It will be of interest to consider some of the less obvious disadvantages of a too great or too rapid industrialization. In the first place, it is a very serious loss indeed that most men and women should spend their lives utterly out of touch with the sources in nature from which their food and clothing and raw materials ultimately come; that men should no longer have the pride and pleasure of exercising their natural and acquired skill in making entire articles for use or ornament with their own hands and with comparatively simple tools and machines; and that women should no longer be good cooks and housewives and seamstresses, but be content to buy ready-made food in tins or take meals in public restaurants. Leisure is very dearly bought at the price of becoming and knowing oneself to be a mere cog in a complex machine, with no resources in oneself, no pride or pleasure in one's work, and nothing to fill the vacuum except smoking and drinking reduced to a semi-conscious routine, listening to mechanical music, witnessing and betting on athletic contests in which one never participates, and enjoying vicarious sexual thrills as a spectator at a cinema or as a reader of the police news in the Sunday paper. Yet this is, in fact, what the leisure gained by industrialization means for a large proportion of its beneficiaries. Moreover, as industrialism develops, and with it the population grows and becomes more and more urbanized, relief from drudgery is paid for by increase of nervous strain, by the unhealthy tiredness engendered by travelling long distances in crowded conveyances from and to one's work, by the deafening noise and filthy stench of mechanized traffic, and so on.
(C. D. Broad, "Some Common Fallacies in Political Thinking," Philosophy 25 [April 1950]: 99-113, at 107)
Note from KBJ: Was this man prescient, or what?
