Qui Reponendi Sunt Te Salutant - Part One

“Those who are about to be replaced salute you.”

Let’s discuss the economics of scale and the looming global population implosion (if we’re lucky) / genocide (if we’re not).

Manufacturing centers, factories, and production lines stretch far back in human history, much farther than the Industrial Revolution’s start date.

While nowhere near the scale of the huge factory complexes and supporting infrastructures of 1760 onward, ancient and medieval merchants clearly saw the economy of buying and shipping goods in bulk:  The more one bought / made / shipped at one time, the lower the individual unit price./

Why is that? 

Well, the human factor, of course.  At every stage of production / distribution / retail the costs are related solely to the human labor involved.

Gold is more valuable than lead because it’s rarer and thus harder to find.  If the ratios were reversed, we’d wear lead jewelry and use gold as ballast.

The human effort to acquire the gold is what gives it its supposed value.

The Industrial Revolution created an enormous change in how humans made things, and thus an enormous change in the economy surrounding manufacturing.

Artisans -- blacksmiths / weavers / glass blowers / whatever -- used to make the majority of common everyday items used by the bulk of humanity, either for direct immediate use by their family or tribal band, or for sale to merchants for resale or directly to customers.

While their goods typically fit in broad general specifics for each class of item they made, be it bread or bricks, there was a lack of universal design specifics and quality control.

While we can’t call each item a work of art, we can certainly acknowledge some artistic skill in their making (and here we define “artistic” by a range of mastered skills, not an individual expression of some idea; by this definition a band that writes its own music would be artists, while a band that only covers oldies would be artisans).

When the Industrial Revolution hit, artisans as a class were virtually wiped out.  The farmwife who wove cloth on the side for her own family’s use or for trade with her neighbors might continue through sheer momentum and because their livelihood didn’t depend solely on weaving.

The professional weaver, whose daily bread derived solely from their work at a loom, quickly found themselves priced out of the market by factory looms that could crank out far more cloth at far faster rates and of a far higher standard quality.

To add insult to injury, the artisans typically found themselves outpriced on the labor market by relatively unskilled labor who could be quickly taught how to operate a machine instead of spending years in an apprenticeship to learn the basics of their profession.

And there was a lot of unskilled labor thanks to the Industrial Revolution making machines that made farming and harvesting far more efficient.

A thresher pulled by a team of horses could harvest a field of wheat in less time than a dozen farm hands using scythes.

Those farm hands and day laborers needed something to survive, so they migrated to mines and manufacturing centers to be trained in the rudimentary basics of how to operate specialized machinery.

You know who didn’t lose their jobs?

Artists. 

True artists have always been in short supply throughout history.

Even in times and places crowded with artistic expression such as Renaissance Italy, only a small percentage could be considered genuine artists, masters of their craft who added something noticeably new to their respective fields.

The vast majority of painters and sculptors either worked in the studios of more popular artists, doing the grunt work while their bosses schmoozed clients and did the conceptual design and finishing touches, or as itinerant artisans who could produce a technically adequate portrait for a wealthy patron.

The genuine artists -- and granted, among this number are many who starved in garrets, being too far ahead of their time to find a steady flow of patrons -- offered something the artisans didn’t:  A unique vision.

Before proceeding, let’s stipulate there is no sharp line separating artists from artisans.

More than one innovative jazz genius knocked out a kids’ music record on the side to pay the bills.

More than one potter enjoyed a flash of inspiration and created something truly memorable and unique among all the mundane kitchenware they cranked out.

Nonetheless, there’s a clearly identifiable group of individuals doing truly individualistic work, and there’s another, noticeably larger group doing similar work that isn’t terribly individualistic.

The Industrial Revolution and subsequent advances in technology dug deep into that group while leaving the genuine artists relatively unmolested.

As the glider pilot told Bill Danch when Danch asked why the pilot had a parachute and he didn’t: “They need me.”

© Buzz Dixon

[Part Two]
[Part Three]
[Part Four]
[Part Five]