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Page added on January 14, 2013
The Myth Of Human Progress
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committeeillustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,”Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments”and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress”have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wrightsaid when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada. “They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today—about 2 billion—is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.”
“If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later,” he said. “If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance”paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,”derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
“The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever,” Wright said. “It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.”
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.
“Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away,” Wright said. “There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable—the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun—would disappear.”
“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”
“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.
19 Comments on "The Myth Of Human Progress"
Regtrys on Mon, 14th Jan 2013 10:21 pm
This makes us feel important. We must be strong if we can take everything down with us. Dance naked around the campfire, smeared in mud and shit. Drown in narcissistic righteousness.
You gotta love this kind of self inflated ego binge. Love it then leave it to the birds who can scatter the seeds in crap to the ends of the earth.
Arthur on Mon, 14th Jan 2013 11:11 pm
Watch the movie Space Odyssee 2001 to get a cristal clear illustration that evolution is real, very real. And that modern life is much to be preferred over that of a cave man. The article is too much of standard leftwing guilt trip. It suffices to say that the party is over and that we need to reinvent ourselves. Western industrial civilization is/was something the whole world aspired to, well maybe not the work, but certainly the fruits.
“The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way.”
You could also say that this process lead to a heaven on earth, sort of, at least compared to the past and that these ‘plundering and looting whites’ took it as their task to ‘develop’ the third world, a gesture unparalleld in history. Most Indians I have met professionally expressed their admiration for the accomplishments of European civilization and I never encountered any resentment about the colonial past. What they want to do, like the Chinese, is mimic the results of that civilization.
Now it turns out that the limits of growth are in sight, as was warned against by many as early as 40 years ago. We know we have to change, that we have to create means of production that are sustainable. It is going to be a difficult road.
Beery on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 1:08 am
Sorry, Arthur, but the idea that 2001 portrayed ‘caveman’ life accurately is a joke. The ‘Dawn of Man’ scenes showed vegetarian apes little removed from chimpanzees transformed by aliens into predatory animals. This is nowhere near the truth.
GregT on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 1:16 am
I know a lot of First Nations Canadians and I can say with conviction, that they despise what the white man did to their culture and to their lands.
The author of this article is absolutely correct. We were never meant to live as we do, self centred, egotistical, greedy, and immoral.
We have become the destroyers of our own planet and everything on it, including our own offspring.
If that is not a good indication of how far off track we really have become, I don’t know what is.
BillT on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 1:49 am
This is one of the best articles I have read in years! It lays out the problem and the cause in a clear, honest way. Basically the White Apes have decimated the world with their greed. The rest of the world had mostly learned to live with-in their resources but Europeans and their North American descendents never did. Greed killed our one chance to prove that we were sapient.
ken nohe on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 2:06 am
Interesting. In the end, somehow I still believe that the apes will run the laboratory, it is unavoidable.
Human progress is not a myth, it is destiny. What is evolving today is not really our brains anymore, this is far too slow to notice, it is our culture. It is also essential to understand that this trend is not linear. Our society can crash utterly, and still keep evolving. The Vikings could not build aqueducts anymore but advanced boat construction far beyond what the Romans could do. Roman numerals were an impediment to mathematical progress. etc… Future archaeologists will excavate Shopping Malls and understand why we made it so far but not much beyond.
Hugh Culliton on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 3:18 am
Bill: if you liked the essay by Chris Hedges, I recommend you read his “Empire of Illusion” and “War is the Force that Gives Us Meaning”.
ennui2 on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 3:42 am
This is a hit-piece against whitey. A lot of the overpopulating going on has a darker complexion. It’s not a race thing at all, it’s a human thing.
Arthur on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 4:52 am
Decimated? Thanks to the inventions of the ‘white ape’ we are with 7 billion and counting. Not that it has much future… The party was good as long as it lasted. Btw I am pretty sure that the author enjoyed all the goodies of western life himself to the max, just like all of us… Heinberg jetting to Sydney, Kunstler driving a car… Ah well, I think I will listen to white ape and looter Johann Sebastian Bach before I try to get some sleep and dream of the times that the noble wild man will rule the planet again.
Mike in Calif. on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 8:56 am
With test scores falling for forty years, it was inevitable that stupidity would trickle up to academia and blog posters. The indoctrinated-but-dumb students of the recent past are now the intellectual lighthouses, the conscience and the correctors of the evil West.
But I thank the author for setting stage for the sad but neglected tale – a pitiful dirge – of the Icelanders. As the author surely knows, the evil Danes began industrializing in earnest by the 1870’s. This would never have been possible if it wasn’t for Denmark’s pillaging of their extensive colonial empire. Without Denmark’s ruthless exploitation of Iceland, she’d still be in the Viking Age. God only knows just how much ice and basalt was stolen from colonized Iceland or how many hapless Thorgrimsons ended up slaving away in Danish creameries.
Let’s not forget the Germans. I say “Germans” and not “Germany” because they were already industrializing to rival England before the independent states unified. In fact, those sneaky kraut bastards (oh yeah, evil too) were insidiously clever. They were so sure they would soon have colonies to rape, resources to steal and natives to exploit that they went ahead and industrialized BEFORE acquiring colonies. Call it colonial credit.
Sigh. I fully expect the 21st Century to be ugly. But this article is the usual formulaic blame hailing from minds which believe in their superiority but which in fact are slogan clones.
The rest of the article is no better. We are treated to a whining and intellectually deficient diatribe, to Tainter’s failed pattern match, to patronizing psycho-BS, to rank racial Marxism. The ‘noble savage’ is lurking there to chastize us. Moral indignation is the shaman’s magic. Industrialization is the product of exploitation, not of science and energy. He laments anthropogenic ills but does so in anthropocentric terms. Yawn.
The truth about the human experiment is that evolution – as a pan-generational “intelligence” – has abdicated a large portion of decision-making to the real intelligence it has created. There is no avoiding this unless we eliminate humans altogether. We have a thousand, maybe 5000, years to figure it out. After that resources will become so dispersed (even with careful recycling) that technology will become nearly impossible. How difficult would a new “Industrial Revolution” be if, 5000 years from now, there are no concentrated energy or metals deposits?
In the shorter term (100+ years), with seven billion, we’re in for some major hurt.
Arthur on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 9:30 am
Haha, 64,000$ for Mike. Excellent formulated!
BillT on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 10:16 am
Really Mike? 5,000 years? Don’t you mean 50 years? And, no there will be no ‘Industrial Revolution’. We blew our load on this one big try. Mother Nature is not going to give the species another chance. Likely, we will be back to the level of the guy behind the machine-gun carrying ape. The one carrying the spear…IF we are lucky. Tech is over. It too took us in the wrong direction in the name of wealth and greed. It’s future is devolution just as our species devolves.
Seven billion today, seven thousand tomorrow. That is how fast it can happen with 20,000 nukes spread around the world. Maybe not even a day. An hour? Who will push the button first? Am I a ‘Doomer’? Maybe, but I am also watching closely the events happening around the world with almost 70 years of perspective. I would not be surprised if the nukes come out eventually.
Arthur on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 11:23 am
The proud owners of nukes are all in the northern hemisphere, which would mean that the Mel Gibson types would survive, in case things go out of hand, as there is hardly any spillover between both planetary halves. Correolis and stuff. A rather surprising evolutionary outcome and not bad for a former penal colony, I reckon.
J-Gav on Tue, 15th Jan 2013 10:07 pm
Good book review(s)with which I broadly agree heartily though I might still present a quibble.Is Wright right when he writes (sorry) “quite soon” concerning the demise of former civilizations? In fact, the Roman Empire took several centuries to fade into the Dark Ages. Mayan culture’s disappearance was no doubt somewhat shorter and the Eastern Islanders’ must have been noticeable even in human life-span terms. Still, not always “quite soon.” The fact is,we don’t know, even if BillT is surely much closer to the mark than Mike.
What I want to consider though, lies elsewhere. It’s intriguing that in an article written by a former seminarian there is no mention (or only very obliquely through shamanic cultures)of spirituality in the scheme of things. I’ll confess outright that I’m not ‘a believer’ in any traditional sense of the term. But I do recognize that designations such as ‘God; Allah; Brahman; the Source, the Tao, the Buddhist Void, the Ultimate Reality,Yahweh,etc’all point to the same thing. Or should we say No-thing?
Humanity’s desperate plight being what it is, could it be that some form of general recognition of who we really are is essential to prolonging the existence of as many living species on the planet as possible for more than, say, a century? That sounds pretty ‘New Age’ doesn’t it? Well, I’m in the over-60 crowd so … haven’t been there, ain’t goin’ there. In spite of that, however,I have read a powerful lot of spiritual literature (Gnostic, Kabbalistic,India, Far East, Sufis, Shamanic) and have noticed that most of the convincing stuff comes from people who re-center ‘being’ from the outside towards the inside. In other words, if we can’t be content within ourselves, how can we reasonably aspire to be so vis-à-vis others? Fairly simple question but the answer isn’t necessarily so easy to work out, is it?
Now here’s the tie-in with the article: one of the ‘key words’ in the text is “greed.” But greed is just a phantom, like so many of the other abstractions we take for reality.If a paradigm shift is to take place, perhaps we all (ie not just the banksters, pranksters, hucksters etc) need to have a good long look at our fundamental belonging to Nature (Deus sive Natura as Spinoza wrote). Just a thought.
Mike in Calif. on Wed, 16th Jan 2013 12:21 am
It’s true the current status quo is in big trouble in the next 100 years. But unless the collapse is unimaginably deep, as in BillT’s 7000 survivors, technology will survive. Mass market technology will never recover, but there are still concentrations of resources which will allow limited come back. I don’t think 5000 years is an unlikely window regarding the big question, “Where does intelligence lead?”
A de-evolution of the species is one possibility. Another is some religiously fanatical “sustainable” survival. But humans, even in the paleolithic state, are never in equilibrium with their environment. So I doubt the “live with nature” idea has any long term merit. And if it did, what is the proposition? Sing Kumbaya until the Sun goes nova?
My point is that there is only a brief window for an intelligent and technological species to define its role in the universe. Once the prerequisite resources are spent and dispersed no level of intelligence will allow another technological flowering. Left over is an “intelligent” but impotent species just waiting for natural events to bring an end. Of course, even “impotent” humans are still capable of significant destruction through agriculture, hunting, water diversion, etc.
If, indeed, BillT is right that technology dies in its one and only iteration, then the problem is resolved. Humans will struggle on, warring, destroying with whatever they can cobble together in ever diminishing tech and in ever diminishing numbers.
Aside from the fact that “sustainability” is a lie and exists no where in nature, the idea of a “sustainable” human future is just as pointless, just as hopeless and just as despairing as the impotent future of the previous paragraph. It is a hypothetical choice over which way to wait for extinction.
But I hold on to some small hope that humans will not be the biblical masters of ALL (impossible) nor a lobotomized sustainability cult (circumscribed) nor a resource castrated isolate (pointless) merely surviving, land-locked, on a tired planet.
Newfie on Wed, 16th Jan 2013 1:33 am
“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.” – Fred Hoyle (1964)
It seem to me that advanced civilizations of any type are not sustainable. They use non-renewable resources for various purposes but eventually these are depleted no matter how carefully they are conserved and recycled – entropy always wins. However it should be possible to construct some kind of civilization that uses only renewable resources and functions in a sustainable way.
Science sans conscience on Wed, 16th Jan 2013 2:01 am
Mike in Calif. > A de-evolution of the species is one possibility.
It’s a certainty, actually. Especially with much oil. The bright make silly apps for smartphones and don’t reproduce whereas the dull use those apps for Internet dating and extend their kind.
Arthur on Wed, 16th Jan 2013 12:06 pm
Automatic progress is not garanteed. After the Roman empire followed the theocratic dark middle ages for thousand years, until some Italians started to pick up interest again for ‘human development’ (Renaissance).
“It seem to me that advanced civilizations of any type are not sustainable.”
There is a recurring pattern in history that as soon as a civilisation starts to thrive, it will invariably attract those who are not able to sustain that civilization by their own energy/talent/interest (‘barbarian’ is the word the Romans used for these people), but nevertheless want to enjoy the fruits of that civilization. And the rot begins from within. Examples: India (Indus Valley), Roman empire and now the West, with the US leading the decay. Wonder where civilization will start all over again. I would gamble in Russia. For 200 years we have seen large migration from Eurasia to North-America, which largely came to a halt after 1970. Expect that migration to reverse in this century. Gerard Depardieu is an early adopter.lol
http://static.euronews.com/images_news/img_606X341_0601-depardieu-putin.jpg
J-Gav on Wed, 16th Jan 2013 4:53 pm
Newfie: That’s an interesting quote from Hoyle. About the only thing I’d disagree with is this sentence: “If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.” That would be giving pretty short shrift to indigenous peoples, at least if he’s equating ‘intelligence’ with ‘high-level technology,’ which he seems to be doing.
Those peoples, our true ancestors, are certainly the most adaptable on earth, otherwise they wouldn’t still be here, and with very rudimentary ‘technologies.’ Of course living in and from nature itself takes a different sort of intelligence than the one(s) we’ve chosen to develop.
Problem(s): we know how badly we’ve fouled the rivers, soils, oceans and forest they live from; in addition, remaining indigenous groups are located in areas which are likely to be most hard-hit by climate change.
Perhaps we should take a page from their ‘intelligence’ before it’s too late.