The pointless debates over evolution discussed in last
week’s Archdruid Report post have any number of equivalents
all through contemporary industrial culture.
Pick a topic, any topic, and it’s a pretty safe bet that the collective imagination defines it these
days as an irreconcilable divide between two and only two points of view, one
of which is portrayed as realistic, reasonable, progressive, and triumphant,
while the other is portrayed as sentimental, nostalgic, inaccurate, and certain
to lose—that is to say, as a microcosm of the mythology of progress.
According to that mythology, after all, every step of the
heroic onward march of progress came about because some bold intellectual
visionary or other, laboring against the fierce opposition of a majority of
thinkers bound by emotional ties to outworn dogmas, learned to see the world
clearly for the first time, and in the process deprived humanity of some
sentimental claim to a special status in the universe. That’s the way you’ll
find the emergence of the theory of evolution described in textbooks and
popular nonfiction to this day. Darwin’s
got plenty of company, too: all the
major figures of the history of science from Copernicus through Albert Einstein
get the same treatment in popular culture. It’s a remarkably pervasive bit of
narrative, which makes it all the more remarkable that, as far as history goes,
it’s essentially a work of fiction.
I’d encourage those of my readers who doubt that last point
to read Stephen Jay Gould’s fascinating book Time’s Arrow, Time’s
Cycle. Gould’s subject is the transformation in geology that took
place in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when theories of geological
change that centered on Noah’s flood gave way to the uniformitarian approach
that’s dominated geology ever since.
Pick up a popular book on the history of earth sciences, and you’ll get
the narrative I’ve just outlined: the
role of nostalgic defender of an outworn dogma is assigned to religious thinkers
such as Thomas Burnet, while that of heroic pioneer of reason and truth is
conferred on geologists such as James Hutton.
What Gould demonstrates in precise and brutal detail is that
the narrative can be imposed on the facts only by sacrificing any claim to
intellectual honesty. It’s simply not
true, for example, that Burnet dismissed the evidence of geology when it
contradicted his Christian beliefs, or that Hutton reached his famous
uniformitarian conclusions in a sudden flash of insight while studying actual
rock strata—two claims that have been endlessly repeated in textbooks and
popular literature. More broadly, the entire popular history of uniformitarian
geology amounts to a “self-serving mythology”—those are Gould’s words, not
mine—that’s flatly contradicted by every bit of the historical evidence.
Another example? Consider the claim, endlessly regurgitated
in textbooks and popular literature about the history of astronomy, that the
geocentric theory—the medieval view of things that put the Earth at the center
of the solar system—assigned humanity a privileged place in the cosmos. I don’t
think I’ve ever read a popular work on the subject that didn’t include that
factoid. It seems plausible enough, too, unless you happen to know the first
thing about medieval cosmological thought.
The book to read here is The Discarded
Image by C.S. Lewis—yes, that C.S. Lewis; the
author of the Narnia books was also one of the most brilliant medievalists of
his day, and the author of magisterial books on medieval and Renaissance
thought. What Lewis shows, with a wealth of examples from the relevant
literature, is that nobody in the Middle Ages thought of the Earth’s position
as any mark of privilege, or for that matter as centrally placed in the universe.
To the medieval mind, the Earth was one notch above the rock bottom of the
cosmos, a kind of grubby suburban slum built on the refuse dump outside the
walls of the City of Heaven. Everything that mattered went on above the sphere
of the Moon; everything that really mattered went on out
beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, where God and the angels dwelt.
The one scrap of pride left to fallen humanity was that,
even though it was left to grub for a living on the dungheap of the cosmos, it
hadn’t quite dropped all the way to the very bottom. The very bottom was Hell,
with Satan trapped at its very center; the Earth was a shell of solid matter
that surrounded Hell, the same way that the sphere of the Moon surrounded that
of Earth, the sphere of Mercury that of the Moon, and so on outwards to
Heaven. Physically speaking, in other
words, the medieval cosmos was diabolocentric, not geocentric—again, the Earth
was merely one of the nested spheres between the center and the circumference
of the cosmos—and the physical cosmos itself was simply an inverted reflection
of the spiritual cosmos, which had God at the center, Satan pinned immovably
against the outermost walls of being, and the Earth not quite as far as you
could get from Heaven.
Thus the Copernican revolution didn’t deprive anybody of a
sense of humanity’s special place in the cosmos; quite the contrary, eminent
thinkers at the time wondered if it wasn’t arrogant to suggest that humanity
might be privileged enough to dwell in what, in the language of the older
cosmology, was the fourth sphere up from the bottom! It takes only a little
leafing through medieval writings to learn that, but the fiction that the
medieval cosmos assigned humanity a special place until Copernicus cast him out
of it remains glued in place in the conventional wisdom of our time. When the
facts don’t correspond to the mythology of progress, in other words, too bad
for the facts.
Other examples could be multiplied endlessly, starting with
the wholly fictitious flat-earth beliefs that modern writers insist on
attributing to the people who doubted Columbus, but these will do for the
moment, not least because one of the authors I’ve cited was one of the 20th
century’s most thoughtful evolutionary biologists and the other was one of the
20th century’s most thoughtful Christians. The point I want to make is that the
conventional modern view of the history of human thought is a fiction, a
morality play that has nothing to do with the facts of the past and everything
to do with justifying the distribution of influence, wealth, and intellectual
authority in today’s industrial world.
That’s relevant here because the divide sketched out at the beginning of
this essay—the supposedly irreconcilable struggles between a way of knowing the
world that’s realistic, progressive and true, and a received wisdom that’s
sentimental, nostalgic, and false—is modeled on the narrative we’ve just been
examining, and has no more to do with the facts on the ground than the
narrative does.
The great difference between the two is that neither
medieval cosmographers nor late 18th century geologists had the least notion
that they were supposed to act out a morality play for the benefit of viewers
in the early 21st century. Here in the early 21st century, by contrast, a
culture that’s made the morality play in question the center of its collective
identity for more than three hundred years is very good at encouraging people
to act out their assigned roles in the play, even when doing so flies in the face
of their own interests. Christian
churches gain nothing, as I pointed out in last week’s post, by accepting the
loser’s role in the ongoing squabble over evolution, and the huge amounts of
time, effort, and money that have gone into the creationist crusade could have
been applied to something relevant to to the historic creeds and commitments of
the Christian religion, rather than serving to advance the agenda of their
enemies. That this never seems to occur to them is a measure of the power of
the myth.
Those of my readers who have an emotional investment in the
environmental movement might not want to get too smug about the creationists,
mind you, because their own movement has been drawn into filling exactly the
same role, with equally disastrous consequences. It’s not just that the media consistently
likes to portray environmentalism as a sentimental, nostalgic movement with its
eyes fixed on an idealized prehuman or pretechnological past, though of course
that’s true. A great many of the public spokespersons for environmental causes
also speak in the same terms, either raging against the implacable advance of
progress or pleading for one or another compromise in which a few scraps are
tossed nature’s way as the engines of progress go rumbling on.
According to the myth of progress, those are the sort of
speeches that are assigned to the people on
history’s losing side, and environmentalists in recent decades have done
a really impressive job of conforming to the requirements of their assigned
role. When was the last time, for
example, that you heard an environmentalist offer a vision of the future that
wasn’t either business as usual with a coat of green spraypaint, a return to an
earlier and allegedly greener time, or utter catastrophe? As recently as the 1970s, it was quite common
for people in the green end of things to propose enticing visions of a
creative, sustainable, radically different future in harmony with nature, but
that habit got lost in the next decade, about the time the big environmental
lobbies sold out to corporate America.
Now of course once a movement redefines its mission as
begging for scraps from the tables of the wealthy and influential, as
mainstream environmentalism has done, it’s not going to do it any good to dream
big dreams. Still, there’s a deeper pattern at work here. The myth of progress assigns the job of
coming up with bold new visions of the future to the winning side—which means
in practice the side that wins the political struggle to get its agenda defined
as the next step of progress—and assigns to the losing side instead the job of
idealizing the past and warning about the dreadful catastrophes that are sure
to happen unless the winners relent in their onward march. Raise people to
believe implicitly in a social narrative, and far more often than not they’ll
fill their assigned roles in that narrative, even at great cost to themselves,
since the alternative is a shattering revaluation of all values in which the
unthinking certainties that frame most human thought have to be dragged up to
the surface and judged on their own potentially dubious merits.
Such a revaluation, though, is going to happen anyway in the
not too distant future, because the onward march of progress is failing to live
up to the prophecies that have been made in its name. As noted in an earlier post in this sequence, civil religions are vulnerable to
sudden collapse because their kingdom is wholly of this world; believers in a
theist religion can console themselves in the face of continual failure with
the belief that their sufferings will be amply repaid in heaven, but the
secular worldview common to civil religions slams the door in the face of that
hope.
The civil religion of Communism thus imploded when it became
impossible for people on either side of the Iron Curtain to ignore the gap
between prophecy and reality, and I’ve argued in an earlier series of posts
that there’s good reason to think that the civil religion of Americanism may go
the same way in the decades ahead of us.
The civil religion of progress, though, is at least as vulnerable to
that species of sudden collapse. So far, the suggestion that progress might be
over for good is something you’ll encounter mostly in edgy
humor magazines and the writings of intellectual heretics far enough
out on the cultural fringes to be invisible to the arbiters of fashion; so far,
“they’ll think of something” remains the soothing mantra du jour of the true
believers in the great god Progress.
Nonetheless, history points up the reliability with which
one era’s unquestioned truths become the next era’s embarrassing memories. To return to a point raised earlier in this
sequence, the concept of progress has no content of its own, and so it’s been
possible so far for believers in progress to pretend to ignore all the things
in American life that are blatantly retrogressing, and to keep scrabbling
around for something, anything, that will still prop up the myth. In today’s
America, living standards for most people have been falling for decades, along
with literacy rates and most measures of public health; the nation’s
infrastructure has been ravaged by decades of malign neglect, its schools are
by most measures the worst in the industrial world, and even the most basic
public services are being cut to Third World standards or below; the lunar landers
scattered across the face of the Moon stare back blindly at a nation that no
longer has a manned space program at all and, despite fitful outbursts of
rhetoric from politicians and the idle rich, almost certainly will never have
one again. None of that matters—yet.
Another of the lessons repeatedly taught by history, though,
is that sooner or later these things will matter. Sooner or later, some combination of events
will push cognitive dissonance to the breaking point, and the civil religion of
progress will collapse under the burden of its own failed prophecies. That’s
almost unthinkable for most people in the industrial world these days, but it’s
crucial to recognize that the mere fact that something is unthinkable is no
guarantee that it won’t happen.
Thus it’s important for those of us who want to be prepared
for the future to try to think about the unthinkable—to come to terms with the
possibility that the future will see a widespread rejection of the myth of
progress and everything connected to it. That wasn’t a likely option in an age
when economic expansion and rapid technological development were everyday facts
of life, but we no longer live in such an age, and the fading memories of the
last decades when those things happened will not retain their power
indefinitely. Imagine a future America where the available resources don’t even
suffice to maintain existing technological systems, only the elderly remember
sustained economic growth, and the new technological devices that still come
onto the market now and then are restricted to the very few who are wealthy
enough to afford them. At what point along that curve do the promises of
progress become so self-evidently absurd that the power of the civil religion
of progress to shape thought and motivate behavior breaks down completely?
It’s ironic but entirely true that actual technological
progress could continue, at least for a time, after the civil religion of
progress is busy pushing up metaphorical daisies in the cemetery of dead
faiths. What gives the religion of progress its power over so many minds and
hearts is not progress itself, but the extraordinary burden of values and
meanings that progress is expected to carry in our society. It’s not the mere fact that new technologies
show up in the stores every so often that matters, but the way that this grubby
commercial process serves to bolster a collective sense of entitlement and a
galaxy of wild utopian dreams about the human future. If the sense of
entitlement gives way to a sense of failure or, worse, of betrayal, and the
dreamers wake up and recognize that the dreams were never anything more than
pipe dreams in the first place, the backlash could be one for the record books.
One way or another, the flow of new products will eventually
sputter to a halt, though at least some of today’s technologies will stay in
use for as long as they can be kept functioning in the harsh conditions of an
age of resource scarcity and ecological payback. A surprisingly broad range of
technologies can be built and maintained by people who have little or no grasp
of the underlying science, and thus it has happened more than once—as with the
Roman aqueducts that brought water to medieval cities—that a relatively
advanced technology can be kept running for centuries by people who have no
clue how it was built. Over the short and middle term, in a world after
progress, we can probably expect many current technologies to remain in place
for a while, though it’s an open question how many people in America and elsewhere
will still be able to afford to use them for how much longer.
Ultimately, that last factor may be the Achilles’ heel of
most modern technologies. In the not too
distant future, any number of projects that might be possible in some abstract
sense will never happen, because all the energy, raw materials, labor, and
money that are still available are already committed twice over to absolute
necessities, and nothing can be spared for anything else. In any age of
resource scarcity and economic contraction, that’s a fairly common phenomenon,
and it’s no compliment to contemporary thinking about the future that so many
of the grand plans being circulated in the sustainability scene ignore the
economics of contraction so completely.
Still, that’s a theme for a different post. The point I want
to raise here has to do with the consequences of a collective loss of faith in
the civil religion of progress—consequences that aren’t limited to the realm of
technology, but spill over into economics, politics, and nearly every other
dimension of contemporary life. The stereotyped debates introduced at the
beginning of this post and discussed in more detail toward the middle will be
abandoned, and their content will have to be reframed in completely different
terms, once the myth of progress, which provides them with their basic script,
loses its hold on the collective imagination. The historical fictions also
discussed earlier will be up for the same treatment. It’s hard to think of any
aspect of modern thought that hasn’t been permeated by the myth of progress,
and when that myth shatters and has to be replaced by other narratives, an
extraordinary range of today’s unquestioned certainties will be up for grabs.
