New Pantheon (01) — Progress
The king of the gods of the modern age
[Letter #004]
Good morning, son.
Happy New Year, for what that’s worth. These days, people are still wishing each other well at the beginning of the year, resolving that they’ll improve their lot, and enjoying the days away from work, but the shiny finish has worn away. Some folks are facing the new year with a good deal of dread. I’ve seen at least one article wherein the author simply wishes to survive this cycle around the Sun.
I still think that Famine is the horseman that will visit us next, but Pestilence (who, you will recall, is a modern invention) has been doing a fine job. Covid is still the disease we’re dealing with predominantly these days. Four years later, and we’re still seeing 2 million new infections each day. I recently read that it’s now considered more deadly than tuberculosis, but no one really cares anymore. Could you imagine that? A flippant disregard for a TB outbreak. That’s essentially what we have with Covid.
But, we’ve been told by the people in charge that everything is fine and has gone back to “normal.” Not that anyone really believes there’s any such thing as “normal” anymore. More than that though, the pandemic just has to be over. It has to. Why? Well, because we came up with a vaccine, we did our social distancing, we washed our hands, we wore those masks for years! We did what was necessary and we overcame it! … Right?
No. The real reason that it just “has” to be over is because to not be so would be against a very popular religion of our time. We laid down our sacrifices before the altar and recited all of the proper incantations, and we were accordingly bestowed the blessing of the most popular god of the modern era. Born about four centuries ago, along with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, he has become more popular, and likely more powerful, than any other deity currently worshiped. He is Progress, and almost no one alive today even realizes they’re faithfully following his tenets.
It’s an odd thing to consider: a planetary religion, spread throughout the globe alongside a close cousin, Capitalism, who is powerful in his own right, the faith of Progress has become the stealthy zealotry of civilization. The faithful of the world know the tenets, they’ve embodied the credos, and they know that sometimes sacrifices must be made. But, the twist is that they don’t realize they’re even worshiping. They would never admit to being faithful to Progress, much less that there ever even was such a god. There absolutely is though, and people here today know his story by heart.
I’m by no means the first person to make this assessment. John Michael Greer has identified this faith in at least one of his books, The Retro Future. Christopher Ryan also identifies the tendency in his book, Civilized to Death: the Price of Progress, although he is not so romantically inclined as to personify Progress as a god, opting instead to refer to it as the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress,” or NPP. Tom Wessels wrote on The Myth of Progress, and Ronald Wright penned A Short History of Progress, both fairly brief books that help summarize the concept. I should have copies of each of these books on the shelf. Help yourself.
Ahem! Now, then! According to all of the holy texts, humans are here because we evolved faster than other animals. Evolution, you see, means to “advance to a higher level.” Certainly, it does not mean “to adaptively change to suit the environment.” Anyway, because of this faster evolution, we were chosen to ascend to apex predator level. You could even look at the charts with the small apes, followed by larger ape-like people, and then there were human-looking people with tools. That’s the path of Progress! We then continued to develop farming, and then cities, and then states, and then global trade, and we are destined to fly amongst the stars as an intergalactic species!
Sure, there were setbacks, like wars and slavery, wars about slavery, slavery because of the warfare, and racism, sexism, class divisions, torture, and all the rest, but… We learned, you see! Those were gropings around in the dark in our attempt to find the one true way. Those were necessary mistakes, sacrifices if you will, on the path of Progress!
Of course, you’ll have to excuse my over-the-top melodrama of the previous two paragraphs. In my day, satire is basically dead, so one must engage the ol’ hamfist to make a point. What I’m driving toward is that there is this belief that the way things have happened was the only way they could have happened. I’m not sure why humans developed this tendency, but we often seem to look to the past as a foregone conclusion, as though there was absolutely nothing else that could have occurred. We’ve always done this, so far as I can tell, but Europeans really kicked that behavior into high-speed with the onset of industry.
Technological advances came faster and faster, and there was a very good reason for this: easier access to abundant, cheap energy. But, we humans usually didn’t bother to consider that it was the energy that made any of it possible. We praised our own cleverness, our ingenuity. We saw decisions made in the past as inevitable. The outcomes were destiny and our victory was assured. We became the master species in our own minds, and we used expressions like “subjugate nature” and “conquer the wilderness.”
Easier access to energy made access to food much easier as well. Food, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is the primary prerequisite for the reproduction of life. Take a look, if you can find it somewhere, at the population levels of the world from around 1500 CE to present, and it’ll be pretty obvious where the tech started to affect food levels. From the process of canning food to the use of diesel-powered tractors to simply trading fossil combustion for fertilizer. I should explain that last one.
Around 1900 CE, the population of the planet was creeping close to 2 billion, and you’ll find a good bit of food shortages happening around that time. This was more due to economic idiocy than actual production limits, but supercharging the food production system with cheap energy was the way we chose to fix everything. We could possibly have gone a different way, shifted away from Capitalism that forced the cheapest option while concentrating wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and found a method of organic-style agriculture that would have produced enough for everyone. We could have distributed food fairly to make sure everyone was fed. But, we obviously didn’t do that. We threw cheap energy at the problem!
From the work of good ol’ Mr. Haber and Mr. Bosch came the process by which we could, at the cost of significant energy, change hydrogen and nitrogen from the air into ammonia. We can look past the small detail that this process was largely invented to make sure that Germany could produce enough explosives to support their habit of going to war in the first half of the 20th century. That’s not the important part — path of Progress, and all that! The important part is that we could feed the entire planet on the cheap. Erm — that is, the process of distribution was still mostly left to the market, and the market was using Capitalist principles, so we’ve never had a time without starvation, but again — Progress!
It’s episodes like the one above that reinforce the faith in Progress. When the chips are down, humanity seems to figure out a solution, and we are assured our happy days again. On the one hand, I don’t think everyone would agree that we figured things out quite so well. I’m sure the millions of Americans (the folks we call “Indians”) who were here in 1491 CE wouldn’t think that we made the best calls. I mean, we’re close to destroying our capacity to live on the planet, and we’ve done so in only a couple of hundred years.
On the other hand, just because those of us who survived figured out a way to do so does not in any way prove that we’re destined to continue doing so, nor does it even mean that we’re particularly good at it. It’s just what has happened. It’s like the guy who jumps from a tall building and is convinced that he is immortal because, until he hits the ground, the fall has not yet killed him. Or the slower example, the guy who believes he cannot die because every day of his life so far has shown him that death has not happened, and thus there is no reason to believe that it will happen.
That’s the key element of the faith in Progress: it has all led to this. That “this” is just another point on the timeline, the linear path from the caves to the stars. It’s the delusion that we’re destined to keep on going, keep on figuring things out, and keep on avoiding cataclysms because “that’s what we’ve always done before.”
Teleology — explaining phenomena in terms of the purposes they serve rather than causes by which they arise.
You might have heard people say, “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of something.” People have said that throughout my entire life. Often, people did think of something. Whether that something actually solved a problem was debatable, but whether it created new problems was often without any doubt. But, you know what that quote is, right?
It’s an expression of faith in Progress. “They,” who will do the “thinking,” are the expected recipients of whispers of Progress, the prophets who will show us the next few steps on the path. We’re “sure they’ll think of something” because, well, they have to. History, according to the faith, is not a chronicling of the circumstances by which we happened to come about to this point. History, through the lens of Progress, is the myth that shows how each step was illuminated that led us from the darkness and into the light, each directed by destiny.
The faith teaches that each decision made in the past was not only the correct one, but that it was the only way that things could have unfolded. This part is usually more just understood than ever openly expressed. Just as one example, the Cuban Missile Crisis could have easily led to the annihilation of all humans across the globe, but these days, it’s hard to imagine that situation turning out any other way except how it did. If we had all died, so faith in Progress would have us believe, then how would we have ever evolved electronics into the Internet? That’s just part of the human experience, right? As though one necessarily derived from only one other.
It’s like the buffoon who turns to you after you both escape a terrifying situation to say, “You see? I knew all along that nothing bad would happen.”
The faith is the result of a massive dose of hubris that humanity has struggled with for as long as we’ve kept records. It’s the hubris that we’re better than other species, that we’re destined for more, that we’re the chosen ones. Some cultures overcame this hubris, but the vast majority today suffer from it.
It’s pretty bold to presume that we’re somehow a special case, considering that more than 99% of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Mammals, as a Class, aren’t really that old in geological time. Humans, in our modern form, have only existed for a blink on a geological scale, and the brief ten-thousand years or so during which we have developed this hubris has been but only a fraction of a blink. Hell, dinosaurs, in the form of modern day birds, have lived for a couple hundred million years. We fire apes sure do have some audacity.
But, do go on, oh prophet of Progress. Tell us all how we’re the golden ones, destined for the stars. Here are some of the chants of the faithful:
“I’m sure they’ll think of something.”
“It’s better now than it’s ever been at any point in history.”
“Civilization is what separates us from the animals.”
“Too-cheap-to-meter fusion energy is about 20 years away.”
John Michael Greer, in the book I cited above, takes particular issue with one especially wasteful aspect of the faith of Progress. Namely, anything newer is by definition better. The latest iteration of any item, concept, phrase, or whatever is considered to be the best available, and that all previous productions should be summarily discarded. On occasion, of course a newer thing would necessarily be better than an older version, but Greer compellingly argues that this is rarely the case.
If we take it as a given that “new” is equal to “superior,” then it’s easy to see how the principles of Capitalism can take care of the rest. Products will be forced to be made of cheaper materials, cheaply and quickly crafted, and destined for obsolescence within a short time frame in order to maximize profits. Throw it out and buy a new one! I’ll discuss externalized costs another day. Meanwhile, the pollution you see around you is due in part to this behavior.
I sincerely hope that by the time you read this letter, son, it will be a far simpler task to see through the lies of Progress. I fear that the circumstances around you that will make that task simpler will not be very kind to you though. It’s hard to worship Progress in the times of famine, disease, and war.
I couldn’t say where I first heard it, but I’ve always really liked the phrase, “If you’re heading in the wrong direction, progress is the last thing you need.”
I love you very much, son. I hope you’re safe.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
