Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

As a feminist-era husband I can truthfully use the first-person plural in celebrating this gain. But in most times and places housework is gendered, so the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general. Arguments for the equality of women go back to Mary Astell’s 1700 treatise and are irrefutable, so why did they take centuries to catch on? In a 1912 interview in Good Housekeeping magazine, Thomas Edison prophesied one of the great social transformations of the 20th century:

The housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge. She will give less attention to the home, because the home will need less; she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic laborer, with the greatest of all handmaidens, electricity, at her service. This and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman’s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman’s energy will be conserved for use in broader, more constructive fields.¹⁶

Time is not the only life-enriching resource granted to us by technology. Another is light. Light is so empowering that it serves as the metaphor of choice for a superior intellectual and spiritual state: enlightenment. In the natural world we are plunged into darkness for half of our existence, but human-made light allows us to take back the night for reading, moving about, seeing people’s faces, and otherwise engaging with our surroundings. The economist William Nordhaus has cited the plunging price (and hence the soaring availability) of this universally treasured resource as an emblem of progress. Figure 17-4 shows that the inflation-adjusted price of a million lumen-hours of light (about what you would need to read for two and a half hours a day for a year) has fallen twelve thousandfold since the Middle Ages (once called the Dark Ages), from around £35,500 in 1300 to less than £3 today. These days (and nights), if you aren’t reading, conversing, getting out, or otherwise edifying yourself, it’s not because you can’t afford the light.

Figure 17-4: Cost of light, England, 1300–2006

Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016o, based on data from Fouquet & Pearson 2012. Cost of one million lumen-hours (about 833 hours from an 80-watt incandescent bulb), in pounds sterling (inflation-adjusted to the year 2000).

The plunging cash value of artificial light actually understates the progress, because, as Adam Smith pointed out, “The real price of every thing . . . is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”¹⁷ Nordhaus estimated how many hours a person would have to work to earn an hour of light to read by at different times in history.¹⁸ A Babylonian in 1750 BCE would have had to labor fifty hours to spend one hour reading his cuneiform tablets by a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, an Englishman had to toil for six hours to burn a tallow candle for an hour. (Imagine planning your family budget around that—you might settle for darkness.) In 1880, you’d need to work fifteen minutes to burn a kerosene lamp for an hour; in 1950, eight seconds for the same hour from an incandescent bulb; and in 1994, a half-second for the same hour from a compact fluorescent bulb—a 43,000-fold leap in affordability in two centuries. And the progress wasn’t finished: Nordhaus published his article before LED bulbs flooded the market. Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage.

The declining proportion of our lives we have to forfeit for light, appliances, and food may be part of a general law. The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”¹⁹ As the necessities of life get cheaper, we waste fewer of our waking hours obtaining them, and have more time and money left over for everything else—and the “everything else” gets cheaper, too, so we can experience more of them. Figure 17-5 shows that in 1929 Americans spent more than 60 percent of their disposable income on necessities; by 2016 that had fallen to a third.

Figure 17-5: Spending on necessities, US, 1929–2016

Source:HumanProgress, http://humanprogress.org/static/1937, adapted from a graph by Mark Perry, using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?ReqID=9&step=1#reqid=9&step=1&isuri=1. Proportion of disposable income spent on food at home, cars, clothing, household furnishings, housing, utilities, and gasoline. Data from 1941 to 1946 are omitted because they are distorted by rationing and soldiers’ salaries during World War II.