Progress (And the Limits of Perfectibility)

At seventeen it was clear to me that there was no such thing in human history as real progress.  Not in the ways that mattered.  This shocked some of my college professors.  What was I talking about?  Progress was obvious.  But it seemed to me, in the certainty and arrogance of my youth, that this was only true if your blinders limited your vision to the United States and your aspirations to material comfort and financial success.  For someone who was reading world literature, history, and philosophy from before I made it to kindergarten (that purple crayon, the man with the yellow hat, the tigers turning into clarified butter, that tiny warrior battling Caesar, the civilization of the elephants) the outlook was far more grim.  Cruelty, oppression, confusion, social disarray, and the fundamental existential crisis of an individual human’s place in the world were all just as acute, on a global scale, as they’d ever been.  I’d started to be deeply concerned about this when I was seven, and as a budding existentialist by the time I was finishing high school, the question of existenz was the only question that really mattered.   Despite pockets of brilliance, the human race, as a whole, had certainly not made any progress with that.

I’m marginally less arrogant in my advanced age and can admit (somewhat grudgingly) that there are aspects of human society where life is not only better than it’s often been, but better than it’s ever been.  Steven Pinker annoys me, and on the question of existence, we’re as clueless and benighted as ever; but at least some of us are warmer, better fed, and frequently not so nasty to each other as we fumble around in that existentialist dark.

Reading Cervantes and Montaigne and Pratchett reminds me that the basic nature of human beings doesn’t change.  We’re as much a mix of good and evil as we ever were.  Politicians will always lie, the people in power will always oppress.  The desire for the clarity and security of caste is baked into the human psyche and will find its expression no matter how we use the organizing capacities of politics and economics to mitigate the damage that it does.

Given that inescapable reality it’s easy to kick hope to the side, to think “what’s the point” of trying to nudge that arc of history towards justice.  The forces of reaction will always be there, biding their time, angling out how to eviscerate the advances that the forces of progress have made.  Because most people’s knowledge of history is no deeper than vague glossy stories about the World Wars and the Civil War and the American Revolutionary War, wars punctuated by peace and prosperity, they tend to think that our politicians are uniquely venal and corrupt, our political divisions and the demonizing of those we disagree with unprecedented.  They think it’s never been this bad.  They despair.

I, on the other hand, know that it has always been at least this bad, and often much worse.  Read Montaigne, his descriptions of the 16th century wars, the egos, the viciousness.  Or if that’s too much of a stretch, read any handful of American newspapers from any decade of the 19th century.  Spend an afternoon browsing the headlines from a time when the whole point of owning a newspaper was to promote your friends and demonize your enemies.  Objectivity in news reporting?  Are you out of your mind?  What a laugh. William Randolph Hearst blows his cigar smoke in your face.

Paradoxically perhaps, that reality gives me hope.  That a bunch of wealthy white expat English landowners, working primarily out of their economic self-interest, created a political system that eventually supported the elimination of slavery, the feminist movement, and the creation of a social safety net paid for by using taxation to redistribute wealth is stunning.   Given how vain, cruel, selfish, and solipsistic people are, it shouldn’t be possible.

It certainly isn’t easy.  And it certainly isn’t guaranteed.

The existentialist questions of my idealistic youth are important questions, but wrestling with them is a luxury.  I was shocked to read, during the initial days of the recent (and still ongoing) infant formula crisis, that nearly half of the babies in the US are getting WIC funds to help cover the cost of formula.  Half!  Do the people raging angrily about getting the government off our backs know about this?  Half!  In a nation with over 700 billionaires.  The parents of these kids are probably not spending a lot of time meditating on the possible perfectibility of the human race.  A society that would do a better job of making it possible for parents to make enough of a living to comfortably feed their kids may not be demonstrating the kind of “progress” that I was questing after in my teenage arrogance, but I don’t suppose those parents would mind.

My reading of history persuades me that the current global slide toward authoritarianisms is neither surprising nor inevitable.  In every age, people think that their social framework, their civilization, is uniquely challenged.  They’re always right in that the specifics of that social framework, and the technical and economic underpinnings of it, are always new.  They’re always wrong in that the ebbs and flows of how human beings respond to those challenges are consistent across centuries.  In times of relative economic security, people become more tolerant, more flexible, more willing to experiment.  When the economic prospects for the future look grim, they retrench, they look for groups of people to blame, and they look for an authoritarian leader who will absolve them of doubt and channel their fears into the satisfactions of rage.  They will chain themselves to that fearless leader in the name of freedom.

When I was a kid, there were battles in the streets, college students gunned down by American troops.  Big men in hard hats with American flag decals screamed “love it or leave it!”  There was a fear then, which has never faded, and has grown stronger under Trump, that to acknowledge our country’s failures is to deny all of its achievements.  And, to be fair, some of the voices hammering away insistently at the reality of the racism in our Constitution seem to take that approach.  But I love the way that Anand Giridharadas talks about our country in a recent New York Times essay – that “[o]ver the last generation or two, in particular, it has dramatically changed in the realm of law and norms and culture, opening its promise to more and more of its children, working fitfully to become what it said it would be.”  Working to become what it said it would be.  Striving to improve and live up to its better nature, just as people do.

Why is it so hard for people to see things other than in unambiguous dualities?  But that’s what we do, whether we’re judging a single person as if their accidental actions on one of their worst days says everything there is to know about them, or identifying the soul of a nation only by its aspirations or its failures.  We don’t judge ourselves that way, which is why it baffles me that we’re so quick to train that beady eye on others.  We make allowances for our own failures, we strive to do better, we feel guilty about our angry outbursts, we find love in our hearts and lash out from jealousy, all in the same afternoon.  Then we try to forgive ourselves just enough to get on with it the next day.

At seventeen, when I looked at the line of history, it wasn’t a continuing ascent toward perfectibility.   It was a generally horizontal line with occasional peaks into something more noble and just, valleys where our worst impulses ran amok.  Civilizations rise and fall.  Philosophies of love and mercy arise and then calcify into dogma and retribution.  Science discovers truths about the physical universe that engineers use to create devices that enhance the comfort and lifespans of millions, right alongside devices that are ever more efficient at layering death and destruction upon our enemies.

My mother was the reading specialist in the local high school.  Small town.  One big paper mill as the main economic engine.  Farms, small manufacturers and shop owners.  Many of the kids in her classes weren’t ever going to do much reading.  They weren’t the ones who’d be going on to college and building a better life than their parents had.  They were just trying to graduate, or just trying to hang on until they could quit school, and get on to their life in the mill and the local bars.  By the time she was getting close to retirement, some of the people in her classroom were kids of the kids she’d had two decades before and their prospects were no brighter than their parents’ had been.  I asked her how she kept at it, knowing that so many of the kids she was trying to help were never going to make it out of the roughshod poverty they’d been born into.  She said, “I know I can’t save anybody, but in all of the encounters we have in our lives, some stuff goes into the good side of the balance and some goes into the bad.  I can try to make sure that their time with me goes into the good.”

That’s probably the most powerful thing she ever said to me.  I think it’s the most that the most of us can expect from our lives.  That we do good in the moment.  That we make each encounter with another person a positive one.  Something that goes into the good bucket that person can take with them.  Depending on the path we’re given, some few of those encounters may be momentous, with rippling effects that shift the arc of history, but all of them are uniquely important. 

Making a good life is a very hard thing.  And impossible to do it without causing other people some measure of pain and suffering, no matter how we try to avoid it.  If I believed in the curse of original sin, I’d probably locate it here, in the ways we inevitably hurt the ones we love, to say nothing of those we don’t have the wherewithal to care very much about at all.  I don’t begrudge people the crutches they use to get by – all of them double-edged and dangerous.  The wonder, for me, isn’t that people’s fears and pain lead them to lash out and do damage, it’s that despite their fears and pains so many people find generosity and love in the midst of their own struggles. 

My views of progress haven’t changed all that much since seventeen.  We do seem to be at another tipping point with the American experiment, but it’s always been an outlandish endeavor that a cool historical eye would judge as foolish and impossible.  For many, the recent elections were shocking.  Nobody got everything they imagined or everything they wanted, but the teetering at the edge of the precipice seemed to have subsided a bit.  The nation didn’t slide off the edge.  There’s a little space in which to shore up the fundamentals, nudge us toward what we said we would be.

In the meantime, all the noise and rage notwithstanding, hand reaches out to hand.  Emily, our excellent waiter at the restaurant the other night says she’ll be having people over for Friendsgiving next week.  (When you work in hospitality, Thanksgiving is one of the busiest times of the year, so you have to postpone your own celebration).  Everybody’ll bring a dish or a bottle, there’ll be little kids, newly formed couples, a lost soul or two grateful to be included, people who’ve been bonded since childhood and best friends who’ve only recently met.  There’ll be laughter, the occasional cross word, a happy surprise or two, a sharing and revealing of secrets.  It won’t be perfect and people won’t treat each other perfectly well, but most of them’ll be trying hard to be the good thing in the lives of the other people there, using that lift to get up over their own struggles.  On the timeline of history, there’s a bit of a glow, a spot of light that rises.  Hand  reaches out to hand.  What’s that line from the song that shuffled up in my headphones this morning?  We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass. It’s not progress, it’s just us trying to be the best we can.  It may not be enough for the arc of history, but on any day we’re given, it’s a fine way to start.