Progress

 The religion of progress has seen better days. Not so long ago, the Steven Pinkers of the world could tell us that the "better angels of our nature" were on a sure and steady upward trajectory, and we knew exactly what they meant. Nowadays, an email can land in our inbox with the heading "we're in a worse place than I expected"—and that one too hardly needs elaborating. Such pessimism is as self-evident to us today as the optimism of Pinker would have been five years ago. 

The headline in question came from an interview with Bill Gates, conducted by David Wallace-Wells. A friend sent me the link to make sure it came my way, but the truth was I'd already noticed it. The headline, once glimpsed, was hard to unsee. Here was a figure we associate with the gospel of progress—millennium development goals, public health, the gradual amelioration of the human condition—saying that the project of global betterment is actually not going so well. 

The good news is that things are still getting incrementally better. The headline wasn't: "we're in a worse place than we used to be." It's just that we're in a worse place than we were supposed to be by now, given the technological capabilities in human hands and the rosier prognostications of a decade ago. But a combination of forces is prompting all of us to wonder whether even this small silver lining might be taken from us in the years ahead. 

Many of us, for the first time in our lives—and probably in generations—are seriously wondering whether the world might not be a worse place overall for human beings in the future than it has been during our lifetimes. Part of the problem is climate change, of course. But there are also all the disenchanting indicators about human behavior we are witnessing: the triumph of unreason in the face of a global pandemic; the election of bombastic demagogues spewing blatant lies...

And I wish the problem was only Trump, and no other politician. But my heart sank to hear Biden declare last night that the "pandemic is over," succumbing even further to wishful thinking in the face of a public health threat that has reduced the average U.S. life expectancy to the lowest it's been in decades. Essentially, the U.S. has surrendered the technological and scientific high ground. It's not even clear that anyone in the country is working on the sort of nasal vaccine that China is already rolling out to its citizens.

If human progress has already slowed, that is to say, we now have to confront the possibility that it could go into reverse. A hotter, angrier world populated by short-sighted populists peddling beggar-thy-neighbor solutions seems like a plausible account of the world our offspring could inherit... a world that has run aground on an iceberg, as it were, and which is being governed solely by politicians trying to elbow each other out of the few remaining lifeboats. 

Plainly, the religion of progress we all inherited is more in doubt than ever. It's fitting, therefore, that we turn to one of its core texts, to try to recover which if any of its insights might still stand. I didn't exactly plan it this way—I never do—but by whatever mysterious process of gut instinct, I was drawn today to read Percy Shelley's "Queen Mab"—his first major long poem—and one finds that it contains perhaps the most ardent and sincere expression of belief in progress ever committed to the page. 

There is a great deal about Shelley's idealism, admittedly, that is harder to credit when in one's thirties than it would have been if one had read it as a teenager, when one first fell in love with the poet's legend (and it was indeed with the legend that one fell in love at that age, one has to confess, more than the work). Do the stings of conscience truly unerringly torment all the tyrants of the world, as Shelley insists, and keep them from catching a moment's rest? Or do we not, as we exit our first youth, start to fear that many of those people—sadly—sleep perfectly well? 

Likewise: are the self-interested motives of commerce really the root of all evil? Or are they one of the few means of incentivizing collective effort among genetically-unrelated people in a complex society without resort to the (more common, throughout most of human history) device of sheer coercion? Will human beings ever become so intrinsically good that they will consistently and routinely be prompted to undertake collective action, not from any motive of vanity or greed, but—as Shelley insists—out of the innate and natural promptings of "free and generous love"? 

Part of Shelley's argument for such a roseate view of the human prospect is that all the rest of nature is organized on the principle of mutual love, so why shouldn't we be? But... is it? To a person of a more Hardy-an frame of mind, writing in the aftermath of Darwin, it seems much more accurate to say that nature is as chaotic and cruel a place as human society, if not more so. Where is the love in a natural world characterized by struggle, in which each form of life subsists by consuming and destroying some other form?

On the other hand, whether one is able to follow Shelley all the way to his conclusion or not, one is never in doubt as to his own conviction. There is nothing here of the mealy-mouthed. And so he is is capable of both reproaching us for our cynicism and bearing us aloft to get heights. When he condemns the doctrine of the inherent imperfection of man, and says this is just a cop-out designed to excuse the ruling powers, one feels one is being justly called to account by the conscience of one's younger self. 

So too, when Shelley bids us not to make the coward's choice of succumbing to the terrorizing tactics of organized religion; when he tells us to place so much hope in the coming perfection of human nature that we cease to fear even death; when he gets going on how we need never dread the "bigot's hell-torch," because "Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom"—one finds one's heart swelling. Yes, yes! this is the faith of my youth!—Shelley speaks in its voice—and in my way I have always been true to it, no matter how much darker the world's prospects may seem to me now than they did when I first read the poet. 

Still, though, one wonders at times just how far and how literally Shelley means to take his doctrine of utmost perfectibility. One can be a sincere believer in human progress, after all, and still entertain doubts as to whether it might not have an upper bound. We can extend the human lifespan, for instance: but can we ever abolish mortality? (Shelley in his notes suggests as much; because by approaching an infinity of thought in each moment, we can eventually extend at least the subjective experience of human time to a felt sense of eternity). 

One also isn't sure what we are to make of Shelley's visions of the coming reign of the peaceable kingdom, when the lion shall lie down with the lamb. One agrees fully with Shelley's recommendations to human beings that we should practice a vegetarian diet (I attempt to approximate one myself; though I confess to cheating with fish). But the poem seems to imply that this improvement in the moral status of the human diet will somehow set a good example for wild carnivores as well, and that wolves will stop eating sheep, and lions stop attacking gazelles. 

If one of our doubts about Shelley's vision of loving nature was that we are harassed by Tennyson's vision of "nature red in tooth and claw," or of William James's image of the jaws of the prehistoric beasts housed at the Harvard Museum of Natural History chomping down through the centuries on thousands of generations of harmless and helpless and frightened rodent creatures, it now appears at times that Shelley is willing to meet this concern head-on. He will go so far as to say that all animate nature—even the bloodthirsty beasts—will attain such a moral improvement that someday nothing will eat anything else across the whole Earth's surface.

Perhaps the strangest (and most unintentionally bitter—in light of subsequent events) passage in this vein comes when Shelley is prognosticating the fate of Earth's climate. So utter and thoroughgoing is the poet's belief in inevitable progress, you see, that he does not stop short even of maintaining that the planet itself, down to the angle of its orbit, will one day be remade in the image of renovated and improved human nature. "There is no great extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be as rapid as the progress of intellect; or that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species," says Shelley in his notes to the poem. I rather think there might be, but I am no expert. 

In the course of his discussion of the coming "physical" improvements to the Earth that will parallel the progress of human mentality and morality, Shelley prophesies that, speaking from the perspective of the future, the "wastes of frozen billows that were hurled [in our time]/By everlasting snow-storms round the poles,/Where matter dared not vegetate or live,/But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude/Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed[.]" In other words, Shelley is prophesying the melting of the polar icecaps. 

And the tragic irony is that his prophecy is now fulfilled... but it has ended up meaning the opposite of what Shelley meant by it. He thought that the world would become more temperate and hospitable to human life. And the globe is indeed warming; the glaciers are receding; and the Earth is undergoing a process of "global greening" due to the copious amounts of carbon dioxide humans are pumping into the atmosphere. But all of these changes are proving to be inimical, rather than conducive, to human life and progress. 

After all, the Earth has gone through periods before when it was almost entirely tropical. The result, on the ancient continent of Pangea—where the dinosaurs roamed—was epochal monsoon rainstorms that swept across the forested plains and made large stretches of the planet virtually uninhabitable. To catch a glimpse of the future Shelley foretold with such enthusiastic zeal, take a look at Pakistan today—where catastrophic rains have caused flooding that has buried a third of the country underwater. 

We may have to jettison, therefore, some of the poet's faith in perfectibility. We may recognize natural limits that he would not admit on what human beings can achieve. And even if we could somehow transcend mortality, abolish limits on the human lifespan and the Earth's carrying capacity, and attain infinite knowledge of the cosmos and its laws, that still wouldn't do anything for all the people and animals who died or suffered before these technological innovations were achieved. 

Even if the people of the future could achieve transcendent happiness, that is to say, how will that make up for all the endless millennia of suffering and injustice and death that people and animals had to endure in order to make it possible? In short, I have to side with William James's suggestion, when he said (in response to all systems founded upon ultimate optimism, including the religion of progress), "It may indeed be that no religious reconciliation with the absolute totality of things is possible [.... I]t may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever[.]"

But one has the sense in reading his poem that Shelley would basically agree. After all, even if his system admits of no final and triumphant evil, his poem is full of bitter denunciation and railing against present wrong. Shelley has nothing if it is not a sense of evil, which exists in his poem as a real and positive substance, whether his philosophy would doctrinally own its existence or not. And it is really in railing against this evil—the menace of superstition, the infinite cruelty of the hellfire doctrine, the warped morality of the Christian atonement, the utterly unjust distribution of the good things of the earth under prevailing society—that Shelley's poem is most alive. 

And so we can follow his example, and realize that whether the world is making progress on schedule or not, our task remains the same as it always was: to try to make what progress we can come about by whatever means are available, even when it seems far from guaranteed... "bravely bearing on, thy will/Is destined an eternal war to wage/With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot/The germs of misery from the human heart."