Farewell to Progress?
Progress is a peculiar word. It is a core word for our
discourse about things like politics or science and, as is usual with such core
words, we tend not to examine it. Progress is our model for understanding good
things that happen. It is a symbol
for good things that happen, of course, because MANY good things that happen
have nothing to do with it. It is a framing word not a direct signifier and, as
such, its use is oblique and non-literal. A pot hole in a road is filled.
That’s progress we might say except it isn’t. Filling a pothole is regress for
the road is being returned to its original state. We don’t say this however
because the word regress has the wrong connotations. To go back to something is
bad and to go forward to something is good. This means that all desirable
‘returns’ are actually motions forward. We can spell this out with a bit more
exactness. Why is filling a pothole a good thing? Well, it is part of an
overarching process: a ‘meta-narrative’ if you like. This process entails the
gradual removal of more and more potholes over time till the ideal point is
reached of a pothole free world. The road is not returned at all! It is a sign
or promise of a future state and that is why we celebrate it. It is a step in
the direction of a universe of flawless transportation. It is, if we want to
speak in religious terms (and the term progress is nothing, ultimately, but a
religious term), a sign of the fulfillment. Like a Christian miracle it is an eschatalogical sign. This implies that
progress is a natural process at very least. Perhaps it is even a divine one.
It is a form of divine/natural necessity and thus often cast in the form of
inevitability. It is the arc by which the world bends. It is the final result
in which evil and good are reconciled and the desire of suffering humanity
fulfilled. One result of this is that, if only we put our shoulder to the
wheel, victory is inevitable. For certain Christians and Marxists this is a
direct, conscious, literal belief. For others less blessed (or cursed?) it is a
semi-conscious belief that slips out in their language, metaphors or implicit
attitudes.
This belief has many virtues not the least of which is
that it motivates people to efforts they might not otherwise have undertaken.
This is true whether the belief is literal or merely implicit. In other
respects, though, the word progress may seriously cloud our thinking and
replace concrete perception of problems with misty vapors of abstraction. In
this way it can function in the same baleful way as words like ‘freedom’,
‘prosperity’ or ‘security’ do. The reason for this is that the word progress
does not just refer to a straight, linear ascent in the overall quality of
things. ‘Progress’ is also a narrative and dramatic structure or framing
device. For instance, progress is framed as exponential. If we have gone from x
to y in 50 years we shall go from y to q in the next 50. Thus, looking back on
how the world has changed in the last two centuries we project similar
unimaginable changes in the next two. Progress does not plateau or stabilize.
This is not an empirical fact but an assumed framing. Consider the example of
aeronautics. In WW1 a Sopwith Camel could fly at just under 120 mph. By the end
of WW2 the fastest aircraft could go over 500 mph. By 1975 (roughly the same
interval) an SR 71 spy plane could fly at around 2200 mph. The rate of increase
(about x 4 or 5 give or take) remained about the same over two 30 year periods.
What, however, has happened in the interim? Do we now have aircraft 4 to 5
times faster than the SR 71? Not a bit. In the last 40 or so years both
commercial AND military aircraft have gotten SLOWER. The speed of air
transportation has SLOWED. In the case of commercial aviation this is because
of cost; pushing higher speeds expends more fuel. This raises costs and lowers
profits for airlines. Also, sleek airframes optimized for speed have the
drawback that you can stuff fewer people in them. Airlines want SLOWER air
travel and SLOWER aircraft to save money and boost profits. Militaries too are
not interested in the fantasy of Mach 6 aircraft. This is because higher speed
flight regimes bring more and more cost in metals and alloys (due to heat
friction) with less and less actual military benefit. One is better off, in
fact, trading off raw maximum speed for other features like stealth or higher
sustained cruising speed. This means that a technology can plateau. This means,
in fact, that progress can plateau and reach a kind of stasis. There is no
necessity to things getting brighter or shinier or faster. Still, I have no
doubt that someone somewhere thinks, even as I write this, that in 2122 planes
will fly at 8000mph as they now can fly at 2000mph. IF something like this were ever to come to pass however (and I can't categorically say it can't!) it would depend not on the necessary exponential curve of progress but on chance, need and opportunity.
This example is fairly innocuous. Far less innocuous is
when the framing of progress as exponential is applied to things like economic
growth. At that point progress is directly ecocidal. It becomes an abstraction
that literally burns up anyone or anything that could actually BENEFIT from
progress. The abstraction itself becomes the end to which everything concrete
is sacrificed; rather as the freedom to own guns would remain absolute even if
every living human were shot. Progress, like freedom, is an abstraction that
kills. This is especially the case since progress, of its very nature, is
opposed by regress. If there is progress there must be regress and if there are
agents, torchbearers of progress there must be agents of regress. If progress
is absolute good then the corollary follows, regress is absolute evil. The
agents of regress are the forces of aboriginal darkness who represent
ontological evil in a grand Manichean drama. I use the word ‘aboriginal’ here
deliberately for of course the archetypal opponents of progress are the
indigenous people whose lands are required (by a sort of cynical, lawless
eminent domain) to make progress a reality. This is because progress is also
framed in narrative terms not just in mathematical curves. It is a narrative of
light and dark, of dramatic clash and conflict between forces inherently good
and others inherently evil. To go back to mythology progress is the battle of
the Olympians and Titans. Myths, when secularized, are murderous and indeed the
Greeks knew this for Orestes murders his own mother in the name of Apollo the
god of reason and light. Progress in the 20th century left mountains
of corpses in both the liberal democratic and socialist worlds. Superficially
there has been some reckoning with this. Capitalists and socialists will cop to
the massacres and genocides with their lips though not really with their
hearts. In an unguarded moment a socialist will indeed reveal that he thinks
the Holodomor was really just a famine or if not that certainly provoked by the
reactionary Ukrainians or if not THAT at least ‘not as bad as those people are
saying it was’. A capitalist will just as casually reveal that if people die
and cultures are wiped out that is terrible and sad but a worthwhile price to
pay for ‘jobs’ and ‘prosperity’. The 20th Century visions of progress are
inherently not accidentally murderous. As we now like to say, murder is a
feature not a bug.[1]
I have a suspicion, more than a suspicion, that
emancipatory projects that seek to reduce institutional cruelty and injustice
can proceed quite happily without the narrative or exponential calculus of
progress. I hope they can also proceed without myths of return to the golden
age as these are equally problematic (THAT though is for another essay). This
is for a number of reasons. One is directly practical. If progress happens it
is because of a vanguard, an elite that is ahead of the curve. To be ahead of
the curve is deeply individuating vis a
vis those wretches who are behind it. Reactionary stances are also deeply
individuating but in a different way perhaps. Yet for a stance to be
individuating it cannot be common. The vanguard, to be a vanguard, must be
small and exclusive. It must appear in the world in the form of a sect of the
pure and a sect of the pure can only constitute itself by excluding the impure.
This is why the sect is constituted by a litmus test of ritual vocabulary or
action. These tests must be specific enough to form a clear boundary but vague
enough so that nobody is safe from them. These tests are utterly inimical to
developing mass movement. A ‘progressivism’ which falls prey to sectarian logic
wills its own failure. Of course the sectarian is fine with this for his
failure only confirms his conviction that he has found an authentic
individuality that is too good and pure for this benighted world. If he fails
to bring others along that only shows what is wrong with ‘others’. Like the Old
Believers of Russia he will burn in his own church rather than conform to the
world. If our purpose is to make the world better we need to remove the
vanguard, the myth of the sacred few, from the myth of progress. One reason is
that the ‘sacred few’ are still all too human and can be as abusive,
manipulative and tyrannical as the rest of the great unwashed. This particular
vice is one to which the young are especially prey. Progressive-ism needs the
young yet the young are all about self-definition by exclusion. Nor have the
young, being young, figured out the limits of self-righteousness as a stance.
Hence the all too typical social media progressive who does not seek to
persuade or win over but rather to provoke, confront and exclude. This sort of
progressive dooms ‘progress’ for it is especially potential allies he works to
alienate as not being ‘pure’ enough. It is the pliability of youth that makes
progress possible but the arrogant folly of youth that undermines it.
There is another myth of progress and that is the myth
of erasure. This is the belief that there are certain identifiable types or
groups of people who are ‘fated to disappear’ because they belong to the past
not the future. If we are magnanimous we will allow this process to happen
naturally and inflict only rhetorical violence on such people. If, however, we
are inclined to put our shoulder to the wheel we will inflict physical
violence. Either way resistance is futile because progress is the necessary arc
of history and certain people are inherently on the wrong side of it. This myth
comes in several forms and will no doubt mutate into many more over time. To
revert to our example above indigenous people were, in the last century, tasked
with disappearing so progress could unfold. According to another hypothesis
popular in the last century religions, and hence religious people, were also
fated to vanish or, depending on locale, to BE vanished. You don’t need to talk
very long to certain ‘progressives’ to realize that Ukrainians are another such
people for their inherent existence and exercise of national sovereignty is
inconvenient to the cause of global ‘peace and order’. Plus, they must defer to
people who are concerned about red-baiting narratives in the U.S. and Canada
and please NOT be so tacky as to memorialize their embarrassing dead. Even
today we have many versions of the claim that ‘liberal values’ will win out
because bigots, fundamentalists, nationalists and patriarchs will die off and
be replaced by progressive youth.
It is my conviction that the myth of erasure DEEPLY clouds
our thinking about how to advance humane political agendas. This is because the
people fated to disappear show a strange reluctance to do so even if they are
called out and shamed. Nor will they disappear because the rebarbative
attitudes they express are rooted in permanent
human temptations. If one form of bigot disappears he will be replaced, as
night follows day, by a new one. If one form of church or one theology
disappears a newer, stranger one will take its place. Forms of oppression are
replaced by other forms of oppression as one vice drives out another. LIFE is a
permanent struggle and there is no community of shiny, happy, positive people
waiting to be born. This means, alas, that there will always be people who put
family, ethnicity, nationality or class over the universal demands of justice.
There will always be people who regard their religious or indeed political
beliefs as central to personal identity in a way that is contractive not
expansive. There will always be people who prefer the same to the other, the
familiar to the strange or self to the neighbor. There will especially always
be people who prefer imagined pasts to fabled futures. They will be stubborn in
this because all these things represent a certain kind or degree of value that
can be preferred to other values. Even if we could abolish things like
ethnicity, religion, nationality or property the underlying will to place the
particular above the universal will remain. It will simply find another object
to attach itself to. In this sense radical
progress cannot happen because the simple structure of human freedom precludes
it. If, as Kierkegaard says, freedom posits a synthesis, say of self and other
or passion and reason, the synthesis can always, inherently, be posited in two
ways. Evil is ineradicable whether one figures that truth as the Christian
notion of original sin or the tragic necessity of the Greeks. We can’t
‘progress’ our way out of the human condition.
But certain myths of progress, alas, makes no such concession possible.
This is because evil is not universal but particular to a class or type whose
elimination will bring on the golden age. If property, say, is an evil then there must be class or category of
person who embody that evil. These might be petite bourgeois shopkeepers or small
business owners to use one example. The removal of the evil is the removal of
the class. With the carriers of the plague of property goes property itself.
Thus, as I have been told by certain people, progress demands that we vandalize
the corner stores of small shopkeepers because they are a reactionary element
in society and enemies of true freedom. They are FATED to disappear and if they
are not disappearing fast enough we need to help them along by breaking their
windows and looting their shops. Since THIS is the case it doesn't occur to certain people to
ask whether real economic justice might involve convincing shop keepers that
they have interests in common with their workers. This means that the petite bourgeois simply become a solid voting bloc for the right. Again, it is more
important to maintain the purity/impurity distinction than it is to make common
cause and win. It is more important to disappear the specified enemies of
progress that it is to win them over. The lesson here, though, is an old one:
grace expands on nature is the medieval formulation of it. The particular loves
of humans are not canceled or removed but elevated. The particular is taken up
in the universal preserved and intact. People get to have families, religions
and corner stores. People get to have property they care for and about. People
get to have a preference for their own not in the idolatrous (and fearful) sense of clinging
to it against all reason and justice but as a basis for the outward expansion
of sympathy and respect for what belongs to others. Progress is not an oblation
of all that is particular or local. The ‘progressive’ message is better families,
happier nations, nicer shops and more reflective faith or spiritual practice for those who need or want such things. If
then we wish to change our current property relations (and property relations
DO change) the shop-keeper, even the dreaded capitalist, must find himself more
fully and freely in the new order than he ever could in the old. He should be
his old self taken up and transformed in the new so that in the deepest sense he gives up nothing. This is a much
easier sell than convincing such people they need to be cancelled or
replaced.
This, of course, raises the question of whether we need
myths of the future to do good in the present. I don’t actually know but I DO
think we can do without four particular myths. We do not need the myth of the
exponential curve. We do not need the myth of the Manichean struggle of light
and dark. We do not need the myth of the vanguard or the sacred few. We do not
need myths of erasure. All these things prevent us from seeing the present
clearly and doing good in it all in the name of a future we know to be a fable.
One reason for this is that we actually have so little purchase on the future
anyway. We are more or less forced to act in the now as ‘time and chance
happeneth to all’ and this bedevils all our power of prediction. At any rate,
as so many of our struggles center on the claims of particularity, loyalty and
identity over against broader communal demands for justice we might remember
the lesson of Antigone, The Oresteia and
Hegel’s fine reflections on them in the Phenomenology
of Mind: the old gods are not banished but find their truth in the city
that transcends but sublates them. They are nestled beneath the shrine of Ares
where they provide for the prosperity of the community in their beneficent, not
destructive or angry form.
[1]
One example of this is how mass shootings have become a core public ritual in
the United States particularly but also elsewhere. This is why they continue.
The ritual is, of course, the ancient one of human sacrifice. For the Aztecs
the universal (the self-activity off the sun) manifested as the negation of the
concrete life of the individual. In a weird way the universal FED on the
particular for its life and energy. The sun of 'liberty' is no different. It
demands death which deaths are given with a show of external mourning but deep
inward complacency. Plus, the sun was not gratified unless the life energy of the
individual was roused by resistance. The sun cannot be fed by suicide, only
murder. The lesson is clear. Freedom, like other abstractions, kills. It is the
very nature of an abstraction to kill for it negates the given and subsumes it
in itself as its truth and inner meaning. This is why it is no joke to say that
the freedom to own firearms can only be fully realized when everybody is dead
from a gunshot wound for freedom then has surmounted all conditions and
contingent limitations. It has surmounted THE condition and contingent
limitation which is life itself. It then stands in the naked purity of its
truth and self-identity like the sun and its indistinct, universal radiation.
When patriots say that the price of liberty is blood they have, in the most exact
terms, recapitulated the position of the ‘barbaric’ Aztecs whose ‘barbarism’,
it turns out, is our latest sophistication.
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