Last month the Historic Moravian District of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The district retains pre-Revolutionary War buildings erected by Moravian settlers and a Moravian “God’s Acre” cemetery from that era. Visitors often stop at the highly praised Hotel Bethlehem, or visit the Moravian University campus which traces its roots to the first female boarding school in what later became the United States.

A one mile walk from the Moravian Central Church in the district brings a visitor to the National Museum of Industrial History, a Smithsonian affiliate. The museum documents a later and much different time in the Lehigh Valley’s rich evolution.

A dive into the history of those two Bethlehem destinations suggest a way forward for us today as emerging technology suggests important and significant ways for the beltway swamp to be flushed out. As we examine this history it is important consider the potential pitfalls of radical changes to technology, but it is perhaps more productive to attempt to discern ways we might put these important new tools to work at preserving our liberties rather than operating against them and against us.

In 1742, long before Rod Dreher proposed the Benedict Option for today’s traditional Christians, a group of Moravians settled in eastern Pennsylvania. These Christians, who became the Moravian Brethren, had originally established a community of John Hus’s followers in the lands controlled by the Bohemian monarchy during the 15^th century, 60 years before Martin Luther’s famous 95 theses were nailed to a public door. Facing persecution during the Counter Reformation, some of the Brethren eventually found refuge on the large estate of Count Nicholas Zinzendorf in Saxony where they established the village of Herrnhut and built a community shaped by shared religious practices, including a commitment to pacifism and to missionary outreach.

By 1740, Moravian missionaries in the New World had converted a significant number of Mohawk tribe members in New York. Expelled from New York by the colonial governor, they established a settlement in Pennsylvania on Christmas Eve 1741. They named it “Bethlehem” and immediately began outreach to the local Lenape tribes. Other Moravians came from Hernhut and soon both Bethlehem and a nearby new settlement named Nazareth were thriving.

The Moravians cultivated strong shared values in their communities. Starting in the early days of the Brotherhood, literacy—including literacy for women and girls—was highly valued since it enabled each believer to read Scripture, encouraged the dissemination of sermons, and allowed people to make informed commitment to their community. Thus, it’s no coincidence that Bethlehem was the site of the first public boarding school for females on this continent, established immediately in 1742—even before the Brethren established one for males. Girls could board there while new settlements were being seeded and later, as mothers, could raise their children in Moravian practices.

Similarly, all males learned a trade. As part of their missionary outreach to local tribes, the Moravians offered the same training in the trades to native peoples that they gave their own sons, and the same literacy for the females.

The original Moravian settlement in Bethlehem, and its extension for unmarried men and teenaged boys in Nazareth, were organized on a semi-communal basis. Shared music for worship was very highly valued, and the Moravians were the first in North America to build keyboard instruments to support group singing. When Charles Martin later established the world-famous Martin Guitar company, he located it in Nazareth due to the many skilled workers in the area who were capable of the precision woodworking and other processes required to make fine musical instruments.

The Moravian settlements at Bethlehem and Nazareth were centered economically on farming and on trades like blacksmithing as well as woodworking, stonework, and more. Moravian stone buildings still stand there, and similar ones found in other nearby cities show the design and craftsmanship at which Moravian communities excelled. The many-pointed Moravian Star ornaments which boys originally learned to make as part of their skills training still hang in local  windows and on porches during every Christmas season.What emerged more than a century later in Bethlehem and the larger region was very different. Bethlehem and its surrounding area became the center of the Industrial Revolution in America, with influence beyond this continent. How that happened, and what it meant for the area, provide a powerful contrast to the original Brethren settlements.

If you travel to Northampton, Pennsylvania, a few miles from Bethlehem, you can visit the Atlas Cement Company Memorial Museum. The tall industrial plant behind it produced the Portland cement used to build the Panama Canal, Grand Central Station in New York City, and other major infrastructure around the United States and elsewhere. At its height the company employed 5000 local workers.

Although Portland cement was invented in Britain, the Lehigh Valley was where its production took off. Leveraging local limestone deposits, the growth of canal and railroad transport, coal as an energy source, and a growing demand for quality building materials, the cement industry thrived in the area after some initial refinements of the British manufacturing process. Cement consumption increased ten-fold from 1890 to 1913 and was the basis for reinforced concrete in high rise buildings, bridges, and more in dozens of countries. Quarries and cement plants still dot the region today.

The limestone for cement was not the only extraction industry that sprang up in the area around Bethlehem and Nazareth. Slate was extensively quarried and was in high demand as a fire-proof roofing material as well as for kitchen countertops, outdoor walkways, and patios. And in the northern area of Northampton County, extending further north into the Pocono Mountains, very hard and hot-burning anthracite coal offered the potential to power industrial processes if it could be mined and transported.

The Lehigh Valley also hosted a smaller but thriving textile industry, starting with specialty silk fabric production. Sewing factories flourished in multiple towns. Today visitors to Nazareth drive past the Kraemer Textiles building on Main Street. Kraemer, founded in 1887, originally produced silk and other stockings. Today the company is best known for its quality yarns for carpets, industrial use, and handicrafts.

But it was the steel industry that epitomized the birth and growth of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and beyond.

Iron, the basis for steel, was first smelted by Indo-Europeans on the Eurasian steppes as early as 2400 B.C.E. from ore they accessed on the southwest end of the Ural Mountains. It formed the basis for horse bits and stirrups, key parts for wagons, and later weapons. Along with domestication of horses for riding and pulling wagons, iron allowed them to follow their herds across the grasslands for grazing then retreat to sheltered valley settlements during frigid winters. It’s no exaggeration to say that together iron and horses directly enabled the spread over time of Indo-European peoples west to the Atlantic, east to the Tarim basin on the edge of China, and south into the Indian subcontinent, the Caucuses, modern day Iran, and what is now Turkey. Eventually, iron armor and weapons played a key role in the city states of classical Greece, in the Roman Empire, and on into the European Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment periods.

But iron has some drawbacks for industrial use. To create precision objects from iron, the ore must not only be melted and impurities removed, but the metal must also be subjected to detailed and often forceful processing. Enter steel, the name for a group of iron-based alloys that are much easier to cast into shapes and to recycle when no longer needed.

Small amounts of steel were produced by hand as early as 4000 years ago. To make industrial quantities of steel, however, an entire ecosystem is required. You need iron ore, of course, but also very hot furnaces. You need ways to transport the ores and the fuel to a location amenable to building large plants. You need a workforce with a range of specialized skills, a market for the final products, and a way to transport those products to those buyers. You need machinery and innovations to accomplish all that and to ensure product quality. And you need substantial capital to be risked in this major endeavor—and possibly lost entirely if you fail.

Enter the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, whose old plant complex houses the National Museum of Industrial History today.

The company originated under another name in 1857, but a financial panic postponed its operational startup. In 1860 operations started at a new site along the Lehigh River and soon there were blast furnaces, rolling mills, a machine shop, and a rail siding on site.

Over the next decades, Bethlehem Steel’s corporate predecessor produced iron rails for the rapidly expanding railroad system across the United States and armor plating for the U.S. Navy. By the 1880s it faced competition from Carnegie Steel and others. But the Navy, which had shrunk greatly after the Civil War, now faced threats both to its own ships and to American trade vessels. After negotiations that included the corporation’s leadership, the president of Lehigh Valley Railroad, and key financiers, Bethlehem Steel secured a contract to erect a heavy-forging plant to manufacture military ordnance which soon became a key part of Naval rebuilding. By the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the company provided the material for the world’s first Ferris wheel, the single largest steel forging ever accomplished to that point.

Eventually, after a series of corporate reorganizations, Bethlehem Steel became a major supplier of armor plate and ordnance in both World War I and World War II. Along the way it manufactured the steel sections for the Golden Gate Bridge, a large oil refinery in Argentina, and more.

The impressive rise of industry in the Lehigh Valley didn’t happen in a vacuum. One key early contributor was the coal and railroad entrepreneur Asa Packer. Born in New England, he moved to Pennsylvania and initially used his carpentry skills to build and repair canal boats. Eventually he moved to what is now called Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania (then called Mauch Chunk), in the Pocono Mountains, after purchasing a canal boat that was transporting anthracite coal from the region to Philadelphia. He then established a company to build locks and boats for the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. By 1851, when that customer was unwilling to risk converting coal transport to the newly established rail system, Packer became the major stockholder of a fledgling new railroad in the region, rapidly establishing rail connections from the coal and ore regions in the north end of the valley south to Easton, at the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers, and eventually over to Bethlehem. In other words, the innovation, risk taking, and vision of Packer provided a key element in the ecosystem needed for Bethlehem Steel and the rise of the Industrial Revolution based in the valley.

In his later life, Packer founded Lehigh University not far from Bethlehem Steel’s future site, specifically intending it to produce trained engineers. Lehigh remains a top engineering university today.

Consider how the launch of the Industrial Revolution in the Lehigh Valley contrasts with earlier Moravian settlements there. The Moravians were centered on their religious beliefs and practices. Although they welcomed converts of all ethnicities, those practices formed the shared identity of their communities—disputes were settled locally and without reference to external authorities. They valued literacy, hard work, and craftsmanship, but did not innovate. Instead, they aspired to excellence in very traditional farming, trades work, and teaching for local consumption. Their economy depended on fertile farmland and a limited access to metals, stone, and wood as building materials.

What a difference a century made! Bethlehem Steel’s emergence relied on coal and ore extraction, major transport of raw and finished materials (sometimes over very long distances), manufacturing innovation, availability of skilled labor, and—critically—a formal contract-based legal system and major financial investors. The latter, in turn, were based on U.S. federal structures: a body of contract law (including agreements with other countries), the U.S. dollar as an exchange medium, and legal agreements that made railroads and rail to ship goods transfer possible.

The Industrial Revolution’s rapid growth in the Lehigh Valley also depended on skilled laborers, many of whom were recent immigrants to the United States. Workplaces were very mixed ethnically but after work most of the employees found their community in local churches, social halls, and other venues that often bore a strong ethnic stamp. In the town of Northampton, for instance, a two-block stretch of street near the railroad tracks contains a Roman Catholic church which, in the 1950s, had a majority Austrian/Central European congregation, a Ukrainian Orthodox church, and a Uniate Catholic church. The town, which was home to approximately 5,000 people at the time, also had over a dozen Protestant churches from multiple denominations and even a small Pentecostal church. When workers needed to jointly push back on or negotiate with corporate leaders, they formed unions for that purpose. Nor were those workers growing their own food. Instead, they relied for the most part on a rising infrastructure of food production and delivery to retail stores.

The Industrial Revolution in the Bethlehem area replaced small, cohesive settlements based on shared practices with a much more distributed network of people, resources, and external structures governing business and society. During Bethlehem Steel’s evolution, important roles were played by industrialists such as Joseph Wharton (founder of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-founder of Swarthmore College). Nonetheless, key nodes in the ecosystem that allowed the Industrial Revolution to develop there were tangible (ore, coal, railroads) combined with innovation and risk taking.

Where are we today?

Just as quantum information theory has taken physics into insights well beyond 19^th century mechanics and thermodynamics, so too information technology, computing, digital communications, robotics, bioengineering, and emerging AI are taking us well beyond the tangible focus of the Industrial Revolution.

That’s not to say that metals, transportation, energy sources, and cultivation of a skilled workforce are no longer important—they are, just as food production remained important after the Moravian settlements in the Lehigh Valley gave way to very new conditions there. But those industries are no longer the driving source of innovation technically, socially—or regarding economic activity and governance—today.

The 18^th century Moravians did not need nor want strong central government control of their lives and activities. Their shared religious beliefs and practices were more than sufficient to structure their interactions with one another and their far less common interactions with those outside of the settlements.

But as the multiple corporate iterations during the growth of Bethlehem Steel demonstrate, during the Industrial Revolution it was precisely a central currency, contract law, formal corporate structuring, long distance transportation, mass immigration of new workers, and the ability of major financial investors to potentially reap large rewards for risk taking that enabled whole new industries to emerge and reshape the world. As a side effect, trade unions emerged—but even more, so did retail commerce that ordinary people came to rely on for food, clothing, and other day-to-day essentials. Just as factories mass produced goods, so too a “mass produced” (or rather, mass imposed) set of rules were crafted to govern peoples’ interactions.

That was then. Today we face different challenges and very different opportunities. We could adopt a Chinese-style centrally controlled surveillance state, complete with embedded microchips mandated for every human, block-by-block tracking of our movements, government-controlled access to bank accounts or even the ability to leave our apartments, and more—even activities like organ harvesting from “undesirables” like that imposed on the Uyghurs is a possibility under that structure.

Or we could take a fresh look at the core principles of the U.S. founding and ask how they can be instantiated in our emerging technical and social context. We’ve already seen the metastasis of central control as epitomized in the Beltway Swamp. But in an age when people can instantly communicate across the globe—and their computers can instantly interact financially—the opposite, an anarchic free for all, is a recipe for massive fraud with serious social impacts.

Instead, we can take a cue from the financial market developments based on communications and computing tech. Today you and I can put a bit of savings into a savings account in a local bank—a low risk and low return approach if one assumes interest rates are relatively stable. We can place our money in a money market fund, choosing one with a term length and risk preference that aligns with our needs. Or we can place that money in a stock mutual fund, or a riskier fund that uses derivatives to hedge risk and potentially create higher return.

We can even day trade from our PCs if we choose. Or we can bet on cyber currencies with no national sponsor at all.

What we want from the central government is to establish some rules that reduce the potential for fraud without limiting our own risk choices—or our responsibility for the outcome of those choices.

In our cities and towns, we want laws to be limited to what is needed to keep relative civic peace and stability, allowing us to make other risk choices as we choose. We want those laws to be clear and evenly enforced.

We want every person in a government role to be accountable to voters either directly or via the ability of key elected officials to remove any given person from his or her role. To accomplish that we want to significantly reduce and greatly monitor the flow of tax funds to NGOs, to highly targeted R&D in universities, and to notional nonprofit Beltway hangers-on. And we want every citizen to have access to timely, accurate information about agency actions.

We want elections to be transparent and for voters to be able to audit voter rolls and counter election fraud.

And we want an end to information censorship by government authorities and their corporate proxies.

Pie in the sky? Not feasible? In fact, all of this is feasible if we put emerging tech at the service of the republic’s founding principles.

Consider the potential of a federally managed cyber currency exchange that retains strong privacy protections, not as a replacement for but as an alternative to the U.S. dollar for those who choose that risk/reward potential. Already we see the startup Worldcoin proposing to use biometric data to uniquely identify every human on Earth and to create initial deposits of their cyber currency for each person who couldn’t otherwise afford to invest with them. In other words, rather than allow biometric identification to serve as part of a nightmarish surveillance state, use it to empower person-to-person transactions and seriously secure the coin exchange along the way, reducing the ability of governments and NGO lackeys to suppress people based on their purchases.

In education we’re already seeing an exodus of children from government-controlled schools to home schooling and other alternate loci. But current and emerging tech offer significantly different approaches to the whole process of education as well. Consider the innovative school established for the children of SpaceX employees, in which kids of various ages work in teams to craft and evaluate potential solutions to complex problems like food production for a Mars colony. That school builds on large amounts of digital information available online—not summarized by a Large Language Model “AI” trained on establishment-approved source data, but everything from specific statistics about plants and nutrition to engineering information regarding the creation and management of an artificial atmosphere under challenging physical conditions. Recently the co-developer of that school launched Synthesis, an online version open to children outside of the SpaceX population. It already offers highly innovative AI tutoring in mathematics in addition to team problem-solving opportunities. Similarly, online credentialling courses are replacing traditional college attendance for many undergrad-aged students in a variety of tech, science, and engineering fields.

Add in the rapid advance of robotics increasingly capable of executing the daily tasks in manufacturing, exploration, and food production. The skills that the SpaceX school are developing become major value-adds to that emerging economy, maximizing human involvement at the highest levels rather than replacing them at more repetitive industrial tasks. Nor does this exclude, say, skilled trades people—their experience will be an important contribution to problem solving and even robot design.

And note how the recent Musk/Trump conversation on X Spaces simply bypassed mainstream media and may already have reached more than 1 billion.

How do we rebuild after we drain the swamp and flush out the beltway’s Augean Stables? We embrace the revolutionary potential of new technology. We acknowledge that community ties now include long distance interactions mediated by communications and computing and we create new approaches to education, financial interactions, and innovation itself. And we do that by establishing new methods for citizens to monitor the actions of those in government positions and to hold them accountable.

The founders’ principles are still the basis for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our means and methods of securing those now face new challenges but promise very great potential if we consistently leverage technology to serve those ends and not those who aspire to be our central masters.