Progress
I know it’s been forever sense I last posted. Contrary to expectations, I’ve been very busy throughout the break making new friends and catching up with old ones. It’s been a blast so far and I’m only a week and a half into it – I still have New Years in New Orleans to look forward to. This is going to be a far less formal post than normal, being that this is not a Spinnaker submission.
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My thoughts lately have been more abstract than usual, crunching the problem of justifying my linear progressive political thought. Linearism is the idea that we’re going somewhere - that progress in thought and material is making mans lot somehow better than it was before. I confronted a mad genius about a month ago who challenged my thoughts on civilization and what progress really is. Mr. Vorchek was himself an anarcho-primativist. Though I wasn’t very impressed with his Ænemiac embrace of tearing down Western modernity for fear of failure, he did stir some thoughts that I had been dormant for awhile.
The two toughest questions stirred were thus: Is life truly better now than it was a decade, century, or millennia ago? And where are we going, what is this grand and noble vision?
To answer the first question, we must get to its root. What do we mean by better off? We could take Jeremy Bentham’s direction, and simply conclude that man’s lot can be gauged through his happiness. I don’t feel that qualitive judgments on our existence should be answered with hedonism. One of the core problems with this approach is that we’re measuring an absolute gain over time and not relative gains. Happiness is relative by nature. I do not find that our psychotropic-loving modern man is much happier than his ancestor of old.
So what then is an appropriate measuring stick? Perhaps I’m old fashioned, but I think the Greeks were on to something with there constant pursuit of the nature of justice. Being that we’re measuring these qualities absolutely, let us look at the advance of mankind over the past century both mentally and physically. Physically, one must look no further than the fields of medicine. Over the past century, we’ve watched the development of vaccines for Polio, Malaria, Influenza and other ailments that severely crippled and painfully killed off huge quantities of people bring these ailments under control. Government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s) like the World Health Organization stop epidemics in their tracks, like SARS last summer.
Mentally, Western Man is freer than ever. Though some like Foucault would argue that this freedom is all illusion, the very fact that I’m able to post online and have a friend across the Pacific read these ideas so that she can spread them into a “communist” country if she sees them fit speaks to one of the greatest virtues of the information age. Ideas are allowed, and do, spread like wildfire. A century ago, we were just beginning to harness the technology of relaying small messages across the Atlantic about events on either side of the lake. Common man could not spread his thoughts without getting published, where today almost anyone literate (provided they attend and use their free public education) can find a library with free internet access and self-publish just as I do.
In absolute terms, man’s general lot has improved enormously in the past century. His happiness has not. Mothers in Westernized nations don’t have to deal with high infant mortality rates, paralyzed and ostracized children with Polio, and Malarial mosquito’s. This does not mean that the pain of man has been alleviated or that new problems haven’t arisen, it’s only that problems that have solutions today are fixed. Relatively, we measure our lot not with our Great-Grandparent’s but rather with the Jones’s, our next door neighbor, which is why relative happiness will not increase with absolute gains.
To answer the second question, where are we going, I worded a horrible answer at the time. “Have you ever seen Star Trek? Imagine that, minus the interstellar travel and aliens,” was the best answer I could think of. What I meant by the answer was that in the fictional world of Star Trek, most of the problems of the industrial revolution had been resolved and mankind didn’t need to worry about the next harvest, having a roof over ones head, clothes on ones back, and consequently crime wasn’t an issue. This is not to say that men did not suffer, that spouses were always faithful, that parents and children did not die, or and that crime was never committed and that all were happy and none sad. Man would still judge his lot based on his fellow man, but by and large the plaques of the 20th century were solved. Wars, pain, and sadness still went on, but the reasons for sadness were far less severe than our reasons are today. Just AIDS is a horrible epidemic, wiping out a third the population in some African nations and affecting something like 1 in 40 Americans, it doesn’t hold a candle to bubonic plaque’s suffering.
The problem with primitivism thought, beyond that it is utopian in it’s own right, is that it goes contrary to human nature. The difference between humans and other extinct humanoids was that man was able to step outside of genetics to evolve. Unlike any other animal on earth, we don't need an extra chromosone to go from fires outside a cave to nuclear fission reactors. We were able to make tools, shelter, and clothing and improve upon them as necessity dictated. This continues today. We will find the cures for the diseases that ravage our people, we will find ways to alleviate grinding poverty, and we will work to educate children and adults. If nothing else, societies will do this to keep their competitive advantages against other societies.
For all its shortcomings, I have not lost faith in Western Civilization and the idea of progress that brought us where we are. My idea of progress has been refined over the past few weeks though. I don’t really feel that there is any one utopia that we ought to follow, but instead there are injustices to be alleviated. The essence of linear thinking in politics is problem solving and achieving goals, and there is nothing wrong with that. We will march on.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Politics Foucault Civilization Anarcho-Primativism
