Mayfly Nine
The myth of progress ~ British corruption, to the moon! ~ Would you rather? ~ The Encyclopedia of the Dead ~ Amusement arcade
The myth of progress
Last week I wrote about meritocracy and the agency trap. I argued that an over-emphasis on the impossible task of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps places blame on the individual when something structural might be at fault, and inhibits attempts to change those structures. It sucks the winds out of the sails of progress.
I then promised to address the myth of progress. So here goes…
David Hume was a miserable sod
Despite his hat, David Hume was a miserable sod. In Part X of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he showed convincingly (at least to me) that the sum of life’s misery and happiness is misery.
“The whole earth, believe me…is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and 'tis at last finished in agony and horror”. If we live long, we live only to see those we love die, to suffer pain of mind and body in more iniquitous and complete ways. Yet happiness is fleeting, small and unsustained; “unsatisfactory enjoyment of pleasures, riches, honours…have become almost proverbial in all languages”; “So anxious or so tedious are even the best scenes of life, that futurity is still the object of all our hopes and fears.”
Hume uses this argument not to induce despair, but to examine the source of evil in a discussion of the nature of God. I recount it, because it seems to me this state of affairs is eternal. It is the human condition. It is our lot. No amount of progress, as I can see it, will alter the calculus that, on our death beds, misery will have been greater than joy in amplitude and extent.
John Gray finds progress illusory
In Seven Types of Atheism, John Gray presents another story for us. Not only can progress not really help us, it is in fact an illusion which has derived from monotheism.
A cyclical view of history was taken for granted by almost everyone before Christianity made it a redemptive drama progressing from an edenic beginning to an apocalyptic end. Likewise, because people are so obviously heterogenous, nobody thought of a history of all mankind until Christianity’s (small c) catholicism laid claim on the path for all people. Moreover the gnostics, building on the Greek and Egyptian mysteries, told us a special kind of esoteric knowledge was necessary for salvation.
During the enlightenment these three beliefs didn’t disappear, but they were forced to wear new clothes. Now, progress in the knowledge of science and the collective efforts of humanity would deliver all of us from evil.
Things, can only get better. Right?
But this view of progress, as popular and reassuring as it is, does not stand up to scrutiny. Living standards may improve, but ethics, or politics or equality?
“Old evils return under new names…No thread of progress in civilisation is woven into the fabric of history. The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics, philosophy or the arts. Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been...” — nor, I would argue, are they any more individuated — “…Gains in civilisation occur from time to time, but they are lost after a few generations”.
And the liberal way of life that we enjoy in the UK, and must defend, is not inevitable or eternal, or destined to get better: “Liberal thinkers have concocted grand theories in which their values are the end-point of history…the sorcery of ‘social science’ cannot conceal the fact that history is going nowhere in particular…A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilised ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed”.
For Henry George, poverty is the inevitable partner of progress
The universe conspired last week (joke) to remind me of Henry George and his book Progress and Poverty, through this anonymous book review on the Astral Codex Ten newsletter.
Henry George argued, as the reviewer puts it, that “the resilience of poverty, oppression, and inequality in the face of advancing economic development is not some embarrassing accident we’ll eventually get around to fixing, it’s an inescapable consequence of our socioeconomic system”.
Why? Well George takes several volumes to explain, but the conclusion of his argument is that any progress in production forces rents up at an even faster rate. The reviewer writes “in the long run, no amount of hard work from labor, no force multiplication from capital, no increased gain from co-operation and specialization, no labor-saving invention or increase in personal efficiency, work ethic, or morals, can escape the long reach of rent”.
In George’s own words “Increased power of production has everywhere added to the value of land; nowhere has it added to the value of labor”…“Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land; it can but add to the power of producing wealth from land; and hence, when land is monopolized, it might go on to infinity without increasing wages or improving the conditions of those who have but their labor.”
As a result, even if we have enough to provide for everyone, rent will prevent us from distributing it fairly, and those without land (which has a specific meaning here) will suffer regardless of their endeavour.
(George’s remedy is land tax. I will examine it further another time to see if it can tell me anything more about how and why UK housing is fucked, and what we can do about it).
The myth of progress
I hope these three digressions go some way to convincing you that progress is a myth. Hume tells us misery must outgun pleasure. Gray tells us we are not marching inexorably towards the sunlit uplands; our history is not one thing, and it is not teleological; things ebb and flow. And, bringing it back specifically to meritocracy and the agency trap, George tells us our economy guarantees deprivation even in the face of whatever productive progress there is.
OK, I know I haven’t defined what progress means, but it’s looking pretty mythical, right?
Last week I argued that an emphasis on agency, on the personal, is a trap that prevents change to structures that may be more powerful. This week I have argued that progress is a myth. Next week, like the ourobourus, I will eat my own tail.
British corruption, to the moon!
Growing up I believed that Britain was not corrupt. I wasn’t paying attention then, but now even the most negligent plebeian would struggle to maintain that fiction. The extent really is staggering, with new stories coming out every day it seems…
Cameron and Greensill
Johnson and Dyson
Johnson and Arcuri
Hancock and Topwood
Lister and Johnson Controls
Jenrick and Desmond
Truss and Mills
etc.
As @RussInCheshire — required reading for much of the last year — says, this is not sleaze, lobbying, donations or patronage. This is corruption, plain and simple.
Why is corruption bad?
You might think it was bad because it requires hypocrisy and dishonesty.
However I think we’re getting beyond that now, since neither appear to be any detriment to success in public life.
Corruption is bad because it means our country is organised for the benefit of the highest bidder, especially in land administration and public procurement. In case you were in any doubt, the highest bidder is not you and me. The highest bidder does not care about what is right or just, or what is best for the most people, or what is sustainable. They care about what is good for them, and this is unlikely to coincide with what is good for you.
The more prevalent, obvious, and successful corruption becomes, the more those individuals and organisations with deep pockets will set aside money to ‘influence’ politics, even if they’re only playing catch up with their competitors.
If you’re trying to spot the next bubble, forget Dogecoin, and find a way of investing in or aligning your finances with the proceeds of backhanders. Our politicians are actually still very cheap, considering the volume of lubrication they ooze. Their value will boom…
…unless the electorate or the National Crime Agency decide to do something about it.
Polling shows the electorate doesn’t care. They’re forgetting politicians should be elected not because of their stance on key culture war soundbites or to serve their paymasters, but to represent our interests in parliament. We’ll see about the NCA.
Corruption is just one more way in which the casino is being rigged. But still we want to believe anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough or meditate themselves happy enough.
Would you rather?
A friend of mine loves playing the game ‘would you rather?’
Another friend sent me this story. In brief, there was an ill-tempered football match between Glasgow Rangers and Slavia Prague. Ondrej Kudela was given a ten match ban for racist behaviour after he whispered to Glen Kamara “you’re a monkey, you’re a fucking monkey, and you know you are”. Kamara was given a three match ban for assaulting Kudela in the tunnel after the game. In the same match Kemar Roofe was sent off and given a four match ban after he kicked the Prague goalkeeper in the face fracturing his skull and requiring 10 stitches.
Would you rather be subject to a racist insult, be assaulted in the tunnel after a game, or have your skull fractured?
With the length of bans — 10, 3, and 4 respectively — UEFA has shown its preference.
Obviously the offences belong to different categories. One could be accidental or negligent, two were during the course of the game, one followed it, some or all occurred when passions were raised. But the relative bans and extent of the carnival of outrage are interesting and, on the face of it, they don’t make much sense.
I am no expert in jurisprudence, thank God. But it seems to me the justification for sanctioning words more than kicks and boots would be that injuring an opponent during the game is a normal byproduct of the game; and even if it is bad, it is commonly understood to be bad. On the other hand attitudes to racism are changing, and racism is still not understood to be bad by a lot of people. Therefore comparatively stiffer sanctions are required to both show that the governing body is serious about the topic, and to force a change of behaviour. The problem, as I see it, is once you’ve achieved a change in norms, how do you bring it back to a propotional punishment without being accused of going soft on racism? That is not something I expect an organisation like UEFA will manage well.
Danilo Kiš - The Encyclopedia of the Dead
Danilo Kiš was the son of an Orthodox Montenegran and a Hungarian Jew (interesting that it’s not a Montenegran Orthodox and a Jewish Hungarian?) who lived through the war in Hungary, and the rest of his life in Belgrade and Paris. A friend saw this book of short stories and bought it for me, and I’m glad he did.
The story The Encyclopedia of the Dead resonated the most. It grapples with the same disbelief I feel that a life, fleeting and insubstantial, can be almost entirely meaningless apart from in itself; that, somehow, there’s a mysterious but false sense that it only becomes important once it is observed or recorded.
“For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a brick from the ruins”.
Not only is Schrodinger’s cat neither dead or alive when it’s still in the box unexamined, it seems somehow irrelevant; but not, crucially, to the cat itself.
“I wanted some evidence, for my hours of despair, that my father's life had not been in vain, that there were still people on earth who record and accord value to every life, every afflication, every human existence. (Meager consolation, but consolation nonetheless).”
I do not think these concerns arise because of a lack of belief in some universal arbiter. They are not concerns of judgement. They are something else.
I have lost and I have grieved. In the process I have compulsively collected information, dreaded losing the knowledge of the life, tried to encode it so it can outlive my memory, and the life’s lacunae seem so tantalising that I try and fill them even though they cannot matter now. It’s a heavy self-inflicted burden and a vain act of necromancy. At best the result will satisfy a few moments curiosity from my children or their children.
In another story, The Story of the Master and the Disciple, the protagonist “sat up at night over a senseless text...pervaded only by a vain desire to justify the meaninglessness of existence - or the premonition of its meaninglessness - by a creative act of some kind”. This, I think, describes much of what I had been doing in my grief.
Even if the records are incomplete, if the stories are forgotten or not communicated beautifully, the life itself is enough. And that’s a good thing in the end, since it is all we have.
(If you’re interested in reading about the other short stories in the book, head to Goodreads).
Amusement arcade
Links
This seems like it could be really important. A new reversible CRISPR method promises to determine whether genes are expressed, without altering the underlying DNA.
I love a good tautology. Torpenhow Hill might as well be called Hill hill hill hill.
Visual
To welcome Spring, here’s The Arrival of the Sun (1962) by Inuk artist Kenojuak Ashevak.
Fatal Attraction, Lyne (1987) - I watched this for the first time in 20+ years and it is actually pretty good. I still find Michael Douglas unlikeable, and Glenn Close was really unattractive, but this fits the narrative and the performances were all strong. Somehow it has become more interesting now it is a period piece, and the fashion and interiors have matured from naff to cool again. And of course it gave us the term ‘bunny boiler’.
This pretty coffee table book arrived today. I’d forgotten I’d bought it, but it is for a cause well worth supporting: the right to roam.
Audio
Van Morrisson, Jimi Hendrix, Pavement, Ought.
Thank you for staying with me. If you think anyone else might enjoy reading this do share it with them, although please keep it anonymous.
When getting to the pub is harder, I love the conversations this stimulates. If you feel like it, make them public in the comments?