Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robby Porter, of East Montpelier, a self-employed woodworker and the owner and partner in small scale hydroelectric projects. He has published a book, “Doodlebug, A Road Trip Journal,” about the road trip that was the genesis for this essay.
[I]n 1994 my brother and I took a two month road trip from Vermont to Los Angeles. Back then we called home on a pay phone, I made my journal entries on an old Olivetti manual typewriter. My brother was 18, 10 years younger than me, but he had already spent a couple of summers working at a fish processing camp in Alaska. I’d graduated from four years of reading classics. Like all young men, we thought we knew how the world worked, but we were about to have a revelation.
Neither of us had ever seen an aircraft carrier, so we stopped at Patriots Point Museum in South Carolina to see the World War ll-era USS Yorktown. As we wandered on a self-guided tour, above decks and below, looking at hydraulic equipment, radio equipment, planes, guns, landing decks and catapults, a feeling of awe settled over us. On a catwalk in the engine room we came to a physical and cognitive standstill, overwhelmed by the evidence of human cooperation and engineering.
“You’d almost think we could feed the poor,” my brother said.
His witty comment crystallized everything we’d just experienced into an idea that is even more true today. A system that can create and operate an aircraft carrier is capable of providing for everyone.
We grew up in rural Vermont where every day we saw competition for resources — trees competing for sunlight, farm animals dependent on hay cut from a field which was itself cut from the woods. The fact that some people were needy seemed an inevitable if unfortunate consequence of the order of nature. But it is not.
In 1930, despite the Great Depression, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that a hundred years hence our biggest problem would be how to fill our leisure time not “economic cares.” The possibility of Keynes’ prophecy is difficult to believe because our individual perspectives prevent us from seeing the larger reality.
When you observe that some people don’t have enough food, decent housing or a livable wage, it is a reasonable conclusion to assume that if they get more, then someone else won’t have enough. It is hard to believe that we are capable of providing a decent living for everyone and are choosing not to, just as it is hard to believe that a metal airplane can fly through the air and land on a boat.
The truth is, no natural law, like the conservation of matter, has prevented Keynes’ vision from becoming reality. We have simply failed to advance our social structures in pace with our technological progress. The engineers are way ahead of the philosophers and social scientists.
Since our road trip, the incredible inventions by the computer engineers have made Keynes’ prediction all the more possible. Unfortunately, the bumbling economists, forever explaining an economic disaster they didn’t predict, have no new ships. Their response to economic inequality and the resulting political turmoil is to tell us that the status quo must be perpetuated until things somehow get better. I’d be typing this on my old Olivetti if the computer scientists approached problems this way.
What has changed since our road trip is that the revelation we had in the engine room is now on display on cellphone screens everywhere. When a single mom working for shamefully low minimum wages looks at her cellphone, she is looking at proof of the engineers’ success and the human potential to make things better. Teen-aged boys living in poverty but watching YouTube videos of fast cars know that their ambitions deserve better opportunities. They know that in any society advanced enough to create iPhones, deprivation of some people is a choice made by other people. Formerly middle-class Americans who remember when a family could get by on one salary, when a company provided a real pension, when an executive made 10 or 20 times what a worker made, but not 300 times, when bankers engaged in fraud went to jail instead of getting bonuses, they know it could be better.
The burning question of the day is not how safe self-driving cars will be or even whether we can get ahead of global warming. The engineers already have solutions to these problems. The question is to the social scientists: Where are your ships? Will you be able to invent and implement new social structures before the world turns into a dystopian nightmare?
What we need is a new Age of Enlightenment. Just as the scientific revolution preceded the original Age of Enlightenment, maybe our current technological revolution will give rise to second enlightenment period. Forget about STEM for a minute, what we need is PEPS — philosophy, economics, and political science — humanity is desperate for new inventions from these fields.