Are We Guilty of Progressing?
The minefield of meta-ethics and the amorality of human advancement
Is unequivocal, harmless progress even possible? Can we do well without perhaps unintentionally or indirectly harming someone else or even ourselves in the long run? Would an entirely innocent species even seek to improve its situation?
On the surface we live in a progressive age. “Modernity” is practically synonymous with “progress.” Scientific understanding, freedom of thought, capitalism, democracy, technological and medical advances, a plethora of options for consumers — it’s hard to look at these changes without thinking of them as improvements in ancient and medieval circumstances. Similarly, it’s hard to view even ancient societies and their standards without considering them as upgrades on animal life in the wild.
If we’d rather live in one period than another, we thereby assume the preferred period is better than the other one.
The underbelly of consumer society
But then you watch a documentary like Seaspiracy (2021), about the catastrophic impact of the fishing industry, and you can’t help but look more deeply at our idea of progress.
When you walk into a supermarket, you notice the huge variety of foods you can buy. Were a starving woman from a poor nation to set foot in an American supermarket for the first time, she would think she’d died and gone to paradise. The surface of postindustrial society is all smiles and rainbows. We’re sold on the creature comforts, so we’re reassured and won’t be inclined to wonder whether that seductive first impression of consumer society is illusory.
What if it turns out that to stock those supermarkets, we pollute and overfish the oceans, which drastically increases our carbon footprint and drives starving nonindustrial fishermen to piracy? What if for each fish industrial fishermen mean to catch, they catch plenty they can’t use because they “fish” by dragging colossal nets through the oceans? What if farmed fish swarm with diseases and sea lice and contaminate the oceans with pesticides and waste?
Even if we don’t eat fish, our taxes often subsidize these fishing fleets that illegally overfish and threaten the ocean’s ecosystem, and companies mislabel their food products to mask these problems and provide false comfort. And what if this only scratches the surface of the supermarket’s underbelly?
That documentary may have fudged some facts to push a vegan narrative, but what’s undeniable is that there’s a litany of damages we inflict to obtain the benefits that are apparent in the fish section of your local supermarket.
Is the whole process, then, from fishing to the consumer’s selection of fish products progressive? What could we mean by “progress” in that case?
Progress as amoral advancement
The origin of the word “progress” is instructive. The word derives from the Latin “progressus,” which means “going forward,” with the stem “progredi” meaning “to advance,” from “pro” (“advancing” or “projecting forward”) and “gradi,” as in the English word “grade” which is the basis of “gradient.”
What’s crucial here is that this original meaning isn’t intrinsically normative. Think of a tone gradient from white to black, which displays the intermediary gray tones. “Progress” from one of those grays on the way from white to black would entail a series of darker shades of gray, as opposed to a leap into a red or a green colour. You could flip the gradient and look at the “progress” or advancement as moving from dark to light, in which case a projection along that same trajectory would require a further lightening rather than a darkening of the gray shades.
Similarly, if we have in mind that original sense of mere advancement, we could speak of “progress” for the Nazis, which would have been for them to have won WWII and killed more foreign races. Likewise, “progress” for the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer would have meant that he avoided being arrested and went on with his gruesome murders. The Devil, too, would “progress” by successfully undermining God’s plan for the created universe.
In all these cases, there’s an amoral, relativist continuation and intensification of past behaviour. If you’re moving forward rather than turning around, progress — as in going further in the same direction — would mean that you keep walking forward, getting closer to your apparent destination. But the judgment of that destination as good or bad is no part of this foundational meaning of “progress.”
If that’s what we mean by “progress,” the continuation of overfishing, for example, would be progressive even if that practice were to end up killing all life on the planet. After all, we fished in the past and we’re still fishing, but we used to fish with smaller nets. So we’ve “advanced” in the direction we’ve been heading in for centuries, like the gray tones that get “progressively” darker in a gradient.
But that’s not what we take ourselves to mean when we boast that our societies are progressive.
The politics of selling amoral advancement
Somewhere along the way, we came to assume that certain practices do indeed take us closer not just to any destination but to a worthy one. Again, science, capitalism, and democracy were radically new rather than continuations of traditions, but we deemed those revolutions to be justified precisely because they made progress possible.
Hitherto, societies were conservative in that they were aimed at ensuring social stability. Progress was modern, as in post-medieval, in that the break from the past wasn’t just new, but was a heroic correction of grotesque dogmas that had oppressed the bulk of civilized humankind, including women, slaves, and infidels.
Even today’s late-modern conservatives oppose progress. More precisely, they might adopt progressive rhetoric, but they’d maintain that progress requires us to return to old wisdom and the traditions of our ancestors.
In reality, conservatism is wholly amoral in its effective equivalence to social Darwinism. The religious or libertarian rhetoric that dresses up the conservative’s regressive policies is just a stream of excuses for imposing animalistic dominance hierarchies in which a psychopathic minority rules over the majority by a combination of force and shameless con artistry.
But this raises the question of whether progressives or liberals differ from conservatives only in providing different ideological talking points to dress up a new, but still amoral civilizational trajectory. Conservatives appeal to religious scriptures and to the stability afforded by deference to natural mechanisms of crowd control. Liberals appeal to the individual’s freedom and to the benefits of free-thinking and of democratized knowledge to create a healthy middle class.
Yet what if the liberal ideology ignores or downplays the harms caused by the industrial and postindustrial trajectories? What if there’s no such thing as harmless progress because you can’t make an omelet without cracking some eggs? Maybe our species can follow civilization’s Promethean path only by extinguishing other species and thus by destroying ourselves. The difference between conservatives and liberals would be just that the latter accelerate the disastrous outcome with fresher rhetoric.
In this case, our notion of progress would be quite myopic. We’d be like a deluded man who thinks he’s on his way to the circus even though he’s being led to the gallows.
The minefield of meta-ethics
Perhaps the notion of harmless, innocent progress is utopian. Even Jains who take a vow of nonviolence and go to extraordinary lengths to avoid harming insects when they walk still harm viruses just by having an immune system in their body that fights off such microscopic threats.
Moreover, our confusion between forward momentum and doing good in the world is understandable: at this late-historical stage, with the benefit of so much hindsight, the underlying meta-ethical terrain we’d have to ponder to resolve the confusion is a minefield.
To show that our civilizations are engaged in real rather than just illusory progress, we’d have to know there’s a genuine difference between right and wrong. Instead of just presupposing the validity of our personal or cultural standards, we’d have to show that those standards are good in nature’s inhuman context. Does the rest of the universe confirm, as it were, that our civilization is on the right track? If not and if that question turns out to be meaningless, there’s no such thing as real progress because the distinction between right and wrong would be muddled.
Let’s just run through some standard religious and philosophical ways of handling this problem. By far the most popular answer is that God tells us what’s right, so if we follow his commandments, we have nothing to fear.
Then comes the litany of doubts. Do we trust God because of his power or because of his wisdom? Is submitting to a dominator morally right? If God knows what’s right, do his moral beliefs agree with independent facts? If so, he’s not the basis of what’s good, and we don’t need God after all to know what we should do. Or is religious morality subjective because it flows from divine whims? Can God’s mind change?
And we’ve only just begun.
If there’s only one supreme being, how could he be sane in such a lonely, alienated position? If there are multiple gods, do they socially conflict, and if so, how would we know which deity to follow? Even if there’s only one God, religions evidently differ on how to interpret his will, so knowing that our life has a meaning can be a burden if we don’t know what that meaning is. Why would an omnipotent creator care about morality anyway when he could produce all possible universes? And so on and so on.
The standard secular takes on morality aren’t much help. Should we do what’s natural? But wouldn’t that beg the question, since who says nature is good if there’s no God?
Does reason tell us what’s good? But reason evolved to enable us to succeed in our animal life cycle, and who says that cycle is worth anything to the rest of the universe?
Is morality a matter of logic, as Immanuel Kant thought? Not really, since bad people can make exceptions of themselves without being inconsistent, just by adjusting their premises, and if badness were illogical it would also be impossible, in which case all decisions would be morally right. Badness would be like a square circle, but evidently badness is just as real as goodness. So logic can’t replace divine commandments.
Is our moral purpose just to seek out pleasure? But bad people take pleasure in evil actions. Are we supposed to be happy, as in content with our lot in life? Yet what if there’s much suffering and wrongdoing in the world? Is the saintly response to keep your composure even in the face of gross injustices and absurdities? Or is contentment a virtue only for sheeple whose docility is being exploited by sinister, amoral elites?
Even if good people do have certain character traits, known as “virtues,” that wouldn’t tell us that a certain way of life is good. The virtues would be tendencies to excel in a certain context, meaning that they’d be means to an end. But what we’re asking now is whether the end itself is good. We can know that some people perform better than others in some social functions, but that doesn’t mean that those roles are themselves worthy.
Again, bad people can excel at achieving their evil ends. We call their character traits “vices” rather than “virtues,” but that’s because we presuppose the merit of the violated social norms. We tend to beg the question here precisely because there’s no clear solution to the meta-ethical puzzle of whether, for example, Gandhi really is better than Hitler, given the godless universe’s apparent amorality.
Pantheism and aestheticized morality
I don’t claim to have all the answers here, but I’m inclined to think that if we want to ground our moral judgments in secular objectivity, we should notice that objectivity can reenchant nature. Nature’s absurdity, inhumanity, sublimity, and monstrousness, owing to the shocking, wild mindlessness of its supreme creativity are all already aesthetic judgments that entail pantheism.
If you were to take all the finished scientific models of how nature works, you’d have a picture of what we could theoretically do with everything in the universe. That’s science’s limited, instrumental purpose. But what those reductive models would imply is that the natural order unfolds without the guidance of any mind. The universe creates and develops itself, and each causal relationship is a zombie-like lurching from one pointless state to the next. In short, this is the picture of nature as a colossal monster, as a brute order of things that shouldn’t be but is.
That recognition should be the basis of our meta-ethics. We can know whether we or our society is on the right track by framing our choices in the terms that the universe can understand, as it were. The universe “knows” about creation, evolution, and destruction because that’s what’s happening everywhere we look. That’s why there’s a preposterous number of stars, planets, galaxies, and perhaps even universes in a megaverse.
But again, nature is a monstrous artist. Nature’s like a magnificent artwork — one that creates itself! Art with no artist. Perhaps, then, our cosmic purpose is to outdo the universe in creative terms, to create an alternative world that supplants the inhuman wilderness. Nature wouldn’t feel offended, of course, nor would we likely succeed in humanizing our solar system, let alone our galaxy or the universe. However, we can impact nature by using its resources according to our ideals, by wreaking havoc in its ecosystems and by terminating its absurd cycles.
Evidently, as I said, doing so threatens us with self-destruction because we still depend on the natural environment. But this might mean only that reality-based morality is a dangerous business. The ideal that we’re failing to achieve might be to sustain an existential revolt against the natural monstrosity.
We’d carry out this revolt by opposing mindless creations with mindful ones, with languages, cultures, worldviews, artworks, cities, civilizations, and galactic empires. We’d inject meaning physically into nature’s undying carcass in the form of the intelligent designs and values that would dictate the operations of our artificial replacement for nature’s wasteland.
Moral values would be recast as aesthetic ones, and they’d make sense not just to our biased egos and societies, but to an enlightened (undeluded) pantheistic perspective that encompasses the gamut of scientific objectifications.