Originally posted Mar 31, cross-posting to the new Forum.
I’ve said that society was generally optimistic about progress until the early 20th century, and lost that confidence in the World Wars. By the late 20th century, from about the 1970s on, a deep skepticism and distrust of progress had come to prominence. But what happened in between?
I have a new theory about what characterized the attitude toward progress (in the US, at least) from about the 1930s through the ’60s. It’s just a hypothesis at this stage, but it goes like this:
The 19th century was dominated by a belief in the power of human reason and its ability to advance science and technology for the betterment of life. But after World War I and the Great Depression, it got harder to believe in the rationality of humanity or in the predictability and controllability of the world.
The generation that went through these shocks, however, was not ready to give up on the idea of progress. They still wanted progress and still believed that reason could achieve it—but they worried that the masses could not be trusted to be rational, and that progress could not be left to the chaos of democracy and free markets. Instead, progress was to be achieved by a technical elite that would exercise top-down control.
The purest form of this, perhaps, found expression in early Communism, which valorized industrial production but sought to achieve it by subordinating the individual to totalitarian rule. The US was too individualistic for that—but it evolved its own flavor of the idea that I’m just starting to understand. Call it “technocracy.”
Historical evidence
Here are some snippets from my research that indicate this theme.
Walter Lippmann and the “democratic realists”
Lippmann wrote a number of books around the 1920s arguing that democracy doesn’t work, because it relies on an informed public, which he saw as impossible. Quoting from “Can Democracy Survive in the Post-Factual Age?” by Carl Bybee:
For Lippmann, given the inevitable tendency of individuals to distort what they see, coupled with the basic irrationality of humankind, the only hope for democratic government was to reinvent it. This new, more “realistic” democracy would be tempered and guided by a form of knowledge which, Lippmann believed, rose above subjectivity and politics: science.
Lippmann was part of a school of “democratic realists”, says Bybee:
The major themes sounded by Lippmann were shared by the democratic realists. First and foremost was the belief in the fundamental irrationality of men and women. The second related theme was that the minimization of participation of the masses in public life was consequently a necessary goal. Third, to preserve democracy it must be redefined as rule for the people but not by the people. Rule would be by informed and responsible “men of action.”
H. G. Wells and other sci-fi authors
J. Storrs Hall, in Where Is My Flying Car?, describes Wells’s 1935 film Things to Come as portraying a “technological Utopia,” a “concept of a completely designed society”, run by a “technological elite that forms the enlightened scientific world government.” Elsewhere Hall points out that Wells “firmly embraced world government, public ownership of capital, and centralized planning on a grand scale,” and compared this to “Isaac Asimov’s computer-controlled economy and wise robotic overlords” and “E. E. Smith’s galactic government of wise, incorruptible Lensmen.”
Technocracy, Inc.
Technocracy was actually the name of a specific political/economic movement from this era, and the name of an organization that promoted it. Here’s how Charles Mann describes it in The Wizard and the Prophet:
Marion King Hubbert, an idealist through and through, believed in the power of Science to guide the human enterprise. A geophysicist at Columbia University in the early 1930s, he was one of the half-dozen co-founders of Technocracy Incorporated, a crusading effort to establish a government of all-knowing, hyper-logical engineers and scientists…. Technocracy adherents believed that the world was controlled by flows of energy and mineral resources, and that society should be based on this understanding. Rather than allowing economies to dance to the senseless, febrile beat of supply and demand, Technocrats wanted to organize them on the basis of a quantity controlled by the eternal laws of physics: energy.
Politically unbiased experts in red-and-gray Technocracy uniforms would assay each nation’s yearly energy output, then divide it fairly among the citizenry, each person receiving an allocation of so many joules or kilowatt-hours per month. If people wanted to buy, say, shirts, they would look up the price on a table of energy equivalents calculated by objective Technocratic savants. The leader of the system, the Great Engineer, would oversee a new nation, the North American Technate, a merger of North America, Central America, Greenland, and the northern bits of South America. No more would self-interested businesspeople and short-sighted politicians run rampant; the North American Technate would be smooth, efficient, and rational.
The twentieth century seen through this lens
No matter exactly how influential these specific ideas were, they point to something in the zeitgeist. When you adopt the technocracy lens, it seems to fit a lot of the major developments of the mid-20th century:
The New Deal was top-down engineering of the economy, after the chaos of the Roaring Twenties and the subsequent market crash
Mobilization for WW2 was managed top-down—both manufacturing and research
The interstate highway system and the Apollo program were massive federal projects to achieve economic and scientific goals
And, possibly but less obviously a fit:
Under the Truman Doctrine of “containment” of Communism, the US became the world’s policeman, definitively reversing a long tradition of attempting to avoid foreign entanglements
Why didn’t technocracy last?
Technocracy made sense to the pre-war generation, who grew up when times were still optimistic. (FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower were all born in the 19th century and came of age before WW1.) But the generation raised after the wars—in an atmosphere of fear and soul-searching—felt differently. They weren’t simply looking for a different means to achieve the same end of progress—they rejected the idea of progress, seeing technology and industry as doing more harm than good. They didn’t trust the elites (or “anyone over 30”), and they bristled at authority and at restrictions on personal freedom.
In 1969, as technocracy reached its apotheosis with the Moon landing, the new generation was partying at Woodstock.
The crisis of technocracy
In the early 1970s, a perfect storm of events conspired to discredit the technocratic idea, including Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil shocks. By 1973 it was clear that our leaders were unfit to govern, in terms of either competence or ethics: they could not handle affairs at home or abroad, neither the economy nor foreign policy, and they were plagued by scandal.
From the 1970s on, the conversation changed. The belief in progress was not totally dead. But the idea that it could be achieved centrally by the elites held much less sway, and there was a major new element of distrust and skepticism at the very idea of progress—an element that has not gone away, and indeed by today has gone mainstream.
Again, all of this is still a hypothesis, and there are many missing pieces. What exactly was the philosophy of the new generation? How did Communism make the transition from the technocratic old Left to the anti-industrial, anti-elitist New Left? And how exactly should we characterize the period since the 1970s—which contains major elements of anti-technology, anti-growth, and anti-consumption sentiment, but which also saw the continued rise of Silicon Valley, the Reagan era, etc.?
I think you are definitely on to something here. It’s definitely interesting how many different camps point to the mid seventies as the period where things started to go wrong. The term often used to describe the political ideology emerging in this period and coming to fruit fully with the election of Reagan would be “neoliberalism”. Often characterized as a distrust of centralized control, a laissez faire approach to governing, a dismantling of welfare and labor protections, and a defunding of things like research initiatives, It definitely seems like it was a turning point in our political mindset. The term is usually used to refer to both Republican leaders like Reagan and Bush and the Democrats of the era including Clinton and potentially even Obama. It also is closely tied to economic thinkers such as F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman.
That said the term has a lot of baggage attached to it to the point where it may be less helpful than I would like it to be. I say this mostly due to how the term has been colored by the Marxists that often have used it. Obviously these Marxists have their own narrative drum to beat and this means finding unbiased resources on the era using this term might be difficult. I think validating that this era is indeed characterized by the traits often ascribed to neoliberalism is a worthwhile endeavor.
In recent years a new group of liberals have adopted the term for their movement and have said specifically that one thing that separates them from the original neoliberals is that the modern version is much more comfortable with technocracy (I can dig up the source for this if anyone is interested). So even the people who have adopted the term neoliberal seem to suggest that this era is characterized by a distrust of technocracy which seems like a solid sign for your overall theory.
“The modern version is much more comfortable with technocracy”—I wasn’t aware of that. I would love to see a source on this.
I’m still trying to find a good source on this in text format. One good resource would be this recent podcast from the neoliberal project on what they believe.
epistemic confidence: low—just an idea
As I’ve thought about these shifts, one idea that keeps coming up for me is the idea of “the enemy / crisis”—there was a very clear enemy during technocrats birth (World Wars, Economic Crisis). The death happened essentially as the first generation without an “enemy / crisis” as their foundational story—and, as they weren’t driven by fear or the purpose of defeating the enemy, they are less likely to be willing to give power or listen to authority. Even Vietnam was a war that lacked a threat or enemy that resonated with the generation. If it was a real war with the Soviet Union (versus a proxy war), I imagine it would have looked quite different.
We can see this dynamic play out at a smaller scale after 9/11 -- support for the president surged and the government was given significantly more leeway than before.
In short, an idea is that technocracy was possible because multiple generations were raised with constant threats and enemies and thus had a larger willingness to cede power and stand behind a leader or elite. And, in the face of great victory, the leaders looked to build on the successes that brought victory—technological superiority—but were unable to keep focus & power without an enemy or crisis to crystalize a largely singular vision and purpose.
Silicon Valley was originally highly suspicious of the business establishment with its focus on disrupting it, although this seems to have softened somewhat as it has formed its own establishment.
As an example, look at the 1984 Macintosh Commercial.