Of Progress and the End Game

 

Of Progress and The End Game..

As I read A Game of Thrones I am struck by one residing sentiment. Things have not changed for a very long time. Not only is it a fiction and a fantasy it also does not portray that one over whelming constant that has been a factor of human existence since the very earliest times.

The striving for change, innovation some call it progress. In this fantasy progress has stood still for over eight thousand years.

“As King Robert say’s; “the Wall has stood for eight thousand years”

Catelyn say’s-“The children of the forest,

Gone eight thousand years”

It is as though time in the seven kingdoms has stood still for over eight thousand years!  The fields of Camelot, King Arthur and Sir Ivanhoe,  the Middle Ages is a permanent fixture.

This is fine in fantasy but in reality humans want to and strive for progress at all costs. The imperatives of progress are strong.

Would we really want to stay fixed in the middle ages for all time?

Sociologist Robert Nisbet finds that "No single idea has been more important than...the Idea of Progress in Western civilization for three thousand years.",and defines five "crucial premises" of Idea of Progress:

1.      value of the past

2.      nobility of Western civilization

3.      worth of economic/technological growth

4.      faith in reason and scientific/scholarly knowledge obtained through reason

5.      intrinsic importance and worth of life on earth.

This faith in science, progress and advancement coupled with a blind faith in neo classical economics is having profound consequences on our planet and daily lives. The interconnectedness of the world will mean if our system fails or is disrupted by things beyond our control will mean that there will be not only a failure of one country but the entire world system. 

As Ronald Wright the great Thinker and Writer examines the meaning of progress and its implications for civilizations – past and present – arguing that the twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology that has now placed an unsustainable burden on all natural systems.

Many of the great ruins that grace the deserts and jungles of the earth are monuments to progress traps, the headstones of civilizations which fell victim to their own success. In the fates of such societies – once mighty, complex, and brilliant – lie the most instructive lessons...they are fallen airliners whose black boxes can tell us what went wrong.

—A Short History of Progress, p 8

 

Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.

The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.

We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands.

I was going to write a few paragraphs on our fate if we do not change our ways and how we deny it but Chris Hedges has explained it brilliantly in truthdig.  Here is the opening paragraph so profound and moving, I have to repeat it.

 

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

 

It is indeed hard to accept at an emotional level the fact that my children and grandchildren will inherit a world that is destined to ‘catastrophic failure’ and that I and my generation are  to blame for that.

 It is also a matter of mind numbing consciousness that the ‘powers that be’ are hell bent on denying and distorting the essential truth of this argument.

We must each in our own way try to fight against these awful powers and forces in any way that we can.

 

John Condliffe

24.9.13