This book review in Salon caught my eye. Joseph Priestley's name appears in the second paragraph of one of my favorite books, Progress & Poverty, alongside that of Benjamin Franklin, who was his contemporary. P&P was written in 1879. It begins,
The Problem
[01] The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and laborsaving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.
[02] At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that laborsaving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past. Could a man of the last century -- a Franklin or a Priestley -- have seen, in a vision of the future, the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he have seen the forest tree transformed into finished lumber -- into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their hand looms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting from improved facilities of exchange and communication -- sheep killed in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred thousand improvements which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as to the social condition of mankind?
George goes on to say that someone of Franklin's or Priestley's scientific vision, could he have imagined all the technological progress of the 100 years which would follow the founding of the US, would surely have assumed that after that 100 years, there would be no poverty or fear of poverty; that society would have advanced to a point where all could be provided for and none need be anxious about the material needs of life.
George proceeds to seek the cause of poverty, since we see it in all parts of the civilized world; see boom-bust cycles ("hard times"); see it in countries with very different political institutions, financial systems, population density and social organization; where armies are large or nominal; where tariffs hamper trade and where there are none; where autocratic rulers are, but also where "the people" have political power, etc:
Evidently, beneath all such things as these, we must infer a common cause.
[08] That there is a common cause, an that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are the most fully realized -- that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed -- we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness. ...
[11] This fact -- the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show themselves in communities just as they develop into the conditions toward which material progress tends -- proves that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way or another, engendered by progress itself.
[12] And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil.... The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch.
[13] It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share.* ... It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.
*It is true that the poorest may now in certain ways enjoy what the richest a century ago could not have commanded, but this does not show improvement of condition so long as the ability to obtain the necessaries of life is not increased. The beggar in a great city may enjoy many things from which the backwoods farmer is debarred, but that does not prove the condition of the city beggar better than that of the independent farmer.
... it may clearly be seen that material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty -- it actually produces it. ...
[15] This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. ...
[19] I propose in the following pages to attempt to solve by the methods of political economy the great problem I have outlined. I propose to seek the law which associates poverty with progress, and increases want with advancing wealth; and I believe that in the explanation of this paradox we shall find the explanation of those recurring seasons of industrial and commercial paralysis which, viewed independently of their relations to more general phenomena, seem so inexplicable. ...
[21] I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization today women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.
The book reviewed in the Salon.com article provides some background on a fascinating figure of the first years of our country. Here are a few excerpts from Andrew O'Hehir's review of Steven Johnson's book, "The Invention of Air:"
As Johnson's new book about 18th-century scientist and freethinker Joseph Priestley, "The Invention of Air," makes clear, Johnson's fascination with the currents of technological and cognitive change is in no way restricted to the computer age. He would certainly agree that the Internet is only a modern manifestation of a primordial human, planetary and indeed cosmological tendency to create information-exchange networks. Johnson clearly identifies a kindred spirit in Priestley, an amateur tinkerer with no formal scientific training who made several important chemical and atmospheric discoveries and also left his mark on Christian theology and revolutionary politics.
If you look up Priestley on Wikipedia right now, you'll learn that he was the discoverer of oxygen, a confidant of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and a foundational figure in the Unitarian religious movement. Johnson's book throws a certain amount of cold water on the oxygen claim, but more important, Johnson sees all of that as secondary to Priestley's greatest accomplishment, a paradigm-changing discovery that neither he nor anyone else in the 18th century was entirely equipped to understand.
Viewed as a modern-day acolyte of Priestley, Johnson no longer seems like such an anomalous figure. At times in "The Invention of Air," you can feel Johnson positively yearning for the prodigious intellectual ferment of England in the 1760s and '70s, when "natural philosophers" like Priestley and his good friend Franklin made explosive advances in all sorts of apparently unrelated fields, with no regard for disciplinary boundaries or established orthodoxy. Not merely were they unlocking the secrets of such mystifying phenomena as oxygen or electricity, they were pioneers in democratic discourse and what we would now call the "open source" model for disseminating and refining ideas. By publishing their ideas in vernacular language aimed at an educated lay readership, they sparked widespread popular interest in science. ...
When Priestley
discovered that his sprigs of mint produced something that could keep
mice alive, he was pointing the way not merely toward the isolation of
a gaseous element, but also, Johnson says, toward "a whole new way of
thinking about the planet itself, and its capacity for sustaining
life." There was a system operating in Priestley's mint-and-mouse jar,
"a microcosm of a vast system that had been evolving on Earth for two
billion years." When Priestley wrote to his friend Benjamin Franklin to
tell him about this strange discovery, Franklin came eerily close, in
his 18th-century language, to nailing the entire concept of ecosystem
science in one shot:
That the vegetable creation should
restore the air which is spoiled by the animal part of it, looks like a
rational system, and seems to be of a piece with the rest. Thus fire
purifies water all the world over. It purifies it by distillation, when
it raises it in vapours, and lets it fall in rain; and farther still by
filtration, when, keeping it fluid, it suffers that rain to percolate
the earth. We knew before, that putrid animal substances were converted
into sweet vegetables, when mixed with the earth, and applied as
manure; and now, it seems, that the same putrid substances, mixed with
the air, have a similar effect.
Of course that isn't entirely accurate by modern
scientific standards, but for a person with no knowledge of
microbiology or organic chemistry or evolutionary theory, it's a
remarkable insight. At least momentarily, Franklin and Priestley seemed
to glimpse a branch of scientific inquiry that would not reach the
mainstream until the mid-20th century: the study of all planetary life
as a single interlocking system, a complex web of energy flows and
chemical interactions that extended from the smallest microorganism to
giant redwoods and blue whales. ...
With another new president about to take office who seems to offer a "recovery from delusion" and a return to "science and honesty," at a moment when the republic's stability seems uncertain, it's a good time for all Americans to imbibe a little of Johnson's, and Priestley's, irrepressible hopefulness.
I've left out some wonderful stuff ... I encourage you to go read the rest, at http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/01/09/johnson/print.html
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