EDITOR’S NOTE | By Bret Bradigan
Looking Up at the Past
Today’s technology not as amazing as it used to be.
My dad was a rural letter carrier, and he dreaded the day each fall when the new Sears and Roebuck catalog would hit the post office. It meant literally tons of deliveries to all the hundreds of people on his route. I loved it. I grew up in an era where people organized their lives around the Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues.
We kids would eagerly sprawl out on the floor with our markers, searching and seeking for the perfect presents for Christmas. The smell of the ink and crinkle of the paper was intoxicating. We would make up our Santa wish lists and only then, some days after Thanksgiving turkey, would we worry about whether we’d been naughty or nice. We were poor, but so were most families in our rural village, and we knew deep down that most of the items on our wish list were out of reach. But kids sure have heaps of hope.
We now live in an age of incredible technological improvements. Unimaginable things a few years ago are now blasé and commonplace. Louis C.K. lamented that a man was complaining about the wi-fi on an airplane flight. This guy is traveling in an aluminum tube at the speed of sound seven miles off the ground and he’s complaining because the high speed internet went down. “It’s got to go into space! Space! And then back! Give it a second … Everything is amazing and no one is happy.”
The light speed of everything information-wise is dizzying, and with the Ojai Hub, we are proud to be of that pace. Ojai, for all its serenity and beautiful natural surroundings, is a busy place and deserves a busy online presence. It’s not coincidental that Thornton Wilder’s beloved “Our Town” was set during the time he was a Thacher School student, witnessing the changes wrought by electricity, automobiles and railroads on a typical small town.
Even as we imagine this brave new frontier, we shouldn’t ignore that this time, for all its miracles, has a long way to go before it matches the period of 1870 to 1970. Lifespans increased from 45 to 70, because of sanitation and improved farm productivity through mechanization, when electricity and telephones brought prosperity beyond the dreams of gilded kings from ancient times to the masses. Rail lines brought the catalogue wish-list items to children in even the most isolated rural villages.
Research shows that there was zero growth between the fall of the Roman Empire and the year 1300, and that between 1300 and 1700 the real output per person in England barely doubled. We are used to our per capita output, our “growth,” doubling every 32 years. This steady upward trajectory is a historically new phenomenon, and it was driven by the many real improvement in our living standards that occurred in those golden ten decades.
As Robert Gordon writes in his highly recommended “Rise and Fall of American Growth,” in the hundred years after the Civil War, “daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television bringing the world into the living room … the economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”
For example, we went from the Wright Brothers’ 103-foot flight in 1903 to jet engines in less than 40 years. For all the promise and peril of artificial intelligence and gene-editing technology, we shouldn’t forget that these advances are built on the genius and hard work of the people in our past. Our technology gives us no reason to look down on them.
In “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder wrote, “Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”
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