The Illusion of Progress

One can only imagine what Henry David Thoreau would think of modern society. He would see a world of superhighways connecting suburbs to the cities, on which people drove their gasoline powered cars from home to work and vice versa. He would see a world of industrialized agriculture, of tractors and trucks, of hydrocarbon based fertilizers and pesticides. He would see a world of corporate advertising, of mass media, of consumer culture. He would be, I think, rather appalled.

E.E. Cummings once stated that “progress is a comfortable disease”. And as Andre Gregory noted, “comfort can lull you into a dangerous tranquility”. Yet we live in a world of perpetual “progress”, from the latest iPhone to the newest weight loss product. It all seems so good to so many people, particularly those of my generation, the “Millennials”, the ones who created Twitter and Facebook and who view technology as humanity’s savior.

Perhaps they are right. Look at what George Orwell had to say some 65 years ago:

From the moment the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.

The emphasis is mine. It is the key phrase in this selection. One must ask the question, “and what if its not used deliberately for that end?” The answer is not hard to figure out. You end up with a world filled with nuclear warheads, drone strikes, Internet surveillance, propagandistic corporate media, and the perils of global warming and climate change. Are we not descending into the dystopian world depicted by Orwell, or Ray Bradbury, or even Philip K. Dick? This is a scary question, but it is the paradigm through which we must view technological progress.

The illusion of progress is perhaps best illustrated by the so-called “post-war boom”, the Golden Age of American Capitalism. Today many Americans are nostalgic about this period, particularly the American Dream of the 1950s. A revisionist look is, however, necessary.

The causes of the boom were many. One cause was the GI Bill, designed to aid returning servicemen economically and blunt the potential effects of an employment glut. One must remember the fears that the economy would slide back into the Depression (from which we had still not fully recovery by December 7, 1941). This was particularly poignant considering the brief but sharp recession in the aftermath of World War I. Thus, Congress passed and the president signed the GI Bill, whose main provisions included free access to healthcare and a college education as well as low interest loans for buying a home or starting a business.

Thus many returning veterans did not immediately enter the workforce but instead went to finish high school or get a college degree. The anticipated unemployment crisis never fully developed. In addition, the access to home loans sparked a massive move the suburbs. This was further fueled by the rise of the automobile and later the construction of highways, including the New York State Thruway and the Interstate Highway System. Home construction and the automobile industry boomed, employing millions of (often unionized) labor. Pent-up consumer demand due to wartime shortages led many families to spend heavily on consumer products like appliances and in particular the newest necessity: the television. The TV in turn provided corporations a new platform for marketing their products, further driving consumer demand.

Another factor drove the boom: the lack of foreign competition. The economies of the other powers were largely destroyed by World War II: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, China and Japan (the Soviets largely reconstructed their industry during the war). Thus the US was the only Western country that had any capacity for producing goods on a large scale. The Bretton Woods system institutionalized American economic dominance, by making the dollar, in essence, the world currency, working toward a global free trade market, and producing leverage with impoverished nations due to its de facto control of the IMF and World Bank.

There was a major obstacle, however, in the American quest for global economic dominance: communism. Communism threatened access to markets (such as Western Europe) and resources (such as Middle Eastern oil). Thus American foreign policy focused on containing communism, through any number of methods: the Marshall Plan and NATO in Europe, CIA operations in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, and overt warfare in East Asia (Korea and Vietnam). It was also no coincidence that such a policy would sustain the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex established during World War II.

The boom was clearly unsustainable. The departure of the middle class out of the cities led to concentrations of the impoverished, leading to urban decay and requiring massive federal antipoverty programs. At some point that pent-up consumer demand would dry up and the industries of Western Europe and East Asia would rebuild, leading to a sharp decline in domestic and global demand for American goods. The massive spending on the military and intelligence establishments would eventually lead to runaway inflation (as happened during Vietnam). By 1971, the dollar was no longer a stable currency, and the Bretton Woods system collapsed. This growing powder keg needed only a spark to explode, which it was given in 1973: the OPEC oil embargo.

Having an economy on which everything from agriculture and transportation to energy and the armed forces were dependent on petroleum products was not smart policy-making. Gasoline shortages (and the accompanying price increases) led many Americans to buy more fuel-efficient, foreign-made cars, leading to the decline of the American automobile industry and costing millions of jobs. Meanwhile, the price of everything went up, as the production of just about everything was dependent on this now scarce resource. This of course led to the stagflation crisis, from which we never fully recovered. (And this is not to mention, of course, the effects that the fossil fuel based economy has had on the environment, the effects of which at this point we may never be able to reverse.)

Thus, one can argue that the “progress” of the postwar years was not really progress at all, but rather hastened our demise as a civilization. A debate on the value of American progress is not a new concept. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson had a view of society as the agrarian one based on the “yeoman farmer”. This was in sharp contrast to the views of men like Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay. It was not, however, until the Civil War that this debate was effectively settled, with the economic policies of (the log-cabin born, ironically) Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in Congress setting the stage for the industrialization that followed.

The combination of industrialization and capitalism, by necessity, produces a drive toward ever greater efficiency. It is this need that led to such processes as Taylorism and Fordism. The later had a tremendous impact on modern world society, serving as inspiration for the totalitarian governments of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. It also, however, inspired something else: modernist architecture, as laid out by Le Corbusier. Corbu’s idealized world is not too dissimilar from that of Brave New World: efficiency, austerity, and rationalism (in fact, Aldous Huxley was a sharp critic of Le Corbusier).

Le Corbusier, of course, had a profound impact on the modern city, leading to such projects as the Brazilian capital city of Brasilia. Nelson Rockefeller was a fan, and brought this ideal to my hometown of Albany, New York, using urban decay and the need for state office space as an excuse for the Empire State Plaza, the “masturbatory megalo-monument to himself”. (The structure was designed by Wallace Harrison, whose assistant, George Dudley, was coincidentally the father of a high school social studies teacher of mine).

The modernist view of the city, as embodied by Robert Moses’ destruction of large portion of New York City, was simply that of the workplace for the suburbanite “happy motorist”. Thus massive road projects cut through cities, destroying neighborhoods and, in the case of Albany, disconnecting it from its raison d’etre: the Hudson River. There was of course a reaction against this, beginning with Jane Jacobs in 1961 and continuing through to the New Urbanists of today, like James Howard Kunstler and Andres Duany. They call for downscaling, contraction, and walkability in the city. As Kunstler says, skyscrapers and urban sprawl have no future; well-scaled small places do. Most importantly, they call for relocalization, for self-sufficiency of the community.

This is in sharp contrast to the neoliberal economic theory of Milton Friedman which has come to dominate policy-making since the 1970s. An Adam Smith true-believer, Friedman felt that markets had to be completely liberalized, and that economies could only develop with no trade barriers or government supports. Of course, this is not how the United States itself was developed, with its long-standing trade protectionism and government aided infrastructure projects, but I suppose this is besides the point. The point is the belief that globalization will produce a utopian world, with interconnectedness producing a democratic peace and efficient distribution of resources.

Wendell Berry would beg to differ. He not only rejects the modernization of industrialization, suburbanization, and globalization, but also of urbanism itself. He would harken back to a an agrarian society, as much of the world was for thousands of years (and in some areas still is). One could argue that Berry is to the 21st century what Thoreau was to the 19th. Berry also denounces what he calls the absurdity of specialization. As he states, “Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.”

This is as much a criticism of education as anything else. William Deresiewicz would most definitely agree. He has stated:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.

The current structure of college education is largely responsible for this, with its emphasis on conformity and specialization and its de-emphasis on the humanities. As a college student myself, this is easily apparent. It feels strange to have been at a supposed “liberal arts” college for almost a full semester and not to have met a single philosophy or English major. This is the core of the problem: no one is here simply for the sake of knowledge, for learning, for personal development, for finding one’s sense of self. As Aristotle states, the best science is that which is choiceworthy for its own sake: philosophy, by definition “the love of knowledge”. In this world, however, everyone is simply trying to do whatever it takes to pass their courses, get their degree, and leave with the credentials they need to move on into a career. This is the society we have created. Perhaps this is why alcohol and drug use and sexual irresponsibility have become so prominent on college campuses: no one really wants to be here, so everyone is just trying to find some way to escape from it, if only for a little while.

In the Phaedo, Plato states that:

There is likely to be something such as a path to guide us out of our confusion, because as long as we have body and a soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth. The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture. Moreover, if certain diseases befall it, they impede our search for the truth. It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions, and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body. Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord, and battles, for all wars are due to the desire to acquire wealth, and it is the body and the care of it, to which we are enslaved, which compel us to acquire wealth, and all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy.

Thoreau might disagree with this conclusion. After all, once he had acquired his Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel, he was “prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.” I doubt anyone would accuse Thoreau of being “too busy” during his time at Walden.

I close with another thought, that of Jared Diamond, who argues that “the worst mistake in the history of the human race” was, in fact, the neolithic revolution. As he states, “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.” Furthermore,

Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we're still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it's unclear whether we can solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture's glittering facade, and that have so far eluded us?

So much for progress. In the words of Bill Watterson (who I contend was the greatest social critic of his time), “scientific progress goes ‘boink’”.