The Little Red Blog

In Brief: "A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS," by Ronald Wright

Ronald Wright may be a skeptic regarding human progress, but he makes clear (in his 2004 A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS) that he is by no means opposed to civilization and its contents:

“I would rather live in a house than in a rock-shelter.  I like great buildings and good books.  I like knowing that I am an ape, that the world is round, that the sun is a star and the stars are suns—taken-for-granted knowledge that took thousands of years to wrest from ‘chaos and old night’.  For all its cruelties, civilization is precious, and experiment worth continuing.”

What worries Wright is that civilization’s more fevered critics—Derrick Jensen comes to mind—don’t seem to recognize that “There is no going back [from civilization] without catastrophe.  Those who don’t like civilization, and can’t wait for it to fall on its arrogant face, should keep in mind that there is no other way to support humanity in anything like our present numbers or estate.” ¹ 

Wright is no Pangloss when it comes to human nature or human history.  He notes that our cultures and our technological capacities have evolved much faster than our biological inheritance: “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago.  This,” he says drily, “may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.”  He quotes William Golding (from the novel PINCHER MARTIN):

“I will tell you what a man is.  He is a freak, an ejected foetus robbed of his natural development, thrown out in the world with a naked covering of parchment, with too little room for his teeth and a soft bulging skull like a bubble.  But nature stirs a pudding there…”

The “pudding” to which Golding referred is the human brain, that locus of (as Wright describes it) “genius and madness, logic and belief, instinct and hallucination, compassion and cruelty, love, hate, sex, art, greed—all the drives towards life and death.”  It is what separates us from the other animals, and it is also what enables us to threaten the delicate balances of the planet itself.

Wright’s particular concern is that humanity has, in the past, fallen into what he calls “progress traps,” ways of living which succeeded for a while but eventually became self-destructive and unsustainable. Enamored of our own successes and convinced we can maintain any given status quo forever², we don’t realize that we’re actually paving the way to our demise; and this, Wright suggests, is what we’re in the process of doing all over again.  Global warming, species extinction, devastation of landscapes and profligate use of scarce resources: if Wright is to be believed, we are currently digging our own civilizational grave under the illusion we are excavating for buried treasure.

Despite our place at the top of the food chain, our fate remains uncertain.  According to Wright:

“Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture.  We have become experimental creatures of our own making.

“This experiment has never been tried before.  And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it.  The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale.  Since the early 1900s, the world’s population has multiplied by four and its economy—a rough measure of the human load on nature—by more than forty.³  We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers.  It’s entirely up to us.  If we fail—if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us—nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.”

Having read my share of Cassandras, Jeremiahs, and doomsayers, I don’t find A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS to be entirely pessimistic—strongly cautionary, perhaps, and with a note of unmistakable urgency: “Now is our last chance to get the future right,” says Ronald Wright, warning that, if we don't, we will soon experience “an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past”. 

At least he’s giving us a fighting chance.

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¹ Derrick Jensen (ENDGAME) is well aware of that fact, which is why he wants nothing more than for us to start killing ourselves off right now and get it over with: so that nature can restore itself to what Jensen believes is its rightful non-anthropocentric balance.

² Famously, President George H.W. Bush on why we couldn’t let Saddam Hussein control Kuwait’s oil: “The American way of life is not negotiable.”

³ Conceiving of our economy this way--as "a rough measure of the human load on nature"--puts an entirely different spin on our obsession with economic growth.  While such growth doesn't have to come at the expense of the planet's health, we seem for the most part blithely unconcerned with whether or not it actually does.

Books Report

I'm trying to get in all the reading I can before the Trump hits the fan.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL is E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 classic “full-scale assault on conventional economic wisdom” (so says one blurb).  It’s about Economics as if People Mattered and it expresses the heterodox opinion that the economy should be built “around the needs of communities, not corporations.”  I decided to revisit this book after reading an article on Schumacher (and his late-in-life conversion to Roman Catholicism) at the Distributist Review. Schumacher, it seems, came to understand that one cannot refuse the reign of homo economicus unless one has another version of humanity to offer; Schumacher chose to offer homo viator (“pilgrim man” or “man on a journey”), a concept he borrowed from the French theologian Gabriel Marcel.  In other words, I’m reading Schumacher as part of my ongoing quest to figure out “what are people for?”

Ronald Wright’s A SHORT HISTORY OF PROGRESS suggests that human beings historically “have a way of walking into ‘progress traps’” and of falling victim to their own successes.  He states at the outset his conviction that “Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology—a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials.  Progress, therefore, has become ‘myth’ in the anthropological sense.”  And while modern progress may have served many of us well, Wright argues that it “has also become dangerous.  Progress has an internal logic that can lead to catsastrophe.”

Wright’s skepticism and Schumacher’s rejection of homo economicus are both challenged by Virginia Postrel’s THE FUTURE AND ITS ENEMIES, a 1998 libertarian manifesto of sorts.  Ms. Postrel is an advocate of what she calls “dynamism,” which posits “an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways.”  She praises “scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention”; what she opposes are such things as top-down planning, regulations, and blueprints for the future imposed by either religious, political, or cultural authorities.  Ms. Postrel is (or was as of 1998) quite the optimist regarding human potential, so long as we manage to get out of our own way.  She also praises our modern consumer cornucopia with its “enormous array of choices [which] embody applications of chemistry, materials science, and extremely high-tech manufacturing.”  She acknowledges that “the plenitude can be overwhelming,” but she also insists that it merely reflects “[consumer] demands for ever-improving, ever-more-customized products…”  Interestingly, there is no entry in the book’s index for “advertising”: go figure.

Finally, James Simon’s WHAT KIND OF NATION tells of the tensions and conflicts between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall in the early years of the American republic.  Spoiler alert: John Marshall (and his Federalist allies) mostly prevailed; the irony being that it was President Jefferson’s bold decision to purchase the Louisiana Territory from France that put the fledgling republic on a course for empire and in the process subverted the Jeffersonian dream of agrarian democracy and a minimal federal government.  If you're ever looking for a telling example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, look no further than the Louisiana Purchase.

In Brief: Liberalism and the Liberal Mind

Edmund Fawcett’s LIBERALISM: The Life of an Idea begins with a neat rhetorical flourish, as Mr. Fawcett writes:

“This is a book about a god that succeeded, though a rather neurotic god that frets about why it has succeeded, whether it really has succeeded, and, if it has, how long success can last.  It asks itself who it is and which its idols are.  It worries about whether it deserves its success or whether it is simply a successor, the next god in line.  For one so widely worshipped, the self-doubt is startling.  But this is an ungodly god that got its start by challenging other authorities, if not the notion of authority itself.  It is the kind of god that tells people to obey its commands so long as they agree to.  Though it is hard to picture the world without it, nobody is quite sure what it is or why it feels indispensable.”

The self-doubting “ungodly god” that is liberalism is characterized, Fawcett claims, by “four broad ideas”:

“acknowledgement of inescapable ethical and  material conflict within society, distrust of power, faith in human progress, and respect for people whatever they think and whoever they are...”

By Fawcett’s account, liberalism is not, as is so often claimed, utopian; it is quite realistic both about the inevitability of social conflict and about the temptations and corruptions of power (overbearing and concentrated economic power as well as government power).  If liberalism’s faith in progress can seem a touch naïve, it remains the case that it has nonetheless helped lay the foundation for a good deal of social, political, and economic improvement.

In an era when hardly anyone has anything good to say about liberalism, and when even American liberals have decided to re-cast themselves as “progressives” because “liberal” is an epithet too shameful to endure: Mr. Fawcett’s book is a welcome effort to set the record straight.

On the other hand: if you favor a skeptical—not to say, jaundiced—view of liberalism, then look no further than Kenneth Minogue’s 1963 classic THE LIBERAL MIND, a book which has been re-issued but not updated, because, as Mr. Minogue would be the first to tell you, the author is quite certain he got it entirely right the first time.¹

In contrast, then, to Edmund Fawcett’s opening, here is the first paragraph of Minogue’s THE LIBERAL MIND:

"The story of liberalism, as liberals tell it, is rather like the legend of St. George and the dragon.² After many centuries of hopelesssness and superstition, St. George, in the guise of Rationality, appeared in the world somewhere about the sixteenth century. The first dragons upon whom he turned his lance were those of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. These battles won, he rested a time, until such questions as slavery, or prison conditions, or the state of the poor, began to command his attention. During the nineteenth century, his lance was never still, prodding this way and that against the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence. But, unlike St. George, he did not know when to retire. The more he succeeded, the more he became bewitched with the thought of a world free of dragons, and the less capable he became of ever returning to private life. He needed his dragons. He could only live by fighting for causes— the people, the poor, the exploited, the colonially oppressed, the underprivileged and the underdeveloped. As an ageing warrior, he grew breathless in his pursuit of smaller and smaller dragons—for the big dragons were now harder to come by."

So, depending on your point of view, liberalism is either a self-doubting god worthy of sympathy and respect or a senile dragon-slayer deserving ridicule and overdue for retirement.  It almost makes you wonder if Edmund Fawcett and Kenneth Minogue are talking about the same phenomenon; and if they are, it makes you marvel at how two highly intelligent and educated human beings in possession of essentially the same facts can come to such utterly different conclusions.³

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¹ Mr. Minogue’s book, by the way, is available for free online in PDF format: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/672 It is part of the Online Library of Liberty, a site which contains an impressive array of (mostly older) books and articles about history, economics, politics, religion and more.  It’s a great site to browse; where else will you find the full text of the debate between Bernard Mandeville and the Earl of Shaftesbury about “Beauty and Virtue”? ]

² More accurately, what Minogue is giving us is "the story of liberalism as conservatives like to caricature the way liberals tell it".

³ The explanation for such widely varying conclusions, of course, is the magic of “epistemic lenses”; but that’s a subject for another time.

A Culture Without Meaning?

Kenneth Minogue, writing (back in 2003) about what he termed “Christophobia” (the “rising” and irrational “hatred of Christianity among Western peoples,” especially among the intellectual elite), offered in the process some broader—and, to me, more interesting—reflections on religion and culture.

In particular, this:

The minimal account of religion as a human phenomenon must be that it is a set of stories and beliefs human beings tell themselves to account for what lies behind the manageable world (to the extent that it is manageable) in which we live. In other words, a religion is a response to the mystery of the human condition. The going secularist account of human life is that we are part of an evolving organic life that happened to develop on the edge of a minor planet in a universe of unimaginable vastness. Beyond this, questions of meaning and significance are in scientific terms unanswerable, and we tend to follow Wittgenstein: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. We have blocked off religious questions altogether, because they are empirically unanswerable, and people respond in a variety of ways. Some drop the questions and get on with life, others shop for a more exotic set of stories and rituals with which to respond, and many, of course, remain Christian to one degree or another. On the face of it, however, we have a culture which very largely carries on without seriously considering ultimates. We have abandoned the cathedral, and are content to scurry in and out of skyscrapers. So perhaps we are pioneering a new civilizational form in which the issues of human meaning have been recognized as essentially unsolvable, and left to one side. Or, alternatively, we may have transferred the passions appropriate to religion onto beliefs of some other kind.    

This strikes me as a fair assessment of modernity; Minogue had it correct, I think, that secular cultures attempt (and for good reasons) to set aside “issues of human meaning”. Whether such a setting aside is possible is, of course, a matter of opinion; as Minogue suggested, it is more likely that the quest for meaning gets displaced onto other things (e.g. politics, work, entertainment, and sex).

And do such substitutes work?  Well, sometimes:

We have bought into substitutes. In secular terms, their basic feature must be that they look more like science than religion. Let me suggest that educated Europeans are today united in terms of a project we characterize as the perfecting of the human condition by the power of reason. Devotion to this perfection leads us to scan the news each day in search of signs of the times: we focus on the fate of rights and how they are violated round the world, at the poverty which signals the imperfection of inequality, at peace processes leading us forward and violence and bigotry dragging us backward. The aim is to foster the happiness of mankind, and we are buoyed up when the signs are good and cast down when they are bad. We seek, if we respond to this new form of devotion, to harness human power to control human folly, inspired by our past successes in triumphing over the vagaries of nature. There are many internal disagreements over what this perfection might mean, though currently there is a large measure of agreement that the central problem is war and other forms of human conflict. All of this can be subsumed under the famous slogan that mankind must take its destiny into its own hands. ¹

What Minogue described here is essentially the cult of Progress, whose devotees have accomplished much but which has also brought a great deal of destruction (creative and otherwise) upon people who have had the misfortune to stand in its way.

Caught (as we all are) between traditional religion and its myriad secular substitutes, Minogue lamented:

I am a simple child of secular times, and a sceptic, but one impressed by the grandeur and complexity of Christian intellectuality. The Voltairian and the village atheist, seen from this perspective, look a little shallow. In the vast rambling mansion of our civilization, the cobwebbed gothic wing containing our religious imagination is less frequented than previously, but it certainly remains a haunting presence.

That, I submit, is marvelously eloquent.

Minogue had a great deal to say—by and large, he was skeptical about the modern project—and I recommend his article in its entirety: which does not mean I endorse either its assumptions or its conclusions.  He ended by warning that, without the solid foundation of Christianity and left to our own devices, we may find ourselves “meandering without a compass in a wonderland of abstractions.” 

I don’t know that Mr. Minogue’s warning is accurate, but I do think it’s worth taking seriously.

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http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/-ldquo-Christophobia%E2%80%93and-the-West-1355

¹ Chris Matthews, whose tiresome banalities MSNBC insists on foisting off on the public, does a commercial in which he solemnly invokes the words of Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Stirring as that proclamation was (and is), it was (and is) both woefully naive and empirically false.

Do You Believe in Progress?

According to the classic General Electric slogan, circa 1960 and pictured above: “Progress is our most important product.”

So how’s that whole “progress” thing been working out lately, anyway? ¹

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, for one, believes it’s working out pretty well:

Plenty of things are getting better, they're just too slow for us to notice.

With every passing day, self-driving cars get closer to reality. Some people are worried about what they'll mean, but I'll just note that in 2012 almost 100,000 people in developed countries died on the road. Self-driving can bring that number closer to zero.

On that same scale, last year, we went from zero to two privately-funded rockets that went to space and back, landing upright. Reusable rockets can make space travel a mainstream reality.

More generally, global economic growth continues. We're making progress fighting malaria, stomach bugs, and other diseases that kill way too many people. Governance indicators in most places in the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, are inching toward improvement. ²

Auto-bots and space travel may not be everyone’s idea of progress, but who can argue with fighting disease or with better governance?  M. Gobry seems to think that, wars and terrorism aside, we're heading in the right direction.

PEG’s optimism pales, however, compared to the enthusiasm of Michael Shermer, who believes that things are getting better and better every day in every way, so long as Science and Reason are in the driver’s seat:

“We are living in the most moral period in human history,” he states unequivocally (or at least he did a year ago). ³ Aware that he may encounter some skepticism, Shermer insists:

I realize that to most readers that statement will sound almost hallucinatory, but not only have we become more moral over the past several centuries, most of this progress has been the result of secular forces, and the most important of these that emerged from the age of reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

So what sort of “empirical verification” does Shermer present for his claim?  All sorts, as it happens:

Improvements in the domain of morality are evident in many areas of life:

• governance (the rise of liberal democracies and the decline of theocracies and autocracies);
• economics (broader property rights and the freedom to trade goods and services with others without oppressive restrictions);
• rights (to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness);
• prosperity (the explosion of wealth and increasing affluence for more people in more places, and the decline of poverty worldwide in which a smaller percentage of the world’s people are impoverished than at any time in history);
• health and longevity (more people in more places more of the time live longer, healthier lives than at any time in the past);
• war (a smaller percentage of populations die as a result of violent conflict today than at any time since our species began);
• slavery (outlawed everywhere in the world and practiced in only a few places in the form of sexual slavery and slave labor that are now being targeted for total abolition);
• homicide (rates have fallen precipitously from over 100 murders per 100,000 people in the Middle Ages to less than 1 per 100,000 today in the Industrial West, and the chances of an individual dying violently is the lowest it has ever been in history);
• rape and sexual assault (trending downward, and while still too prevalent, it is outlawed by all Western states and increasingly prosecuted);
• judicial restraint (torture and the death penalty have been almost universally outlawed by states, and where it is still legal it is less frequently practiced);
• judicial equality (citizens of nations are treated more equally under the law than any time in the past);
• and civility (people are kinder, more civilized, and less violent to one another than ever before).

That’s an impressive list of improvements--assuming it's accurate.  After providing a brief (very brief) history of the Enlightenment, Shermer summarizes his case:

From the Scientific Revolution through the Enlightenment reason and science slowly but systematically replaced superstition, dogmatism, and religious authority as the most reliable means of solving social and moral problems. I am not arguing, for example, that discoveries in physics and biology led directly to moral changes in society; rather, the application of the methods of science, as first developed in the physical and biological sciences, when applied to the human and social sciences led to advances that bent the moral arc toward justice and freedom.

It is Shermer’s story (and he’s sticking to it) that religion (i.e. dogmatism, superstition, and “the authority of an ancient holy book”) not only held back scientific and material progress, it also impeded our moral development:

For tens of millennia, moral regress best described our species, and hundreds of millions of people suffered as a result. But then something happened half a millennium ago — the Scientific Revolution led to the age of reason and the Enlightenment, and that changed everything. Instead of divining truth through the authority of an ancient holy book or philosophical treatise, people began to explore the book of nature for themselves. Instead of human sacrifices to assuage the angry weather gods, naturalists made measurements of temperature, barometric pressure, and winds to create the meteorological sciences. And instead of a tiny handful of elites holding most of the political power by keeping their citizens illiterate, uneducated, and unenlightened, through science, literacy, and education people could see for themselves the power and corruption that held them down and they began to throw off their chains of bondage and demand rights.

Mr. Shermer is a passionate and articulate advocate for the secular gospel of Progress, but not everyone is buying what he’s selling.  For example, and not at all surprisingly, John Gray begs to differ.⁴ Mr. Gray insists that “progress is a myth”; which may well be the case, but we should at least take note of  how he chooses to define "progress":

I define progress…as any kind of advance that's cumulative, so that what's achieved at one period is the basis for later achievement that then, over time, becomes more and more irreversible. In science and technology, progress isn't a myth. However, the myth is that the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics, or, more simply, civilization. The myth is that the advances made in civilization can be the basis for a continuing, cumulative improvement.   

To clarify further, he states:

Take slavery. If you achieve the abolition of slavery, you can then go on to achieve democracy. Again, the myth is that what's been achieved is the basis for future achievement. My observation of history is that this isn't the case for civilization. Of course, I strongly support advances in civilization, like the emancipation of women and homosexuals and the abolition of torture, but all that can be easily swept away again.

In short, nothing counts as “progress” for John Gray unless it is an essentially irreversible advance, which seems to rule out such realms as human rights, morality, politics, and so forth—because people (and nations) can always relapse into barbaric behaviors.  For instance, in the wake of the Iraq War, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, Gray points out:

The ban on torture was notoriously "relaxed" by George W. Bush and his gang in the world's greatest democracy, not by some obscure dictatorship…Something like torture, which is completely beyond the boundaries of civilization, can become renormalized at any time.

Not only is moral “progress” precarious and unstable, but sometimes it’s no more than a veneer in the first place.  On that score, Gray indicts Western societies which, having abolished slavery long ago, have now (he claims) “changed the name, and…outsourced it. And we've done the same thing with pollution. We've outsourced heavy industrial pollution to China and India so that we can be very clean. But they produce the goods that we actually use.

People who subscribe to the myth of Progress, according to Gray, are engaged in a misplaced and futile search for meaning:

[They] suggest that Western countries, despite the great problems they have, are the meaning of history. That is a myth. Western countries do have many virtues…but they also have great difficulties. Behind every myth, there is this demand for the meaning of life…we as human beings can create meaning ourselves, but there's no ultimate meaning inscribed in the universe or in history. My advice to people who need a meaning that's beyond what they can create is to join a religion. On the whole, those are older and wiser myths than secular myths like progress.

Gray then delivers the rhetorical coup de grace:

I've called progress the Prozac of the thinking class before. People have often said to me, “If I didn't believe in progress, I wouldn't be able to get up in the morning.” But as the belief in progress is only about 200 years old, I usually ask them, “What were people doing before that? Lying in bed all the time?” 

What limited progress there is, Gray insists—by which he means scientific and technological developments—merely fosters an unfortunate illusion:

The rapid movement in technological advancements creates a phantom of progress. Phones are getting better, smaller, and cheaper all the time. In terms of technology, there's a continuous transformation of our actual everyday life. That gives people the sense that there is change in civilization. But, in many ways, things are getting worse. In the UK, incomes have fallen and living standards are getting worse…

Plus, there’s a downside to everything, even to Progress (maybe even to auto-bots and space travel):

Technological progress is double-edged. The internet, for example, has more or less destroyed privacy. Anything you do leaves an electronic trace.

While he’s at it, Mr. Gray goes on to question not just Progress but also the “myth of happiness”:

Happiness is a myth of satisfaction. The belief is that if you arrange your life in a certain way, then you'll have a certain state of mind. But I think a more interesting, fulfilling way to live is to just do what interests you because you never know in advance whether you'll be satisfied or not. 

Have we come this far—by “we,” I refer to My Generation of Baby Boomers—only to find that the Truth was right in front of us back in 1965, when the Rolling Stones complained “I Can’t Get No (Satisfaction)”? 

What seems clear from all this, I think, is that “Progress” is a contested concept that raises more questions than we can likely answer: what do we mean by “progress” in the first place, how do we measure it, and what are we making “progress” towards?  If the whole point of progress is auto-bots and space travel, I’m not sure the game is worth the candle; but if we might actually be slowly, fitfully, and painfully working our way towards a more peaceful world and a more humane society—well, I’m all for it.  And I also think that, in order to make any advances at all, we need both cheerleaders of Progress like Michael Shermer and skeptics (or curmudgeons) like John Gray. 

Progress (or "Progress") is a fascinating subject; the very notion has a history of its own, and in future posts I’ll present some background and some perspectives on it.

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¹ And whatever happened to GE’s handsome and genial spokesman of that era?  He looks vaguely familiar…

² http://theweek.com/articles/596818/what-im-looking-forward-2016

³ The Shermer quotes come from an article published by the Cato Institute in February 2015; they are in turn excerpted from Shermer’s 2015 book THE MORAL ARC: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. http://www.cato.org/policy-report/januaryfebruary-2015/science-reason-moral-progress

⁴ http://www.vice.com/read/john-gray-interview-atheism  Seriously, Mr. Gray should consider that as a title for his eventual memoir: “John Gray Begs to Differ”.