I’ve been thinking and reading about this idea for several months and what follows is my attempt to capture something which I feel is critical – and at a point of crisis. I don’t know how well I’ve done it but it’s something I felt that I needed to write.
As dutiful consumers, we have been fed and swallowed-whole the idea that the story of human existence is one that can be described by using the word progress. I think this is wrong. I think what we have swallowed is a lie and that lie is now damaging our societies and our businesses in a profound way.
When Science replaced Faith as the deity that guards the ineluctable secrets of existence, the New Inquisition recruited the zealous foot soldiers of progress. This new religion has seduced tens of millions of devoted zombies, who march to its call; it spawned High Priests, snake oil sellers and chancers. But the very worst thing it has done is to make people in general, and politicians in particular, believe that everything in our lives can be explained away and measured. If it isn’t making progress, it has no value. If it can’t be measured, it has no value. If it cannot be turned into a profit, it is a waste of time and space. If it moves, monetise it.
Let’s be very clear: there is no progress in nature. There is only change. Because we see ourselves as the golden product of evolution, we describe the stages of evolution as progress towards the coming of humanity but that’s not the real story. Science actually has a name for change – it’s called entropy and it is an irreversible process of energy moving from structure to no structure. The whole universe is on this journey and the road is one way. At a point ahead of us in time (and don’t get me started on time), all of the energy in the universe will equal itself out – and there will be nothing.
And then let’s remember that we humans are part of nature. We forget that sometimes don’t we? We think we are above and beyond nature, that we can control nature and treat it as we like. Even the High Priests have cottoned on to the fact that we are milking the golden cow to death – but still we draw milk. A typhoon here, a record temperature there, it’ll be fine; Science will come up with a solution – we are humans, we are a higher form of life.
Except, of course, we’re not. We are a part of life, not above life.
There is a school of learning called ‘Big History’. I like this concept. The founder, historian David Christian, is Emeritus Professor of Macquarie University and has explained his thinking in a Youtube video1 that has been watched by more than 12 million people. Over 700 schools now run his course and development has been funded by the Gates Foundation (I know, I know, one of the High Priests…).
Big History is physics, social science and chemistry, all rolled into one holistic birdseye view of the 13.7 billion years of our universe. At maximum zoom out, Big History describes just 8 moments, called Thresholds when ‘Goldilocks’ conditions prevailed and created the preconditions for step change. Humans don’t appear on the scene until Threshold 6 and are distinguished in Christian’s narrative as the first species that could both create and preserve language, thus allowing for the accumulation of knowledge. Humans were the first species to be able to do this and we have created another species that is currently artificial but at the point of singularity will become as ‘real’ as we are.
So much for history. In a 13.7 billion year tale, the Anthropocene Epoch of the human domination of the planet is just a blink of the eye. And just a blink of a blink ago, call it 500 years, humans began to exchange their ancient cultural belief systems for a common worship of the God of Science.
Now I have nothing against Scientists; many of my best friends rattle test tubes and stare endlessly through microscopes, but they are the uncommissioned foot soldiers of a global army which has subjugated the world under a catechism which says that in Science lies truth; and that the measurement of this truth can be called progress.
Really, this was never agreed. Maybe I missed the meeting or someone forgot to take minutes but I haven’t seen it written down anywhere that we should regard our success as a race on the basis of scientific progress. I have written about this before but when did we agree that productivity was the way that one human should judge another? I am better than you and deserve more compensation for my betterness because I add more value. This is what we say, isn’t it?
The word ‘progress’ is, of itself, problematic. My Oxford Languages google offers two definitions:
forward or onward movement towards a destination (my emphasis)
development towards an improved or more advanced condition
If we take the first definition, what is our ‘destination’? Well that’s really asking what is the destination of life, which we can say, with great confidence, is death. Do we really want to make progress towards that goal? In fact, we try to do the exact opposite and cheat the grim reaper as long as possible – and we use science to do it. So by that measure, we might say that science is the device that we use to delay progress.
Let’s try the second definition for size: that seems more hopeful. Surely, the great God of Science is guiding us towards ‘an improved’, ‘more advanced’ condition? We hear about these advances every day, don’t we. Man given pig’s heart in transplant first; Musk says we must become an interplanetary species; new iphone 13 can cook bacon and eggs whilst measuring your sinus rhythm.
When did the Followers of the Sacred Measurement first begin to trample the peoples of faith? Hard to pin it down to 74 decimal places but perhaps we could settle on the fall of Constantinople in 1453? Over the ensuing centuries, faith has been contained, controlled, undermined, weaponized and cynically exploited by leaders the world over.
To be clear, I’m not promoting the virtues of faith either; the faithful burned, crucified, looted and dominated just as lustily as the scientific, profit seeking, colonials but my point is that – at some unheralded changing of the guard, around 500 years ago – humans stopped believing in what they couldn’t see and started to believe in what they could measure.
Progress was appropriated to be the gold standard of the Age of Measurement and we began to revere this progress above all else.
We chant progress when forests are razed to build eco-cities; progress when we set out into space because we have defiled our own planet so badly that we have all but cut Goldilocks’ throat; progress when we dam rivers to create hydroelectric power whilst displacing or destroying centuries old cultures down stream. Progress is biodegradable plastic; progress is electric driverless cars; progress is cashless consumerism.
And this poison has infected our education system – you can take it all the way back to the start of the ‘modern revolution’ when we had to round up our young from the fields and hedgerows and store them in warehouses that were run like detention centres. We called these warehouses ‘schools’ and pretty soon we developed the idea that we could even rank and rate the children with tests and by numbers so that we could identify the most productive who would add to the commonwealth of things. We created research based ideologies which said that a young human’s progress could be measured…in England they even created a weighing system that they actually named ‘Levels of Progress’ and a warehouse was ranked as ‘Outstanding’ if the young humans made more progress and faster than the warehouse down the road.
Progress towards what?
Where on earth are these ‘productive’ young people headed, other than into the destructive vortex of consumerism that is destroying humanity and heralding in, ever faster, the next Threshold of Big History: The Post Human period?
If we have to worship progress, if we need to believe that our existence needs that justification, here are some of the measures that I suggest would be more worthy than a better electric toothbrush:
- An end to war
- An end to poverty
- An end to malnutrition
- Universal collaboration towards the outcomes of the Paris Agreement
- Universal collaboration towards the Sustainable Development Goals
- A final and irreversible rejection of politicians who lie, cheat, scheme and allow suffering in their pursuit and retention of power
- An end to the intrinsic belief that some lives are better or more valuable than other lives
This would be real progress, would it not?
Our part in Big History, is not so big. It’s actually infinitesimally small and at some point, soon, we will not be here.
Can we not simply be here with compassion and kindness, for as long as Goldilocks takes to finish her porridge, and enjoy it together?
Why is that so terribly hard? Where do we all think we are going?
1http://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_%20history.html
