We think of technology as constantly improving the quality of life because we assign points for the problems it solves without deducting points for the problems it creates. Sigmund Freud, of all people, nailed this in his book Civilization and its Discontents, when he ponders why the rapid technological progress of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hadn’t seemed to increase man’s happiness at all:
It prompts one to exclaim: Is it not then a positive pleasure, an unequivocal gain in happiness, to be able to hear, whenever I like, the voice of a child living hundreds of miles away, or to know directly a friend of mine arrives at his destination that he has come well and safely through the long and troublesome voyage? And is it nothing that medical science has succeeded in enormously reducing the mortality of young children, the dangers of infection for women in childbirth, indeed, in very considerably prolonging the average length of human life?And there is still a long list one could add to these benefits that we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and practical progress—but a critical, pessimistic voice makes itself heard, saying that most of these advantages follow the model of those “cheap pleasures” in the anecdote. One gets this enjoyment by sticking one’s bare leg outside the bedclothes on a cold winter’s night and then drawing it in again.
If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would have never left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice. If there were no vessels crossing the ocean, my friend would never have embarked on his voyage, and I should not need the telegraph to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing the mortality of children, when it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest moderation on us in begetting them, so that taken all round we do not rear more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for sexual life in marriage and probably counteracted the beneficial effects of natural selection? And what do we gain by a long life when it is full of hardship and starved of joys and so wretched that we can only welcome death as our deliverer?
We need to learn to stop being dazzled by individual localized advances, determining instead whether technological progress has resulted in net global improvements. It is amazing how many subtle and intricate problems modern obstetric medicine can solve, but it is horrifying how many of those problems it created for itself, and it is questionable whether it has led to a net improvement in the well-being of families. Applying this test to other areas in which technology is assumed to be triumphant—railways, automobiles, farming, education, entertainment, communication, government, medicine, charity, business, evangelism, child-rearing, consumer goods—is left as an exercise to the reader.
