The Snare Of Progress
Grant Havers’ post on a number of prominent learned Tories included a brief mention of one of my favorite modern philosophers, the Canadian George Grant, whose criticisms of the American right and American empire anticipated many of the objections that we have been making in recent years. It also reminded me of Grant’s deeper criticism of the American empire as a technological empire. This came back to me as I was reading Jim Pinkerton’s recent column in TAC (sorry, not online) and then listening to him during his diavlog with David Corn. The glorification of technology in the column and the criticism of conservation in the diavlog, in which he said that environmentalists wanted to make us all into “Hobbits,” struck me as strange and remarkable, especially in light of Mr. Pinkerton’s memorable cover article from last year in which he developed an elaborate vision of a revived Christendom on the model of...the Shire! So we are apparently supposed to become spiritual, but not material, Hobbits.
This cuts to the heart of what Grant saw as the main conflict between proper conservatism and the American political movement that has taken up that name for itself, or viewed another way it is a perfect example of the division that runs down the middle of American conservatism and through the hearts of many conservatives, and it is expressed in warring responses to our relationship with nature. Grant said in his In Defence of North America, part of his Technology and Empire collection of essays:
That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery.
Within many conservatives, there can be responses to this statement that range from “So what?” to “Something must be done,” but at the heart of the Grant and Lukacs criticism of American conservatism is the correct observation that the former response typically wins out. From At The End of An Age Prof. Lukacs states an important, if obvious, truth:
“Conservatives," especially in the United States, are some of the most strident proponents of “Progress”; their views of the present and the future are not merely shortsighted but laden with a bellowing optimism that is imbecile rather than naive.
And again:
“Conservatives," who had once stood for the defense of traditions, have become chief advocates of technology and of militarization and even of populism, all in the name of “Progress.”
The objectification of nature into the “environment” as something apart and against man is something that many environmentalists on the left and their critics on the right share equally; their disagreement is over the proper response to or use of the objectified environment. This calls to mind Lukacs’ important point that man should be understood as part of nature, and instead of “environment” the proper human relationship to nature is one in which man is integrated into nature and also shapes nature into landscape, and it reminds us of another one of his critiques of the progressivism on the American right in “The Problem of American Conservatism”:
For at least two hundred years, beginning with Burke and Dr. Johnson, the commonsense argument against abstract reasoning has been the strongest and the best intellectual weapon of conservative thinkers against the celebration of modernism. Yet the admiration of the mechanical and the abstract, in the age of computerization and of nuclear international relations, seems to have had a strange and particular appeal to many American conservatives.
So within many American conservatives and among different groups of conservatives, there is a struggle to recognize that Progress is fiction and the pursuit of it wrecks much that we have that is of enduring value. At its core, this is a struggle between natural conservative pessimism and the optimism that imagines that every problem, every evil circumstance, can be “fixed” or “solved” with the right use of power and knowledge, which is the same as a disavowal of limits and an abandonment of self-restraint in favor of endless consumption, boundless “growth” and a reckless disregard for preserving our patrimony for our posterity.
Comments
Another good one Dan, Thanks.
I couldn’t comment on the Euonmia site on your recent articles about Obama but I wanted
to point out that Carter-Reagan race was close too despite all the problems Carter had
through the 1980 election. The race didn’t decisivly turn in Reagan’s favor until the last
week after their one debate that Reagan won because he convinced so many people on the
fence about his ability to be President that he could do the job. John F. Kennedy needed a similar
convincer against Richard Nixon. I think you would agree Obama does as well but when
that moment happens, victory is his.
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Thanks, Sean. I agree that Obama needs that moment to win over the doubters. The problem he has is that he is hardly at his best in debates. What his admirers take to be thoughtfulness, the doubters will probably see as hesitation and uncertainty. Meanwhile, McCain relishes town hall meetings and, when he isn’t grimacing like a cartoon pirate, can be quite effective in formal debate formats. If the election turns on a particular moment in one of the debates or town hall meetings, McCain is just as likely to be the winner of that exchange.
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It should remembered that the split described here by Mr. Larison runs through the Left as well as the Right. This has implications for strategy.
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A rather confused piece. Technology can certainly bring problems, but it can also bring immensely useful advances. Do you fancy discarding computers and the internet for the sake of ideological purity? The article illustrates the foolishness of being bound by any one political ideology, rather than assessing issues on their merits.
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We are nearing a topic that concerns me greatly. Being from the western US, I come from a culture that has the outdoors as part of its bones . I, like Chilton Williamson, am a critical admirer of Edward Abbey. And yet, I find myself divided by the line spoken of in your essay. Progress is undefined here, but part of it does mean technology for me. Frankly, I fear for the health of my children without modern technology. And yet, I wish for them to be raised in a small community arena. The question then is can a societal structure exist that encourages technology while retaining the attachment to the Permanent Things? Starkly put, would I rather live in a village with caring neighbors whom I know and love and sometimes quarrel with but without running water or modern medicine or would I rather live in a suburban sprawl where I know for sure that medical care is available 24-7 for my child who will have medical difficulties for the rest of his life?
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Anyone who thinks that this post has something to do with “ideological purity” needs to do some more thinking. It is hostility to abstraction that informs this entire post, as should be quite clear from one of the Lukacs quotes above.
It isn’t technology that is the problem, but man’s attitude towards its use and the use of it in relationship to nature. Technology is neutral in itself. It is a tool, nothing more and nothing less. The error comes from the belief that progress is possible and that technical advances do not carry significant costs with them. In reality, what is possible is the sacrifice of certain things for the sake of others. The obvious point is that conservatives ought to know that there are trade-offs and ought to be wary of making trade-offs when these undermine and ruin those things that they wish to preserve. If I thought that discarding computers and the Internet was at all likely to shore up the integrity of the family, Christian tradition and a humane way of life, you’d better believe I would advocate it, but that would be to make a typically puritanical error of blaming the thing for a human failing.
The real problem is the glorification of technology as the solution to virtually all problems. The glorification of technology as the answer to each new predicament is simply a way of avoiding the recognition of the costs of “progress” and pretending that we can have it all. This leads to an irresponsible and destructive attitude towards the natural world, one that I am quite familiar with because I used to hold it when I was younger, that we don’t need to change our behvaiour or our habits but just invent some new technology that will allow us to keep living in the same fashion indefinitely.
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Daniel
The real major threat to the environment in most countries isn’t technology per se or man’s attitude towards it, it is the booming human population and the pressures it places on resources.
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“The real major threat to the environment in most countries isn’t technology per se or man’s attitude towards it, it is the booming human population and the pressures it places on resources.”
Sorry, the booming human population is a direct result of increases in human longevity (often unwanted, judging from the popular support of euthanasia among the elderly) brought about by innovations in medical technology. In fact, we are on average having less kids than we did ages ago.
Same goes for the pressures we place on the environment: per person, we have a larger ecological footprint than we have in the past precisely because of our technologically-oriented lifestyle - we need running water, electricity, cable, instant access to food, fuel for cars, and a whole host of things that either didn’t exist or weren’t thought of as necessities 100-200 years ago.
Anyone who really, truly desires to know the truth about technological progress and its relation to tradition, family, and Christian religion, and other such things conservatives hold dear, would do well to check out Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society.
The notion that technology is merely a “tool”, without any sort of inherent moral value, is patently false, in the sense that each technological innovation leads the way for another, and progresses in a geometric fashion, and since these innovations are almost always invented towards the purpose of greater efficiency, anything which is not strictly utilitarian and pragmatic is thrown away - thus the erosion of local cultural traditions, religious doctrine, the family (countries that strongly value the family have high occurrences of nepotism, which is highly inefficient - one split their loyalty between the family and the technological state), the natural environment (which is viewed mainly as either a sterile, human-free preserve for wild animals or merely as a natural resource to be exploited, not as a place for suitable habitation, something that is part and parcel of the human experience and something that has shaped mankind’s traditions and values for centuries.), etc.
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The problem is not technology. The problem is when “progress” becomes an ideology.
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