When you think about it, it’s really rather odd that so many
people nowadays should be so hostile to the suggestion that history moves in
circles. Central to the rhetoric that celebrates industrial civilization’s
supposed triumph over the ignorant and superstitious past is the notion that
our beliefs about the world are founded on experience and tested against hard
facts. Since the cyclic theory of history gave Oswald Spengler the basis for
accurate predictions about the future—predictions, mind you, that
contradicted the conventional wisdom of
his time and ours, and proved to be correct anyway—wouldn’t it be more
reasonable to consider the suggestion that his theory applies to our
civilization too?
Other faiths face
their own challenges in dealing with the task I’ve proposed. I hope that at
least some of my readers will be willing to attempt that task, though, because
it’s far less abstract than it might seem at first; it has practical
applications that bear directly on the hard work of preparing for the difficult
future ahead. We’ll discuss that next week.
Reasonable or not, of course, that’s not what generally
happens. Suggest that industrial civilization is following the same arc of rise
and fall as all previous civilizations have done, and shows every sign of
completing the rest of that trajectory in due time, and outside of a few circles
of intellectual heretics on the fringes of contemporary culture, what you’ll
get in the way of response is an angry insistence that it just ain’t so. The overfamiliar claim that this time it
really is different, that modern industrial civilization will either keep
soaring ever higher on the way to some glorious destiny or plunge overnight
into some unparalleled catastrophe, is wedged so tightly into the collective
imagination of our age that not even repeated failure seems to be able to break
it loose.
That last comment is anything but hyperbole; the repeated
failures have happened, and are happening, without having the least effect on
the claims just mentioned. Glance back over the last half century or so, to
start with, and notice just how many prophecies of progress and apocalypse have
ended up in history’s wastebasket. From
cities in orbit and regular flights to the Moon, through fusion power and
household robots who can cook your dinner and do your laundry for you, to the
conquest of poverty, disease, and death itself, how many supposedly inevitable
advances have been proclaimed as imminent by scientists and the media, only to
end up in history’s wastebasket when it turned out that they couldn’t be done
after all? Of all the dozens of great leaps forward that were being announced
so confidently in my youth, only a few—notably the computer revolution—actually
happened, and even there the gap between what was predicted and what we got
remains vast.
It’s indicative that the humor magazine The Onion,
which makes its money by saying the things nobody else in American life is
willing to say, ran an
edgy piece a few months back announcing that Americans had begun to
grasp that the shiny new era of progress and innovation promised so many times
was never actually going to happen. No
doubt sometime soon they’ll run a similar story about the claims of imminent
cataclysm that fill the same role on the other side of the spectrum of
industrial society’s folk beliefs about the future. Year after weary year, the
same grandiose visions of destiny and disaster get dusted off for one more
showing,; they resemble nothing so much as a rerun of a television show that
originally aired when your grandparents were on their first date, and yet
audiences across the industrial world sit there and do their best to forget
that they’ve watched the same show so often they could close their eyes and
plug their ears and still recall every tawdry detail.
Meanwhile, over the same half century or so, a very
different story has been unfolding here in America and, to a significant
extent, elsewhere in the industrial world. Cheap, easily accessible deposits of
the resources on which industrial civilization depends have been exhausted, and
replaced with increasing difficulty by more expensive substitutes, at steadily
rising costs in money, labor, energy, and other resources; the national
infrastructure and the natural environment have both been drawn into an
accelerating spiral of malign neglect; standards of living for most of the
population have been sliding steadily, along with most measures of public
health and meaningful education; constitutional rights and the rule of law have
taken a beating, administered with equal enthusiasm by both major parties, who
seem incapable of agreeing on anything else even when the welfare of the nation
is obviously at stake.
In other words, while one set of true believers has been
waiting hopefully for the arrival of a bright new golden age of scientific and
technological progress, and another set of true believers has been waiting just
as hopefully for the arrival of the vast catastrophe that will prove to their
satisfaction just how wrong everyone else was, history ignored them both and
brought what it usually brings at this season of a civilization’s life: that is
to say, decline.
Even so, our collective fixation on those two failed
narratives shows few signs of slipping. It’s uncomfortably easy to imagine an
America a century from now, in fact, in
which half the sharply reduced population lives in squalid shantytowns without
electricity or running water, tuberculosis and bacterial infections are the leading
causes of death, cars and computers are luxury goods assembled from old parts
and reserved for the obscenely rich, and space travel is a distant memory—and
in which one set of true believers still insists that the great leap upward
into a golden age of progress will get going any day now, another set insists
just as passionately that some immense cataclysm is about to kill us all, and
only a few intellectual heretics on the fringes of society are willing to talk
about the hard facts of ongoing decline or the destination toward which that decline
is pretty obviously headed.
There’s no shortage of irony here, because modern industrial
culture’s fixation on fantasies of progress and apocalypse and its irritable
rejection of any other possibilities have contributed mightily to the process
of decline that both sets of fantasies reject out of hand. Since the early
1980s, when the industrial world turned its back on the hopes of the previous
decade and slammed the door on its best chance of a smooth transition to
sustainability, every attempt to bring up the limits to growth or propose a
useful response to the impending mess has been assailed by partisans of both
fantasies; the rhetoric of progress—"I’m sure they’ll come up with
something," "There are no limits to the power of technology,"
and so on—has been precisely balanced by the rhetoric of apocalypse—"Jesus
will come soon so we don’t have to worry about that," "It’s too late
to save humanity from inevitable extinction," and so on. Thirty years on, the breakthroughs have
proven just as elusive as the catastrophes, but the rhetoric still plods
onward.
Behind both sides of that rhetoric, I’ve come to believe, is
a habit of thought that’s deeply ingrained in contemporary consciousness—the
habit, mentioned toward the end of last week’s post, of postulating an
imaginary "real world" that contains some set of desirable features
the actual world lacks, and then condemning the actual world for its failure to
measure up to the imaginary one. Few
corners of modern have escaped that habit of thinking, and fewer still have
avoided being harmed by it.
Take politics, which used to be the process of finding
acceptable compromises among the competing needs and wants of members of a
community. These days that process has
been all but swamped by supporters of an assortment of fictive worlds—consider
the heavily fictionalized pre-1960s America that features so heavily in
Christian fundamentalist rhetoric, in which Christian faith was universal,
happy families all prayed together on Sunday mornings, and gays, atheists, and
other deviant types were safely quarantined in New York City, for example, or
for that matter the assorted utopias of political correctness to be found on
the other end of the political spectrum. People who are struggling to make the
actual world conform to some imaginary one are rarely prepared to accept the
compromises, the negotiations, and the quest for common ground that make for
functional politics, and the result is the stalemate between entrenched
factions that pervades politics on nearly all levels today.
From public health to personal ethics, from dietary choices
to the management of the economy, the words are different but they’re all sung
to the same old tune. Abstract theories
about how the world ought to work are treated as descriptions of how the world
actually works, and heaven help you if you suggest that the theories might be
judged by comparing them to the facts on the ground. All the usual contortions
of cognitive dissonance then come into play when, as so often happens, measures
that are supposed to improve public health make it worse, moral stances
intended to improve the world cause more harm than good, diets that are
supposed to make people healthy actually make them sick, economic programs
proclaimed as the key to lasting prosperity run one economy after another
straight into the ground, and so on.
What’s the alternative? Simply put, it involves setting
aside our own desires, preferences, and sense of entitlement, and paying
attention to the way things actually happen in the world.
It’s important not to overthink what’s being said here.
Philosophers since ancient times have pointed out, and quite rightly, that
human beings have no access to absolute truth; the world as we experience it
comes into being out of the interaction between the "buzzing, blooming
confusion" of raw sensory data and the structures of the individual
consciousness. Whatever its relevance to the deeper questions of philosophy, a
subject I don’t propose to address here, the world as we experience it is as
close as we need to get to reality to apply the proposal I’ve just made. In the
world as we experience it, some things happen reliably, other things happen
unpredictably, and still other things never seem to get around to happening at
all—and it’s not hard, even across cultural and linguistic barriers, to find
common ground concerning which things belong in which of these categories.
That quest for common ground among the vagaries of
individual experience is among other things the basis of modern science. The
theory of gravitation is an elegant mathematical way of summing up the
fact that billions of individual human
beings have had the experience of watching something fall, and each one of
those experiences had important features in common with all the others, as well
as with such apparently unconnected things as the apparent movements of the Sun
in the sky. The kind of knowledge found in the theory of gravitation, and the
whole range of other scientific theories, is not absolute truth; it’s always at
least a little tentative, subject to constant testing and reformulation as more
data comes in, but it was good enough to put human bootprints on the Moon, and
it was gained by setting aside narratives that played on the preferences of the
individual and collective ego, in order to listen to what Nature herself was
saying.
Suggest that this attentiveness to what actually happens is
a good idea when dealing with falling rocks, and you’ll get little debate. It’s
when you suggest that the same approach might be usefully applied to falling
civilizations that the arguments spring up, but the principle is the same in
both cases. Over the last five thousand years or so, scores of societies have
risen and fallen, and their trajectories through time, like those of falling
rocks, have had important features in common.
It’s easy to insist that because contemporary industrial society differs
from these other societies in various ways, those common features have nothing
to say to our future, but what follows this claim? Inevitably, it’s yet another
weary rehash of the familiar, failed narratives of perpetual progress and
imminent apocalypse. If the present case really is unprecedented, wouldn’t it
make more sense either to suggest some equally unprecedented model for the
future, or simply to shrug and admit that nobody knows what will happen? Both
these responses would make more sense than trotting out what amounts to scraps
of medieval theology that have been dolled up repeatedly in pseudosecular drag
since the market for religious prophecy turned south in the eighteenth century.
I’d like to suggest that it’s high time for both narratives
to be put out to pasture. No, I’ll go further than that. I’d like to suggest
that it’s high time for all our stories about the world and ourselves to be
tested against the yardstick of what actually happens, and chucked if they
can’t meet that test.
What I’m suggesting here needs to be understood with a
certain amount of care. Knowledge about the world takes two broad forms, and
the connection between them is rather like the connection between a pile of
bricks and lumber, on the one hand, and the house that will be built out of the
bricks and lumber, on the other. The
first form of knowledge is history in the broadest sense of the world—a sense
that includes what used to be called "natural history," the careful
collection of observed facts about the world of nature. Before Isaac Newton
could sit down in his Cambridge study and work out the theory of gravitation,
hundreds of other investigators had to note down their own observations about
how things fall, and tens of thousands of astronomers down the centuries had to
look up into the sky and notice where the little moving lights they called
"wanderers"—planetoi in Greek—had turned up that
night. That was the gathering of the bricks and the milling of the lumber that
would eventually be used to build the elegant structure of Newton’s
gravitational theory.
Long before Newton got to work, though, his brick-hauling
and lumber-gathering predecessors had picked up quite a bit of relevant
knowledge about how rocks fall, how planets move, and a range of similar
things, and could explain in quite some detail what these things did and didn’t
do. The theoretical models they used to explain these regularities of behavior
weren’t always that useful—I’m thinking here especially of those medieval
mystics who were convinced that rocks were head over heels in love with the
Earth, and would fling themselves in the direction of their beloved whenever
other forces didn’t prevent them from doing so—but the regularities themselves
were well understood. That’s the kind of knowledge that comes from a close
study of history. Once enough historical data has been gathered, that empirical
knowledge can often be summarized and replaced by a coherent theory, but that’s
not always possible; if the subject is complex enough, the number of examples
is small enough, or both, a meaningful theory may remain out of reach. In that
case, though, the empirical knowledge is well worth having, since it’s the only
real knowledge you have to go on.
The trajectory of human civilizations over time is an
immensely complex subject, and the scores of societies that have risen and
fallen during recorded history still forms a small enough data set that strict
theoretical models may be premature. That leaves the empirical knowledge
gathered from history. It’s impossible
to prove from that knowledge that the same patterns will continue to happen,
just as it was impossible for one of the medieval mystics I mentioned to
disprove the claim that now and then a rock might have a lover’s quarrel with
the Earth and fall straight up into the sky to get away from her. Still, when
known patterns are already at work in a given society, it’s reasonable to
accept that they’re likely to continue to their normal end, and when a given
theory about the future has failed every time it’s been proposed, it’s just as
reasonable to dismiss it from consideration and look for alternatives that work
better in practice.
This is what I’d like to ask my readers to do. Each of us
carries around an assortment of narratives about what the future might be like,
most of them derived from one or another corner of popular culture or from
various older traditions and writings. Each of us uses those narratives,
consciously or otherwise, as templates into which scraps of information about
the future are fitted, and very often this is done without paying attention to
what history has to say about the narratives themselves. Instead, I’d like to suggest that it’s worth
taking a hard look at those narratives whenever they surface, and checking them
against the evidence of history. Has anything like this happened before, and if
so, what results followed? Has anyone ever believed something like this before,
and if so, how did that belief work out in practice? These are the kinds of
questions I encourage my readers to ask.
I’m aware that this is a heavy burden—much heavier than it
may seem at first glance, because it involves discarding some of our most
cherished cultural narratives, including those that have become central to a
great many modern religious traditions. Those of my Christian readers who
believe that their scriptures predict a total overturning of the order of history
in the near future may feel that burden more sharply than most. To them, I
would point out that the belief in an imminent and literal apocalypse is only
one of several ways that devout Christians have interpreted the scriptures. A
great many believers in Christ have seen his words on the Mount of Olives as a
prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, and the Book
of Revelations as a prophecy—put in symbolic terms to get past Roman censors—of
the impending decline and fall of the Roman Empire: both events, it bears
noting, having far more immediate importance to their audiences than, say, a
cataclysm in the distant twenty-first century.
My Jewish readers will have to fill me in about the range of
accepted interpretations of the prophecies
concerning the Messianic kingdom—it’s not a subject I know much about—but I’d
be very surprised, given the ebullient nature of rabbinic debate, if there
weren’t plenty of options as well, including some that don’t require history to
be stood on its head.
My atheist readers will have an easier time of it in one
sense but, in at least some cases, as hard a time in others. To believe that
the universe is mere matter and energy without purpose or consciousness, that
humanity is simply one more biological species to which evolution has granted a
few unusual gifts, and that nobody is peering anxiously down from the sky to
observe our species’ foibles and bail it out from its mistakes, might seem to
offer few obstacles to the sort of realism I’m proposing. Still, I’ve met an
embarrassingly large number of atheists who accord humanity the same privileged
status and glorious destiny that prophetic religions claim for their believers.
It might seem odd to portray humanity as the Chosen Species while denying that
there’s anybody to do the choosing, but such is the nature of the return of the
repressed. To those of my atheist
readers who indulge in such imaginings, I would encourage attention to the
presuppositions of their own beliefs, and a particularly close study of past
claims of progress and apocalypse that didn’t happen to include a god as one of
the stage properties.
To those of my readers who share my Druid faith, or any of
the other movements in today’s inchoate but lively field of nature-centered spirituality,
I hope I may speak even more frankly.
For those who recognize the ways of Nature as a revelation of the powers
that create and sustain the cosmos, as Druidry does, the notion that the world
will abandon her normal ways and jump through hoops like a trained seal to
satisfy our sense of entitlement or our craving for revenge is really pretty
absurd. To study nature from a Druid perspective is to learn that that
limitation is the first law of existence, that what looks like a straight line
to us is merely part of a circle too large to see at a single glance, that
every movement generates and is balanced by a corresponding countermovement,
that what systems theory calls negative feedback and an older way of thought
calls the Royal Secret of equilibrium governs all things and all beings, with
or without their conscious cooperation. In such a cosmos—and all things
considered, a strong case can be made that this is the kind of cosmos we live
in—there’s no room for the paired fantasies of perpetual progress and imminent
apocalypse, except as exhibits in a display of the odd things human beings talk
themselves into believing from time to time.
