A balanced, objective position, some people seem to think, lies halfway between the truth and a falsehood. Thus, in a recent 16-page advertisement a pro-energy, pro-technology viewpoint was "balanced" by others, one of which disputed the "fallacy" that energy is linked to civilization and culture¾on such grounds as that Elizabethan culture bloomed without the benefit of the steam engine.
Let's take a closer look at this "myth."
In all of its history, human society has gone through two great revolutions. The first, the one that turned bands of hunters and berry-pickers into a civilization, took place when the productivity of a society rose beyond the point where it produced more than it consumed, so that significant sections of the population were freed for work not directly connected with food and survival. That was the Great Agricultural Revolution of 10,000 B.C. when men first exploited solar energy to raise crops and to husband domestic animals.
It was also the beginning of slavery. If the (only just self-sustaining) tribes had previously warred against each other for hunting grounds, they had either killed their prisoners or taken them up as equals¾a slave would have been a food liability.
The second great revolution was the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, when energy was harnessed on a large scale, and not just for growing food. It was then that avery (or serfdom, or effective economic serfdom) was abandoned¾when it became more costly to feed a slave than to buy fuel for a machine that would do more work. The link between freedom and industry fed by abundant energy is clear by a look at a map of the world. (The exceptions are only seeming:
Industrialized dictatorships keep their subjects in line by starving them of energy and material goods; conversely, what meaning does freedom or democracy have to a starving pariah in India?)
It is highly interesting that the social indicators such as life expectancy, per capita education, disease incidence, etc., did not dramatically change in the 12,000 years between the two Great Revolutions. For example, Elizabethans were well protected from cancer: By the time cancer would normally have struck, most of them were long dead of the plague, cholera, dysentery, scurvy, consumption, smallpox, and other diseases that have been conquered in the industrial age. Their life span was below 30 years: Few of them made it to the luxury of cancer. Then there were the masses of landless peasants who could not eke out a living, and if they did, they could not afford to procreate; these masses went mostly unrecorded by history until they appeared as the workers flocking to the cities when the Industrial Revolution offered them a bad life (at first) instead of no life at all.
To point to the Elizabethan Age as one in which culture bloomed without the benefit of steam engines is cheap and shallow. The real issue is how many Shakespeares were wasted in poverty, disease and illiteracy because the steam engine had not yet been invented.
Besides, Shakespeare was not the only monumental figure of the Elizabethan Age; it was replete with men who were not afraid of the future¾the Raleighs and Drakes who opened up new worlds, and the Virginians who colonized them.
It is a comforting thought that if there were any "leave well enough alone" Elizabethan representatives of the Sierra Club mentality, they probably perished of dysentery in the smelly environment of the 16th century.
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Vol. 7, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 7 Issue/No.: Vol. 7, No. 3 Date: November 01, 1979 02:52 PM Title: Hairshirts or energy?
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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