Book Review: Progress

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future

4 Stars

I heard about this book on the late Mark Steyn Show that used to be on CRTV.com.  I very much liked the show and was really disappointed when it was taken off, which has never been explained.

This book talks about the great benefits that capitalism has brought to the world.  Most of the book I already knew.  Things like how the appliances have given the average person, especially women, in the western world has the leisure to enjoy things that used to be enjoyed only by the most wealthy and privileged.  Things like reading, enjoying music, fine art, a long healthy life and fresh delicious food.

He also pointed out something that I have never considered.  For a long time I have always thought, because it’s been taught this way, that the industrial revolution was a pity because of the way it treated people as soulless parts of the machine of the industrial revolution, especially young children.  Then it was pointed out that I had hadn’t been considering the fact that living on farms back then wasn’t the pastoral bliss that I like to think modern farm life is like.  It was dirty and dangerous.  If a farm had large animals like sheep or cows that could accidentally kill a small child, the animal was often more valuable than the child.  A child on a farm was not given the kind of life children are given today, they were needed to do important things that they could do, like watching the large animals that could kill them etc.  They moved to the cities because it was a better, safer life than they enjoyed on the farm.  This book points all this out but then it pointed out the next step that I’d never considered.  It was only in cities when capitalism started to bring enough leisure, and Christians with a social conscience like William Wilberforce and the Society for the Reformation of Manners, started agitating for changes beside abolition.  After those changes then all the rest of the benefits of capitalism we’re brought about and children now have an ideal life like they’ve never had in history.

Most of this book I agreed with but there were a few chapters I don’t agree with.  For example I think that the normalization of homosexuality is a bad thing, but over all I agree with the books premises that capitalism, which was brought about by Western Christianity, has brought about a great new world to live in.