THE PURSUIT OF WORLDLINESS
 A blog by Barry Edelson


CRUEL JOKE 7:

Progress Is Our Most
Important Product



QUERIOUS
Are you feeling any better these days?

ANTAGONĒ
Yes, as a matter of fact. I'm on a new medication.

QUERIOUS
I'm pleased to hear it. If we live long enough, they'll find a cure for everything.

ANTAGONĒ
In the first place, we won't live that long, and in the second place, they'll never cure everything. The day after they solve the riddle of the last known illness, some terrible new plague will emerge to send them back to their test tubes.

QUERIOUS
You are maddeningly pessimistic sometimes. Your doctor has just succeeded in making you feel altogether better, and all you can see is the hopelessness of medical science.

ANTAGONĒ
I am duly grateful for the drug-induced improvement in my health, but I fail to see it as cause for millennial celebration. My personal good fortune doesn't have much to do with the state of humanity as a whole.

QUERIOUS
Surely some pharmaceutical company isn't manufacturing your prescription for you alone? I just read that it costs an average of three hundred million dollars to bring a new drug to market. Not that you aren't worth it, but I presume that others are also benefiting from this specific example of the march of progress?

ANTAGONĒ
What does progress have to do with it?

QUERIOUS
What would you ascribe the discovery of new drugs to? Random accident?

ANTAGONĒ
Of course not, but the idea that progress is inevitable or even desirable is an unfortunate manifestation of man's incurable belief in the improvement of life on Earth. Stephen Jay Gould rather convincingly exposes progress as one of the great myths of human thought, arising as it does from the mistaken impression that the emergence of homo sapiens represents the culmination of the evolutionary process — or, if you want to take the religious view, the pinnacle of creation. Either way, man can't shake the notion that his appearance in the universe is nature's final and greatest act. But it's a laughable illusion, because man's adaptability for survival is no greater than that of thousands of microbes that have existed for eons, and nature cares not a whit for our ability to build a suspension bridge or to put a man on the moon. Evolution is interested only in reproductive success, and it is the height of arrogance and irrationality to suppose that our species is in any way an improvement on countless living creatures that preceded us. In fact, our unique ability to destroy our own habitat renders us as something rather less than the ideal guardian of the planet.

QUERIOUS
Why must you take such a broad view of the subject? Even if many people take the Book of Genesis literally and assume that all creation exists for our sake, that view doesn't preclude the possibility that within the context of plain old suffering and death we aren't capable of making life better in the long run. Scoff all you like, but I happen to take comfort in the idea that researchers are working around the clock to decipher the genetic code, and I am heartened by discoveries of causes of disease and of new treatments to fight them. I also thrill to the idea that man was capable of going to the moon and back. Where's your sense of adventure? Watching the NASA missions on television when I was a child was one of the most exciting experiences of my life.

ANTAGONĒ
The most salient characteristic of the space program is that we've lost interest in it so quickly. I was riveted by those missions, too. The sense that nearly everyone on Earth was tuned in to Neil Armstrong at the same moment was truly awe inspiring. No one but a handful of cranks could have failed to see at the time that the moon landing was such a great and noble symbol of the triumph of skill and determination over the most insurmountable obstacles that it would have a profound impact on the future of human society. But then what happened? Did peace break out all over? Did no one get killed in Vietnam during that July night of the first moon walk? Did a new era of international cooperation dawn over the Sea of Tranquillity? Hardly. The reality that even the most stunning human accomplishments have no impact on even the most basic human problems was a tough lesson. Now, I'm actually a little embarrassed to think of how naive we were to have placed so much significance on it while it was happening.

QUERIOUS
We were both kids at the time, so I think we can be forgiven for having faith in the future. You also underestimate the importance of successful discovery for the human psyche. It springs from our fundamental optimism, and gives us reason for further optimism. If people believed that life would magically become nothing but sunshine and flowers because two guys in space suits left footprints on the moon, they were just plain foolish. But that doesn't diminish the accomplishment, or render it worthless. There have been many tangible as well as intangible benefits of the space program, and you know it. Only a died-in-the-wool cynic like you could find anything but hope in such expressions of human ingenuity.

ANTAGONĒ
I'm not suggesting that we aren't better off in some respects as a result of scientific and technological success, but your so-called progress isn't without consequences. I'm sure you've heard of the laws of chemical thermodynamics.

QUERIOUS
You mean the ones that say that the amount of energy in the universe is finite, and that everything is moving towards a state of constantly increasing disorder? I can well imagine why they would appeal to you.

ANTAGONĒ
I had a professor in college who defined the three laws as "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." In other words, the universe is not moving from a chaotic, random state to one of perfect bliss, creation myths notwithstanding. Naturally, we desire that it should be so, and our imaginations make it possible to contemplate an increasingly better world, but it just isn't so. As the song says, "Everybody loves a sound of a train in the distance, everybody thinks it's true." But our little corner of the universe obeys the same physical and chemical laws as every other place, and my feeling better because of a recently engineered new pill that owes its existence to technologies spawned by the space age doesn't prove that we're progressing in any meaningful respect.

QUERIOUS
That entirely depends on what you consider meaningful. An individual's feeling better matters enormously to that individual. For that matter, the eradication of smallpox or polio certainly matters to countless millions who won't ever catch them again. You simply can't ignore the fact that human life has gotten better in many ways.

ANTAGONĒ
As long as you ignore the price. My professor was fond of saying that the true meaning of thermodynamics is that there's no such thing as a free lunch. Do you really believe that technological progress hasn't had dire consequences for the long-term ability of the planet to sustain our supposedly improving lifestyle? In our tiny, isolated pocket of the cosmos, life has managed to appear to get a temporary beat on the general decay and dispersal of matter, but when something is built, something else is destroyed in the process. Entropy is the iron rule of the universe; there's simply no escaping it.

QUERIOUS
It may be hard for you to believe, but I'm not terribly concerned with the overall status of the cosmos, nor is most of mankind. What does interest me is the incremental improvement in the quality of life, which you casually dismiss.

ANTAGONĒ
Regardless of the relentless despoliation of the natural environment? Mountains of garbage and plumes of toxic chemicals don't signify a bit of a problem with so-called progress? What is casual is our general indifference to the consequences of our actions.

QUERIOUS
Technology solves problems as well as creates them. I am as concerned as anyone with pollution, but I have confidence that there will be as yet undiscovered solutions to today's environmental damage. In any event, when did you become an environmentalist? You don't even recycle.

ANTAGONĒ
That's because I recognize the futility of trying to prevent a calamity that has already spiraled out of control. I am a lone voice of reason among the clamoring hordes of do-gooding Earth-savers. No, I will not voluntarily give up my car or my air conditioner or any other of my creature comforts that, in their own small way, inexorably lay waste to the planet. But neither will I pretend that wrapping my plastic bottles in plastic bags and throwing them in a plastic receptacle from which they will be retrieved by a filthy truck that spews diesel fumes at my house every other day and carts them off somewhere to be remade into more useless products is really going to make a great dent in the viability of my drinking water. Such hypocrisy will not save the environment, because it assumes that it is possible to live without taking something from the Earth and without leaving our waste behind. That is the rudimentary reality of existence, and putting your faith in even more progress to clean up the mess that progress has already created is fundamentally mistaken.

QUERIOUS
I'm afraid you are on the wrong side of history. The last several hundred years have seen a steadily growing faith in technology's ability to deliver substantial benefits in daily life, which is a marked improvement over the fatalism that dominated Western thought for centuries before the Renaissance.

ANTAGONĒ
I beg to differ. The 19th century was the peak of a nearly fanatical devotion to science and mechanization. It was shattered when World War I demonstrated that progress can be harnessed as easily for destructive as for constructive purposes. Your assertions to the contrary, people have been much warier in this century about tying their fate to technology alone. I think that's why the space program managed to hold our attention for only a few years. A more potent symbol of our current skepticism is the sinking of the Titanic. After many years in which progress was deemed to be an unqualified good, it reasserted in a shocking and dramatic way the transience and vulnerability of human endeavor. And it set the stage grimly for the tragedy of misbegotten progress that was about to unfold in the war that followed just a few years later. It's interesting that the earlier calamity remains far more vivid in the public imagination than the First World War, even though it was an immeasurably smaller loss in human terms. The war, though far worse than any that had come before, was still just another war, but the Titanic was a natural disaster and therefore more frightening — and fascinating — in its consequences. We can tolerate the idea that people can be beastly to one another more readily than we can admit our helplessness against the onslaught of the natural elements, because we imagine we can do something, at least in theory, to prevent human cruelty; but, in our heart of hearts, we know that we can never really tame nature.

QUERIOUS
Forget about science and nature, for a moment. What about social progress? We still have a long way to go, but there is unarguably less slavery, less poverty, less starvation, less disease, less intolerance and even less war right now than at any time in recorded history. I'm not trying to gloss over the many horrors that still go on, but they are certainly fewer and farther between.

ANTAGONĒ
The world has known a few decades of relative peace and prosperity before, so I don't think I would close the book yet on mankind's propensity for murder and mayhem. The idiot who asserted a few years ago that the end of the Cold War represented the end of history obviously doesn't live in Rwanda or Bosnia or Northern Ireland, or next door to a biological weapons factory. In his last novel, Robertson Davies makes the point beautifully that the true view of history is not that man has progressed naturally from primitivism to civilization, but that instances of enlightenment have been rare while barbarism and superstition are, as he calls them, "undying elements in the human story."

QUERIOUS
You are a truly hopeless misery. The economist Julian Simon once predicted that there were two sure bets for humanity: that everything will continue to get better, and that everyone will continue to complain about how much worse things are.

ANTAGONĒ
Unfortunately, pessimists are seldom disappointed. And nihilists, of course, will enjoy the greatest vindication when all is said and done.

QUERIOUS
You betray yourself when you say "unfortunately." A true pessimist or nihilist would take pleasure in the decline of man's fortunes.

ANTAGONĒ
The one thing I am not is a sadist; quite the contrary. I expect the universe to have the final word, but I derive no satisfaction from it. Besides, I can't help but take advantage of what little solace man and nature have to offer. Consider me a lapsed nihilist, if you like.

QUERIOUS
A lapsed nihilist whose medication is making him feel better.

ANTAGONĒ
An infinitesimal droplet of joy in the inescapable dying of the universe.

QUERIOUS
Don't forget to take your pills.

posted October 2007




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