A certain online science fiction
magazine used to have a list of "Stories We've Seen Too Often."
One of them read:
"The future is utopian and is
considered by some or many to be perfect, but perfection turns out to
be boring and stagnant and soul-deadening; it turns out that only
through imperfection, pain, misery, and nature can life actually be
good."
I can see how this might be viewed as
cliché. But there is
something eerily sweeping here, as if the editors had completely lost
patience with the idea of questioning Utopia or progress. Is it not
interesting that they receive so many stories of just this sort?
Isn't it maybe a little disturbing too?
In the New York Times there was an
article recently called "Why Not Utopia?" which considered
the increasing automation of the workforce (due to computers, mostly)
and how this is causing inequality and putting people out of work.
The proposed solution was to embrace a utopian socialist society of
perfect equality and let the robots do the work for us. The author
failed to mention the fact that automation depends on fossil fuels
and other nonrenewable resources. He dismissed global warming as a
"scientific" problem. He said nothing about soil depletion,
mine depletion, or the staggering loss of biodiversity directly and
indirectly caused by the industries that allow for this automation to
happen. Nor does he mention that most of the economic inequality that
needs to be addressed is between nations and not within the U.S.
Since we use at least 5 times our share of resources I guess we'd
have to give up 80% of our wealth. Why not Utopia? I don't know, give
away 80% of your belongings and income and we'll talk.
People like to say (or at least imply)
that human ingenuity can solve all such problems eventually. I don't think it can. Life is essentially a set of evolved responses to problems. No problems, no life. But even if I'm wrong about this, it still seems like a weird, eery
idea.
Let's say you had a future like this.
Robots do all the work for us. They grow our food and repair
themselves and build more robots. Humans, for lack of anything better
to do, spend their days in virtual reality experiencing whatever they
want to. Does this sound good? Bad? Personally I find it sort of
terrifying. When I imagine the end point of progress, as people seem
to define it, this is what I see. I don't see how it would be
avoidable if progress were continuous. Things get more and more
convenient until they are maximally convenient and nobody has to do
anything.
The idea has always baffled me. I once
wrote a science fiction short story based on it, where
robots take over not through violence or intelligence but through
human laziness. The result is a new ecosystem of animal-like robots
that take care of the bodies of the VR-addicted humans, until the
humans, who forget to breed at all, simply die out of old age.
It's never been accepted for
publication, but that's all right. I understand that I wasn't the
first to think of such an idea. But that doesn't mean it's somehow
irrelevant.
I find the idea of Utopia terrifying
not because it's at all plausible, but because it's considered a
legitimate goal of human life by so many intellectuals. It's not
uncommon among scientists and in the sci-fi community to imagine a
future where all humans are uploaded into VR and there you have it. A
large part of the success of the Matrix movies, I think, was that
they tapped into a collective uncomfortableness with the prophecy. A
similar idea is Ray Kurzweil's Singularity. He argues that once
computers have become more complex than humans ... SOMETHING! What
exactly we can't know because our brains are too simple compared with
what's coming. The idea is absurd: a tablespoon of healthy soil
already contains more complexity in bacteria than the entire human
brain. The Singularity has already happened and is still happening,
and it used to be called Nature.
Nature used to be considered a good
thing. It was mysterious, romantic, full of danger, and rich with
life. In contemporary literature you see this mystique portrayed
occasionally, but rarely well. Fantasy literature uses a nature
aesthetic most often, but even this is derided as old-fashioned and
reactionary by the most influential genre authors today. Michael
Moorcock called Tolkien's work "strongly anti-urban" as if
this undermined its relevance. He said the books sold because "people
have been yearning for an ideal rural world," as if something
were wrong with this. It reminds me of philosophy papers on environmentalism proposing that nature might have intrinsic value that
ought to be respected. Since when did this idea become something
controversial to be proven? When did we decide that yearning for a
more natural rural life was unhealthy?
Our civilization is unsustainable, and
massively so. Our cities are unsustainable. A return to a more rural
life is therefore inevitable.
It's madness to yearn for robots and
VR, rather than forests and farmwork. It's environmental
shortsightedness to teach our children to value human-crowded
convenience over gardens and free-ranging animals.
Another story the science fiction
editors had seen to much of was one where:
"In the future, all learning is
soulless and electronic, until a kid is exposed to ancient wisdom in
the form of a book."
This is an apt summary of Ray
Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, which itself is an apt prophesy of
everything that has gone wrong over the past century. That these
editors consider it a moot point to harp on shows another very eery
sort of complacency.
Part of the soullessness of modern
learning is that we use textbooks, not classics. Since we see modern
philosophy as more progressed, we do not read ancient wisdom, though
ancient wisdom is time tested and more reliably useful in day-to-day
life, and less provisional than modern studies and hypotheses.
Ancient wisdom is what we're missing.
It's what we've lost. In losing it we have made ourselves madly
focused on giddy techno-utopian dreams. Too many are preaching
against nature and tradition, and therefore against sustainability
and ecology. Michael Moorcock attacked Tolkien like this:
"Since the beginnings of the
Industrial Revolution, at least, people have been yearning for an
ideal rural world they believe to have vanished - yearning for a
mythical state of innocence ... as heartily as the Israelites yearned
for the Garden of Eden. This refusal to face or derive any pleasure
from the realities of urban industrial life, this longing to possess,
again, the infant's eye view of the countryside, is a fundamental
theme in popular English literature."
But this brings me hope, not despair.
If science fiction magazines receive "too many" stories
about the bleakness of industrial life and the importance of ancient
wisdom, that's a sign that they've lost touch with their audience.
(That they often receive more submissions than subscriptions might
also clue them in.) If people want novels about the country and about
nature, this is not a sign of backwardness but of farsightedness
amidst an unsustainable civilization.
***
2
Our taste for old books has been ruined
by the notion of progress, by the idea that newer is better. We
assume that newer is smarter and more humane, that ancient thinkers
were old fashioned, irrational, unscientific, and tied to dogma,
religion, and supersitition, and that therefore what they said was
tainted and any of us can do better without trying.
I think this attitude is worse than
unfair. It is pernicious, nonconstructive, and breeds a funny kind of
ignorance. We think we know where we're going but we don't even know
where we've been. We don't realize that our schemes for progress are
already centuries old, millennia old even, and that this idea that
newer is better has self-destructed repeatedly since the dawn of
civilization.
We neglect to read Immanuel Kant's
philosophy because it was Christian. Yet Isaac Newton, the founder of
physics, was not only Christian but an alchemist and a mystic.
Aristotle believed in a final cause. Einstein was a theist.
Darwin, it is true, began to lose his
faith as he developed his theory. He wrote,
"I can indeed hardly see how
anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain
language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe,
and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best
friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable
doctrine."
Is it any less damnable to let rot
every book written by a theist, or by an aristocrat, or by a
conservative, a liberal, a Marxist, or a Pagan?
A friend of mine once dismissed Tolkien
because there weren't enough female characters in his books. It is
certain that Tolkien could have been better about portraying women,
but it strikes me as harsh to dismiss every other good idea or
beautiful vision he might have had for this single weakness, however
annoying.
Another intelligent person I know has
questioned the value of the Greek philosophers in light of the fact
that they owned slaves. This should doubtless give us pause when
weighing their writings. Nothing can excuse their owning slaves, even
if slavery was a universal practice in ancient Greece. But I must ask
whether it means anything that out of thousands of philosophical
books written in ancient Greek, these few by Plato and Aristotle—who
rarely mentioned slavery in their books—were copied and recopied
thousands of times by hand, through dark ages, by monks and scribes
whose superiors might have preferred they copy Bibles or Korans
instead, in books that cost a fortune to make (think new car rather
than cheap paperback) that would nevertheless decay over just a few
generations, at best, and were in ancient, unspoken languages? Today
we can pay $3.50 on Amazon for a high quality English translation, or
even get an old translation on Kindle for free, but I guess we're too
progressed to read it and don't have the time anyway.
Thomas Jefferson owned slaves as well.
Should this throw any doubt on the veracity of his phrase: "All
men are created equal," or should we torch our tainted
Constitution? Perhaps we should torch all contemporary American books
too, given our dependence on wage-slaves in Mexico and overseas.
This idea that we are so progressed has
muddled our thinking. Is there any making sense of a notion of
progress that conjures such callous illusions? Maybe. I think we need
to do everything we can to shake our dependence on foreign labor and
stop the exploitation of poor countries. It is one reason I try to
buy locally. If this is a kind of progress, then I whole-heartedly
endorse it.
The fact of the matter is, I don't
believe progress is happening. I don't think our civilization is
moving forward at all. Someone recently asked me if I thought Western
civilization was winning. I said of course not, but I didn't give
much of an explanation. Here's my explanation:
You ask whether
Western civilization is "winning." To make sense of this we
must measure "winningness" in terms of energy, money,
power, complexity or some other quantitative measure. But looking at
success in terms of quantity is ultimately absurd. If having a larger
population is better, then the best organisms are microbes. If having
greater concentrations of energy is better, then we should all want
to collapse into a black hole. If power or control is the most
important then we are forced to the conclusion that Stalin was the
greatest man who ever lived. If you mean complexity then a teaspoon
of soil with its millions of species of bacteria is many orders of
magnitude "better" than all of human technology combined.
You might say
something like, "No what I mean is that Western Civilization has
the highest culture, in terms of science, philosophy, and art."
But the success of our science is measured in terms of technology,
which lands us back in the quantitative fallacy. The success of our
philosophy is usually explained in terms of science. It's true that
we've produced a lot of art, but whether it is genuinely better than
that produced in other cultures or in previous ages begs the question
of what "better" really means, and we're back to square
one.
So no, there is no
meaningful notion of "winning" that applies to Western
civilization.
But can we define progress? I
want to say no, because I want to be rid of the notion of progress so
we can talk about old books and the human story.
Let's humor the idea for a minute, so
we can truly refute it and leave it behind. To progress, I suppose,
means to become better. Fortunately for me, in order to define
"better" you will have to define "good," and the
question of what is ultimately good has remained an open problem in
philosophy since it began. Different religions, for example, have
different notions of good. The U.S. considers itself to me one of the
more progressed nations, but Islam considers it one of the most
retrograde. When conservatives say that family values are being
eroded in America, they are claiming regress. When liberals say that
ecosystems are being degraded, they are also claiming regress. But
both Christians and social liberals have a tendency to say that
America leads the world in human rights. There are countless axes of
"goodness" along which to measure progress or regress.
I enjoy G.K. Chesterton's view on the
matter:
One of the ablest agnostics of the age once asked me whether I thought mankind grew better or grew worse or remained the same. He was confident that the alternative covered all possibilities. He did not see that it only covered patterns and not pictures; processes and not stories. I asked him whether he thought that Mr. Smith of G— got better or worse or remained exactly the same between the age of thirty and forty. It then seemed to dawn on him that it would rather depend on Mr. Smith; and how he chose to go on. It had never occurred to him that it might depend on how mankind chose to go on; and that its course was not a straight line or upward or downward curve, but a track like that of a man across a valley, going where he liked and stopping where he chose, going into a church or falling drunk in a ditch. The life of man is a story; an adventure story ...
... and not a line graph.
The most common view among
intellectuals, because it most evokes feelings of compassion and
indignation to injustice, is that progress is the increasing satisfaction of every
human's material needs—food, clothing, health, and shelter. A
thousand schemes for progress have been proposed along these lines,
starting with the Marquis de Condorcet and Karl Marx, and continuing
today in the writings of Amartya Sen and Jeffery Sachs.
Pollution and resource depletion are
huge obstacles to this sort of progress. We like to assume that
renewable energy, sustainable farming, and recycling all our waste
might be attained in the next few decades. There are a few countries
that have succeeded in one or more of these goals. Denmark is largely
wind powered now, much of Ireland uses sustainable permaculture, and
Sweden recycles nearly all of its garbage. But all of these countries
are in the top 20 wealthiest nations. The biggest polluters and
ecosystem destroyers are actually the poorest countries struggling
the hardest to keep up. This creates a very deep conflict of
interest: is it more important to help these countries industrialize
or to help them become ecologically sound? Only the second option is
sustainable in the long run, but it is very expensive and will lead
to more starvation in the short run.
But let's pass over these serious
questions and say all the environmental problems are solved. Say
we've developed some sustainable system of farming and industry
that's cheap enough for everyone. The next hurdle for Utopia to
overcome is population growth.
Though population growth has slowed, it
is still happening at an exponential rate. And it's happening faster
in certain countries and among certain ethnicities. That means that
these faster growing peoples, usually bound by religion or
nationality, will be ever more numerous. For example, though Amish
and Mennonite communities are a small minority in North America, at
current rates of growth they will be in the majority within 200
years. The same goes for Muslims in Europe. I'm not uttering this as
a warning, because I don't see the population "problem" as
a problem but a fact of life. Are we going to form a world government
and legislate family size? It's unrealistic. I also believe it would
be wrong.
For the sake of argument, let's say
we've leaped this hurdle to Utopia as well. We've developed a
sustainable system of agriculture and industry and instated a world
government capable of enforcing a strict two-child-per-family policy.
I don't think it's anywhere near doable but I know some people
disagree. So let's consider.
The next issue you're going to face is
genetic decay. Humans are organisms, and all organisms are built
according to the code in their DNA. DNA is a really long molecule
composed of four submolecules called "nucleotides,"
represented by the letters A, G, T, and C. We've all got a DNA
sequence that determines our physical traits, something like this:
AGCTGCTCTAGTGACCCAG...
When scientists first sequenced this
molecule it kind of looked like gibberish, but over the last few
decades we've started decoding its language, which codes for
proteins—the components, motors, and machines of the human body.
It's a very precise language, molded by billions of years of natural
selection.
How does natural selection work,
exactly? We all know it's survival of the fittest, but how did the
fittest get so fit? DNA changes randomly as it is passed
from parent to child. This can happen in numerous ways. As the
mother's DNA combines with the father's DNA, you can get new
combinations that weren't there before. DNA molecules can also be
modified by stray chemicals or radiation from space. Sometimes the
molecule in charge of copying the DNA malfunctions and copies it
wrong. This happens less than once in a million times, but you have
several million nucleotides in your DNA so it normally happens a few
times per generation.
Mutation is random. It acts on DNA like
noise, creating little random changes that usually damage its
function. Once in while, no more than 30% of the time, it actually
changes the DNA in way that is not worse but only different. This is
why every human (and every dog) is different—we're the results of
different combinations of mutations. Some rare combinations of mutations
result in an organism that produces more offspring. "Natural
selection" is what biologists call this process. Over time DNA
types that produce the most offspring become more common in a
population.
Let's look at the theoretical limit of
Utopia where every family is limited absolutely to two children. What
will happen? There will be no natural selection. In order for a
couple's genes to spread through the population, they must have more
than two. If they don't their genes will be as common as before.
There might be four grandchildren but they will include 50% genes from
different couples, so their commonality will stay the same.
Meanwhile, mutations are building up every generation from cosmic
rays. There is no species on earth that has survived in the long term
without any natural selection (i.e. with two offspring per couple).
In most cases six or more is the norm, and this is even true for most
traditional human societies.
Why is our culture so abnormal in this
respect, averaging less than two? Humans are unique organisms because
they have two systems of inheritance of equal importance: genes and
culture. From this point of view it is just as important to pass on
your genes as to pass on your ideas. And people do, in fact, behave
this way. Religious people love making conversions, smart people love
to sell their books, and scientists want more people to think
scientifically. Modern Western culture, in fact, puts much more
stress on spreading ideas than spreading genes. This way of doing
things has its intellectual advantages but is certainly not
sustainable. There are already a
number of subcultures in America that do have larger families,
including Amish, Mennonites, Rabbinical Jews, Mormons, Catholics,
Mayans, and many Baptists. Over then next few centuries these
populations will gradually come to predominate in this country. This
is nothing new—it's a big reason why conservative Christians have
predominated in Europe since Roman times.
But let's come back to our fantasy of
eliminating poverty by developing sustainable agriculture and
industry and enforcing a birth rate to two per family worldwide—a
tall order, right? But it's getting taller. What about the build-up
of mutations we discussed? Mutations are a kind of noise, a kind of
randomization, and so you'd get more and more people who want
different things and do things differently. There would be more
genetic ailments and physical limitations. As a fear of what might be
happening in our society, this is irrelevant and hearkens back to
fascism. If people mutate and no longer can or will support our
nation it doesn't matter—better to let it collapse and go back to a
more natural way of life than try to control people's personal
choices. But as for our spotless theoretical Utopia of sustainability
and population control, it is fatal. Unless, of course, you use
something like genetic engineering.
If you think I'm about to endorse
genetic engineering you've been reading too hastily and with too much
seriousness. Genetic engineering of humans would be a monstrous thing
to undertake. Romance, love, and sex have been the beautiful, natural
way of selecting genes for millions of years. It would be scientific
idiocy to end this. The term "idiot" comes from the Greek
and originally meant someone who was stuck to a single idea. If you
are so stuck to the idea of Utopia that you feel the need to regulate
the sex life of every individual on the planet, you are being, in a
word, evil. Are we so in love with technology that we would literally
make it the eternal bride of every human on earth? I hope not. In any
case we probably don't have the money or the biotechnology for it.
It's hard enough feeding everyone let alone genetically engineering
billions of new people.
So where does this leave us? I say
forget Utopia already. The idea was insane to begin with. Toss
progress. Scratch it. It was a fad, a short-lived cult, a brainstorm
of a culture drunk on fossil fuels. You will never completely
eliminate hunger and disease from the world. It's just part of the
way life is. It's not our job to engineer-out all the pain (and thus
also all the danger and adventure) of human life.
Here's my question. It's the reason I'm
writing this post, and why I'm writing this blog to begin with. Hell,
it's the reason I first became interested in philosophy: What is the
point of life without progress?
Here's my answer, if I must with
extreme brevity. It is living your own life to the best of your
ability. To live in the most romantic and adventurous and heroic and
compassionate way possible. That's all. It's not saving the world.
You can't save the world. It's not creating a world government that
redistributes all the wealth and feeds all the poor. No such creation
would last and in the past such schemes (read: Stalin, Third Reich)
have done more harm than good. It's better to fix yourself first.
Then when you've got your own life in order, help your family
members. Help your close friends. Help your local community. I
guarantee you will be more fulfilled than if you throw yourself heart
and soul into Utopian idealism, as so tragically many young people
have done over the past 150 years, to the detriment of their minds,
spirits, and souls.
So there's my argument against
progress. At one point I was going to make it a book, I guess because
it seemed big to me. But now I don't think I want it to be big. I
want it to be little. I want it to be a hurdle anyone can jump.
Because what is really important lies on the other side of the veil
of the illusion of progress. Ancient wisdom. A connection with the
past. A connection with nature and the earth. Value in gardening and
fishing and farming and quiet nights trading stories on the porch.
Value in old books. I am an evangelist for old books. I'm an
apologist for ancient wisdom. The experiment of reevaluating our
values isn't working. We should refresh our values. We need new old
values. We need to jog our memory for what it was really like to
value hard work, nature, and simplicity.
I've shared this argument against
progress with a lot of people. I suppose I haven't always been very
eloquent about it. Some have only heard my list of horrible problems
and gotten the impression that I myself am a Utopian idealist.
Others get the impression I hate technology or think we should all
become Amish. All of this misses the point. The point is that each
individual is free to pursue their own idea of the sacred. We should
not value civilization and comfort over freedom and nature and
wisdom. All the problems I've listed above (population growth, DNA
mutation, world government) should be forgotten, not tackled harder.
Those progressives who still disagree
with me have a tendency to listen to the end, skirt the veil, balk,
and pull back because they see that one of the implications of what
I'm saying is that our civilization will collapse. This is indeed
part of what I'm saying. Give it at least another 10 years, maybe
210. I don't know. But it's happened to ten thousand civilizations
before ours and it will happen to ten thousand civilizations after.
It won't be fatal to what matters. Whatever books and music and
culture and belief systems survive the next 1000 years will be the
cream of the crop, because they will be what got people through the
most formidable of all adventures: an apocalypse.
***
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Next time:
-Why we need philosophy now more than
ever
-Rediscovering basic common sense by
reading the classics
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