The story was unbelievable when it broke a few weeks ago, just before the new autumn term began: around 100 schools in England would have to close due to the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). Cheaper than normal concrete, RAAC was widely used (usually in roofing) between the 1950s and 1990s, during which time nearly 15,000 schools were built in England. Eventually, concerns were raised about its liability to collapse. For a long time, the advice was basically just “keep an eye on it”. However, after a beam collapsed without warning this past summer, things got more urgent.
Unsurprisingly, it’s not just schools affected. Search “RAAC” on the BBC website and you will find an ever growing list of buildings forced into some level of closure, many of them public or public facing: leisure centres, entertainment venues, university halls of residence, and more.
The story inevitably became a political football, blame pinging about everywhere. It has been folded into the media’s developing “Britain isn’t working” narrative: public services are literally crumbling, and we supposedly have an incompetent government to thank.
I don’t disagree with the political interpretation of the story—but it is insufficient. This goes beyond policy failure. It is more than a political story—it is a spiritual one.
The whole thing is almost parable-like—a simple tale on one level, yet dense with many meanings. It’s one of those minor apocalypses of late modernity that we’ve become more able to spot since COVID—that is, a revelation, a moment when things are peeled back and the true spiritual forces behind the curtain are exposed.
So: what does RAAC reveal?
The needlessness of the new
When should we adopt a new technology? In his classic essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy A Computer”, the great Christian writer Wendell Berry gives nine standards for technological innovation:
The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
If possible it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the correct tools.
It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.
Berry’s criteria apply most directly to tools, but they work for technology more broadly. RAAC was, at some point, a new technology, able to replace normal concrete in some circumstances. It clearly meets a couple of Berry’s criteria—it is cheaper and of the same scale, certainly.
Other standards, however, are ones of which RAAC falls most obviously and drastically short. Clearly, it does not do work that is “clearly and demonstrably better” than what it replaced.
Now, we may think it unfair to upbraid RAAC here: how could people have known this when they started using it in the 1950s? It was only in the 1980s, after all, that people began to realise that even short term exposure to moisture could reduce RAAC’s strength by as much as 13%.
Yet it is hard to see how a basic description of what RAAC is wouldn’t have raised questions: it’s concrete, but full of holes. The air bubbles which make it lightweight and insulating (and thus, good for roofing) are precisely what allow it to take in water and collapse. Much good engineering is of course profoundly counter-intuitive (especially to fluffy humanities-brains such as mine), but how was it not obvious that water would find a way to burst the RAAC bubble(s)?
RAAC was a cheap, seemingly effective new material invented at just the right time—a new technology for a self-consciously new age. In the 1950s, British infrastructure was expanding rapidly in the post-WW2 boom. RAAC offered a cheap and easy way to facilitate such expansion. It’s noteworthy that Essex is the area most affected by school closures right now. Of the 147 schools affected as of last week, 53 are in Essex—an area epitomising post-war suburbanisation and population growth.
The adoption and widespread use of RAAC betrays one of our default modern assumptions: that newer is better. When we began pouring this stuff into our schools and other buildings around which our public life would obviously revolve, it did not occur to us that previous generations had been constructing such buildings perfectly well for centuries before us using traditional concrete, bricks and mortar, and stone, and that many of these had stood perfectly well for centuries. C.S. Lewis’ chronological snobbery doesn’t just apply in the intellectual realm—it seems that civil engineers need to beware too.
Newness and innovation are not evils, but they are not positive goods either. Often, newness is needless. Our assumption that newer is better is ultimately a spiritual disposition, one that is entirely oppositional and negative, and something which makes us moderns unique in history. Any other era or culture basically defined itself in some positive sense. But to be modern is simply to be “not not-modern”.
“Newer is better” does not really positively orient you towards the future; it simply negatively orients you towards the past. And so it breeds hostility toward all that comes before us—our ancestors, our traditions, our history, and (and here is why it’s a spiritual disposition) to religion, since religion has come to be perceived as, in and of itself, something born of the past rather than something inimical to human nature anywhere and everywhere. There is but a short leap from the uncritical acceptance of new technology to the uncritical rejection of God.
The ugliness of the useful
Berry’s ninth standard is, I think, his most profound: a new technology “should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.”
Let’s ask: what, if anything, did RAAC disrupt or replace?
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