The main argument seems fundamentally flawed. It is argued that the idea of progress as a goal for humanity is pointless, because we are ultimately restricted by our nature, and instead of idealizing the concept of progress we should be satisfied with what we are.<p>However, it is painfully obvious that we are not imprisoned by our nature. We were not born to fly, yet we do fly. We fly gigantic metal heaps, around the world and even farther. We carry oxygen with us to outer space to circumvent our biological limitations. We can already bypass certain built-in elements of our "nature", such as anger, via medicine or surgery. In fact, we have been capable of changing our nature for a long time already, as advances in science have taught us that it is possible to cause physical changes in our brains through conscious effort, such as meditation. In the future, our capabilities for changing our nature will only increase.<p>Yes, we are still commonly quite foolish, and history has shown that we easily reduce ourselves to beasts in times of crisis, but we can, and have changed our beliefs into ones that represent the world around us more accurately. Using labels like secular humanism, our progress may be painted to look like misdirected religion, but these ideologies do not just represent the idea of progress, they have proven it - we truly have developed a more accurate image of our existence. We have progressed, and we will continue doing so.
As Rob Pike would say; mais oui.<p>I believe in the EU; or rather, I want to believe in the EU, because I want to believe that the European countries can work together and close at that. Politically, economically and so on.<p>But neither am I naïve to believe that the current implementation of the EU is the <i>best</i> solution, nor do I believe that it will ever form into some sort of 'United States of Europe'. Nation states will never disappear in my view (that's the cynic in me), regardless of how ridiculous the idea may be to keep them.
A couple of thoughts:<p>1) A hard upper limit on the intellectual capacity of an individual human being does not directly necessitate a corresponding limit to the capacity of humanity as a whole. There are now reliable means of preserving past knowledge and experience, and population growth means more minds are available to ponder difficult problems.<p>Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to where we are today in computer hardware - an individual processor's power is limited, but large gains are yet to be made by adding more processors, and storage of information is increasingly exponentially.<p>These kinds of gains are not linear as you would expect from an increase in processors' speed, but they are gains nonetheless.<p>2) Even if you do assume that the individual human's finite capacity does imply an upper limit on human progress, it is still possible for progress to increase indefinitely; the gains will merely be increasingly marginal.<p>I agree that the idea that progress is an inevitable force of nature is completely false. It is a goal, not a natural force. I personally don't know anyone who actually believes this though, so I feel like this is something of a strawman.
Whatever one's thoughts on the article <i>in its entirety</i>, the initial implication that the thinkers listed could not account for Herzen's fish is disingenuous.<p>Helvetius (one of the listed):<p><i>"The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."</i><p>If freedom refers not to the biological limitations and fundamental nature of man, as the author repeatedly asserts during the construction of their straw opponent, but refers to whether man is in chains, then it becomes possible to generate empirical measures demonstrating "progress" in terms of freedom:<p>At the beginning of the 19th century, serfs and slaves made up 3/4s of the world's population.
A great blog on this theme is Mencius Moldbugs "Unqualified Reservations". Which he describes as an 'anti-democracy blog'. (Where 'democracy' includes supposed populist ideologies like fascism and communism.)<p>Writing from the view that monarchism is a good idea, Moldbug has a strange perspective on just about every topic imaginable. While I'm not sure how much of it I agree with, it's definitely interesting.<p><a href="http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/</a>
A fantastic find. If you read the <i>Federalist Papers</i>, it quickly becomes clear that the founders were not so much wide-eyed idealists as many Constitution-thumpers would have it, but a fairly cynical bunch who were as worried about the inability of people to rule themselves as they were about being ruled poorly from afar. Reading the FP made me quite a fan of Alexander Hamilton, hence my sometimes-grumpy statist position.
What if this were written in the 1850s? Of course slavery is normal. All cultures have had slavery. So all those loony abolitionists with their progress notions are beating their heads against the fixity of human nature.<p>Take your is-ought fallacy and... well... this is a family web site.
I liked this. A lot. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it brings up some great "deep thinking" conversations. Excellent HN fodder.<p>It's ironic that this would be on the front page as the same time as "HTML 5 genetic cars" because the two are so related. I think an extended analogy is in order.<p>Gray's first mistake is to do exactly what he accuses others of doing -- making a value statement about whether one society later in history is better than another, or whether there is some "direction of progress". Gray thinks there is not. Others think there is.<p>What I've learned from political and systems theory is that small, self-optimizing systems always outperform other systems, because they are able to adapt better.<p>Does evolution produce "better", "smarter", or "more perfect" creatures? No. It produces creatures better adapted to current conditions.<p>So when you look at civilizations, you should think about those little cars. Sometimes early adaptations lead to performance problems later on. Many times there is no universal car. Different adaptations work at different times. The best we can hope for is a system where the <i>cars adapt as they move along</i>.<p>Likewise, human systems will not get "better" -- that's a value judgment, akin to "I like chocolate ice cream". Such statements are impossible to argue one way or another. Human systems will always adapt. The key, critical question here is this: are we encouraging systems of humans in which small units adapt and self-optimize? Or are we trying to create universal rules for all humans, thereby decreasing our ability to adapt to what lies ahead of us?<p>Moving farther to the right on the HTML5 cars app is not necessarily better or worse than spinning in place. But it does take us to places we haven't seen before. And that's pretty cool.
The article opens with an example of someone seeing how life broke down in postwar Italy. But there is an alternate view of how humans behave in crisis, well-articulated by Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell". She notes that, in actual crises, the expected apocalypse of savagery never arises. Instead there is often an unusual sense of solidarity.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html</a><p>Now, this has no bearing on the claim that humans have a limited capacity for rationality, which is obviously true at some level. But I want to draw your attention to the rhetorical strategy. In order to get you to submit to the idea that domination is normal, they first have to depress your hope in humanity. It then follows that one's choices are between slavery and chaos.
What a neat article.<p>My wife and I have been recently binge-watching the TV show "Jericho." It's not deeply philosophical, but its a nice expression of this quote in the article: "The most basic trait is the instinct for survival, which is placed on hold when humans are able to live under a veneer of civilization. But it is never far from the surface."
> Gray rejects it utterly. In doing so, he rejects all of modern liberal humanism. “The evidence of science and history,” he writes, “is that humans are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in religion.”<p>This just seems like empty rhetoric.<p>Some people are more rational than those in the past - and we've learnt a lot about cognitive biases, and about how to have productive conversations. I don't think it requires a particularly great leap of faith to believe that people <i>may</i> one day be more rational.<p>It's not a sure thing mind. But to go from a prescriptive must, to a may, to then saying that oh it's never going to happen. The evidence of science and history here may as well read 'It's common knowledge that...' a phrase that doesn't really support anything.<p>> “Technical progress,” writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, “leaves only one problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is insoluble.”<p>Because, hey, I say it is.<p>> Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals.<p>Straw man.<p>#<p><i>sigh</i><p>I mean, look, I appreciate this is meant to be a book review, but in that role it's really bad. It's just a list of the book's claims along with some talking about what Grey believes. It might be an excellent book, it might be total tosh, but you're never going to know from that review which rapidly dissolves into nothing more than a political rant that takes it as granted that you already agree with Gray.
The author is really arguing two things. (1) There is no such thing as moral progress, because human nature is fixed.(2) People are not naturally inclined to be free.<p>His first claim is demonstrably false. If you look at historical, statistical evidence you can rapidly demolish his position. Start with Stephen Pinker's Ted talk: <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...</a><p>His second claim is probably true, but irrelevant. Humans do seem to naturally love hierarchies. And in the grand sweep of time and place, freedom is still a tiny blip.<p>But So. Fucking. What. Humans are naturally inclines to die of infectious diseases, too.<p>The author admits that science <i>does</i> progress. And more importantly, the capital structure of society progresses along with it, symbiotically. That puts the lie to the rest of his argument, because ideas from science have <i>demonstrably</i> altered human behavior, and science is already on the cusp of altering human nature <i>directly at the molecular level</i>.
Pointing out that neither Russia nor Iraq have evolved into liberal democracies the instant they escaped despotism, is hardly conclusive. The number of democracies in the world is always on the slow rise. When Russia overthrew the tsar, they thought they had a better idea and decided to give it a try. Not every experiment is a success. When South Korea escaped war with half a country, they traded occupation for an authoritarian Democracy that devolved into despotism and eventually evolved into a true liberal democracy. The process took a good 30+ years. Progress isn't linear, but it is steady.
What is this, some Ayn Rand fanfic in reverse?<p>Seriously, it's the kind of book that she had one of her strawmen write within Atlas Shrugged.<p>Please let's not encourage the randroids.
> <i>their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.</i><p>If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical claim. An ideal is something you aspire to, despite the fact that it does not match reality at this time, nor at any time in the past, and perhaps never even in the future.<p>Progress is something that you want to spend a lot of time producing, not something you just find in nature. It's something that you want to produce <i>despite</i> the fact that billions of people before you have failed miserably, not <i>because</i> of previous successes. If you want to help the kids in Africa who die of easily preventable diseases, you're a believer in progress. Just because you don't think it has a high chance of success doesn't mean that you don't want it to happen.<p>Now, people do disagree about what constitutes progress. But only a sophomore philosopher throws away an idea just because people disagree about it. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater every time you find a contamination in the bathwater, there will be hardly any babies left. And guess what, a life without ideals is like a world without babies. Without babies, our species will die out. Without ideals, our intellects will have nothing better to do than contemplate the grim reality. If that's all we're going to use our brains for, why have an advanced brain in the first place?<p>> <i>We simply need to accept our fate, as they did in the classical age, before the Socratic faith in knowledge and the Christian concept of redemption combined to form the modern idea of progress and the belief in the infinite malleability of human nature.</i><p>It is not true that people simply accepted their fates prior to the invention of Greek philosophy and Christianity. Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Fruit on a branch that's too high? Get a stick to reach it. Too much weed and not enough grain? Burn the weed and plant some barley. River too deep to wade across? Build a bridge or a boat. Boat is too slow? Add some sails. No wind? Add an internal combustion engine. Anything else too inconvenient for your lazy ass? Find a way to make it easier. It's in our nature.<p>The paleo-conservative movement, which The National Interest seems to be a part of, is getting ridiculously out of hand. No ideal of progress? That's not even paleolithic. Cavemen lived in caves because they found it warmer and safer than sleeping in an open field or on a tree. They used stone tools because they found them more convenient than ripping things apart with bare hands.
As the Joseph Conrad story implies, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative and as with all beliefs, all things really - fundamentalism and extremes can become harmful pretty quickly. So my fellow believers in progress, don't give up but be wary.