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		Why Simple Answers Won't Work Don Mize © 2005, Don Mize The Industrial Revolution continues to change American society.  For example, the modern family has been reduced to child care and to meeting the sexual and emotional needs of the adults.  In fact, even child care is increasingly being done outside the family through day care centers and pre-school education.  Contrast the modern family with the Pre-Industrial Revolution family. For the 5000 years before the Industrial Revolution (began in England in the 18th century), the family was the unit of production.  The family may have produced goods to sell outside the home, but the family remained largely self-sufficient, making clothing and growing food, for example.   Extended families dominated the agrarian society with older members doing child care and physically less demanding tasks.  Decisions affected the whole family and were made within the family.  Education also occurred within the family. We cannot turn back from the effects of the Industrial Revolution; i.e., we cannot return to a family-centered agrarian society.  Production, by and far, takes place outside the home and family members earn wages to support the family as a unit of consumption.  Moreover, outside forces dominate the family.  In an industrial society, for example, agricultural workers decrease to a small percentage of the population due to increased efficiency of agricultural production; blue collar factory workers become white collar workers in a service industry as machines replace hands; and white collar workers watch computers replace years of knowledge and developed skills. Knowledge and education become essential, but education is tempted to become training, a shortsighted view.  Limiting education to training will not produce the theoretical knowledge of pure science necessary for future advances in technology.  In addition, reducing education to training will not produce a people who can think, evaluate, and understand the historical moment in which they live.  A clever propaganda machine can easily exploit such a people devoid of a liberal arts education. We must face the operative force in the Industrial Revolution: machines replace people, requiring fewer people to perform the same tasks more efficiently.  The Post-Industrial Society is debatable because the same forces operate in the service industry.  For example, software will one day allow self-diagnosis of illnesses where currently physicians must perform that function.  Teaching machines (computers) will increasingly replace teachers. Thus, white-collar workers are now experiencing the same phenomena that blue-collar workers have experienced.  Now white-collar workers watch years of skill and experience disappear into a computer in the hands of a less educated and well-trained person who does not even understand how the computer works.  Often the lower paid worker operating the machine lives in a Third World country.  Multinational corporations will continue to ship jobs to countries where lower wages are accepted.  In addition, multinational corporations will continue declare their profits in countries with low tax rates, exporting not only jobs but also tax revenue.   Rather than a new Post-Industrial Society, we are seeing the Industrial Revolution extended into the so-called service sector. Still, we cannot turn back.  Once a society begins to industrialize, the old agrarian system disappears.  Smokestacks and white collars, cities and suburbs, mutating families and new social systems replace the old way of life.  The old cosmos has ceased to exist. In other words, the old agrarian family-centered system is gone.  Either private enterprise creates the new systems (child care, education, health care, a place for the elderly) or the government must provide the new system.  Private charities, secular or religious, must depend on contributions from private enterprise and/or government, not significantly alternating the equation.  Since it is in the interest of private enterprise to keep wages low, a large segment of the population will always find it impossible to replace the disintegrated agrarian family-centered system by purchasing the same services on the open market. In Third World countries being reached by the inescapable Industrial Revolution, the old agrarian system built around the extended family has become obsolete while neither private enterprise nor government services have created a workable replacement.  In these countries, some affluent, sophisticated, well-educated people prosper while others live in sprawling slums.  Such countries experience great political instability. While private enterprise may be the first choice, government funded programs to produce a well-educated (public school system), a healthy (public health care system), and a motivated population (civil rights, human rights, employment opportunities, adequate housing opportunities, religious freedom) is still a better alternative than social chaos.  Unless private enterprise becomes especially creative or we get over our aversion to government programs, we face a future America dominated by palaces and cardboard shanties.  Yet, we have no simple answers. Modern systems in America are largely impotent.  Most government programs do not work because they are so under-funded that needed resources simply are not available.  Private enterprise is completely profit-oriented, eliminating those who cannot pay market prices for services or products.  In the current political climate of smaller government and minimum taxes, government money flowing to religious and secular charities will eventually cease.  Still, there is no turning back from the inescapable permeation of the Industrial Revolution.  We need to look beyond current modern systems. Only if we adopt an ethic of love and treat every member of society as we would like to be treated will we have any hope of creating a new social system that both works and enhances human life (Matthew 7:12).  The solution begins with a decision to love.
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