Society is caught in the grip of false progress
The idea that progress is around the corner is hardly new. Progress as a bastion call frequently accompanies tragedy and violence. Case in point: Monterrey turned its beautiful landscape into the criss cross of potholed highways. Over four hundred years its enterprising founders first made it to that valley, with wagons and horses, to found the city. What would they make of these fruits of modern civilization? We stripped the visible mountain side of the Topo Chico as a raw ingredient for cement, visibly scarring the beautiful mountain vistas as a beacon of extractivism. The city is mired by congested traffic, and concrete structures and power lines drooping from every structure. Is this cacophony the best we could do with science, technology, energy and resources?
Yet this isn’t an invective against all notion that we can have civilization and progress. Frequently when one points out the deficiencies in our form of development, people immediately ask if we would denounce antibiotics and running water. Yet antibiotics and running water do not depend on the widespread devastation of the natural world. They depend on human resourcefulness, and an appreciation for life. Such is the false choice that encodes a sense of pessimism and bleakness in the minds of many, that it blurs this distinction.
Similarly, city planners, employees and business people do not create monstrosities like Brasilia out of spite, but due to bad ideas. Things get out of control when the those who decide on plans for other people won’t suffer the consequences for their bad decisions. A class stratified society where the few educated, wealthy and powerful decide for the many uneducated and poor cannot but end with general squalor and a few gated communities of wealth. The educated (in the broad scheme of things) know little more than their own entitlement. They also lack the humility to realize that the problems can be better solved by mobilizing society’s formidable cognitive resources — the perceptions, opinions and thoughts and even interests of the many. Instead, most people are ignored and a few ham-handed bureaucrats in cahoots with a few industries tend to produce dystopia. This pattern holds true in in soviet-style communism and in corporate-driven capitalism.
It’s this general pattern by which countries like Mexico, India and China plunge themselves into unbreathable air pursuing material wealth. They manufacture things the world often doesn’t need to squeeze out some cash for themselves. While surely a good thing that people have employment and access to more consumption goods — we can all agree that trashing the planet for a wad of dollar bills is probably not the high-point of the human species. This ranks top of my list as the most likely reason for which future generations will look back on us, their ancestors, and curse our graves. And yet this is precisely what the machinery of society is bent on.
It isn’t only so-called “developing” countries that are at fault for overlaying natural beauty with gritty nonsense made in a cheap factory. The United States is guiltier than most. The first inhabitants for the Bay Area must have thought they had found paradise. Indeed they had. With the temperate weather, beautiful redwood trees and lush hills and magnificent coastline, the area is still beautiful. Yet it isn’t helped by the gridiron of congested roads in San Francisco, nor the human denizens who sleep on the street for lack of a shelter, and a general lack of social concern or welfare for people who lack money, who battle addictions or suffer mental health problems.(fn) If this is our idea of acceptable “development”, it’s only a matter of time for paradise to be turned to Mordor.
Similar problems afflict urban areas everywhere. People, most of whom are encouraged to consume and never to create, can hardly invent new technologies or organizational structures better suited to local needs. Instead, they import the failed ones from other places (short-term usefulness always winning-out over long-term failure), or inherit the broken models from the past. This describes our schools, government, health institutions, and so on. Badly paved roads are easier to plan and build than collective public transportation. It is easier to erect a mass of cookie-cutter houses than to do it with craft and character. And it is easier to shrug and buy gasoline vehicles than build excellent, smooth-running public transport with all the infrastructure costs, or create electric transports. Locals may even call the imposition of technologies from abroad development or modernization, because a culture so used to a dynamic of low local creativity and intellectual output may get used to this kind of colonialism of the mind. Thus, countries like Mexico import search engines, social media networks, ride-hailing applications and so on without developing a better local solution to meet the need. Yet as always, deferring one’s own judgment merely sets the stage for future problems, and further entrenches “underdevelopment” in the culture. The secret is that only a state of mind of full responsibility entitles one to adulthood, one cannot merely wear the clothes of adults and expect life to happen a certain way.
And thus, the colonial mindset of “progress” invades places and through vague generality does violence to the local spaces. It took grit and heart and years of battle for Susan Jacobs to prevail over the stupidity of Robert Moses and rescue the West Village from the bulldozer and the highway. Yet most often, Robert Moses wins. This tendency is inherent in our images of success. People still think it is acceptable for some suited expert to decide on the fate of neighborhoods they’ve never lived in nor haven’t a care for. Consider the millions of children who this very day will study for standardized tests, and probably by tapping their freely-donated “insert name of tech monopoly” tablets running the “inner name of other tech monopoly” still unproven yet marvelously free educational software. Was this the education that any of the luminaries in our culture received? How can we in good faith experiment with mass-psychology in this way before actually trying the only methods we have ever known to work?
At heart, the imposition of these bad ideas follows a profound lack of self-confidence by people everywhere to challenge the ideas they are taught and to replace them with better ones. This lack of self-confidence, of willingness to know (sapere aude!), to try and to attempt — becomes a lack of power. People suppress their critical spirit and accept the authority of those who impart instruction upon them. Such slavish mentality produces a general impoverishment of humanity because it enables bad ideas to spread like a disease, and it weakens the natural immune system people have to call out bullshit. What is sacrificed is fresh air, the potential for unique local design and technology, for the cheap imports of other places — whether China or Silicon Valley. This also happens in the realm of ideas, where so-called thought-leaders peddle provocative page-turners while paving over real problems and real solutions.
What is needed, therefore, is a renewal in the faith in progress but not through the mediating agent of some distant expert who knows better because they have PhDs after their name or because they own a few sweatshops. Instead, progress is the fruit of our taking responsibility of the creative process and of important decisions. This isn’t such a novel thing — its the idea at the core of democracy. As more people actualize their human potential, they add their minds to the human project in being able to reflect upon it, contribute to the ideas it expresses it, and shape it through their participation. Before they do so, they are mere consumers, agglomerations of body parts to eat food, wear clothes, tap on devices and so on. The food, clothing, devices are not what is really consumed. What is consumed is the life force of these many people as it is used to continue a failed civilizational model where we sacrifice our world for cheap thrills. This is what made the film The Matrix so powerful — because it was always a metaphor for our existing world. We are the energy the system lives on. And it many respects, it is a very inhuman system.
Unlike the vastly exaggerated claims of the internet as a sentient being, a thriving civil society of actually cognitively present sentient beings can unlock a flood of potential. Taking responsibility requires a critical push-back to the toxic notions inherent in dominant culture which have shown themselves, time and time again, to fail and to produce bad practices that abuse life rather than ennoble it. We must replace failed notions with well-substantiated ideas that hold better promise for our future. Fortunately, a careful and rigorous study of human potential across the millennia and centuries gives us hope and clear guidance that we can create a new breakthrough.
For those interested in a deeper explanation, I recommend The Patterning Instinct, by Jeremy Lent.
