An
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.
This has certainly
become a cliché. But there is something eerily sweeping here, as if
the editors had lost patience with questioning utopia. Isn’t it
interesting that they receive so many stories of just this sort?
Isn't it a little disturbing?
If it is true that
utopian perfection—by which I mean the absence of all
suffering—would be empty and lifeless, it would stand to reason
that no step toward utopia would be progress. Our status as the
pinnacle of history would be thrown into question. Automobiles,
airplanes, modern medicine, computers, modern agriculture: none of
these would be progress. They would rather be sources of spiritual
stagnation.
In this book I will
argue that progress, indeed, is an illusion.
Science-fiction
writers and cultural critics have been exploring this idea for
decades. But where they have used allegory and rhetoric, I will make
the case using evidence and logic. The philosophical essence of what
I’m getting at is the same: without suffering, uncertainty, and
struggle, there can be no joy, novelty, or success.
People often claim
or imply that human ingenuity will eventually solve all the world’s
social problems. I don’t think it can. There are theoretical
reasons to think that it’s impossible to permanently tip the
world’s balance between joy and suffering. And explaining these
reasons is the goal of this book.
Why
bother writing a book attempting to disprove progress? What’s the
point if you can’t make the world a better place? Indeed, what’s
the point of anything on my view? To someone used to thinking in
terms of progress, the non-progressive view sounds cynical. It sounds
like the argument, “Nothing really matters
in the end, because we know that in a few billion years the sun will
expand into a red giant and swallow the earth.”
But
world progress can’t be essential to our purpose as humans because
it’s a very new idea. It’s been taken seriously for only two
centuries, since the publication of the Marquis de Condorcet’s book
on progress, Outlines of an Historical view of the Progress
of the Human Mind. Around that
time, global culture was basically non-existent, and most
philosophers, religious leaders, and scientists assumed that world
history was fairly static. They didn’t write books to improve the
world, but for the humbler purpose of improving themselves and their
readers as individuals. At their most ambitious, they hoped to
improve their own community, nation, or belief system.
My
goal with this book is an old-fashioned one, to help bring Western
philosophy back to what matters. At the moment we’ve become
obsessed with the notion of improving the entire world based on
scientific advances. But this has led our greatest thinkers astray
into materialistic calculations, away from the meditations on wisdom
that originally made Greek, Roman, and Christian philosophy so
profound.
Promises to improve
the world focus on material goods. People are demoted from free,
responsible, moral beings, to mere members of populations to be fed.
Since individuals are diverse in ability, they can’t be trusted to
provide for themselves, and centralized, industrial production must
increase. New children are seen not as wondrous creations, but as new
liabilities, dangerous to the stability of the system, which must be
regulated from the top down. Ancient cultural traditions are not seen
as the treasures they are, but as obstacles to development. Progress
means social engineering, and social engineering means
dehumanization.
I am often told that
my skepticism of progress comes from cynicism. Quite the contrary—my
skepticism of progress comes from idealism. The “perfect” society
we are building is indeed “boring and stagnant and soul-deadening.”
I write this book not out of despair, but out of resolute protest. I
find it hard to believe that people would prefer a closed, controlled
world without struggle, to an open world of wild adventure and
freedom. My ideal is the ecology of nature, a system of manifold
diversity and unpredictable novelty, filled to the brim with both
horror and elation, each vitally intertwined with the other. The
realities of nature are the fundamental moral realities. Traditional
morality has its source in human evolution. Our oldest philosophical,
literary, and religious traditions have been tested to their core
through the successive growth and collapse of previous civilizations.
It is in these traditions that our most vital principles and values
live, not in the changeable fashions of social science. The idea of
progress—that science, technology, or any other means can produce a
better world than what we’ve had—is an illusion. The proper goals
for a society are to survive and create, not mechanize and control.
Modern ideas are untested in their long-term effects; we should have
more confidence in the traditional ideals that have helped our
ancestors thrive across centuries and millennia. We need to start
valuing longstanding ideals again, not short-lived “progress.”
***
If you haven’t
already gathered, this book is unusual. It is almost certainly not
what you expect. It’s not a textbook. It’s not a popularization
of an academic theory by an expert. It’s not a plea to
policy-makers. It’s not a meandering journalistic meditation on the
follies of our culture. It’s not a work of postmodernism. It’s
not a series of literary essays.
What this is—and
it took me some time to admit this even to myself—is a work of
systematic philosophy in the traditional sense.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
Philosophy
is—or should be, regardless of what they presently teach at
the universities—an attempt to understand humankind’s place in
the world and to determine what ideals and principles to live by
while we are here. It is concerned with the big picture, with the
whys and what-fors of human existence. Historians investigate
events—their order, causes, and effects. Scientists
investigate laws—the ways that nature produces cause from
effect. Philosophers investigate meaning—the significance of
all these scientific facts and historical events. Is there such a
thing as long-term, worldwide progress? This question has historical
and scientific components, but it is essentially philosophical.
Systematic
philosophy approaches such questions using reason. The first
component of reason is logic, which is the connecting and
deducing of facts and principles using still more basic facts and
principles. Pure logic is simply mathematics. Logical reasoning is
found throughout the sciences and in all systematic philosophy. There
will be mathematics in this book, though where it gets complex I will
put it in an appendix.
The second component
of systematic reason is evidence, which is simply a term for
observed facts. Evidence-gathering is the essential activity of
science. It is an important part of any systematic investigation
because it provides raw material to reason about. I will present a
great deal of secondary evidence in this book. This book is not
attempting to present new evidence, as a scientific or historical
book does, but rather to present the evidence in such a way as to
reveal the big picture of what it means. I am seeking to critique,
promote, and unite extant, well-tested ideas into a panoramic collage
that shows a more coherent picture than the progressive one that is
currently the fashion. My argument may have its foundation in
research done by others, but this is precisely what allows it to do
the neglected job of synthesis.
When I call my
philosophical style traditional, I mean to emphasize
that I reject the modern notion that real philosophy is the critical
dissection of language and argumentation that occurs in current
academic books and articles. This leads to a collection of
microscopic, over-specialized texts that do almost nothing to help
anyone—especially non-philosophers—understand humankind’s place
in the world.
Traditionally,
synthesis was considered the essence of philosophy. It was the
primary task of the most highly regarded classics, including Plato’s
Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Aquinas’s Summa
Theologica, Descartes’s The World, Rousseau’s Social
Contract, and Darwin’s Origin of Species. Science itself
used to be considered a branch of philosophy—“natural
philosophy”—that focused less on human purpose and more on
objective reality. In recent times, since we’ve enthroned
technological progress and the technical science it depends on as the
summits of human intellectual achievement, we’ve come to neglect
the task of synthesis and demean it as inexact and unreliable. But
this is to dismiss what is most essential simply because its
investigation involves unique challenges.
In short, I attempt
to develop an argument supported by science and logic for a new big
picture of world history and our place in it. This picture
necessarily has aesthetic, poetic, and moral components. But it is a
view that is, as well as I can muster, also firmly grounded in the
physical and material realities of the human condition. It’s an
attempt at systematic philosophy, in the traditional sense of these
terms.
***
What needs to
change, in my view, is not a certain isolated collection of policies,
theories, or practices. What needs to change is the entire modern
picture of world history and social ecology. We need to abandon the
notion that human history consists of an accelerating series of
technological and political innovations that make our lives better.
Instead, human history has been an evolutionary process involving
both rapid changes and gradual adaptation. Disruptions brought on by
technology have led to the growth of some societies and the decline
of others. Prosperity has come in spurts and led to the flowering of
civilizations, each of which eventually grows luxurious and corrupt,
ending in decline and collapse.
This
is not a new picture of history. Stories of growth and decline are
what you find in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, in the writings of
the Greek philosophers, and in the Bible.
Scholars had taken this view of history for granted until fairly
recently. It’s the view Gibbon alludes to in 1776 when he begins a
sentence with: “Notwithstanding the propensity of mankind to exalt
the past, and deprecate the present ...” It’s only been over the
last two centuries that our ideology has taken a radical twist,
deprecating the past and exalting the present. But the resulting
logical, physical, and aesthetic inconsistencies have led our
philosophy widely astray of what is natural, ecological, beautiful,
and good. And progress has made us blind to certain hard realities.
Human beings are mortal and fallible. Sometimes they are evil and
sometimes they are incompetent. The freedom and individual diversity
that make humanity beautiful are essentially tied to
the possibility of evil and incompetence. So far, the entire romantic
“back to nature” philosophy has chosen to ignore these disturbing
truths. One thing that separates this book from most others of its
kind is that, rather than avoiding such facts, it will plunge right
into their heart to gain a clearer view of the fundamental,
unshakable principles of nature that are at work. In fact, the
principles that eliminate the possibility of progress will turn out
to be those of Malthus and Darwin.
***
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. Most
of the issues I focus on in this book (population growth, DNA
mutation, world government) should be forgotten, not tackled harder;
this book is a long-winded critique of the pernicious and widespread
idea that these issues are “problems” that must be solved. I
don’t write it to fuel more discussion of how to curb population
growth, feed the entire population of the world, and eliminate all
violent struggle everywhere, but to ridicule our persistent obsession
with these utopian goals, and to bring ideals of nature, romance, and
adventure back into philosophy.
Those
progressives who 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 and billions will die. This is indeed part of what I'm
saying. It may take a couple of decades, maybe a couple of centuries.
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. Human culture has always managed to renew itself.
Whatever books and music and knowledge and belief systems survive the
next 1000 years will truly be treasures, because they will be what
got people through the most formidable of all
adventures: an apocalypse.
Introduction: The Argument All-Too-Briefly
excerpt from Chapter 1: Malthus's Principle, Explained and Expanded
excerpt from Chapter 2: Evolution versus Birth Control
Introduction: The Argument All-Too-Briefly
excerpt from Chapter 1: Malthus's Principle, Explained and Expanded
excerpt from Chapter 2: Evolution versus Birth Control
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