The oldest complaint in Western literature is that the old days were better. Around 700 BC the Boeotian farmer-poet Hesiod, in Works and Days, told of a golden race of men who lived like gods, free of toil and grief, the earth yielding its fruit to them unbidden. After gold came silver, then bronze, then the age of heroes, and finally Hesiod’s own race of iron, which never rests from labor by day nor from perishing by night. Hesiod wished he had died before the iron age or been born after it.
Hesiod was a farmer. He knew what he was complaining about. What he could not know was whether his second wish, to be born afterward, was worth making. On this week’s episode of Acton Line I spoke with Chelsea Follett, research fellow at the Cato Institute and managing editor of HumanProgress.org, about her new book The Grim Old Days: An Introduction to the Preindustrial Past. Her answer, across more than five hundred pages, is that being born in later days is worth it, spectacularly so.
Follett and I began with the golden-age reflex itself. It persists in the pastoral novel, the costume drama, and in more than one school of contemporary political philosophy on both left and right, where the preindustrial village stands for simplicity, closeness to nature, and a community life we are said to have traded away for wealth. Follett’s argument is not that these longings are foolish. It is that they are ignorant, in the strict sense: they rest on not knowing. Modern people misjudge the harshness of the past by orders of magnitude, and this error is not harmless. It is the root of a cynicism about industry, markets, and technology that takes modern health, safety, and plenty for granted, as though they were the natural condition of man rather than a recent and improbable achievement.
What was the natural condition? Follett’s book proceeds through every facet of daily life, and our conversation sampled a few. Work was grueling manual labor for nearly everyone, and the slower pace of life celebrated by romantics was mostly the pace of exhaustion and chronic pain. Life expectancy was low, not only because so many infants died but because adults were worn down young. Sanitation barely existed; waste went into streets and rivers, clean water was a luxury, and without the germ theory of disease or anything resembling medical science, sickness swept through communities unopposed.
Above all, preindustrial people lived at the mercy of weather. One late frost, one dry summer, one blighted harvest, and a region tipped from subsistence into famine. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes warned, “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.” He wrote knowing exactly what a bad harvest meant.
The second half of our conversation turned from the misery to the escape. Here Follett resists the story in which industrialization is a fall from grace, the moment a harmonious world was broken for profit. Industrialization, together with the extension of free markets and the unleashing of human ingenuity, was rather the great liberation, the first sustained exit humanity ever found from the iron age Hesiod described.
The idea beneath this, one that runs through all of Follett’s work at HumanProgress.org, is a rejection of the Malthusian picture of the human person as a mouth to be fed, a drain on a fixed stock of resources. Human beings are not just bodies but minds. They solve problems, invent tools, and leave their descendants richer in knowledge than they found them. This is close to what the Church means when it speaks of man as made in the image of a creative God, and it is why Catholic social teaching, from Leo XIII to Leo XIV, has never been able to join the romantics in mourning the machine, however sharply it has criticized particular abuses.
Hesiod got his wish, though not in his own person. Those of us born afterward, in the long afterward that began with steam and has not stopped, are the beneficiaries of exactly the toil, ingenuity, and accumulated knowledge the golden-age myth teaches us to despise. Follett’s book is an exercise in gratitude disguised as a catalogue of horrors. Read it, and the next time someone sighs for the simple life of the village, you’ll know what they are sighing for.
Listen to the full conversation here: