The myth of progress

I just turned in a paper for my American Urban Crisis class. I kind of took a broader view of the "urban" crisis and basically wrote more of a manifesto than a research paper. I put in references to links that vaguely fit the context - after I had finished writing in most cases. There's not much of anything new that I'm saying here (not to you at least). My only motive really is to introduce my thoughts to one more person (the teacher, Jody). I'm tiring of my redundancy, and I'm sure you are too. I won't be posting any more essays from classes because I'm one exam away from being finished with those. I'm going to slow down and try to stew for a bit so I can find what I actually have to contribute. I am finished with "rearranging abstractions." I can continue to tell my own story but there is not much new there for the moment. I look forward to sinking my teeth into some practical application in the near future - gardening, dumpstering, cooking, foodnotbombsing, working/playing/living/learning at Dancing Rabbit for three weeks, travelling, unschooling. I'm excited.
Onto the essay...

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As a culture, we perceive ourselves to be progressing over time, evolving in a linear fashion towards some preordained ultimate goal (presumably of perfection). This meme of progress manifests itself in the form of civilization. Civilization is characterized, according to the documentary Yu Koyo Peya, by these five things: “1. settlement of cities of 5000 or more people, 2. full-time division of labor, 3. concentration of surplus, 4. hierarchical class structure, 5. state-level political organization. And all of these depend on agriculture.”[1] Indeed, civilization was only made possible by the domestication and intense production of a few grains in only a handful of locations throughout the world, starting about 10,000 years ago. This Agricultural Revolution allowed (or maybe forced, rather) people to settle down, once they had taken control over their food supply, ensuring a surplus that would not require constant migration. This sedentary lifestyle gave rise to villages that eventually expanded into cities. In these cities, there is already an emerging ruling minority. Agriculture is very hard work (much much harder than the work required in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle), and people would not do it willingly unless they had to. The production of a surplus of food necessitates the storage of that surplus and its eventual redistribution. Storage of a surplus necessitates guarding of that wealth. Keeping food locked up allowed those in power to create a peasant class of farmers who they could control through having control over the food supply. Already, at the dawn of civilization, we have the making of the underclass, separated from the ruling class, which profits from and lives off of their labor.[2]

Civilization is predicated on continual expansion and growth, behaving like a disease or a cancer, fabricating a need for resources, and starting a vicious cycle of increasing size and complexity with increasing consumption of resources. The above agriculture that I discussed caused an increase in population size. This increase in population size necessitated a corresponding increase in food production. And the cycle goes on and on and becomes more and more vicious. As such, civilization is not sustainable. All past civilizations have collapsed, and this one will too. The extent to which a civilization can expand is limited, primarily, by the amount and quality of energy available to it. When only human and animal muscle power was available to civilizations (through the course of most of civilized history), they were somewhat limited in how far they could develop their complexity. Today, we are in the end-stage of an age of very cheap energy – in the form of oil. The rate of production of oil peaked in the United States in the 1970s, and it is estimated to peak worldwide in the next few years. What Peak Oil means is that after that point is reached, supplies will start to decline – it will become less and less cost-efficient to pump the remaining reserves. It does not mean that we will run out of oil completely, only that it will become much more expensive. Our entire economy and way of life is based on oil. Oil is used in manufacturing processes, in the synthesizing of plastics, in our industrial food production (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, transportation), and, of course, most obviously in the cars that many drive. And demand for oil is increasing. China and India are beginning to enter the oil market as larger buyers. Demand is increasing even as supply is just about to start on a never-ending decline. People may look to alternative energy sources such as nuclear, solar, and wind, but none of these are sufficiently scalable, cheap or fast enough to solve this coming crisis. Our global economy will crash, and with it, our civilization. [3]

Even if Peak Oil were not to happen, our civilization would be threatened in other ways in the coming years. The biological world, on a global scale, is already largely dead as a result of the combination of widespread industrial agriculture and industrialization in general. Global warming, dying oceans, vanishing topsoil, desertification, deforestation, water exhaustion/pollution, species extinction, and the exponentially booming human population all are symptoms of an environmental collapse.[4] Civilization is very literally a disease that is killing our planet, our biosphere, upon which we depend to live. We, as a civilization, may aspire, or think of ourselves already, to be above such dependence on the web of biological life, but we certainly are not. Without food, you die. All of the symptoms I just listed are all collecting together to make it increasingly harder to feed every human on the planet. As I mentioned before, we are, in effect, eating oil, and when it becomes too expensive, food will become too expensive to produce as well. It seems that an involuntary powerdown is inevitable. Our way of life as we know it is about to end. Civilization, should it recover, will have to progress by using some other energy source, but I doubt that the complexity (or progress) that this civilization reached will be matched, again, as I can’t imagine an energy source as abundant, rich, and flexible as petroleum.

What we base our concept of progress on is largely the level of complexity of the technology that we have created. When you look to point to some example of progress, you would be apt to point to the car or the computer.[5] Note that these are also objects of consumption. Besides technology, progress is also measured in how much resources are consumed and how much profit is made upon them. These are the standards by which we judge the success of our society, our way of life.[6] The level of complexity of our technology has progressed, yes, but human quality of life has not (not to mention the quality of life for the rest of the biosphere, as I have already mentioned). Prior to civilization, hunter-gatherers lived in the original affluent society, existing in relative leisure without having to work much at all to provide for their sustenance, and their “work” was more like our play. By contrast, today, the majority of people in the world live in abject poverty, working long hours in horrible conditions to barely eek out survival. There is a minority at the “top” who live in relative luxury thanks to the progress of civilization, but the costs (to humanity and the rest of the biosphere) for supporting such a lifestyle for such a small minority far outweigh the supposed benefits of civilized life. But even such affluence among the minority does not necessarily provide them with happiness. Americans, on average, are some of the most mentally sick people on the planet, if not physically as well (physically, Americans are the sickest among developed nations[7]). We are also the richest nation on the planet. I think I can safely call that a correlation, if not a causality. Civilization makes us sick. We are culturally conditioned to believe that primitive people lived lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.”[8] But this is simply not true. Modern healthcare is just beginning to return health standards among the rich minority to levels existing pre-agriculture.[9]

Progress is a meme, an idea in our culture, created and proliferated to make sure that everyone in civilization believes that civilization is the only way in which one can live in this world as a human. If it were not for this myth, people would feel free to abandon their miserable lives and adopt one of a myriad of different ways of living that are not predicated on continual growth, or progress. There is “no one right way” to live.[10] Humans have evolved to be adaptable to whatever environmental niche is open to them, but now we are so removed from even understanding our relationship with our environment, leading lives in artificial environments which we are very maladapted to, that instead of diversifying into a multitude of niches, we are culturally compelled to conform to a perceived one right way – civilization.

On the micro level, progress is perceived by the public in such areas as segregation in cities where none actually has occurred. This popular perception that we have evolved above such problems as racism masks the reality of the situation and prevents any action towards rectifying them. When the Kerner Commission report was released in 1968, stating that the country was moving steadily towards two societies – one black and one white, it surprised white society even though they were the ones who created and enforced policies of segregation all along.[11] But really, these are symptoms of much bigger problems that go all the way to the root of our culture, all the way to the root of our experience as humans on this planet. Ultimately, for us today, the problem of civilization and our acceptance of the myth of progress is not the result of some remote switch to agriculture thousands of years ago but rather stems from the trauma to our psyche that growing up in civilization causes. We need to deal with that psychological trauma, a split between mind and body, projecting itself in all of the dualities we see around us – white and black, left and right, citizen and foreigner, good and bad, civilized and primitive, progress and balance. We need to heal that split on a personal level in order to begin to heal the larger context of civilization.

What would be the goal of progress? What are we racing forward towards? What we call progress is the increase in control over our environment, shaping it to our liking. The desire for such control comes out of fear of uncertainty. If our goal is complete control of everything, of complete certainty, then we will have created the conditions of death (for that is the only certain thing in life). Civilization and progress go hand in hand, operating as a death-urge, ultimately desiring to eliminate all biological life, which is much too messy and chaotic to allow its continued existence. If you look deep enough, that is where we are heading, that is our “progress”. Progress as a positive, life-affirming process is a lie. The idea itself and its sinister effects are all too real, but the benevolent-looking mask it wears must be stripped off.[12]

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[1] Tyler Kimble, Yu Koyo Peya, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6579559693433526430

[2] Jason Godesky, The Thirty Theses, http://anthropik.com/2005/10/thesis-10-emergent-elites-led-the-agricultural-revolution/

[3] Matt Savinar, Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash, http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/Index.html

[4] William H. Kotke, Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species, 15.

[5] Kirkpatrick Sale, The Myth of Progress, http://awok.org/myth_of_progress/

[6] Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A call for institutional revolution, 9.

[7] Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe, Associated Press, http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/1500AP_Sick_America.html

[8] Thomas Hobbes, Levithan, Ch. 13.

[9] Jason Godesky, The Thirty Theses, http://anthropik.com/2006/01/thesis-22-civilization-has-no-monopoly-on-medicine/

[10] Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, 97.

[11] Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass, 4.

[12] Ran Prieur, The Soul of Progress, http://ranprieur.com/essays/soulprog.html

Tags:

• progress
• civilization
• collapse
• ecology
• meta
• rewilding
• unschooling