ideas of the people I now spend my time arguing against. I was very unhappy about modern, industrial civilization. I looked upon highways, cars, trucks, and factories as blights on the landscape. I thought the hustle, bustle, and stress of consumerism and modernity were unnatural and unhealthy.
Some of this no doubt came from a slightly introverted nerd’s attempt to intellectualize his own personal alienation from other kids and the awfully boring world my parents’ generation seemed to inhabit. I thought that there must have been a better time in the past, when we lived in harmony with one another and with nature. I looked at the kind of life that my farmer ancestors in northern Sweden lived during the mid-19th century. I imagined the region as unspoiled and beautiful, and their life as simple and natural. There, I thought, were the good old days.
This view predisposed me to look at technology and construction and consumption only in terms of their negative impacts on traditional lifestyles, livelihoods, and the environment. Because they apparently took us away from something better, I could not see why someone would welcome such changes.
So, why on earth did anyone expose humanity to such a horrible fate? Why did they destroy the good life and the planet? Clearly, something was wrong with my fellow human beings. I was drawn to literature about the absurdity of the human experience and the vanity of simpleminded people.
I read the Existentialists, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henry David Thoreau; I read Franz Kafka and plenty of other disturbing fiction, all of which reinforced my sense that something was seriously wrong with the world and humanity. It made me a pessimist, almost even a misanthrope. Such stupid people, to ruin their world like that!
Many problems followed from my rejection of modernity.
Obviously, it would be impossible to find a satisfying job in a world like this, so how would I ever be able to earn a living? I remember contemplating living on welfare and writing bitter books.
And given that human beings are shallow and vain, how would I be able to find friends and a partner who had at least a minimum of decency and intelligence? They would have to share my depressing views, but then wouldn’t they make for pretty boring and miserable company?
I don’t think that I ever became clinically depressed, but as a friend of mine put it, I had made myself “philosophically depressed.” The world and everything in it just seemed hopeless. And that became a self-fulfilling despair.
Two things began to lift me out of the intellectual hole that I had dug for myself: reading about history—boy, was that an eye-opener—and studying politics.
Whatever period I read about, and whichever region I turned to, the “good old days” were nowhere to be found. I started to think, like Voltaire, that “History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.” And misery! I found that the desperate struggle to find something, anything, to feed your family and stave off hunger for another few weeks was the defining experience of all previous eras.
My ancestors in northern Sweden had not lived a good life; they had fought hard for food, shelter, and clothing, and when the weather was bad, the crop failed, and they starved. In bad times, they had to dry and grind tree bark into flour to prepare their daily bread. As Vilhelm Moberg, our greatest novelist, observed in his history of Sweden, “of all the wondrous adventures of the Swedish people, none is more remarkable and wonderful than this: that it survived all of them.”1
I started searching for global historical statistics. It turned out that in 1850, most of the world lived in extreme poverty, and life expectancy was lower than thirty years. Every second child died. I had assumed that my ancestors lived in touch with nature. It turns out they died in touch with it, too, and young.
This was an unwelcome discovery, to say the least—not just because I suddenly became aware of the hardship of previous generations, but also because it revealed to me that I had been embarrassingly naïve. I had thought of “the past” as a nice weekend excursion to the countryside, with unspoiled nature—and I’d never considered what life was really like without accessible calories, antibiotics, and indoor plumbing. I had taken all the benefits of modern civilization for granted.
Once I began to pull this thread, I found it hard to stop. I just had to find out what made the difference between their lives and ours. Why is it that for ten thousand years, people did not experience any lasting improvement in their material condition, and then suddenly, in the past five or six generations, we saw an explosion of wealth and technology?
For the first time, I started to actually think about the impact of railways, steamboats, international trade, corporations, financial markets, and so on. I had to ask myself: Where would I have been without them? Probably in the graveyard, or never born.
And what would be the disastrous consequences if people like my old self managed to undermine all this? This was the beginning of my obsession with human progress. I could no longer take modern civilization as a given—or a curse.
Step by step, I realized that the modern world was not so bad after all. But my heart was not in it. My ethical beliefs and emotional responses still led me to conclude that the scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs were up to something that, if not nefarious, was nonetheless creating something mindlessly boring and, well, aesthetically ugly. Only artists and writers did important, beautiful work. Modern civilization seemed, at best, like a necessary evil.
My political and philosophical journey of discovery helped me to reassemble my worldview. I had long considered myself an anarchist, leaning toward neither capitalism nor socialism but something peculiar in between. I believed in freedom from force of any sort, which to me just seemed more natural, but I felt hostile to both big government and big business. I wanted everything to be small scale and environmentally friendly. How would that happen without government control? Somehow.
Most people read great thinkers to learn something. I am a little embarrassed to confess that my early studies in intellectual history were motivated by something much less legitimate: bolstering my preconceptions.
I started reading anarchists only after I had become one myself. And they disappointed me. Some of these supposed anarchists wanted us to live in suffocating communities where every aspect of human behavior was subjected to majority control, which seemed to me the opposite of the complete freedom to which I was drawn. Others were little more than rebranded socialists, rejecting all forms of private property and business. This was problematic; I thought that property you had earned peacefully was your own, and I found it difficult to draw a line over which someone had “too much”—especially as I started to realize that the free market was a driving force behind innovation and economic growth. I did not find intellectual ammunition for the position I had tried to carve out, so I continued my search for thinkers who made a stronger case for individual liberty.
The “neoliberals” of the late 1980s caught my interest. In Sweden, this was the word for classical liberals or libertarians, usually used as a pejorative. This was before the internet, so I had to make do with researching their ideas in newspapers and whatever I found in libraries. I found attacks on them in several books. Reportedly, these people, in the tradition of Adam Smith and the Manchester School, hated the government and did not care enough for people to subject them to regulation and control. It was a caricature close to what people said about me. I started reading thinkers such as Smith, Richard Cobden, and John Bright, though I found them to be much too focused on economics rather than ethics. But at least they cared more about individual liberty than some of my old anarchist friends.
This led me, when I was seventeen, to the Freedom Front, a Swedish libertarian organization with great minds who introduced me to modern free-market thinkers. They were also brave activists who hid refugees from the Balkan wars and ran a popular nightclub protesting restrictive licensing laws in Stockholm. Here, at last, I found a community of fairly likeminded people and a common purpose.
I often worked as a bartender in this speakeasy; in the mornings, when I had closed the bar and cleaned up the mess, I went down into the basement clad with bookshelves and exchanged my earnings for books. This is how I found such classical thinkers as John Locke and Frédéric Bastiat, and such modern ones as Friedrich Hayek and Robert Nozick. They helped me to see how the ideas I held could be connected, and I started to get a better understanding of Enlightenment philosophy and free-market economics. And yet, their ideas often struck me as sterile truths. As far as I could see, the left and the environmentalists still had the poetry and the music; for some reason, the electronic music and goth rock that I listened to seemed to be composed mostly by leftists.
Then some friends in this community told me that I had to read Ayn Rand, whom I had never heard of. It happened at an important moment in my thought process. I still found it difficult to embrace my intellectual conclusions about science, technology, and growth wholeheartedly. Although I had accepted the practical benefits of human progress, my emotional responses lagged far behind. I had yet to experience, in visceral form, the meaning of industrialization and commerce, and so I was left with a hollow, less-than-inspired ideal. That began to change when I read Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s nonfiction books.
For the first time, I read someone who talked about man as a heroic being, with happiness as his moral purpose, and science, technology, and industry his noblest activities. I was appalled. And deeply fascinated!
Rand had this annoying ability to get to the bottom of every question and challenge my every belief. She did not leave me alone, so I kept debating her, sometimes with others but mostly in my own mind—and eventually I lost. Rand revealed that the ideas I had held were often floating abstractions, disconnected from any evidence of my own experience. When I saw these abstractions concretized via the characters and events of Atlas, it helped me to ground my ideas and so actually understand them as true (or false) instead of just accepting them as unfounded theoretical constructs.
If scientists and entrepreneurs provide us with the knowledge and wealth that make the world an amazing place, why weren’t they the heroes in my story? And why were the whiners and moaners good guys—just because they dressed in black like me and had the better tunes? Previously, I had identified government intervention as a bad thing and had been involved in libertarian activism against it, but I had not clearly identified or articulated the good that deserved protection against it. Thanks to Rand, I began to shift from fighting against what’s bad to fighting for what’s good—for progress and not just against oppression.
Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the biggest impact of reading Rand was on my emotional outlook—the part of my personality that had not kept up with my intellectual transformation. She helped me see the beauty in exploration and achievement and that technology and innovation can be romantic adventures. I credit her at least partly with my bright sense of life, my belief in mankind, in progress and the future. In Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, the sight of one man’s achievement provides a young boy with “the courage to face a lifetime.” In time, that’s what Rand’s works provided me.
This intellectual journey of discovery is why I am obsessed with progress. It is fueled in part by my gratitude for the people who keep on working and thinking and producing, even when people like my old self denigrate them. I had always taken progress for granted. I did not recognize it, and I did not understand it, and now I am trying to make up for it.
As a convert to the cause, I hope you will forgive my missionary zeal. You see, I am trying to get a younger version of myself to see the error of his ways.