Is Industrialization necessary for a society to progress?

It seems like every other day, someone asks "what if XYZ nation or culture industrialized?" Industrialization in itself is a rather blanket and unspecific term, meaning in a vague sense the many technological innovations of the 18th century that allowed for a dramatic increase in the population of the cities and the decline of agrarian societies in favor of powerful nation-states that engage in manufacturing. However, the specific innovations required for this are many, and since real life isn't a video game, there's no "tech tree" that would guide a prospective industrializer in which technologies to acquire. Furthermore, steam engines and other proto or pseudo industrial technologies have existed since ancient Greece, but were seen as random toys or curiosities rather than something that could actually be used to make things. Even the first steam powered device was just seen as a curiosity to shove into a temple of a god who in 400 years wouldn't even be worshiped anymore.

This begs the question, for a society to advance to a standard of living like we see today, is it necessary that it undergo industrialization? Personally, I genuinely do not know. On one hand, you could have a society similar to the Indus Valley Civilization, that had running water and sewage and even the assembly line, but even then, while not technically the industrial revolution as we know of it OTL, they did have a kind of Mechanical revolution that lead to the increased urbanization found there. On the other hand, industrialization made things like the mass production of food, vaccines, and penicillin happen, which meant that the human population could just take off. ON the other hand of that, today our environment is suffering, and it is arguable that for a long time things got significantly worse for the average person during Industrialization until the mid 1900's.

What say ye? Is industrialization required for a society to progress? If not, is there a viable alternative?
 
No industrialization, no books/mass literacy. Until you get movable type, the ability to produce paper on a large scale, and manufacture durable printing presses even hand operated, all of which require significant metallurgy and precision manufacturing, you are looking at handwritten books/scrolls in small numbers and at huge cost. This means you have the vast majority of the population illiterate, and not just the peasants, and information transfer whether laterally or intergenerational is very limited. Just one example. Another is food preservation, once you get the ability to produce glass jars in large numbers, preserving food becomes much easier - think of home "canning" using supplies you can buy for very little at the hardware store. This is especially important to preserve foods with nutrients you need year around, but don't grow in the winter - sauerkraut for example is high in vitamin C.

Industrialization does not mean just large steel mills belching smoke - sure you can have "civilization" not just hunter gatherers or iron age farmers absent industrialization, but then you hit an upper limit. Famines, loss of knowledge (if you only have a few books the knowledge can be easily lost), plagues all thrive in the pre-industrial history.
 
Industrialization allows larger and more importantly more efficient economies, which means that there's more labor & resources to devote to matters not related to survival/basics (less devote to redundancies). Much like agriculture allows enough stability to begin the process of specialization of labor (as not everyone is needed on the matters of food production, just most people, but hey that's still leaves a few around to do other things). Also industrialization allows the concentration of resources and labor/manpower (so in theory, while some stats on various pre-industrial countries/empires were certainly impressive, in actuality they are incapable of fully utilizing their massive manpower/resources).

More resources/labor available means that more could be devoted to luxuries. Those would include concepts such as human rights, equality of the genders* (both the idealistic and cynical forms), etc.

*interesting to note that while the pre-industrial societies the more 'advance' the society in question the more misogynist it is, but the converse seems to be true in industrial/post-industrial societies...
 
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What is progress?
Progress means to advance towards a better position than before.
It therefore depends on your perspective which situations are better compared to others in your own worldview.
Depending on your ideology and worldview all kind of different answers are possible.
(So yes and no are correct answers depending on your ideology and your understanding of progress)
 
Not sure I get the point about the Indus Valley Civilization; it was mostly an agrarian society of villages?

Re; progress and industrialisation, you must need some kind of mass production and industrialisation if you want improved mortality and to avoid a society of mass poverty.

On the other hand, I am not sure that the mass consumption focused society that we have, with a lot of consumption that has little strict connection with welfare and lots of connection with fashion, social standing and image, is inevitable at all.

I could imagine a culture that goes through the stages of industrialization that are primarily about producing bulk goods to meet needs, but then has a very different take on luxury consumption vs leisure; choosing early to be less "industrious" and work less, to afford less visible wealth and experience. Particularly if they were quite "repressed" in terms of attitudes to displays of wealth and individuality and intra-individual competition.
 
Industrialisation generally resulted in the increased power of the middle class in comparison to the nobility, usually leading to increasing employment in a society that eventually led to the working class gaining greater say in how the nation is run. In Britain the industrial revolution went hand in hand with increased healthcare and education for many, though this could also attributed to the Boer war.

Hope that helps.
 
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