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.”
It would appear that humans cannot outrun themselves; not individually (for sure), nor collectively (so it would seem).
Abrahamic religions offer us the promise of redemption, but only if we bend the knee. Certain kinds of Buddhism offer us the possibility of escaping our temporal, i.e. animal cages, but only if we renounce everything we like about being us. Stoicism, existentialsm, tell us that this is the way it is, and we should stop whining and suck it up.
No wonder we’re pissed off—for all the good it’s ever done us—no wonder the tech bros’ Deus ex Machina seems so attractive, especially if it can actually deliver us the delight of endless vengeance on everyone and everything regardless of whether or not any of them, or it, are responsible for our dis-ease.
I say if it sucks being us, we should ignore the spiritual and intellectual nostrums being hawked on every corner of the real and virtual worlds, and just do the best we can.
Damn.
You catapulted me right back to conversations I had with a beloved, though badly damaged mentor.
“….and just do the best we can.”
Right. A’ la Paul Tillich (?), I go to the “ground of my being” and fuck-all with the mewling of those less certain.
I haven’t any idea whether Tillich was genuinely an atheist as some of his critics claim, but I have no problem claiming it for myself. And, you’re right. It gives me no satisfaction to think that there will be no justice if not delivered in the temporal sphere we actually have.
One can, however, make a decent living hawking the isms and the ologies. Is cynicism, then, the true Balm of Gilead,? Or, if you’re Stephen Miller or William Bennett, sophistry?