Over the last eight and a half years, since I first began
writing essays on The Archdruid Report, I’ve fielded a great
many questions about what motivates this blog’s project. Some of those
questions have been abusive, and some of them have been clueless; some of them
have been thoughtful enough to deserve an answer, either in the comments or as
a blog post in its own right. Last week brought one of that last category. It
came from one of my European readers, Ervino Cus, and it read as follows:
“All considered (the amount of weapons—personal and of
MD—around today; the population numbers; the environmental pollution; the level
of lawlessness we are about to face; the difficulty to have a secure form of
life in the coming years; etc.) plus the ‘low’ technical level of possible
development of the future societies (I mean: no more space flight? no more
scientific discovery about the ultimate structure of the Universe? no genetic
engineering to modify the human genome?) the question I ask to myself is: why
bother?
“Seriously: why one should wish to plan for his/her long
term survival in the future that await us? Why, when all goes belly up, don't
join the first warlord band available and go off with a bang, pillaging and raping
till one drops dead?
“If the possibilities for a new stable civilization are very
low, and it's very probable that such a civilization, even if created, will
NEVER be able to reach even the technical level of today, not to mention to
surpass it, why one should want to try to survive some more years in a
situation that becomes every day less bright, without ANY possibilities to get
better in his/her lifetime, and with, as the best objective, only some low-tech
rural/feudal state waaay along the way?
“Dunno you, but for me the idea that this is the last stop
for the technological civilization, that things as a syncrothron or a manned
space flight are doomed and never to repeat, and that the max at which we, as a
species and as individuals, can aspire from now on is to have a good harvest
and to ‘enjoy’ the same level of knowledge of the structure of the Universe of
our flock of sheeps, doesen't makes for a good enough incentive to want to live
more, or to give a darn if anybody other lives on.
“Apologies if my word could seem blunt (and for my far than
good English: I'm Italian), but, as Dante said:
“Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.”
(Inferno - Canto XXVI
- vv. 112-120)
“If our future is not this (and unfortunately I too agree
with you that at this point the things seems irreversibles) I, for one, don't
see any reason to be anymore compelled by any moral imperative... :-(
“PS: Yes, I know, I pose some absolutes: that a
high-tech/scientific civilization is the only kind of civilization that
enpowers us to gain any form of ‘real’ knowledge of the Universe, that this
knowledge is a ‘plus’ and that a life made only of ‘birth-reproduction-death’
is a life of no more ‘meaning’ than the one of an a plant.
“Cheers, Ervino.”
It’s a common enough question, though rarely expressed as
clearly or as starkly as this. As it happens, there’s an answer to it, or
rather an entire family of answers, but the best way there is to start by
considering the presuppositions behind it.
Those aren’t adequately summarized by Ervino’s list of ‘absolutes’—the
latter are simply restatements of his basic argument.
What Ervino is suggesting, rather, presupposes that
scientific and technological progress are the only reasons for human existence.
Lacking those—lacking space travel, cyclotrons, ‘real’ knowledge about the
universe, and the rest—our existence is a waste of time and we might as well
just lay down and die or, as he suggests, run riot in anarchic excess until
death makes the whole thing moot. What’s more, only the promise of a better
future gives any justification for moral behavior—consider his comment about
not feeling compelled by any moral imperative if no better future is in sight.
Those of my readers who recall the discussion of progress as
a surrogate religion in last year’s posts here will find this sort of thinking
very familiar, because the values being imputed to space travel, cyclotrons et
al. are precisely those that used to be assigned to more blatantly theological
concepts such as God and eternal life. Still, I want to pose a more basic
question: is this claim—that the meaning and purpose of human existence and the
justification of morality can only be found in scientific and technological progress—based
on evidence? Are there, for example, double-blinded, controlled studies by
qualified experts that confirm this claim?
Of course not. Ervino’s claim is a value judgment, not a
statement of fact. The distinction
between facts and values was mentioned in last week’s post, but probably needs
to be sketched out here as well; to summarize a complex issue somewhat too
simply, facts are the things that depend on the properties of perceived objects
rather than perceiving subjects. Imagine, dear reader, that you and I were
sitting in the same living room, and I got a bottle of beer out of the fridge
and passed it around. Provided that
everyone present had normally functioning senses and no reason to prevaricate,
we’d be able to agree on certain facts about the bottle: its size, shape,
color, weight, temperature, and so on. Those are facts.
Now let’s suppose I got two glasses, poured half the beer
into each glass, handed one to you and took the other for myself. Let’s further
suppose that the beer is an imperial stout, and you can’t stand dark beer. I
take a sip and say, “Oh, man, that’s good.” You take a sip, make a face, and
say, “Ick. That’s awful.” If I were to say, “No, that’s not true—it’s
delicious,” I’d be talking nonsense of a very specific kind: the nonsense that
pops up reliably whenever someone tries to treat a value as though it’s a fact.
“Delicious” is a value judgment, and like every value
judgment, it depends on the properties of perceiving subjects rather than
perceived objects. That’s true of all values without exception, including those
considerably more important than those involved in assessing the taste of beer.
To say “this is good” or “this is bad” is to invite the question “according to
whose values?”—which is to say, every value implies a valuer, just as every
judgment implies a judge.
Now of course it’s remarkably common these days for people
to insist that their values are objective truths, and values that differ from
theirs objective falsehoods. That’s a very appealing sort of nonsense, but it’s
still nonsense. Consider the claim often made by such people that if values are
subjective, that would make all values, no matter how repugnant, equal to one
another. Equal in what sense? Why, equal in value—and of course there the
entire claim falls to pieces, because “equal in value” invites the question
already noted, “according to whose values?” If a given set of values is
repugnant to you, then pointing out that someone else thinks differently about
those values doesn’t make them less repugnant to you. All it means is that if you want to talk
other people into sharing those values, you have to offer good reasons, and not
simply insist at the top of your lungs that you’re right and they’re wrong.
To say that values depend on the properties of perceiving
subjects rather than perceived objects does not mean that values are wholly
arbitrary, after all. It’s possible to compare different values to one another,
and to decide that one set of values is better than another. In point of fact,
people do this all the time, just as they compare different claims of fact to
one another and decide that one is more accurate than another. The scientific
method itself is simply a relatively rigorous way to handle this latter task:
if fact X is true, then fact Y would also be true; is it? In the same way,
though contemporary industrial culture tends to pay far too little attention to
this, there’s an ethical method that works along the same lines: if value X is
good, then value Y would also be good; is it?
Again, we do this sort of thing all the time. Consider, for
example, why it is that most people nowadays reject the racist claim that some
arbitrarily defined assortment of ethnicities—say, “the white race”—is superior
to all others, and ought to have rights and privileges that are denied to
everyone else. One reason why such claims are rejected is that they conflict
with other values, such as fairness and justice, that most people consider to
be important; another is that the history of racial intolerance shows that
people who hold the values associated with racism are much more likely than
others to engage in activities, such as herding their neighbors into
concentration camps, which most people find morally repugnant. That’s the
ethical method in practice.
With all this in mind, let’s go back to Ervino’s claims. He
proposes that in all the extraordinary richness of human life, out of all its
potentials for love, learning, reflection, and delight, the only thing that can
count as a source of meaning is the accumulation of “‘real’ knowledge of the
Universe,” defined more precisely as the specific kind of quantitative
knowledge about the behavior of matter and energy that the physical sciences of
the world’s industrial societies currently pursue. That’s his value judgment on
human life. Of course he has the right to make that judgment; he would be
equally within his rights to insist that the point of life is to see how many
orgasms he can rack up over the course of his existence; and it’s by no means
obvious why one of these ambitions is any more absurd than the other.
Curiosity, after all, is a biological drive, one that human
beings share in a high degree with most other primates. Sexual desire is
another such drive, rather more widely shared among living things. Grant that
the fulfillment of some such drive can be seen as the purpose of life, why not
another? For that matter, why not more than one, or some combination of
biological drives and the many other incentives that are capable of motivating
human beings?
For quite a few centuries now, though, it’s been fashionable
for thinkers in the Western world to finesse such issues, and insist that some
biological drives are “noble” while others are “base,” “animal,” or what have
you. Here again, we have value judgments masquerading as statements of fact,
with a hearty dollop of class prejudice mixed in—for “base,” “animal,” etc.,
you could as well put “peasant,” which is of course the literal opposite of
“noble.” That’s the sort of thinking that appears in the bit of Dante that
Ervino included in his comment. His English is better than my Italian, and I’m
not enough of a poet to translate anything but the raw meaning of Dante’s
verse, but this is roughly what the verses say:
“Consider your lineage;
You were not born to live as animals,
But to seek virtue and knowledge.”
It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing
about this passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a
model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put those
words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the
Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of
Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so deeply
in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these are the words
with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all known seas—a voyage
which took them straight to a miserable death, and sent Ulysses himself
tumbling down to eternal damnation.
This intensely equivocal frame story is typical of Dante,
who delineated as well as any poet ever has the many ways that greatness turns
into hubris, that useful Greek concept best translated as the overweening pride
of the doomed. The project of scientific and technological progress is at least
as vulnerable to that fate as any of the acts that earned the damned their
places in Dante’s poem. That project might fail irrevocably if industrial
society comes crashing down and no future society will ever be able to pursue
the same narrowly defined objectives that ours has valued. In that case—at
least in the parochial sense just sketched out—progress is over. Still, there’s
at least one more way the same project would come to a screeching and permanent
halt: if it succeeds.
Let’s imagine, for instance, that the fantasies of our
scientific cornucopians are right and the march of progress continues on its
way, unhindered by resource shortages or destabilized biospheres. Let’s also
imagine that right now, some brilliant young physicist in Mumbai is working out
the details of the long-awaited Unified Field Theory. It sees print next year;
there are furious debates; the next decade goes into experimental tests of the
theory, and proves that it’s correct. The relationship of all four basic forces
of the cosmos—the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and
gravity—is explained clearly once and for all. With that in place, the rest of
physical science falls into place step by step over the next century or so, and
humanity learns the answers to all the questions that science can pose.
It’s only in the imagination of true believers in the
Singularity, please note, that everything becomes possible once that happens.
Many of the greatest achievements of science can be summed up in the words “you
can’t do that;” the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics closed the door
once and for all on perpetual motion, just as the theory of relativity put a
full stop to the hope of limitless velocity. (“186,282 miles per second: it’s
not just a good idea, it’s the law.”) Once the sciences finish their work, the
technologists will have to scramble to catch up with them, and so for a while,
at least, there will be no shortage of novel toys to amuse those who like such
things; but sooner or later, all of what Ervino calls “‘real’ knowledge about
the Universe” will have been learnt; at some point after that, every viable
technology will have been refined to the highest degree of efficiency that
physical law allows.
What then? The project of scientific and technological
progress will be over. No one will ever again be able to discover a brand new,
previously unimagined truth about the universe, in any but the most trivial
sense—“this star’s mass is 1.000000000000000000006978 greater than this other
star,” or the like—and variations in technology will be reduced to shifts in
what’s fashionable at any given time. If the ongoing quest for replicable
quantifiable knowledge about the physical properties of nature is the only
thing that makes human life worth living, everyone alive at that point arguably
ought to fly their hovercars at top speed into the nearest concrete abutment
and end it all.
One way or another, that is, the project of scientific and
technological progress is self-terminating. If this suggests to you, dear
reader, that treating it as the be-all and end-all of human existence may not
be the smartest choice, well, yes, that’s what it suggests to me as well. Does
that make it worthless? Of course not. It should hardly be necessary to point
out that “the only thing important in life” and “not important at all” aren’t
the only two options available in discussions of this kind.
I’d like to suggest, along these lines, that human life
sorts itself out most straightforwardly into an assortment of separate spheres,
each of which deals with certain aspects of the extraordinary range of
possibilities open to each of us. The sciences comprise one of those spheres,
with each individual science a subsphere within it; the arts are a separate
sphere, similarly subdivided; politics, religion, and sexuality are among the
other spheres. None of these spheres contains more than a fraction of the whole
rich landscape of human existence. Which of them is the most important? That’s
a value judgment, and thus can only be made by an individual, from his or her
own irreducibly individual point of view.
We’ve begun to realize—well, at least some of us have—that
authority in one of these spheres isn’t transferable. When a religious leader,
let’s say, makes pronouncements about science, those have no more authority
than they would if they came from any other more or less clueless layperson,
and a scientist who makes pronouncements about religion is subject to exactly
the same rule. The same distinction applies with equal force between any two
spheres, and as often as not between subspheres of a single sphere as
well: plenty of scientists make fools of
themselves, for example, when they try to lay down the law about sciences they
haven’t studied.
Claiming that one such sphere is the only thing that makes
human life worthwhile is an error of the same kind. If Ervino feels that
scientific and technological progress is the only thing that makes his own
personal life worth living, that’s his call, and presumably he has reasons for
it. If he tries to say that that’s true for me, he’s wrong—there are plenty of
things that make my life worth living—and if he’s trying to make the same claim
for every human being who will ever live, that strikes me as a profoundly
impoverished view of the richness of human possibility. Insisting that
scientific and technological progress are the only acts of human beings that
differentiate their existence from that of a plant isn’t much better. Dante’s
Divina Commedia, to cite the obvious example, is neither a
scientific paper nor a technological invention; does that mean that it belongs
in the same category as the noise made by hogs grunting in the mud?
Dante Alighieri lived in a troubled age in which scientific
and technological progress were nearly absent and warfare, injustice, famine,
pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs about the world were
matters of common experience. From that arguably unpromising raw material, he
brewed one of the great achievements of human culture. It may well be that the
next few centuries will be far from optimal for scientific and technological
progress; it may well be that the most important thing that can be done by
people who value science and technology is to figure out what can be preserved
through the difficult times ahead, and do their best to see that these things
reach the waiting hands of the future. If life hands you a dark age, one might
say, it’s probably not a good time to brew lite beer, but there are plenty of
other things you can still brew, bottle and drink.
As for me—well, all things considered, I find that being
alive beats the stuffing out of the alternative, and that’s true even though I
live in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress show
every sign of grinding to a halt in the near future, and in which warfare,
injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs are
matters of common experience. The notion that life has to justify itself to me
seems, if I may be frank, faintly silly, and so does the comparable claim that
I have to justify my existence to it, or to anyone else. Here I am; I did not
make the world; quite the contrary, the world made me, and put me in the
irreducibly personal situation in which I find myself. Given that I’m here,
where and when I happen to be, there are any number of things that I can choose
to do, or not do; and it so happens that one of the things I choose to do is to
prepare, and help others prepare, for the long decline of industrial
civilization and the coming of the dark age that will follow it.
And with that, dear reader, I return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of decline and fall on The Archdruid Report.
