Before
debunking progress we need to define progress.
The
first thing to eliminate is the idea that we can measure progress as
a quantification of capability or means, such as energy, money,
power, numerical advantage, or complexity. It is easy to see why this
would be absurd. If having greater concentrations of energy is
better, then we should all want to collapse into a black hole. If
power is the most important then we are forced to the conclusion that
Stalin was the greatest man who ever lived. If having a larger
population is better, then the most advanced organisms are microbes.
If you mean complexity then a teaspoon of soil with its millions of
species of bacteria is many orders of magnitude more progressed than
all of human technology combined.
More
generally, any quantity that attempts to capture how capable
something is neglects the point, which is what that capacity is to be
used for. It’s a means without an end. We admire not large
populations but happy populations. We admire energy not for its own
sake, but because we can use it for so many ends. Once the means in
itself is considered good, you end up with an absurd goal of having
an enormous capacity to no purpose.
We
might be tempted to define progress as the loftiness of one’s
culture, in terms of science, philosophy, and art. But the success of
our science is measured in terms of technology, which brings us back
to mere capacity. The success of modern 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 brings us back, full-circle, to
the question of how we measure that worth.
The
most common view among intellectuals, perhaps because it most evokes
feelings of compassion and indignation to injustice, is that progress
is the increased satisfaction of every human's material needs—food,
clothing, health, and shelter. This makes sense because it is an end,
not a means. A hundred 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. Here we have a notion of progress that is widely influential
and has been around for centuries. Here we have a worthy antithesis.
In
short, this kind of progress means a decrease in the sum total of
human suffering. I think this is very close to what people mean by
“progress,” but it leaves out something important: human joy. If
we only count suffering, a negative quantity, we can’t account for
all the things people do not out of fear but out of desire for
reward. Going to work is a kind of suffering, but it pays off in the
joy of prosperity. Childbirth can be agonizing, but people do it for
the joy of family. Fighting in wars is terrifying, but it is often
done for the joy of victory. So if we are to define progress in terms
of suffering, I will have to side with the utilitarian philosophers:
what matters is the sum total of happiness, minus the sum total of
suffering. The founder
of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, first introduced the idea of
measuring total happiness in the late 18th
century. We will come back to the details of his theory in later
chapters. For now, this is my definition of progress:
Progress is a permanent increase in the ratio of the happiness of all people to the
total suffering.
And the thesis of
this book can be stated:
The ratio of the
total happiness experienced in the world, to the total suffering,
converges to one when each is summed over a long-enough period of
time.
Happiness and
suffering can fluctuate over time, as resources become scarce or
plentiful. So I’m not saying that this quantity will always balance
exactly. But similar to the way flipping a coin repeatedly will
eventually lead to an even ratio of heads and tails (a phenomenon
called the Law of Large Numbers by probability theorists), good and
bad times, I will argue, will also approach an even ratio over time.
Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were in fact
among the first to argue that total happiness could be increased and
total suffering decreased. They believed that using birth control
could achieve this. Their ideas became widely implemented after about
1900, when birth rates in Europe and America began to plunge. Since
then, prosperity in the West has increased and hunger has declined,
and it is generally believed that the ratio of happiness to suffering
is getting higher and higher.
Our
society now takes progress for granted. We assume that the human
condition is improving, and will continue to improve. But I think
we’ve been too hasty in celebrating our victory over the past. The
majority of the world remains in dire poverty. The human population
is still growing, and resources are dwindling. The most disconcerting
fact is also one of the best known—it would take six planet earths
to support the world population if everyone were to adopt the Western
way of life.
We are flaunting the
wealthiest, most exploitative nations as examples of the possibility
of progress. Western civilization is unsustainable. Its industry and
energy use are growing exponentially, even if its population is not.
It cannot survive forever in its current form. The fact is that there
have been thousands of civilizations over the course of history and
the vast majority have collapsed. Many of these civilizations,
including the ancient Greeks and Romans, used population control.
Limiting the population is not, contrary to popular belief, a
cure-all.
If
it eliminates suffering, birth control does so by eliminating the
struggle to flourish that’s at the root of the creativity of human
evolution, which produces so much diversity in our species. We know
this instinctively. The fertile energy of sexual passion makes life
life: a holy mixture of joy and sorrow, triumph and tragedy.
Life
should be such a mixture, I
will argue. If it is not, we should conclude that something is wrong
with our perception of it. Life is worthwhile because we must strive
toward the best, happiest outcomes, and avoid the worst and saddest.
It’s why we have a mind in the first place, to be able to consider
these contrasting possibilities
and learn from the pain of mistakes. Paul Valerie, the French poet
and aphorist of the early 20th
century, was correct to point out, “Happy peoples have no mind.
They have no great need of it.” Even before Darwin, Malthus argued
that, “To avoid evil and to pursue good seem to be the great duty
and business of man ... and it is by this exertion, by these
stimulants, that mind is formed.”
The
fundamental inconsistency in the idea of progress is easy to state,
if not to fully grasp. If we imagine a world where the worst forms of
suffering have been eliminated, we are necessarily imagining a world
with that much less challenge, that much less triumph, and that much
less mind. Life itself is thus extinguished along with
suffering. Progress means that by degrees the need for the business
of living disappears. Life disappears.
But
this way of putting it sounds surreal and fantastical. And we are
left with a no less abhorrent picture of our present world, with its
exploding human population, and untold suffering due to lack. Are we
to simply turn up our noses to the miseries of the poor and say,
“Such is life”?
Absolutely
not. Life is, as Malthus argued, essentially a struggle against evil.
The struggle must continue. What should cease is the idea that this
struggle can somehow be won once and for all. Such a victory would
mean the destruction of life itself. This book is about how to to
understand this abstract insight from a practical, physical point of
view. What can we and can’t we realistically expect for the future
of our civilization? To address this question systematically I will
be applying Malthus’s theory of population (Chapter 1), Darwin’s
theory of evolution (Chapters 2, 3, and 5), and utilitarian decision
theory (Chapter 4). We will look at some evidence concerning the
short-to-medium-term survival of our industrial civilization (Chapter
6), and suggest that intellectual life should be re-oriented toward
the classics rather than scientific progress (Chapter 7).
Thomas
Malthus was the first to argue that the basic ecology of populations
will prevent any long-run improvement of the world. The joy of
procreation causes population growth, and this growth causes resource
limitations, famine, and suffering. In this way, Malthus believed
that human life remains in an overall equilibrium, never getting
better or worse on the whole. This is a good start toward a theory of
what I call “creation-destruction balance.” In short, population
growth is a kind of creation, and limits to growth mean destruction.
Roughly speaking, growth is always balanced by limits, so total
creativity and total destruction must balance in the long run. In
Chapter 1 I will attempt to
extend and refine Malthus’s version of this theory.
However,
most modern progressives view birth control as a final “solution”
to Malthus’s dilemma. In Chapter 2 I
argue that this neglects the effect of evolution on the human
population. Recent studies suggest that mutation has
been increasing the rate of congenital diseases in industrialized
countries, and that if the trend continues the effect will be
catastrophic within two centuries. (See
Kondrashov AS, 2003;
Lynch M, 2010.)
Chapter 2 will go on to explain the theoretical core of
this book, evolution by mutation and natural selection. Evolution is
essential to life. Without mutation, there would be no diversity, and
without selection over this diversity, no new structures can be
formed or preserved. Selection means that some organisms succeed and
others do not. Here again we’ll see an aspect of the evolutionary
balance, a mutual dependence of creation and destruction—which
correspond to joy and suffering in humans.
According
to the progressive view, humans, by use of reason and technology—such
as genetic engineering, for example—can overcome the forces of
evolution. I will argue in Chapter 3 that this is not at all
the case. The process of natural selection is not special to
biological life, but applies with equal force to human ideas,
culture, science, and technology. “Mutation” in human culture can
mean the generation of new ideas, random or not; “selection” can
mean the competition among these ideas, whether it takes place
rationally, economically, or by violence; and Darwin’s theory of
evolution will still apply strictly. Because some ideas reproduce
themselves faster, and it takes physical resources to store them,
socio-cultural evolution will necessarily reach a
creation-destruction balance just as biological evolution does. This
process can already be seen in countless instances, including the
struggles between Islam and the West, the competition among social
theories, and the universal endeavor by writers and artists to become
admired and emulated.
A
common objection to evolutionary arguments is that joy and suffering
do not always correspond to reproduction or failure to reproduce. In
Chapter 4,
I will argue that, on the contrary, joy and suffering are essentially
the mental sensations of evolutionary success and failure, whether of
our genes or our ideas. When we succeed in spreading our genes or
ideas, we feel pleasure. When our ability to survive or reproduce is
diminished, we feel pain. The fact that we can sometimes trick our
inborn perceptions of reality by using such things as contraception
or psychoactive drugs only strengthens the force of this insight. In
the long run, our perceptions of success and failure should track our
actual evolutionary success and failure, because those whose
perceptions are discordant are eliminated by selection. (An example
of this would be the extinction of the practice of infanticide in
antiquity, an attempt to enjoy the pleasure of sex without having to
raise the child.) The upshot is that the Malthusian balance between
creation and destruction implies an overall balance between joy and
suffering.
The
view that natural selection applies strictly to humans is often
derided as “Social Darwinism.” It is criticized as being a
heartless and brutal view of the human condition, pitting us all
against each other in a perpetual struggle for dominance. In Chapter
5 I
argue that a proper understanding of evolution shows that selfish
behaviors have no intrinsic selective advantage over non-selfish
behaviors. Charity, kindness, and benevolence can and do have
evolutionary benefits. Biologists may disagree on what the mechanism
is behind such evolution, but none seriously doubt that non-selfish
behaviors can evolve by natural selection.
In
Chapter 6
I’ll attempt to anticipate where our current civilization is going,
and how this should affect the way we live our lives. It appears that
our exponential economic growth, coupled with fast-depleting
non-renewable resources, will cause the decline or collapse of our
industrial civilization within the next few centuries, if not
decades. Even without resource limitations, this outcome would be
inevitable due to the effects of cultural and biological mutation.
Our population and its diversity have been growing rapidly for a
couple of centuries, but a return to a creation-destruction
equilibrium, as in the last dark ages and the non-industrialized
world, is inevitable, and we should aim for cultural achievements in
science, philosophy, art, and religion, that will be able to stand
the test of future dark ages and benefit generations less affluent
than our own.
Chapter
7
will argue that our philosophy should focus less on ways to
perpetuate modern unsustainable world civilization, and more on how
we can improve as individuals, families, and local communities.
Modern science is a good source of facts, but doesn’t supply
reliable, tested principles for living a successful life. Tradition
and ancient wisdom—classic literature, sacred texts, and canonical
philosophy—are the most reliable sources of truth, analogous to the
oldest parts of our DNA, tested over centuries or millennia of
natural selection on culture.
excerpt from Chapter 1: Malthus's Principle Explained
excerpt from Chapter 2: Evolution and Birth Control
excerpt from Chapter 1: Malthus's Principle Explained
excerpt from Chapter 2: Evolution and Birth Control