I Am Behind Because I Am Ahead

Occasionally we hear people say that an institution is behind or ahead of the times (see last two posts). The word “times” here signals either culture or a functional vector; when this concept (if not the phrase) is applied to children, they’re either retarded or precocious; when to a business it is “behind” when it stops growing or fails to go public and then, in turn, fails to engage in diversification or acquisitions.

This dynamic vector has no terminus. I’m evolving, I’m evolving—and forever more. Progress is always to the better, evolution to the higher. Regression and devolution therefore are negatively flavored words. And arrival’s always mythical: the classless society or the end of times rapture. The imagination just refuses the infinite progress as well. Time must have a stop.

Deep engagement with “the times” is listening to one hand clapping. Reality is better pictured as the cycle of the seasons. Autumn is summer’s devolution and the progress toward winter time. And someone behind the times in Winter, dreaming of warmth and colored flowers, may be ahead of time because Spring is just around the corner.

Progressive Delusions

Nearly a year has passed since I last mentioned George F. Kennan on Ghulf Genes, so it is time again. We have no scientific evidence for this, but as Wikipedia informs me, “Native Americans in the United States have historically had extreme difficulty with the use of alcohol.” Similarly I have no scientific evidence for asserting that “The late Western Civilization has had an extreme tendency to succumb to progressive delusions.” Both may be true. The late but long-lived George Kennan (1904-2005) had discovered an inoculant to prevent the onset of that disease: realism. Hence I hope that he will be remembered.

This came to mind as we settled down to read The American Conservative yesterday. We always read it together, meaning that Brigitte reads, I listen, and then we both talk. The article in question was a review by Leon Hadar of a book by Charles A. Kupchan of Oxford University titled: “No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn” (October 2012 issue). We were delighted. The spirit of rationalism, realism remains alive.

The other day I offered the opinion that technology progresses but humanity cycles. The progressive delusions syndrome (PDS) is the mistaken belief that humanity also progresses and that, in the West, the two-beat events of the American and of the French Revolutions inaugurated the new age with a ta-Dah! The theme, of course, had been sounded earlier in the 1215 Magna Carta and smaller echoes of the same. But it took the eighteenth century to offer us the quartet of Enlightenment, Secularism, Democracy, and Capitalism. The syndrome consists in believing that these Four Horsemen will inevitably conquer the world.

Outbreaks of PDS marked our invasion of Iraq. At last, we thought, we would establish a beachhead of democracy where all of the oil is. The impossible conquest of Afghanistan (has been done before but never successfully) arose from pure faith, an ardent desire to bring light to mountainous darkness—although, of course, the ghost of a great pipeline glimmers in that darkness as well.

The most recent outbreak accompanied the Arab Spring. I hastened to register a cautious disagreement then. Somehow I do not believe that Twitter will conquer the world or that “the Spirit of Progress moved upon the Facebook of the waters” then. That drama is still “under construction,” as it were, but the forms emerging, most recently in Egypt and in Libya, are not easily recognized as marketable offspring of Progress.

So let us by all means reread George Kennan and, fortified, prepare to battle the horsemen we’ve created. Nor should we fantasize that China, which looks back to 2100 BC to see its first dynasty, the Xia, will gladly embrace what we produced circa 1800 AD. In that spirit I note that it might be time to do some raking—as soon as the rain stops to fall.

Aesop's Progress

A telling proof that the idea of progress is at best ambiguous is the fact that Aesop’s fables retain their currency today. If such a figure ever lived, he lived between 620 and 564 BC, thus in “pre-modern” Greece. My illustration, taken from a 1489 book cover and from Wikipedia (link), shows that his stories were also popular in “pre-modern” Europe. In this image Aesop is shown as a hunchback; the legends reaching us makes him a very ugly slave who amused his betters with stories that, presumably, they laughed at and ignored; we know them in the aggregate and Aesop by his name. The illustration also shows that some things remain the same: five toes and five fingers; and look at those intelligent eyes. The images are taken from his stories, and at about 9:05 on the clock is the image of the grasshopper (from the Grasshopper and the Ant), which floated into my mind today as I contemplated the power-outages in India. Neglect of maintenance—while grooving on outsourced wealth from America?

Progress is real enough—but manifests as individual achievement. But however great or minor, it too ends as the body marches on, eating the years. Progressive periods? Yes. When by some happy chance and virtuous cooperation humanity for a while pulls together—usually illuminated by some genuine inspiration—progress is real but something in us tempts us to believe that it will be permanent—even when we pull apart. Therefore nothing lasts. Yin and Yang wax and vane.

I wrote a brief riff on the power-outages on LaMarotte—which then reminded me of sounding, perhaps, like Chicken Little. That tale has no known author beyond Folklore—but is structured so that it reveals the presence of a very bright mind. That’s another perennial. The wisdom keeps bubbling up, whether named or nameless. The state of man remains what it was and always is. We always live in the Age of Iron—while dreaming of an Age of Gold.

Computer as Typewriter

When my Internet connection fails I feel a kind of silence, but it’s not the pleasing kind. It’s the silence of a power failure. We’re used to the all-pervading vibration all of our electric gadgets. It’s the silence of the dead refrigerator. Next I note that the software I use most is absolutely useless. What remains is the functionality that made me buy a computer long ago. The computer is the typewriter I once but dreamt about. Brigitte and I chanced across a new store that sells old objects—old objects and beautiful. We saw two or three old typewriters on display there—and I do mean old. But they were in pristine condition. We stopped before them and reached out reverently to touch raised keys. Memories. The keys activated slender metal armlets; at the end of each was a tiny metallic letter you can feel with the fingertip. But the feel of these old tools is also awkward. They are bulky, primitive—as if, reaching into a kitchen drawer for a knife we’d come up with a stone chipped so that it has a kind of cutting edge.

Back in antiquity, in my BC years, I used to pass a computer store on trips for groceries. It was dark in there as in stores that sell radios, music systems, TV sets. Techy. Finally one day I dared to enter this alien space. I stood unmoving, a little awestruck. I did not understand the things I saw. My rigid silence eventually drew a clerk. Could he help me? I said: “Do you have any of these that come with a typewriter attached?” This my incoherent way of asking if you could get computers to print something—which I had then imagined as requiring little metal armlets hitting a rubber roller moving paper upward line by line.

Later I also discovered that the computer was not too bad a calculator, either. And I even knew its name, a spreadsheet, because I’d earlier used paper spreadsheets, and little electric calculators, to do laboriously what now happened all at once. Change one number and the results of all linked equations changed at once. In a word, my life became much easier. What used to take weeks of effort—like typing a long manuscript—became the work of a couple of days of final proofing. What used to take days of calculation got done in an hour or two.

Then came the Internet. And when it’s not available, and the old uses of the computer are suddenly its only uses, then I feel exactly the same way as we did in the store the other day fingering those heavy, clunky keys. We’ve just experienced such a failure, an outage due to a defective power cord. It extended over two days; for more, see this. Bracing, that, I can tell you. What if the power had also failed? I just realized that I no longer own any kind of typewriter, not even an electric one. And as an emergency measure, I would be tempted to buy one of those antiques we saw—if I could find a source for typewriter ribbons. Instead I’ve just taken an inventory. Thank heaven I still own pencils and even an actual bottle of ink. When the end times come, we shall still write. Courage. We shall overcome.

Reflexive Progressivism

It happens three, four times a week, usually in TV interviews about some drastic (or would-be drastic) innovation. The person interviewed imagines the world radically changing because of the what’s-it that he is reporting on;  yes; they’re almost exclusively males, these discoverers of the future. The interviewer wryly nods. The unspoken assumption behind these marvelings at changing times is that What-Has-Been shall always be—only more so. The What-Has-Been refers to trends in the last fifty years. These people are so deeply embedded in modern urban culture, their time horizons are so narrow, their grasp of the total system of our current times is focused on so tiny a point (usually New York or Silicon Valley), they reflect so small a population (just the well-off and the young) they’re literally blind to the great movement already devouring the recent past. The gadgets, devices, trends, arrangements, initiatives that they ooh and ahh invariably depend on wealth, social order, and above all on energy. At the same time it is precisely these people who’re on the tube. Viewing the world in a comprehensive fashion requires time, advanced capacities, and attention. Reflexive progressivism therefore rules by its sound bytes while a great, roaring, but mysteriously unseen, unheard surf eats away at the foundations of modernity.

Collective Progress? Afraid Not.

The short span of lives and the brute fact that it takes decades to reach maturity—longer yet to achieve something like wisdom—suggest the reason why genuine progress eludes us. The signs of effective maturity are wide and comprehensive knowledge, concomitantly an extensive time-horizon looking forward and back, and an empathic view of other people well beyond the first three circles of family, tribe, and nation. The will to express that empathy in action must also be present. It’s a major effort—and much dependent on good luck—to achieve anything approaching that kind of maturity. Narrow, pragmatic knowledge, a short time-horizon, a competitive view of the other (“We must compete with China or else”—the last such good advice), and a willingness to engage in preemptive violence produce the cycles of history, the same-old, same-old. To be sure you have to age a bit to recognize that the newest wonder is the same-old. Meanwhile there is also some good news. This realm is quite wonderfully suited to develop individuals so that they do advance. The hard knocks—in combination with our innate gifts—will yield that result. In general, however, it’s the old Wheel of Karma going round and round. Hearing this infuriates some people; thus they demonstrate my premise; but later they too might learn.