Introduction to Industrial Civilization

To date, industrial civilization is the most dynamic and creative civilization. The advantage of industrial civilization is the rapid abundance of human commodities due to large-scale production, and the defect is that the consumption and pollution of the earth's resources have also accelerated sharply. The post-industrial era of the 21st century will enter a high-tech economic model of sustainable circular economy and ecological economy. Industrial society is the only one that depends on sustained economic growth for survival. Once the growth of wealth stagnates, industrial society loses its legitimacy. Required by the continuous growth of wealth, industrial society cannot do without innovation, which is the foundation of industrial society's life and death. Required by innovation, the growth of knowledge in industrial societies is also endless. Agricultural societies have had their share of inventions and improvements, sometimes quite large in number and scale, but progress has never been, and cannot be expected to be, continuous, and even the most progressive agricultural societies (such as China during the Tang and Song dynasties) are far from being able to compete with industrial societies in terms of the number, level, and impact of their innovations. The nature of agricultural societies requires fairly static societies and stable divisions of labor, the nature of industrial societies requires perpetual innovation and change.

Infinite growth requires high productivity, and high productivity requires a well-developed division of labor, and it also requires that this division of labor must be subject to constant, sometimes rapid, change, because innovation keeps bringing new divisions of labor and new industries. Thus industrial societies have many more occupations than agricultural societies, but they are short-lived. A man in this society does not generally remain in the same position for life; he must always be ready to change from one occupation to another. It is thus a world where there is no strict division of occupations, and where people can choose their occupations at will. A mature industrial society must therefore be one in which its members are able to communicate and move around smoothly (both spatially and occupationally). This is the economic root of why freedom of movement and freedom of choice of occupation are recognized as fundamental human rights in industrial societies. In a highly mobile society, it is not possible to put deep barriers between any divisions of labor, or to allow social hierarchies to remain unchanged, which would undermine mobility. This leads to occupational equality. The logical consequence of occupational equality is the legal, social and political equality of those who stay in any occupation, with identity largely irrelevant. In other words, industrial societies have occupations and classes without hierarchies. Classes and hierarchies are both products of the division of labor; the difference is that members of classes are mobile and members of hierarchies are not. There are notoriously wide differences in the possession of property in industrial society, and other inequalities relating to class, rank, and occupation do exist, but in general they are of an elastic, relative, and moderate nature in relation to the rigid, absolute, and profoundly hierarchical divisions of agrarian society. The egalitarianism of industrial society is neither a complete fantasy nor a pure reality. Members of industrial society are no longer aristocrats, subjects, untouchables and fools, but citizens.

To this, the author would like to add that the consumer culture of industrial society also contributes to equality. Mass consumption is an absolute necessity for continuous economic growth, and for this reason it is necessary to make all people end-consumers of modern industry; and consequently, all too great economic, social, political, and cultural disparities that impede consumption cannot be allowed to persist. The frequent mass mobility and equality of members of industrial society implies a society of strangers. Strangers in an industrial society need to communicate with each other continuously, frequently and directly, and for this purpose need *** to enjoy an unconditionally universal standardized language, the understanding of which does not require any special cultural background. They also need a homogeneous and secular culture necessary for the use of such a standardized language, so that all people can communicate closely in brief face-to-face encounters. This requires the creation of a standard language and the education of all members of society in this standard language and other foundational, universal, and standardized knowledge necessary for social mobility, i.e., the variable division of labor. Gellner calls "literacy" the mastery of a standardized language and other common skills necessary to communicate with others that are also necessary to communicate with others***, i.e., the ability to read, write, and compute, the basic ability to express and understand, and a basic general knowledge of nature and the society in which one lives.

The official languages of the industrialized countries are half-natural, half-artificial, i.e., they are the result of the adaptation of a carefully chosen dialect. Hobsbawm points out that the process of standardization of the languages of European countries mostly took place between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 20th century. [⑧] The formation of Mandarin Chinese, vernacular script and simplified characters took nearly a century, from the late 19th century to the late 1950s. The material basis for a unified official language was industrial civilization. "A standardized national language, whether spoken or written, would not have been possible without the invention of the printing press, the spread of literacy, and the widespread establishment of public education. In an industrial society, "literacy" is no longer a specialty, but a prerequisite for all specialties. The most important part of a person's education, the part that confers citizenship, is no longer technical specialization, but so-called literacy. Education for a real profession, though also essential, has become much less important than in agricultural societies. Therefore, the development of the general qualities of the mass of workers, i.e., making them literate and enabling them to perform different occupations with less difficulty and speed, rather than the training of specialists, became the main task of the educational system of the industrial society. The production and reproduction of such a secular and popular culture, based on literacy for all, is a totally unthinkable undertaking for an agrarian society, which requires the modern state. Only the State, the political organization with the greatest scope and the highest power and control over the greatest resources within society, has the capacity and the will to carry out such large-scale and continuous education. For members of industrial societies to qualify for work and to become true citizens, they must achieve a level of literacy in accordance with the ****same requirements, which the family and the local unit simply cannot provide. The consequent requirement for education also prescribes a minimum size for a political unit such as the state. This size is ultimately determined by the size of human resources and the necessity for mass mobility as determined by the mass production and endless growth of industry. It must be larger than most cultural and political units in traditional agrarian societies.

"Literacy" in this context cannot be understood too mechanically; Gellner understands it as a comprehensive quality that is up to date. In his view, the nature of industrial civilization requires that the average worker, who will always be the majority of the population, have roughly the same competence, and the technological advances of industrial societies dictate that this competence must be increasing, and that the specialists who have real expertise are a very small minority. The use of the term "literacy" therefore merely indicates its popular nature. From the 1880s and for the next three generations, an unprecedented and far-reaching revolution unfolded throughout England. "From that time on, the world was no longer the same as it had been before." The British Industrial Revolution marked the beginning of a whole new era in the history of human social development, and opened the curtain of "modernization" for the whole world to transform into an industrialized society. The success of the British Industrial Revolution made all countries see the hope of revitalization, and they changed their laws in order to become stronger. Since then, the Industrial Revolution has been unfolding in different countries and regions, and is still in the ascendant. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, two major types of civilizations began to exist on earth: industrial civilization and agricultural civilization. Of course, there are still many transition zones in between, because the degree of industrialization varies from country to country, some are very advanced while many others have not even begun to industrialize. The Industrial Revolution was the actual beginning of modern industrialization and the turning point in the transition from traditional agricultural society to modern industrial society. The industrial revolution is a great leap in human history. The industrial civilization established by the industrial revolution has become the end of the traditional agricultural civilization that has lasted for thousands of years, which has not only radically enhanced the productivity of the society and created huge amounts of social wealth, but also fundamentally transformed all the aspects of the agricultural civilization and accomplished a major transformation of the society. The economy, politics, culture, spirituality, as well as the social structure and the way of life of human beings, and so on, all underwent a radical transformation.

The so-called Industrial Revolution was in fact a unification of different levels, first an industrial and economic revolution, then a social revolution, and finally a cultural revolution. The industrial revolution cannot be regarded as a mere industrial revolution, but should be grasped comprehensively from the perspective of social and cultural revolutions. In fact, the industrial revolution could not have been finalized without the support of the social revolution. The industrial revolution and the fundamental change in social structure are mutually exclusive. Virtually everything in an industrial society is based on industrial mass production. On the one hand, the state establishes a highly interconnected industrial system with an extremely close division of labor, generating a large number of "free laborers"-industrial workers (both blue-collar and white-collar); on the other hand, industrialization requires a high level of professionalism in the workforce. At the same time, industrialization required a high level of education, so the state set up a complete and systematic national education system and socialized education and vocational training. On the other hand, the state, as the centralized expression of the interests of large enterprises, was highly integrated with economic management, and its management capacity and state power were greatly enhanced. In this way, the whole state and society are highly organized, like a gigantic machine that produces a daunting amount of energy day and night. The current study of civilization divides the world into several major circles of civilization, such as the Christian Civilization Circle, the Confucian Civilization Circle, the Indian Civilization Circle, the Islamic Civilization Circle, and so on. Such a study is not incorrect or without value, but it is in fact a study of traditional civilization, basically a division of agricultural civilization, which not only fails to give a clear account of the pattern of development in the world today, but also confuses people's minds very easily. The division of the stages of social development into primitive, feudal, capitalist and ****productivist societies is also too mechanical and fails to grasp the root of productivity. In fact, the division of civilization should be based on productivity as the fundamental criterion, according to the level of industrialization to the division of human society seems to be very simple, but it is the most scientific, because industrialization is the fundamental change of the means of production and the mode of production, it is the change of the most revolutionary elements in the elements of the productive forces. The level of industrialization can be used as the only criterion to evaluate the level of development of countries around the world, at the low end of the backward countries, at the high end of the developed countries, at the highest end of the country was once the British Empire, and in the 21st century is the "Great American Empire".

Evaluation

Human society has gone through the primitive civilization, agricultural civilization, industrial civilization and finally arrived at the knowledge civilization that the western countries are in now is a process, and any stage in between cannot be omitted. This is a process of progressive development of the level of productivity, is a universal law of human society.

In comparison, the early years of industrial civilization caused great damage to the environment. This has led some leftists to express their strong dissatisfaction with it. This kind of emotion is normal, but it is also irrational. It is because those people only saw the environmental pollution, waste of resources and widening of the gap between the rich and the poor caused by the early stage of industrial civilization, but they did not see the rapid growth of human food production after the Industrial Revolution, the prosperous development of the social welfare system in the later stage of the Industrial Revolution, or the rapid decline in the mortality rate of newborn babies after the Industrial Revolution. As a result, the Western countries once walked the road of industrialization today we must also go, but we have to learn the lessons of the advanced countries in the West, so that we in the industrialization of the road as far as possible to take fewer detours, with a view to entering the knowledge civilization earlier.