progress16 quotes

“We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the idea of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law upon our pert loquacity.”

“The human spirit has two remarkable powers: invention and assimilation. Turning the old into the new and then turning the new into the old. The most abrasive intrusion into the body and the most violent disruption of habit are quickly absorbed and domesticated. Almost immediately we lose our connection to old ways, our former agonies. The clanking of machines drowns out years of suffering. New technical programs revise our memories and beliefs in their own image, and the present stands ready to be erased by the future.”

“I don’t know what happened to the Future. It’s as if we lost our ability, or our will, to envision anything beyond the next hundred years or so, as if we lacked the fundamental faith that there will in fact be any future at all beyond that not-too-distant date. Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.”

“The conservatives who fear developments that they believe will ignore indelible aspects of the human condition would gain by attending to history and geography before they claim to know what mankind is, for the forms that the human enterprise has taken are sometimes more varied than they might think. But the followers of progress would do well to learn their own history and geography before legitimizing and legalizing any social development, for the forms of human existence are more coherent than they think, and they risk reestablishing archetypes that contradict their own points of reference.”

“Knowledge grows, but wisdom, though it can improve with years, does not progress with centuries. I cannot instruct Solomon.”

“Change, of course, is inevitable. We need not be committed to change as good in itself to have the experience of change. We are mortal, temporal beings and change is ineluctable. Fixity is not our earthly fate, even if we long for it. Yet to subscribe to the idea of change as intrinsically good (and not to think of it as simply a necessity), and to couple that idea with efforts to engineer change in the hope that someday we will be content, is a recipe for oscillation between utopian expectations and disillusionment.”

“Oakeshott believed that we might consider becoming less preoccupied with the world of getting and spending, less prone to measure our well-being in quantitative terms, allowing ourselves to find delight in the poetic interstices of the daily world. This means looking for the possibilities available to us in the present, not always thinking that we must commit ourselves to what may come in the future. Abstracting ourselves from present circumstances, a liberation that is at best partial, for the sake of an idyllic future, moves us toward constant dissatisfaction and anxiety, thinking that all present accomplishments are of little value compared with a hypothetical perfection that we have taught ourselves to seek.”

“What travels under the term ‘progress’ is revolutionary destruction of previously immutable-seeming limits. This is usually framed as moral advancement, but in practice follows a two-step ratchet. This first is a shining picture of the utopia that will follow when all the old norms are dissolved and new, improved ones are free to form in the space this cleared. Then, whatever has been smashed in pursuit of progress ends up reordered to the atomised laws of the market.”

“The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.”

“The trajectory of compound growth shows that the scouring of the planet has only just begun. As the volume of the global economy expands, everywhere that contains something concentrated, unusual, precious will be sought out and exploited, its resources extracted and dispersed, the world’s diverse and differentiated marvels reduced to the same grey stubble.”

“There are many who have no other idea of social progress than the extrapolation of the character of a society in time of war—the artificial unity, the narrow overmastering purpose, the devotion to a single cause and the subordination of everything to it—all this seems to them inspiring: but the direction of their admiration reveals the emptiness of their souls.”

“Thus everywhere we see that the very comforts and safety produced by the best men leads to the usurpation of society by those parts of the human spirit that are oriented instead toward a different kind of life, that everywhere the mode of the yeast wins out…and usually wins out very quickly. And in the West, whose special fate has been confused for History or Progress of the entire species, this development has taken place through the promotion of logos or reason and all the manifestations of this: the adulation of empty words, of legalism as a guide for social and political life, of the cult of science that is very far from real science. All of this has been a cover for the ascent of the blob human, of the lower orders of the spirit and is instead delivering not just the West, but all of mankind, to a condition of domestic brokenness and servility.”

“True progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen, and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.”

“Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel/

And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land./

Well, they dug for their coal ’til the land was forsaken/

Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”

“The dispute between the unscrupulous optimists and the dystopians will not disappear, but will be endlessly renewed as new futures occur to the one, and a renewed past detains the other. In emergencies, and all changes that abolish old routines, the optimists hope to turn things to their benefit. They are as likely to consult the past as a battalion fighting for its life in a city is likely to protect the monuments. They strive to be on the winning side, and to find the path into the future on which the light of ‘I’ stays shining.

The ‘we’ attitude, by contrast, is circumspect. It sees human decisions as situated, constrained by place, time and community; by custom, faith and law. It urges us not to throw ourselves always into the swim of things, but to stand aside and reflect. It emphasizes constraints and boundaries, and reminds us of human imperfection and of the fragility of real communities. Its decisions take account of other people and other times. In its deliberations the dead and the unborn have an equal voice with the living. And its attitude to those who say ‘press on’ and ‘ever onward’ is ‘sufficient unto the day the evil thereof’. It does not endorse a comprehensive pessimism, but only the occasional dose of pessimism, with which to temper hopes that otherwise might ruin us. It the voice of wisdom in world of noise. And for that very reason, no one hears it.”

“Even while I protest the assembly-line, production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother’s cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance.”