This week I’ll be talking about what’s changed over the last century, what hasn’t, and why I think progress isn’t inevitable. On the other hand, I don’t think we’re doomed. That last may take explaining.
Yesterday’s Future
It was the end of civilization as they knew it.
Populations perished as climate change swept the globe (they called it “drought”).
Death and disease ran rampant as chaos stalked the streets.
In the aftermath of a war unlike any other, scientists meddled with powers that might destroy humanity — and the great globe itself.
Meanwhile, crosswords threatened the very foundations of society.
It was as if the unsinkable Titanic’s sinking had been the harbinger of a particularly dreadful doomsday.
That was the situation, back in 1924.
Small wonder Alfred Döblin wrote “Mountains, Oceans, Giants”: a tale of social, economic and ecological collapse; followed by a man-made environmental catastrophe.
And melting Greenland’s ice cap had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
Anyway, M.O.G. is “perhaps the most forgotten modernist epic of the Anthropocene”, according to Alex Langstaff (Los Angeles Review of Books).1
O Tempora, O Mores, O Wow!
A century later, I can count on reading headlines heralding the latest dreadful developments, including but not limited to: climate change, war in the Middle East, and the looming threat of artificial intelligence.
Details have changed since Döblin’s day, but not by all that much.
They had the 1918-1920 flu pandemic. We had, and still have, the COVID-19 pandemic.
They were getting over “The War That Will End War”. We’ve recovered from World War II and the boom times that followed.
But these are sincerely not peaceful times.
Although New York City rebuilt their World Trade Center, blaming the “Great Satan America” is still easier than facing social issues. My opinion.
They had fictional dystopias. We have fictional dystopias.
I’m not sure how many folks take atomic Nazi zombies, chrome-plated robot cops, and giant mutant frogs seriously.
Make that took them seriously. Times have changed, along with our A-list boogeymen.
These days, dystopian malefactors are more likely to be climate change, fossil-fuel crises, the fatal lure of online communities, and — of course — evil corporations. Impressively, that calamitous quartet was the collective big bad in one movie.
We’ve had utopian fiction, too. The Star Trek franchise, for example, has somehow avoided diving into the conventional ‘we’re all gonna die but it doesn’t matter because life has no meaning’ platitudinous profundity.
How and why “Logan’s Run” ended up in a “Utopian films” category, I don’t know.2 And that’s another topic.
Progress is Inevitable Possible
I’ll occasionally run across an opinion piece suggesting that we’re not doomed.
That happened last year, and again last week; which got me started writing this.
Here’s where I’d like to talk about golden ages, Aristotle, both nostalgia and optimism above and beyond the call of reason, and a bunch of other stuff.
But it’s Thursday afternoon. I’m having a time focusing this week — I’ll get back to that, maybe — so I’ll pick up part of humanity’s continuing story, about two and a half centuries back. And lean heavily on a few ‘for example’ excerpts.
“…The Good or Evil Performed by Nations … in a Cosmopolitical View…”
I’ll start with Immanuel Kant’s ‘big picture’ look at history:
“Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan“, Immanuel Kant (1784) translated by Thomas de Quincey (1824) [emphasis mine]
“…what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment….”
“…we know that History, simply by taking its station at a distance and contemplating the agency of the human will upon a large scale, aims at unfolding to our view a regular stream of tendency in the great succession of events,—so that the very same course of incidents which, taken separately and individually, would have seemed perplexed, incoherent, and lawless, yet viewed in their connexion and as the actions of the human species and not of independent beings, never fail to discover a steady and continuous, though slow, development of certain great predispositions in our nature.…”
“…Reason in a creature … works, however, not instinctively, but tentatively, by means of practice, through progress and regress, in order to ascend gradually from one degree of illumination to another. … or else, supposing the actual case that Nature has limited his term of life, she must then require an incalculable series of generations (each delivering its quota of knowledge to its immediate successor) in order to ripen the germs which she has laid in our species to that degree of development which corresponds with her final purpose.…
“…My object in this essay would be wholly misinterpreted if it were supposed that, under the idea of a Cosmopolitical History which to a certain degree has its course determined a priori, I had any wish to discourage the cultivation of empirical History in the ordinary sense. On the contrary, … There is no doubt that they will estimate the historical details of times far removed from their own, the original monuments of which will long have perished, simply by the value of that which will then concern themselves,—viz. by the good or evil performed by nations and their governments in a cosmopolitical view. To direct the eye upon this point as connected with the ambition of rulers and their servants, in order to guide them to the only means of bequeathing an honourable record of themselves to distant ages, may furnish some small motive (over and above the great one of justifying Providence) for attempting a Philosophic History on the plan I have here explained.”
I don’t know why translators, including Thomas de Quincey, translated “weltbürgerlicher” in Kant’s title — “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht” — as “cosmopolitical”.
Google Translate says it means “cosmopolitan” or “more cosmopolitan”, which lines up with another source.3
Science, Religion, Progress, and — Maybe — Mything the Point
Anyway, fast-forwarding to the century I was born in.
Kant’s view of a slow but steady progress throughout history had morphed into the notion that progress is inevitable.
Bear in mind that I’m simplifying the situation something fierce.
Now, about this next excerpt: I prefer citing my sources accurately.
But in this case, the source’s format was — sophisticated. I’ve assumed that what they formatted as a link was the title, and put the rest down in the order they did.
PeP Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 14:399-399
General: M. D. Eder. ‘The Myth of Progress.’ D. Matthews, The British Journal of Medical Psychology, 1932, Vol. XII, p. 1.“…The myth of progress states that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction. Progress is inevitable. The myth in its origin coincides with the gradual decline in the christian belief in heaven and hell. According to the Christian myth man is only saved from damnation by Divine intervention. The great strides recently made in scientific discovery and invention have encouraged man in the belief that the millennium is not far distant. Science has become god. Philosophers, men of science and politicians have accepted the idea of the inevitability of progress. But the hopes built on science are proving as illusory as those built on religion and other myths.…”
[emphasis mine]
Oh, boy: there’s a lot to talk about there. Starting with what “myth” means.
- Oxford Reference: myth
In popular usage, a widespread belief which is untrue, distorted, stereotypical, or romanticized, as in ‘the myth of the American West’
In my dialect of English, what Oxford Reference calls “popular usage” has “myth” meaning “something that is not true”.
That may be what the author(s) had in mind. Or maybe the “myth of progress” was seen as a narrative which served to put the idea of progress in a larger context: like “religion and other myths”: which are “illusory”.
Maybe because I grew up in a time and place where ranting radio preachers were doing their best to support the notion that someone could either accept what we’re learning about this wonder-packed universe or be “Christian” —
Never mind.
One point is that by 1932 science “had become a god”, at least in the eyes of a few.
And that at least a few folks had noticed that methodical study of natural phenomena wasn’t up to filling a god’s role: let alone God’s.
Another point is that, although various flavors of “progressivism” are still in play — often relabeled and rebranded4 — saying that progress is inevitable is no longer in fashion. Unless it’s “progress” toward doom and destruction.
Truth, Facts, Science: and Hope
Now, finally, I’m coming to what got me started with this week’s post.
Articles in BBC Future (“We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don’t accept — we ask why.”) occasionally pop up in my feeds. Probably because I have a habit of clicking on ‘science news’ items.
That could have filled me with fear and dread of the omnipresent botnets which even now probe our minds, seeking to enslave us in the hive mind of — Oi. No. I’m nowhere near as obsessed with privacy/anonymity as some folks, and that’s yet another topic.
Seeing “future” and “hope” in the same title got my attention. So did the article’s introduction:
“Historian Thomas Moynihan explores what we can learn from the hopeful and ‘flagrantly fictional’ forecasts written 100 years ago, just as humanity was emerging from a global pandemic, the end of the First World War and encountering rapid technological change.…”
It’s now late Thursday afternoon, I won’t have time Friday to work on this, so here’s another whacking great excerpt, with highlights.
I’ll be back, after “… from X-rays to radioactivity….”
“What the ‘future histories’ of the 1920s can teach us about hope“
Thomas Moynihan, BBC Future (January 12, 2024)“…If we look back 100 years, how was tomorrow imagined back then? A century ago, there were dystopias and utopias, but many writers and thinkers also approached the future in other ways: with an open, nuanced and often playful perspective. And they did so despite the grave challenges they faced in their societies. What might we learn from these visions?…”
“…Understandably, back then, there was similarly a burst of dystopian fiction. There were chilling visions of tech-fuelled totalitarianism, where Earth’s oceans are filled in and its mountains levelled, whilst humans become drones serving like neurons powering one centralised, mechanised mega-brain. There were even prescient visions of climate disaster. …
“…Amid the dystopias, there remained widespread conviction that technology could be harnessed, in harmony with the natural world, to emancipate, rather than to suppress, humanity. Speaking to a crowded hall in Yorkshire in 1923, Keir Hardie — who founded the UK’s left-leaning Labour Party in 1900 — directly compared science’s empowerments to those of his movement. He noted how physicists had recently discovered entirely new forms of energy, from X-rays to radioactivity.…”
[emphasis mine]
I strongly recommend reading Thomas Moynihan’s article. He’s probably not on exactly the same page as I am, but he does know history.
And he realizes that if progressive and allegedly-scientific eugenics policies hadn’t been reversed, “…many of us wouldn’t be here today….”
Today’s world is no more stable and serene that it was in 1924. Blind optimism didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t.
But neither does blind pessimism.
And I am convinced that hope is a reasonable option.
Works in Progress
I think Kant had a point. Progress does happen. Slowly.
Life is better now, on average, in many parts of the world, for most folks, than it was a thousand years back. Or two thousand, or three and a half thousand plus a few centuries, when Hammurabi’s law code was new.
Granted, a few centuries after Hammurabi, something went horribly wrong. But on the ‘up’ side, we haven’t had anything like the Late Bronze Age collapse since.5
Basically, I see slow — very slow — progress over the millennia. On average.
We keep learning new ways of staying healthy, or getting healthy when we’re not.
Producing enough food has become less difficult.
Seeing to it that food and other necessities get to the folks who need it — that’s a work in progress, but I think the key word is progress.
Basically, progress can happen: but it’s not automatic.
It depends on enough of us deciding to do what’s right, instead of what’s easy or selfish. And that’s another work in progress.
Now, I’m done for this week.
I’ve talked about science, technology, and using our brains before; and probably will again:
- “Medieval Monkish Medicine: Scientific Before Science was a Thing“
(November 14, 2023) - “ChatGPT, Attorney at Law — or — Trust, but Verify“
(June 3, 2023) - “Green Sahara, Environmental and Climate News“
(July 30, 2022) - “Crosswords! Or, the End of Civilization As We Know It“
(March 26, 2022) - “Couney’s Baby Incubators vs. the Progressive Era“
(February 8, 2021)
1 Droughts, famines, and other historical stuff; a book review, and something I didn’t have time for this week:
- Wikipedia
- 1919 Egyptian Revolution
- 1921-1923 famine in Ukraine
- Adwan Rebellion
- Franco-Syrian War
- Iraq Revolt
- List of famines
- List of modern conflicts in the Middle East
- List of conflicts in the Near East
- Drought in Australia
- Droughts in the Sahel
- Dust Bowl (U.S.)
- Chinese famine of 1920-1921
- Kazakh famine of 1919–1922
- Persian famine of 1917-1919
- Russian famine of 1921-1922
- Simko Shikak revolt (1918-1922)
- Spanish flu (AKA 1918-1920 flu pandemic, Great Influenza epidemic; started in Kansas, U.S.A.)
- Titanic
- Turkish War of Independence
- World War I
- “The fear of a nuclear fire that would consume Earth“
BBC Future (September 7, 2023) - “Alfred Döblin’s Anthropocene“
Alex Langstaff, LARB Los Angeles Review of Books (July 9, 2021)
2 Fiction, a few facts, opinion and attitude:
- Wikipedia
- Category: Utopian films
- COVID-19
- COVID-19 pandemic (AKA coronavirus pandemic)
- Creature with the Atom Brain (film)
- Hell Comes to Frogtown
- Logan’s Run (film)
- Mad Max 2
- O tempora, o mores!
- National September 11 Memorial & Museum
- Post-World War II economic expansion
- Ready Player One (film)
- September 11 attacks
- Star Trek (film franchise)
- THX 1138
- Utopia
- World Trade Center (2001-present)
- World War I
- World War II
- Great Satan
Wikiquote - “If you want to know how we ended up in a cyber dystopia, read Ready Player One“
Laura Hudson, The Verge (April 19, 2018)
- Wikipedia
- weltbürgerlich
Wiktionary
5 Laws and a catastrophe we nearly forgot:
- Wikipedia
- Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 B.C.)
- Late Bronze Age collapse (ca. 1200 B.C.)
I suppose thinking of progress as inevitable would mean something like letting those toxic instincts you restrained up there run wild and expecting something good to come out of it, while progress as possible would be putting those restraints on those toxic instincts, no?
Yes.
And not just putting restraints on toxic instincts.
Not hurting my neighbor is a good idea: a very good idea.
But it’s when I decide that helping my neighbor is a good idea — and act on that decision, within the limits of my talents and place in the world — I think that’s when I start working for “progress”.
And, yes, getting back to what you said — letting instincts, impulses, whatever, run wild: will produce results. But those results almost certainly will not benefit others. Except, perhaps, as horrible examples. And that’s almost another topic.