As I've written before, Chris Hedges is a nihilist. He flatly denies the possibility of moral progress, and vehemently asserts that any efforts to improve humanity will inevitably end in mass slaughter and destruction. He says so bluntly at the beginning of his book:Those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but they also make moral reverses... We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness. We can move forward materially, but we do not move forward morally. The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inherent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic reality of human history... All utopian schemes of impossible advances and glorious conclusions end in squalor and fanaticism. (p.10-11)
Previously, he countered Hedges by saying:
First, moral progress, though it may be slower than we would like, is real and it is undeniable. A glance over human history would offer as examples the abolition of slavery, the granting of equal rights to women and minorities, the emancipation of state from church, the flowering of democracy worldwide, the increasingly greater efforts at avoiding war through diplomacy, and many more. This is not to say that there aren't many evils remaining, nor that no new ones have arisen.
A stickler might note that the examples he cites are common in the West, but hardly worldwide. And conceding, even as an afterthought, that this is not to say that no new evils have arisen, well -- isn't that a large part of Hedges' point? We make progress on this or that specific front, but overall, plus ça change. The larger themes remain, with new variations on them appearing. As John Gray put it:
History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of growing scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent.The core of the idea of progress is that human life becomes better with the growth of knowledge. The error is not in thinking that human life can improve. Rather, it is in imagining that improvement can ever be cumulative. Unlike science, ethics and politics are not activities in which what is learnt in one generation can be passed on to an indefinite number of future generations. Like the arts, they are practical skills and can be easily lost.
This is a tragic view, as well as a staunchly conservative one, but it's hardly nihilism. As Hedges said, we do make moral advances, but we also make moral reverses. Cyclical, not linear. And it's foolish to put so much stock into state-granted "rights" as an indicator of deep-rooted progress. That which can be granted with the stroke of a pen can be taken away easily, too. Shall we go talk to some Japanese families on the West coast about what good all those Constitutional rights as American citizens were for their grandparents in the 1940s in the face of jingoist hysteria? Do we need to revisit some of the more ominous recent polls showing a worrisome number of Americans willing to trade their own rights for an illusion of security, let alone those of others like Muslims and Latinos? The United States a hundred years from now could just as likely be a Franco-style military dictatorship with severely curtailed civil liberties or a failed state with no worldwide influence, as it could a sorta-democracy with an uneasy tolerance for gays and atheists. As Gray also notes in other places, authoritarian states like Russia and China have proved that popularity, stability and economic power are not necessarily linked to an acceptance of American-style individual rights.
5 comments:
I don't much know what to make of such debates, since they're often awfully vague and unclear about their own assumptions. But Gray seems a bit disingenuous when he rails against the cumulative view of moral progress. (The other possibility is that he may be stupid, but I refuse to entertain it).
For one, moral advances are not just skills, like the know-how involved in making a good omelet. Rather, they become embodied in moral practices, which often acquire a life of their own, perpetuating themselves over and above the heads of individuals, hence across generations. In addition, some moral progress gets enshrined into institutions, which are also amazingly resistant to abrupt turn-around or individual efforts to undo them.
Second, science itself is not cumulative in the way Gray trusts it is. Remember the Christian Middle Ages, when a good deal of late-ancient science went lost, and had to be rediscovered a thousand years later (Pierre Duhem wrote a decent case history of the West rediscovering the principles of statics beginning with Jordanus de Nemore in the 14th century, in fact relearning what had been known to Archimedes and Hellenistic Aristotelians). The Muslim world also underwent a period of scientific decline, after they had been the leading lights of inquiry during our Middle Ages. China inexplicably began to stop accumulating scientific knowledge around the 15th century or so, which led Joseph Needham to spend a lifetime pondering why that happened.
Second, science itself is not cumulative in the way Gray trusts it is.
Heh. I was thinking about that myself, but I decided to let it go in favor of emphasizing his broader point as a corrective to what Ebonmuse was saying.
Your point about moral practices is a good one too, of course.
I think I've told you about sitting in classical-medieval studies watching the professors list the great centers of learning all subsequently wiped out by barbarian invasions. Every one.I remember how horrified I was
So, what I took away from that is that progress is not a given; it must be defended, and its bitterest enemy is complacency.
Oh yes, our "progress" such as it is, is cyclical, but my fight is against the real enemy, not whether or not progress is real
but my fight is against the real enemy, not whether or not progress is real
Now, I would think a multitasker extraordinaire like you would know that we can easily do both!
But yeah, that's the thing -- people like Hedges, or even Gray (or Isaiah Berlin) would probably all agree that complacency is a threat, which is why they refuse to be lulled into the comfort of believing in a progressivist ideology. Hedges is probably farther left politically than many of the mainstream liberals who would criticize him for these sorts of sentiments, which is why I think it's unfair to call him a nihilist.
I always kinda think that nihilists are rather tragic; maybe that's me being touchy feely, but at the heart of every nihilist I just see a little kid determined to never be disappointed.
And....if it's not true, going all empathic on them when they're in high form just really winds them up ;)
God, how can I call myself a healer when I think these EVIL THOUGHTS? lol
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