Repurposed from comments on Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality Substack
History does appear at times to have some sort of arc, although maybe not the one referred to in MLK’s very non-Marxist portrayal of history as a pilgrim’s progress. Sixty years ago I might have been hopeful that history, at least conceptually, was finally reaching some sort of apogee, but I was young then, and my knowledge of German hadn’t yet revealed to me any of the more dismal historical events that had been busily giving the lie to Enlightenment optimism as I was being born. Nowadays, given the commedia dell’ arte version of the Decline of the West being cosplayed with such ferocity by the unholy fools in the White House, I’m beginning to wonder if history’s true arc isn’t some lumpier version of a sine wave. If so, maybe people serious about what is to be done ought to exchange Hegel and Marx for the Ramayana.
Optimists hope that technology’s ultimate ROI will be to help us smooth out our ups and downs as a species. Pessimists fear that there is no ROI, that technology just heightens the amplitude of the wave until it breaks, and whether it breaks at the apogee (the singularity) or perigee (annihilation by nuclear weapon exchanges or climate collapse) hardly makes a difference. They both have evidence to offer us. Me, I have doubts that the evolution of our technology aids the speed of our biological evolution much at all. Give an ape a bone, and he uses it as a club. Millennia later, give him a hypersonic nuclear-tipped missile, or an economy predicated on the burning of trillions of dollars worth of petroleum fuels, and sic transit gloria mundi. It’s like Pogo said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”