"Perpetual progress is no more possible than perpetual motion."

[ecosophia]

That's the opening line of an essay published last Friday on Quillette, an online magazine which is becoming one of the bastions of free inquiry in an internet otherwise saturated with censorship and conformism.  The essay itself's worth reading, but the thing that struck me is that the author, David A. Eisenberg, chose to begin his piece with that once-unthinkable idea. 

His timing seems appropriate.  One of my readers -- tip of the Druid hat to Ecosophian -- proposed on the other blog two days ago that June 20, 2008 is the day that progress ended; it was right about then that twin bubbles in oil prices and real estate values peaked and began a plunge that destabilized the industrial world and set shockwaves in motion that haven't damped down year. It was not long after then, for that matter, that the Russo-Georgian war gave notice to the world that the triumphalist attitudes that followed the Soviet Union's collapse and gave rise to such embarrassing outbursts of hubris as Francis Fukuyama's "An End to History?" no longer had any relevance to events in the world we actually inhabit. 

In an important sense, he's right, but the myth of perpetual progress never did have that much to do with events in the real world. It was a religious faith all along, a transposition of Protestant postmillennialist theology into the key of technofetishistic narcissism. The point I take away from the opening words of Eisenberg's essay is that we've now passed the point at which public profession of that faith is a social necessity. That being the case, an enormous number of constructive and creative possibilities are on the verge of opening up before us. Progress, after all, means nothing more than continued motion in the same direction; break the shackles of that rigid trajectory and it becomes possible to envision, pursue, and achieve a galaxy of less dismal futures. 

Still, it's important to realize the sheer scale of what is happening. A god is dying: a false god, some of my readers doubtless think (as indeed do I), but the deity named Progress was just as central to the lives of his devout worshipers as any other god can be. Heinrich Heine's 1834 outburst seems apropos:  "Don't you hear the little bells? On your knees!  They are bringing the sacraments to a dying god!"

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Are we looking at our 1989 then?

[ecosophia]

Potentially, yes.

[(Anonymous)]

You've been publicly questions the Great God Progress online for more than decade. Why do you think this is an indicator things have changed?

[ecosophia]

I'm a figure of the extreme fringe, and what I write can be (and of course generally is) dismissed out of hand by respectable thinkers. Quillette is not a fringe publication -- quite the contrary, it's become a widely respected venue of the center-right. That's a very significant difference.

A false god?

[(Anonymous)]

Hi!

Are you sure it is/was a false god?

Re: A false god?

[ecosophia]

Quite sure. The prophecies made in its name have flopped comprehensively and the blessings it was supposed to confer on its faithful followers have mostly gone missing.

[(Anonymous)]

John Gray in a recent video interview has stated that 2020 is very much Liberalism's equivalent to 1989. He asserts that it isn't so much that faith in progress is dying, but that it is liberal universalism that has come to an end. i.e. the fact that it is now clear that nations like Russia, China and India are going to evolve in their own pattern makes it impossible to continue the belief that liberalism is going to become the pan-global system of values and method of governance. This means that the Western intelligentsia are no longer in the flattering position of the vanguard of mankind, as they had once believed they were, and this realisation has a lot to do with why they are currently wigging out.

As Gray puts it in a recent article:

"Here another difference from the leftism of the ’30s emerges. With all its lies and crimes, communism was a universal movement. In contrast, woke movements are pretty much confined to decaying liberal societies. The demonstrations of the past months have had few serious reverberations beyond the post-Reformation West, and cancel culture is largely limited to the English-speaking world."

https://unherd.com/2020/07/what-the-woke-movement-shares-with-communism/

[ecosophia]

That sounds like Gray! He's quite right, too -- and the broader context is that the English-speaking nations are much less important than they used to be, and will become much less important still.

[(Anonymous)]

I am pretty sure Vladimir Putin speech said exactly the same thing not too long ago. As someone who is quite attached to the developing world, I fear what the decline might bring in the form of .. a more brutal/exploitative face of capitalism, and not that it already is not that, but as the current world order crumbles, the smaller nations in the south might face a challenge not seen since Europe's colonialist/imperialist adventure..

[1wanderer]

As always, a lot depends what you mean by words. "Progress" can be at least three things.
One is based on the idea that history is more than just One Damn Thing After Another, but has patterns and tendencies which play out over long periods of time. For the ancients, this was a long process of decline from a Golden Age.Later, you had cyclical theories of history from Vico and others, and in more modern times from people like Spengler and Toynbee. The Chinese also had theories of history which moved from growth to decline and back again. It's fair to say that these ideas are not as popular as they once were. Progress does exist, in other words, but it's temporary.
The difference with the second type is the element of teleology, where history is seen as doing towards some end (which is all that "telos" means). This is a religious view (it existed before Protestantism and is also found in Islam) but is now a minority opinion, even among believers. Marxism is often described as a Christian heresy, but it's more than that: it's the application of scientific laws to history and economics in a deterministic, Newtonian sense.
The view of progress I grew up with, in the 50s and 60s, was much more prosaic. It was the broadly Social Democratic view of what Popper called "piecemeal social engineering"; the idea that life would get better incrementally, that your children's' life would be better than your own. This was not primarily a question of scientific progress as such, more a political decision to use scientific developments for the good of the population as a whole. To a large extent this did happen in the generation after WW2, when life became easier and more secure for most people, largely because of mundane products like washing machines and refrigerators. But it was also a question of political will. The introduction of a National Health Service in Britain required no scientific breakthroughs or extra funding, but it incomparably improved the lives and health of British people, just by changing the way the system worked. Likewise, trivial investment in University expansion and the provision of education grants enabled me to have ten years' more education than my parents did.
This kind of progress was separate from, and not really dependent on, great scientific breakthroughs and technological fantasies. There's no reason why it could not have been continued: it was abandoned for political reasons, as elites became less afraid of social upheaval and revolution, and as the challenge of Communism faded: why bother, why not keep the money for themselves? This is behind what Franco Berardi has called "the end of the future." Not the literal, teleological, end of time, but the end of any pretence by elites that the world can actually get any better. Nobody now expects rising living standards, public services that at least get no worse, a political system that is even minimally responsive to the wants of the people, etc. The future, for the first time in a very long time, is advertised as getting worse for everybody except the super-rich, and if you don't like that, well, you can do the other thing. Mark Fisher, the British cultural critic, has written very well about the cultural effect of the sense of creeping despair that the abandonment of any hope in the future has produced over the last few decades.
The idea of endless, purely technological, progress actually broke down a long time ago. It's enough to compare the world of today with the world of, say, 1970, and then that world with the world of 1920, to see how little, frankly, has changed in the last fifty years. In some areas (space travel is the classic example) we've actually gone backwards. We could have dealt a lot better with the virus fifty years ago.
Although there are still techno-fantasists out there, they only seriously offer a glittering future for those with money and power. What do the rest of us get? The idea of progress has, like a lot of things, gone backwards. You remember that Hegel thought that the only really important progress was that of ideas - mundane reality would follow after. That's what Fukuyama was getting at of course: that Liberal Democracy had won the war of ideas by default. So in recent decades, we have been fed social progress as an alternative ideology to actually making lives of ordinary people better. We are given things to believe rather than things to eat, and notional freedoms rather than freedoms we can actually use. The current IdPol hysteria is in many ways the terminal stage of this policy, which hasn't worked, and has generated a lot of opposition. It's that ideology which is currently falling apart, and people all over the world are starting to think again about simple, effective ways of making peoples' lives better with the passage of time, which is what progress is - or should be.

[(Anonymous)]

About "We are given things to believe rather than things to eat"

"Work and pray, live on hay... you'll get pie in the sky when you die...."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMjy_ATbF8

[ecosophia]

The assumption that it's possible to make people's lives better with the passage of time, that this is a reasonable and normal expectation, is exactly the delusion I've been critiquing all these years, you know.

You have a point, especially about the lack of new tech since 1970, but-

[(Anonymous)]

Since 1970, lawyers broke America's light plane industry, Jimmy Carter's judge broke Bell Labs, and Nader's Raiders broke nuclear power. Our host thinks nuclear power's huge hidden costs were simply exposed. Even if he's right, there weren't many hidden costs of having a light plane industry, from which new plane types sprang like Oshkosh on steroids, or huge hidden costs to having Bell Labs. I liked Bell Labs. Founded by Thomas Edison (sort of) and with his legacy and all the ideas he stole from other geniuses, plus all the ideas of tens of thousands of technicians and a whole mess of Nobel Prize winners, it was a golden goose that should NOT have been killed. Japan, Singapore, and now China are the remaining first world countries, to whom the world looks for new tech. Like we used to be.
Engleberg.

[(Anonymous)]

The door has been given quite a crack open by a certain little virus. It has shown that things can change, and be changed, extremely quickly. There are consequences, some good some bad, but they aren't end of the world. Systems we have thought of as 'baked in' actually aren't - e.g. the western school system - we have also 'discovered' their weaknesses - with schools here in the UK they are set up incredibly linearly - so if you miss too much time you can't sit the exam. If you don't have an exam how can we possibly tell how good you are? Creating headaches all around and some are questioning the system. Quite right.
Jay Pine

[ecosophia]

No kidding. Here in the US a very large number of parents, having finally had the chance to see the vacuous makework that passes for education here, are planning on homeschooling their kids even after the virus panic is over.

Hallelujah

[(Anonymous)]

I remember when I first came across your work my response was "Hallelujah! Somebody gets it". I always suspected that we were on a downward trajectory and you where the first intellectual I came across who seconded and validated my suspicions. Thank you for all your work that you make freely available.

OT - I have been doing the cell salt protocol for nearly 2 months now and I notice that I seem to remember my dreams more easily but not much else. I dreamt about you and Sara last night. You were irritated about something but Sara was very pleasant. :-)

Re: Hallelujah

[ecosophia]

Well, I apologize for my dream-self's irritability. ;-)

Thoughts on concept of time and millennialism

[(Anonymous)]

Neptune's Dolphins

One aspect of this is how people conceive of time. Right now, it is time's arrow ever pointing upward. That came with St. Augustine and the other church fathers. Why have polyvarient time or circle time, when Christ ended all time? So we have monotheistic time of the straight line from Christ's Resurrection. Since Monotheism enforced its religious view on everyone, along with that come the arrow. Few people think in any other type of time. So Progressivism is an offshoot of time's arrow.

But is time really like that? That is a long discussion that philosophers have and are having. How do people experience time? As for me, with my brain injury, I lost all sense of time. So I live outside of western time.

Millennialism is based on the time's arrow when the final days come, and of course we are all blessed with a new world. (Readers here probably knew that already.) Progressivism is millennialism done up in acceptable terms for patricians who want to better the rest of us. And make the U.S. the shining city on the hill (an old idea).

Obama was to be the Messiah, who would usher in the New Age. We were to have a New World blessed by Progress. Then Clinton was to carry the banner forward.....

The Anti-Christ got elected instead. So instead of being human, Trump is now heralding the awful part of the Final Days. This is one reason for TDS, we have still wait on the New Age.

Re: Thoughts on concept of time and millennialism

[ecosophia]

And since the 2012 fiasco, the New Age movement has been in freefall. No wonder chanting "Orange Man Bad!" has taken the place of any more constructive activity...

Trump and the Gods

[(Anonymous)]

Turquoise Exogenous Filbert
Well I was a squirrel in a former life, so being a filbert in this one.

I have brought up the notion of Trump being sent by the Gods. I think that the God of Progress was created over the years by people's faith. Now that leads into the often discussed question of did humans create the Gods or did Gods create humans who sensed Gods. Pondering that, I think the God of Progress was created by humans. However, I also think that the Gods existed before humans. So I believe that what is going on is a battle of the Gods, with the human created ones dying off.

For me, TDS is the last dying gasp of these Gods to re-enforce their grip on the human mind. They could be called mind parasites in their grip on people's brains. All this self-flagellation is a part of the true believers trying to reassert their power over all.

Of course, I believe that the Ancient Powers will probably win out. They may be breaking this world to create a new one. What that world will be is beyond me. Other than it will be alien to this world.

Neptune's Dolphins.

Re: Trump and the Gods

[ecosophia]

I like to distinguish between gods, who are superhuman intelligent beings, and egregors, who are the product of the consciousness of a group of human beings, and are sometimes mistaken for gods. Progress is an egregor -- the collective group-mind of industrial civilization, with its obsessive fixation on an imaginary future. Egregors can exert a great deal of force on the thoughts of those who feed them; it's not at all incorrect to think of them as mind parasites, though they can also be used constructively. But they can go insane, and then things get really crazy for a while.

[(Anonymous)]

The article was a good read in and of itself. No quibble on the myth of Progress.

An aside: some Christian friends of mine were having an online conversation about the current dystopia unraveling in the Northwest, and many of them were firmly in the camp of fear for the liberties being lost in the mayhem of the moment (ignoring, of course, Paul's advice about how Christians ought to accommodate their rules, as many do). This prompted me to consider Liberty and Justice, two goddesses, both with iconic statues in the nation's history, both invoked in the Pledge of Allegiance, and both, apparently, in some degree of opposition today. Our worship of deities is perhaps always imperfect, yet even more so for those who are unaware (as with Progress) of whom they worship.

[ecosophia]

A case could be made that one of the values of religion is that human beings invariably worship something, and it's better to do so consciously and have some control over the process than to do so unconsciously and be completely at the mercy of the gods.

[monkofshellcreek]

I find it mildly amusing that the date proposed as marking the End of Progress is the date of my 10th wedding anniversary. Also, interesting that that date very nearly coincides with the summer solstice.

[peter_van_erp]

Ecosophian chose that date because it was the Summer Solstice in 2008. It also happens to be my 28th wedding anniversary!

[(Anonymous)]

You’re on the extreme fringe in a country that thinks the New York Times is the epitome of stodgy mainstreamness. In the country of the mad..

Also, I swear true blue to you, Druid of Hu, that (this time) I am not trying to sneak in an extra kitten. I just thought everybody might enjoy seeing how, in the top picture, the adult cat’s tail looks like a furry tentacle 🐙. Does Cthulhu have pets?

https://goodmorningkitten.com/kitten/4506/

[(Anonymous)]

Ummm...I thought that's what we were...

[ecosophian]

From an occult perspective, where on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life would you place the false god of Progress? The god may be false and dead at this point, but there was some real force behind it. Curious kabbalists query.

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds like an excellent theme for meditation! ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Bronze Age Pervert calls the various progressive ideologies (communism, liberalism etc.) "diddler ideologies", because if they were ever to reach their utopian endpoint where there is no more poverty, misery and hard labour, then there would be nothing for people to do but diddle around with minor hobbies and little odd jobs.

[ecosophia]

Funny! True, but funny.

[(Anonymous)]

Quillette is great! Would you ever pitch them an article?

[ecosophia]

I've considered it. When I have spare time, maybe...

[(Anonymous)]

I was half expecting there to be 538 comments here.....