Image: Brian Rawlinson in the role of Robert Onedin, taken from the BBC TV series The Onedin Line (By “The Onedin Line”, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53407879): “But, James, it’s progress!”
What drives progress?
When Belgian National Railways shifted its then principal Brussels terminus at Gare du Nord to a new site in the 1850s, the city laid out a new street that would bring the travelling public thronging to its portals, slicing through the lower town in a unerring plumb line, and christened the street Rue du Progrès – Progress Street. It now forms part of the great wander-trail (sentier de grande randonnée) between Amsterdam and Paris.
Progress was the indelible hallmark of the entire Victorian era. When Queen Victoria came to the British throne in 1837, and her uncle Leopold installed Belgium’s in 1831, Europe was in the throes of a fervour of industrialisation that seemed, and seems, never-ending. Belgium’s was the first railway in continental Europe (Mechlin-Brussels, 1835: note, always cited in the order from the province to the capital), and constituted a mark of progress so worthy of note, they named a street after it. As ships with sails gave way to those with cavernous, coal-consuming boilers, as homely, home-spun industry ceded its place to leviathan factories, as empires expanded egregiously, and as Chinese silks and chinking jars of spice disgorged on quays of commerce to accommodate the copious tastes of Europe’s upper crusts, nods of consent were manifold: this was progress. Progress, from Amsterdam to Paris, and beyond.
One of the foremost sparks that leads to progress is serendipity – the art of seeing more in something than the eye beholds: Robert the Bruce observing the determination of a spider; Isaac Newton seeing an apple drop to Earth; Alexander Fleming noticing mould on his discarded sandwich. Such observations occur millionfold every day and had occurred millionfold before these observers observed them. But only few gave and give pause for thought. And the thoughts they give pause for, change the world.
Recently, I was buying orange juice. Over at the soft drinks area was a large, 1.5 litre bottle priced at EUR 1.25. In the chilled section was a variety of juices, some of which ranged (for grapefruit) up to EUR 6 for 750 millilitres. Broadly, the prices ranged from 0.125 to 1.67 cents per millilitre. A difference of a factor of over 13. The cheap variety is made from concentrate, and the details of what that means to the juice’s manufacture are beyond me. The juice stems from the fruit, the orange. It gets concentrated, which means it’s easier to transport, and at less cost. It’s then reconstituted at its destination so that it again approximates the state in which it left the orange tree, and will keep for a reasonably long period of time. The chilled juice essentially goes direct from the fruit into the bottle and will keep for maybe a week or so. The fresh tastes better than the concentrated version. But, I asked myself as I pondered my purchase: does it taste 13 times better?
If your income is such that you don’t need to ponder such things, then like as not the calculations above will comes as a revelation to you: you simply pop the product into your trolley and pay whatever it is that the bill comes to, without a second thought. Because, whether it’s 13 or 300 times better, the chilled is better, and that’s that.
But, for the companies that make these orange juices, that is very much not that: EUR 1.25 is a modest outlay for breakfast refreshment, and EUR 6 will not break most people’s banks, but the makers will have gauged their pricing with scientific precision to ensure that the discerning customer always directs their hand towards chilled, and that the impecunious translator, such as I, will gravitate towards soft drinks. He who controls his market really must control it. And he controls his market best, who has the power to cut a cent off his product’s production, making it more alluring to the thrifty, or adding a cent on his retail price, knowing the discerning gourmand will not thereby be daunted.
Which of the two juices is progress? Squeezing an orange of its juice to put it in a bottle for sale is what man has done since the idea – a product of serendipity – occurred to the first person to have done so. I don’t think it goes back to the 17th century – Nell Gwynn wasn’t that progressive – but at some point it did happen, that much we know. But the idea of concentrating orange juice in order to facilitate its transportation from Florida, California or Israel to the northern climes where we need our vitamin C, is a stroke of genius.1 It keeps the product longer, it makes it cheaper to ship, and, if taste must suffer as a result, even if it is to a factor of 13, one thing is not affected by that process: the chemical composition of the bottle’s contents. The smallest component in the flagon is the vitamins; they’re as good as negligible. You have more vitamin C from eating a boiled, unpeeled potato. But the rest, aside from water, is, whether concentrate or chilled, pretty much 50/50 glucose and sucrose. What’s in the two bottles may taste a bit different; but it is in fact exactly the same in both.
The progress, if progress it be, that is represented by chilled juices, lies not in the juice but in the logistical progress that now renders it feasible to transport fresh produce across relatively large distances and still ensure a taste sensation for the customer, a healthy profit for the maker, and a much greater burden for the environment; and, like all environmental burdens, orange juice can achieve a status that accords social status. The discerning customer pays the premium on their premium product because it panders to their taste, or perchance their standing; but their taste is not representative of progress in the manufacturing of juices, rather in the efficiency of logistics chains. When they fork out their EUR 6 at the check-out, they are not wrong when they hold to a belief that they are buying a superior product. It is, without much discussion, superior. But at what cost is it superior and in how far is their taste for fresh orange juice being exploited by the maker? Remember: the bottles’ contents are the same in both cases.
A few years back, my computer received an update that was awaited with wide-eyed curiosity and great anticipation: the upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit operation. A number changed and, to be honest, as a simple computer user, I didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. But this, I was assured, was as momentous a change as when Neil Armstrong fluffed his lines on the moon.
Prior to the switch, everything had worked pretty much as it should. And, after the change, it did as well. Well, most of it did. There were, of course, a whole range of programs that appeared in the tree with an ominous no parking sign placed over their icon. Those programs, I’d been told, would no longer work, and I’d been told accurately: they did no longer work. Some of them I had paid for. But no refund was offered, and no compensation was offered by Apple Mac. If I wanted to use those programs in the future, doing so would be easy: all I needed to do was pay for them again. The old versions were now obsolete.
Obsolescence is a feature of technological advancement. It is a price we must pay for progress and comes as the natural runt in progress’s litter. Sows give birth to runts as a part of the natural litter-birthing process. But no sow intends – were we to anthropomorphise a pig’s procreational habits – to produce a runt. She simply produces them. In the lifecycles of economies, however, as opposed to that of pigs, obsolescence is far from accidental or a product of nature: it is very much intended. Manufacturers employ cheap labour to mass-produce cheap stuff for the masses, and then make it obsolete so that the masses will rush to buy the new version of a cheap something they never needed in the first place; but at least it was cheap. Obsolescence is the kind of thing that keeps software developers in work; and it never, or rarely, comes without a vaunted benefit.
The Ukrainian army has been known to deploy equipment for shooting its present enemy that first saw the light of day during World War One. These machine guns are old technology. But they fire, and, if fired in the right direction, they will kill the enemy (who was their friend when the guns were manufactured). And, since killing the enemy is part of the function of being on a battlefield, it is on battlefields that this old technology is being deployed, and to no small effect. It works. Even if better, more progressive weapons also work.
There is a scene in the 1970s BBC TV drama The Onedin Line in which the eponymous shipping magnate’s brother, Robert, played by Brian Rawlinson, delivers to James Onedin, played by Peter Gilmore, with avid relish the line that instilled this whole topic in my mind some 50 years ago, “But, James, it’s ‘progress’!” The progress that Victorians embraced promised betterment, reforms – in election laws, in prisons, in social conditions, in the lives of sailors, in agriculture, in morality, in an understanding of what it means to be an imperial conqueror, in communications – from railways to radio waves – and in insouciance as to the cost to our environment of forging all these progresses. In some areas, progress has been palpable: without the semaphore, we’d not have had the spur to develop electrical potential into a worldwide web. But all these progresses — bar the Internet itself, ironically — could only be feasible with the spur of gain. Without financial gain, progressive gain remains ungained. And in how far progress is vaunted as being progress, is difficult to say, whilst keeping the cost in material terms, if certainly not financial ones, well concealed from those to whom it is vaunted.
I return again to the Tragedy of Titan and its creator – more accurately its adapter – Stockton Rush. He once quoted General Douglas MacArthur’s quip that rules are made to be broken. He was right. Rush was, and so was MacArthur. But MacArthur and Rush broke rules differently. Rules are not made to be broken, they are made to be circumvented with care and circumspection. MacArthur broke rules by being better equipped with the knowledge that allowed him to do so than were those persons who’d made the rules. Rush simply broke rules to save money, and that was his downfall, because he was not possessed of the knowledge that allowed him successfully to circumvent the diktat of the rule in question.
My oldest brother, also Douglas, once told me a most important mantra for life, whilst out driving in the car and attempting a turn at the lights: “If you can’t see, don’t go.” MacArthur could see; Rush couldn’t. It takes foresight and an ounce of serendipity to go where you cannot see. When you take others with you into the pitch darkness, foresight is unmissable. There are some who will pay handsomely to join you on your fresh, tasty explorations, just as some will pay premium prices for juices that are fresher and tastier than they ever experienced before. But it is irresponsible to take them where the blind lead the blind: even in pitch dark, those who cannot see must be able to foresee.
Foresight is the ability to reckon with all the extraneous negative effects that the positive effect one seeks to achieve will bring with it. It is the ability to reckon on success as a product of the process, and not as an accident of it. It is the ability to realise inherent weaknesses and parry to them: the ability to not be Alec Guinness in The Man In The White Suit. Progress is retailing fresh orange juice by a means that does not place undue burden on the environment and, if it does, not telling customers that the high price they pay is due to their own unfair imposition on the environment.
Progress is driven by patents, we are told, which guarantee a period of exclusivity to the inventor in exchange for benefiting the world with his invention. To some degree, that’s true. But patents can also stifle innovation, just as colonisation and its planting of a flag stifle home-grown endeavour: by creating a safe haven for the one who has claimed proprietorship. Somewhere I have an inkling that the cure for HIV has already been long since found, but the market conditions for anti-retrovirals mean that they are far from being obsolete, as long as the putative cure remains under lock and key.
What patents certainly do guarantee, because copiers are copious, is a period of exclusivity for patent lawyers. There were no patents in ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt or when Galileo made his astounding discoveries. All of these ancient wisdoms and revelations were simply gifted to mankind. They were sought and yearned for out of a drive to know, and not a drive to gain. The ancients of old are nowhere known to have deployed the expression a fast buck.
Must everything be driven by gain? We’re told that technological innovation would be turgid if patent protection were not there. Yet patent protection doesn’t preclude plagiarism, it just makes it actionable. It may even encourage it: the blueprints are available to do so. If competition law cannot create a landscape where all competition is free, is it because the benefits of cheating outweigh the fines? The German industrialist Oskar Schindler sought material gain in the deployment of slave labour. But, by the end of the film Schindler’s List, as by the end of Schindler’s sway over life, he’d come to a stark realisation to which many never come, and for which he is held in cherished memory: the industrialist at last saw the futility of gain, and the value to the giver of devotion to others, without lust for any gain. Plato said that he suffers injustice most who wreaks it on others; in the Acts of the Apostles, we read that it is more blessed to give than to receive. And so it is here: he gains most, who seeks no gain.
So, what is it that drives progress? Progress is driven by foresight, the goal being to benefit all, and rightly reaps its reward in its wake, as impelling its feasibility. But, when progress is driven solely by reward, with foresight its platitudinous panacea, as in Rush’s “Safety is our number one priority,” then, it is not progress, but regression. It is a backward step, towards man’s basest motivator – benefit of the self.
1939 U.S. Patent No. 2,453,109, applied for by Louis G. MacDowall and Cedric D. Atkins, granted 9 November 1948. Its purpose was the easy supply of vitamin C in the form of orange juice to U.S. GIs serving in the Second World War. Patent protection is retrospective to the date of application, regardless of the date of grant, but is dependent on grant actually being made.
"(who was their friend when the guns were manufactured)."
Absolutely not. Ukrainians, like all non-russian nationalities colonized, raped, murdered, tortured, stolen from, starved, annihilated, disappeared, russified, by the Russian empire, Soviet Union, and Russian "Federation" were not "friends". We were enslaved, colonialized, and brutalized.
Never friends.