John Gray, David Hawkes, and the Myth of Progress
John Gray is a British social philosopher who, in the words of David Hawkes, puts forward an “uncompromising challenge to the myth of progress.” Hawkes (an English professor at Arizona State) has recently published an essay, “Backwards into the future” in the TLS (8-30-2013) which is a sympathetic presentation of Gray’s views and a review of his latest book, The Silence of Animals: On progress and other modern myths. What is Gray’s challenge all about?Gray’s new book is an attack on “meliorism” — which Hawkes explains as the view “that the moral and material condition of humanity will improve over time” and that its improvement is, in the long run, inevitable. Defined this way “meliorism” will be easy to attack. Conjoining “moral” and “material” conditions with “and” rather than “and/or” and adding “inevitability” suggests that meliorism is some form of utopian dream and indeed a myth.
But not all philosophers use this straw man definition of meliorism. Much more useful is the definition given, for example, in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Meliorism “is the view that the world is neither completely good nor completely bad, and that incremental progress or regress depend on human actions.” This view holds that: “By creative intelligence and education we can improve the environment and social conditions.”
Meliorism is the possibility that humans can make some progress towards improving the world but regress is also possible at times, and there is no guarantee of success since human actions cannot be predicted with inevitability. Under capitalism, for example, human actions are guided by competition and the profit motive and lead to socially destructive behaviors with respect to the environment and other people who are seen as objects to be manipulated for economic gain. Meliorism in such a system would not seem to have much chance of success in the long run, although in some parts of the world progress in scientific understanding and disease control can be discerned.
The Wikipedia article on “Meliorism” points out that this view is the basis on which the values of liberal democracy, human rights, and liberalism as a political philosophy are founded. I should also add that Marxism and other forms of socialism are likewise indebted to Meliorism but do not think the meliorist project can really get underway, or can get underway only with great difficulty, under capitalism or in under-developed parts of the world where meliorist social projects, including socialism, are attempted in the face of capitalist hegemony.
Hawkes praises Gray for his “bold effort” to “exorcize” the “spectre of progress.” This “spectre” presents itself in “the guises of Enlightenment rationalism, Romantic individualism, liberal humanism, nationalism, Marxism, and neo-liberal capitalism.” Only the kitchen sink seems to be missing.
But I think Hawkes indulges in overkill. He attacks the uses to which science has been put in the last century and gives as negative examples the two world wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima (all done under the aegis of capitalism). He says science is misused, perhaps, due to a defect in its methods and thinks “we may well ask whether such uses are not in some way inherent in the scientific method that enables them.”
I don’t know how many science courses English professors are required to take, but Gray’s target is not progress in science but the claim that there has been moral progress. In a talk he gave at an RSA conference in Britain he stated that there has been progress in scientific understanding of the world from the time of Copernicus and he is not arguing against that, but he rejects claims of ethical and moral progress — the United States, for example, has reverted to the use of torture, a practice we had thought was extinct in advanced democracies and outlawed by all sorts of international agreements and conventions.
There is nothing “inherent” in scientific method, anymore than in mathematics, that leads to the Holocaust. The failure of morality that led to the Holocaust, or Hiroshima, or the Invasion of Iraq was not a failure of science. Science, as is mathematics, is neutral on moral questions and only seeks to describe how the world works in terms of natural processes. It is similar to the rules of chess: this is how the pieces move, etc. If you play chess poorly, it is not the the fault of the rules.
Hawkes admits that Gray “never renounces belief in scientific truth” but still there are serious consequences resulting from an abandonment in belief in moral or ethical progress. The consequences Hawkes reports that Gray thinks follow from his rejection of moral progress are not “profoundly disturbing” as Hawkes maintains because they don’t really follow at all. Gray thinks it is worse to lose “faith” in progress than to lose it with respect to “God, reason or even science,” Hawkes writes.
We are told without the idea of progress we cannot see “meaning in life.” But this is just not true. Humanity makes itself by its choices and gives meaning to life by the commitments it undertakes. Sartre pointed this out before Gray was even born when he said:
Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery.That there is no transcendental meaning to life does not mean there is no meaning tout court.
We also have to abandon the idea that “empirical appearances conceal substantial essences.” This is nonsense. Discussions of empirical and substantial essences, or real and nominal essences, of Aristotle’s views or Locke’s for that matter are quite independent of one’s theory about “progress” one way or another.
Nor is it responsible for our having to give up the belief of a “soul” within the body. Materialism is responsible for this view — it goes back to Epicurus at least and is not dependent on Gray’s views about the myth of progress. Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, written when Gray was a toddler, deals with “the ghost in the machine” quite apart from notions of progress.
One can also reject the idea of progress independently of being either a neo-pragmatist or a postmodernist — it does not commit one to rejecting the view that signs refer to external reality.
Finally we are informed, incorrectly, that not having faith in progress means we “view the world as a depthless simulacrum with no underlying significance.” Wrong again. Not all cultures have produced philosophies based on the idea of progress. The Ancient Egyptians for one had no concept of progress in our Western sense yet they did not believe the world was a depthless simulacrum without significance.
Again, Sartre would maintain that we are responsible for creating our own significance in terms of the values we choose to live by. The world presented by science is the backdrop for our experiences and choices — it up to us to provide the significance. None of the above five so called “profoundly disturbing”consequences of rejecting the idea of moral progress are logical consequences of such a rejection.
This very conclusion that I have articulated is the one Hawkes indicates is shared by Gray himself. Hawkes writes that one of the conclusions of The Silence of Animals is: “The world can only have meaning conferred on it, or be deprived of it, by human beings.” But this conclusion does NOT logically follow from Gray’s thinking. He thinks we have arrived at this conclusion not because the world has changed but because the mind; i.e., “the twenty-first century mind” has changed. But this conclusion would be consistent with the views of mid-twentieth century thinkers such as Sartre, among others, so no new and startling “development in human history” is responsible.
Marxists would say that the dominant ideas in a culture are a reflection in the ideological super structure of the social reality that the culture has created around its basic interaction with the natural world it finds itself in and especially with respect to its mode of extracting food and sustenance in order to sustain the living human beings that comprise it.
And while the scientific world view would question the idea of “eternal verities” with respect to the development of ethical and moral systems, if Gray’s views are correct about the world’s meaning, or lack of it, being dependent on human beings then — the very idea he rejects — that it is “not the discovery of an eternal verity about the world” (as Hawkes puts it) is incorrect. The only way it could be true that the “meaning of the world” is put there by the human mind is the fact that the world, in and of, itself has no transcendent meaning of its own — it never did and presumably never will — it is just atoms and the void — and this is certainly an eternal verity about the world and a necessary condition for Gray’s views to even make whatever sense they do make.
Hawkes questions whether Gray is correct in apparently thinking that life, even for people who think it has meaning, is still meaningless. Gray writes, “symbols are useful tools; but humans have an inveterate tendency to think and act as if the world they have made from those symbols actually exists.”
Hawkes, however, asks if this is really an “inveterate tendency” rather than [as Marxism suggests] the result of historical conditioning. We might think the word “fire” is a symbol for the speedy exothermic oxidation of combustive substances resulting in heat and light and we would not, I think, be wrong to hold that what the symbol represents “actually exists.” However, we might not have the same opinion as the ancient Greeks about “Zeus.” It is the job of science, and philosophy, to try and hook up the proper symbolism with the actually existing world.
We can pass over the next section of Hawkes essay where he discusses the problems of symbolism and signs as elaborated by Gray in an earlier work, False Dawn (1998; 2nd edition, 2009). Here the discussion revolves around Gray’s use of economic examples to illustrate his theories and Hawkes seems to take Gray seriously when he does so. The problem is that Gray’s economic views (and Hawkes remarks about them) appear nonsensical. I base this not only trying to parse this discussion but also on Paul Krugman’s review of the second edition of False Dawn. Krugman, who has a Nobel in economics, thinks that Gray’s writings on the subject are the “garbled” views of an “ignoramus.” Krugman, however, writes that Gray didn’t need to show himself “to be an economic ignoramus, when his core argument does not really depend on economics anyway.” [False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (book review, New Statesman)] Let us return to the “myth” of progress and the “core argument” and leave the dismal science to Krugman and his confrères.
Hawkes next deals with a contradiction in Gray’s position (not necessarily a bad thing). Progress may be a myth, but “modernization inexorably occurs” [the spectre of progress under another name] Hawkes writes. We may claim not to find any meaning in history but history and change still go on. If the myth of progress is overcome and our understanding of the world is no longer perverted by it — is this not progress? Hawkes, I fear, may be a victim of dispirited English department post modernism when he writes:
If the Western intelligentsia no longer acknowledges any significance to life, that does not mean that we have discovered a timeless truth that had been hidden from Aristotle, Plato and the prophets of monotheism. It means that we can no longer see meaning where others once did.Well, I don’t think Hawkes speaks for the whole “Western intelligentsia.” As far as finding significance in history is concerned the “Western intelligentsia” would do well to ponder the following admonition from Hegel with regard to any scientific study and that is the categories we use to find significance or meaning in the world are the ones we ourselves bring with us and a thinker “sees the phenomena presented to his mental vision exclusively through these media.” From which he concludes that to a person “who looks upon the world rationally, the world in its turn, presents a rational aspect.”
And what do we find when we look at the world rationally; i.e., scientifically? We don’t find the world according to Plato or Aristotle or the prophets of monotheism. We find a universe about 13.788±037 billion years old, we know life on one planet (so far), Earth, which is about 4.6 billion years old and it seems has had life for the last 3.6 billion years and for the last 200,000 years, anatomically modern humans. Our species resulted non-providentially by a process of evolution by natural selection. So here we are and we have to make the most of it.
Do we see any significance or meaning in the history of our species? Hawkes seems to agree with Gray that it is irrational to believe in (moral and ethical) progress — he is very unimpressed by the twentieth century — but, he says, that doesn’t mean there is no meaning in history.
Hawkes proposes that the meaning of history is not progress but anti-progress; i.e., not ascent but decline. “History is not progress but regress, not advance but decline, and it leads to destruction rather than to utopia.” Gray would think this just as ridiculous as progress because for him the basic reality is that the animal man is an unchanging essence. In his book Straw Dogs he writes:
Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive.”Hawkes writes that “Belief in historical regression is a far more challenging proposition than Gray’s assertion of insignificance.” It is challenging because it is ridiculous. What is history regressing from — Atlantis? Ancient Egypt? The Stone Age? At least Gray’s warmed over Schopenhauerian pessimism makes some sense where regress doesn’t.
Hawkes also seems to miss the point about the difference between moral progress and scientific progress. A world without polio or smallpox is a great scientific advancement and shows that we can make progress in disease control and understanding nature. If there are areas where polio still breaks out, mostly in the underdeveloped world, it is a moral crisis not a scientific one. If capitalists demand money and profit for medicines, it is a moral crisis not a scientific one.
When Hawkes writes, “It is relatively easy to admit that what we have seen as scientific advancement and economic enrichment are meaningless” he is missing the whole point of what science is all about. It is not meaningless to fight against malaria, yellow fever and other infectious diseases. Pasteur was not engaged in a meaningless exercise when he discovered how to prevent rabies, nor was Koch when he discovered the cause of tuberculosis.
Hawkes ends his essay by remarking that we may soon have to consider the fact that scientific advance and economic enrichment (two inherently different activities indiscriminately lumped together) are “actively evil and destructive.” This is like calling cooking evil because some people over eat and get sick. Did cooking make them sick?
I will give the last word to Bertrand Russell who sums up all that anyone will get out Hawkes’ essay or Gray’s books as far as positive knowledge is concerned. “Change is one thing, progress is another. ‘Change’ is scientific, ‘progress’ is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy” (Unpopular Essays, 1951).
Twenty years ago, Evgenia Cherkasova and Elena Kornilov were doctoral students in their mid-20s, living in the same housing complex at Penn State University. As they pursued their degrees -- Cherkasova in philosophy, Kornilov in physics -- both started families, and to take a break from studying they often found themselves meeting for wine or tea, or watching their young children on the playground. As their friendship deepened, their conversations often veered into the Big Questions on their minds: How could they live a "good life" with purpose, happiness and success? What did those words mean?
After graduation, Cherkasova and Kornilov went their separate ways, keeping in touch via letters and weekly phone calls, sharing the details of every aspect of their lives – their kids’ first days of school, their academic research, their relationship hurdles.
On March 4 of this year – Kornilov’s 48th birthday -- her doctor called to tell her she had breast cancer. Even as she hid the diagnosis from other friends and some family members, Kornilov confided in Cherkasova, and the two went over her treatment options. Some, like chemotherapy, were physically intrusive, but would greatly reduce the chance of remission. Others, like hormonal drugs, were easier to handle, but came with a higher risk of a tumor returning.
Suddenly, the conversations and questions that guided their friendship over the years took on a new meaning. They weren’t just idle speculations; they were real, urgent, full of consequences, perhaps now even a matter of life and death.
“We started talking about how you deal with these situations, especially when it’s a patient with a potentially terminal disease,” recalled Cherkasova, now a philosophy professor at Suffolk University in Boston. “She told me, ‘it’s a question of the quality of life versus length of life. You have to decide: If you want to prolong your life, then what do you do it for? What am I doing in life at this point? What’s happiness?”
Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests this is easier said than done. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which takes an annual measure of how Americans use their time, the average person spends about 45 minutes daily “socializing and communicating.” Watching TV, meanwhile, accounts for nearly three hours of the average American’s day. And today’s laptop-scattered coffee shops don't seem to foster environments of conversation and debate, like the salons of France, often credited with incubating philosophical discussions that ushered in the Age of Reason, or the cafe culture, a backdrop for the Existentialist musings of Jean-Paul Sartre and his contemporaries.
Of course, it’s much easier to measure TV-watching than America's intellectual engagement and introspection. But for some time, scholars and observers have been documenting, often with alarm, a shift from a society structured around social gatherings to a culture of technology-driven individualism -- or, depending on your point of view, isolation. Writing more than a decade ago in Bowling Alone, Harvard public policy professor Robert D. Putnam documented the erosion of Americans’ participation in community clubs -- like bowling leagues and civic organizations -- and the disengagement from society and the self that it fostered. More recently in Alone Together, Massachusetts Institute of Technology clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle, who studies the impact of technology on social relations, examined how hyperconnected-ness has created relationships where we have the “illusion of companionship” without the “demands of friendship.”
In other words, we are moving toward a way of life that discourages the kinds of conversations that defined and sustained Cherkasova and Kornilov’s friendship.
"We have stripped away so many of the conditions that make conversations like these flourish. And the condition that makes it flourish, in many cases, is the uninterrupted full attention to each other," said Turkle, who has spent the three years interviewing dozens of people from various walks of life about what they talk about with friends and how they do it for an upcoming book called Reclaiming Conversation. "These conversations are what college students are missing, they're what people at work are missing, they're what we're all missing.”
In the midst of this shift, the American university system remains an oasis of sorts, a place where the Big Questions are freely and fiercely debated -- in no small part because many students are not yet dealing with the pressures of work and family. But there’s a shift on American campuses, too. Just seven percent of graduates major in the humanities, like philosophy and literature, while majors in largely career-oriented fields have increased as more Americans pursue higher education. A half-century ago, twice as many students walked across commencement stages with humanities degrees.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has written and spoken extensively about the decline of the “humanist vocation,” began teaching a course at Yale University last spring about the history of character building. He said he believes there’s a shortage of people publicly asking the cosmic questions.
“People are hungry for a certain side of writing about these issues, but we no longer have that kind of group of writers widely discussing how you measure a life," said Brooks.
On occasion, an awe-inspiring commencement speech -- like David Foster Wallace's "This is Water," which was given at Kenyon College in 2005 and became a book after his death -- makes its way into pop culture. But Brooks believes we need much more. "Back in the 1950s, you had Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr; they were writing books devoted entirely to these issues," he said.
Heschel, a rabbi who stood on the front lines of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches with Martin Luther King Jr., also was known for penning provocative theological works, like Man is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. The works of Niebuhr, a Christian theologian and professor at Union Theological Seminary, include Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man.
“For anyone who goes to church, these are the questions they are essentially grappling with via their faith,” said Brooks. Indeed, a measurable drop in religious affiliation and attendance at houses of worship may be a factor in the decline of a culture of inquiry and conversation. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 Americans identifies with no religion, including those who are atheist, agnostic or “spiritual but not religious.”
But the Big Questions aren't just for the faithful, and there are glimmers of hope for those who long for the days when it was easy to find souls loudly searching for what the Greeks described as eudaimonia, or the “human flourishing,” considered central to a person and society’s development.
On Meetup.com, a website where people organize get-togethers around mutual interests in homes, restaurants or cafes, hundreds of groups focused on philosophy, spirituality and religion have launched in recent years. TED, the conference series with the slogan “ideas worth spreading,” has an independent affiliate that hosts weekly salons in a Manhattan apartment where attendees watch taped talks then discuss them (in August, the theme of each meeting was “courage”). And from suburban Columbus, Ohio, to Seattle, individuals and nonprofits have launched grassroots efforts aimed at getting Americans to talk about death and what they desire out of life; events include Death Cafes -- monthly coffee shop-centered discussions on dying that can now be found in nearly every major American city -- and Death Over Dinner, a coordinated series of meals that took place in hundreds of homes last month.
The Adult Philosophy Club of East Greenwich, R.I., was launched just over three years ago by a drug addiction counselor who recognized what he called “existential crises” among his clients. Today, the group is open to the whole town.
“What constitutes morality? Are we moral? Is what’s right something natural or is it something that we’re taught?” Houghtaling said, recounting some of the club’s recurring themes. “People come in with strong convictions and religious views. It can get heated.”
Oftentimes, the conversation spins off of the news. With international controversy over revelations about the National Security Agency’s extensive spying programs and amid increased tensions over the Obama administration’s threat to launch strikes against Syria, the discussion frequently turns to the role of the state. “What obligation does the state have? In a critical situation like a war, can the government suspend natural rights?” said Houghtaling. “Where’s the line?”
As Houghtaling sees it, these are questions that can all too easily be swallowed by the activities and stresses of everyday life.
“We go through the perfunctory things so much, putting on our suits and ties, and putting on our titles, that we don’t get to talk about humanity and life. It’s cathartic when you get to do it,” he said. “It’s tough to sustain yourself unless there are ‘whys’ and purposes.”
Yet, there are plenty of reasons for putting off these questions. With high unemployment and economists predicting years of recovery from the recession ahead, jobs and money have a way of taking precedence over any talk of higher purpose. When Gallup researchers asked an international group of respondents a few years ago to describe their “best possible future," the responses leaned heavily toward “wealth” and “good health.” It was harder, on the other hand, for people to describe what they considered good relationships and a sense of community, and how important they were.
Recognizing a yearning for “intellectual community,” the National Endowment for the Humanities has given $2.2 million in grants since 2009 to fund college and university courses that tackle the “enduring questions.” Cherkasova will teach one next year at Suffolk University in Boston called, What is the Meaning of Life (its syllabus includes Ecclesiastes and Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse’s philosophical novel about a young Brahmin’s journey of self-discovery during the age of Gautama Buddha). Among dozens of courses that the NEH has funded are, What Is The Meaning of Happiness, taught at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces; an upper-level class at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., titled, What am I?, and at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Penn., What is Love?
To advocates, these courses are more than mere intellectual exercises and bull sessions. They pose questions intimately connected to the core of everyday life.
“When you are dealing with college students, mostly what you are doing is trying to plant seeds so they are familiar with different world vocabularies,” said Brooks, whose own course was not taught with a grant but is similar in some ways to the NEH programs. “You want it to be so that when they get older and encounter challenges, they know what to do, and have books and ways of thinking to help them tackle problems.”
The West Conshohocken, Penn.-based John Templeton Foundation, best known for its annual Templeton Prize, has spent tens of millions funding largely academic endeavors looking into the "basic forces, concepts, and realities" of the universe and our place in it. They range from the esoteric, like a $5 million project to research immortality at the University of California, Riverside, to projects aimed at a wider audience, like Big Questions Online, a news site updated weekly with essays by academics and spiritual thinkers.
“One of the things that interests me is whether we can save young people literally decades of wasted time in coming to the conclusion that almost everyone does generation after generation: The things we thought were important in our youth when the world was open to us, when it was our oyster, when the future would bend itself to our will, really are not,” said billionaire natural gas and gold investor Thomas Kaplan, who started Recanati-Kaplan with his wife, Dafna Recanati.
Kaplan’s own interest in philosophy was set off in high school when his mother gave him a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a major Stoic text.
“There are certain truisms. No man on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I spent more time at the office,’” Kaplan said, describing one of the many lessons he hopes to impart through the nascent effort. One of the foundation's launch events in 2012 was a two-day conference on the “Art of Living.” Hundreds of students, faculty and Providence residents listened to philosophers, psychiatrists, experimental psychologists and scholars of other disciplines examine the "good life."
Meanwhile, at Stanford University, there’s Sophomore College, a three-week intensive course series where students meet for several hours every day with the same class and live together on campus. Among its seminars, the Meaning of Life was taught by the university’s dean of religious life, and included field trips to houses of worship and readings of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. In another push, the Office of Religious Life hosts “What’s Meaningful to Me and Why,” a series of hour-long public discussions with faculty and administrators about “life questions.” Speakers are encouraged to discuss their personal struggles and reasons for pursuing their fields.
Isabelle Wijangco, who graduated from Stanford last year with a degree in human biology, is among those who took the Meaning of Life seminar in Sophomore College and said the course is part of what spurred her to want to focus on global women's health issues when she attends medical school.
“One of the big questions we grappled with in Meaning of Life was how to live every moment and be fully present while also being forward-looking and planning for our hopes and dreams for ourselves and the world," she said.
Wijangco recalled that a fellow student described a way to strike that balance by repeating a bit of wisdom he heard from his father: ‘Lay each brick reverently. Lay a purposeful brick, but be in the moment of laying that brick. The house will form.’”
She has carried that wisdom with her ever since. “It has helped serve as a metric for me in maintaining intentionality in every action,” she said, “for both present and future.”