Andrew WhiteI was reading an article in the BBC History Magazine, one of my favorite monthly deliveries, last night and I was very disappointed to read an article on the Industrial Revolution. Of course, as a young boy in England my education included some information about the Industrial Revolution (which I can hardly remember – other than the invention of steam and Stevenson’s Rocket), and since I have grown a little (in directions I’d rather not grow any more) I have read more widely and my understanding of the period is much broader.
The article summarized the current popular view that the Industrial Revolution was a stain on humanity due to the high level of child abuse and general poor welfare that was experienced by a lot of people (few of which were white males). I have to say that this so called popular view made me sick! Why on earth do we have a section of the population that concern themselves with such views? Why did someone have to waste some ink and paper to write an article that had to remind us that:
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This is history that is long gone, and no one today has any real direct link to acts taken back then,
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History has shown that without an industrial revolution, we would not be where we are today, and more importantly
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If England had not been first, another country/economy would have been
The current mood – to look for all manner of “bad” things on which to extract apologies from someone – will lead to the natural conclusion that either the Big Bang, or Creation, was a stain on the universe or natural order of things. Next up – we will have the whole of mankind, some unnamed all-powerful being, or God, in the dock. Is this really what civilizations do?
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