“There is no progress whatever.
Everything is just the same as it was thousands,
and tens of thousands, of years ago. The essence does not change.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”
Stanislaw Lec
“New roads; new ruts.”
G.K. Chesterton
So enamored are we with our own species that we see ourselves as the pinnacle of some grand evolutionary process. To carry the egotism further we assume that the process continues, and that in some Lamarckian version of it we are directing the progress of our species, looking down our noses at those who have gone before. We speak of an “evolution of morality”, and being on the “right side of history”, as though anything before us is the “wrong side of history”. We dismiss the wisdom of ages past because their foolishness, their wickedness, took on a different form than our own.
Conservatives revere the forefathers of this nation, who, of course, are manifestly on the “wrong side” of history so far as progressives are concerned. That devotion is mistaken for worship, and the Progressive god is a jealous one who will have no other gods before the present. It has become fashionable to bring up the moral failings of the founders, bringing them down a peg, and in so doing invalidate their ideas as the product of flawed minds. Consistent with the progressive modus operandi the sense seems to be that knocking heroes down somehow lifts the rest of us up, and that pointing out their faults simultaneously indicates our own virtue. We look back a few centuries (the blink of an eye in terms of “evolution”), and tut-tut our ancestors’ understanding of slavery, equality for women, and diversity. One wonders if the flow of time could somehow be reversed, if those same ancestors would look with disdain to our generation for our disregard for human life, our lawlessness, vulgarity, family instability, and corruption. Morality ebbs and flows throughout history. Just when you think mankind and society is evolving, something happens to highlight that decay is just as prevalent. Like a game of wac-a-mole society pounds down iniquity in one area to see it arise somewhere else, reminding us that it is unlikely that Utopia can be formed from men with feet of clay.
“The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things
behind us, has utterly obscured the idea of real growth, which
means leaving things inside us.”
G.K. Chesterton
The reason this blog is so often littered with quotes from the past is rooted in a recognition that wisdom and morality are not evolved, they are learned. They are not something that has been incorporated into our genetic makeup as individuals, or, even if there was such a thing, our genetic makeup as a society. We quote Wilberforce and Lincoln with regards to slavery, for example, because they devoted so much of their lives toward discovering truth in this area of thought. We can augment, extend, or fine tune their understanding, but there is no need to re-invent it or start from scratch, they have already done the heavy lifting. Technology deceives us into believing that newer is always better. Genius is not always dependent upon the progress of society. Michelangelo’s talent is not eclipsed by today’s artists because they are members of a more “advanced” society. Mozart need not hang his head because today’s musicians have Pandora at their disposal. The architects of our Constitution studied the history of thousands of years of the implementation of government, learned from philosophers who spent hundreds of hours considering human nature and the consequences of political power, debated for years among themselves and cooperated in putting together what until recently was considered a model for democracy, and a miracle in self governance. Their genius was not in some epiphany of a new way of doing government, but in a humble, plodding research of what had come before them, and a building on the foundations that had been laid by great thinkers of years gone by. It is the height of hubris to believe that we are so profoundly superior to all who have come before, that we can by virtue of our evolved genius “transform” all that they worked to create, or even to suppose that it requires such a transformation.
IMHO: We all have those friends who think their brilliance is such that they can always find a better way to do things, even things they really know little about. The limits of their knowledge paradoxically is what permits them to mistakenly assume their cleverness. They spout off on everything from bridge construction, to interpersonal relationships, to world politics. There are distant horizons and areas for research that we have not even begun to find the limits of, but there are other places that were fully discovered years ago. It is doubtful that a better shaped wheel will be invented, that I can improve on my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce, or that we will find a better structure for government than thousands of years of history have shown us is possible. Oh, we can tweak things to accommodate our tastes and our times, but change isn’t always progress; progress comes from building on what others have worked for, and growth incorporates the past rather than disposing of it. Those without the humility to honor those who have gone before, despite their flaws, are like those who cut down trees in Fall expecting a forest in Spring. Question the “progress” unconnected to history, that has destruction as its foundation.
