Stop Looking for Progress
I’ve been reading Kurt Vonnegut’s letters lately. I’m about half-way through and I can see how success as a writer (or getting older) is liberating him to be more outspoken about his humanist views. It’s good to see, yet I’m starting to cringe because I already know that this is all going to end so badly. The bitter disappointment of A Man Without a Country is waiting there in his future like the sword of Damocles. That book was so painful to read because of the grief and the sense of betrayal on every page. We all felt it as George W. Bush dragged America down into shame and degradation but Vonnegut seems to have felt it more than most.
Perhaps because he had higher hopes for the world than the rest of us.
Maybe it’s because those letters have sensitised me that I’m seeing the same thing all over the place – not the despair but the hope.
It’s particularly obvious on Twitter – a social medium in which I actually enjoy indulging. People there are selected – by me – to be the voices I want to hear. For the most part they are writers, artists, geeks and scientists. They’re a pretty left-leaning, libertarian, environmentally-conscious, well-educated, articulate, and politically correct bunch. They try to stay positive and up-beat. (Many of them are trying to sell their books, so they would, right?) And they strive to find what is good and getting better in our world.
Yet, every now and then, a chink appears in the positive thinking. Some new GOP insanity, some vicious piece of oppression, or animal cruelty, some new evidence of sexism, or racism, or blatant fuck-you greed, will make them shake their collective heads and say what a retrograde step it seems. They’ll lament the lack of progress this shows and they’ll hope for improvement in the future.
Well, I’m sorry guys, there will be no improvement. People will be just as evil in 2100 as they were in 1900. We’re not on some gradual, upward path. The Omega Point is not pulling us towards social or moral evolution. We are what we are and we will always be the same.
Progress is a dated, 19th Century, pseudo-religious concept. The real world doesn’t work like that. Evolution is mere change. It isn’t “improvement”. People should stop looking for progress. The best we can hope for in human affairs is to mitigate our shortcomings.
There’s a lot we can do in the mitigation arena. A huge amount. We can do science, we can educate ourselves, we can build fair and just societies, we can pass laws that protect the weak, and on and on. None of that will make us one jot better than we are, but it will make our lives better. We just need to be be honest about what we’re doing and why.
