Paul Kingsnorth on the myth of progress
The writer Lewis Mumford called this "The myth of the Machine". Progress is the story that we tell ourselves, it's absolutely central to Western mythology, and it's replaced our religious story, which was the Christian story in the West, it's replaced all of our other myths and it's this notion of forward momentum, always. You're always moving away from something and you're moving towards something else. And I think it's probably quite unique in global terms, this story of progress, which comes out of the modern West. It doesn't come out of the medieval West.
For example, in the Middle Ages in the West there was no notion of progress. Life was seen as fairly cyclical in the Christian way of seeing: this was where you were and you existed within the world, you did God's work, and there was the cycle of the seasons. There was no notion of forward motion and you don't really get that in other cultures either. You might get it within a human life, and there are certain things that you can improve, but the notion that society as a whole is always moving away from something bad and towards something good. There's always a process of moral improvement and a process of technological improvement going on. It's quite unique, I think, to the modern West, it's something that comes out of this particular area of the world and we've again tried to globalise that, and it's fundamentally what keeps the Machine going.
Now it's interesting because in some ways things clearly do progress right? Technology gets more advanced, more sophisticated, medicine could get more advanced, so it's possible to cure things now we couldn't cure 50 years ago. Some things have improved, obviously, and because of that material improvement for some people, in some ways, it's easier for us to believe that this is a progress which will continue, that we're moving towards a goal.
And the question I ask myself is, well, what's the goal? What are we moving towards and what are we moving away from? The story we tell ourselves is that we used to be poor, we used to be stupid, we used to be superstitious, we used to believe in a load of rubbish that wasn't true, but now we have science so we don't have to believe that. We used to be lacking in knowledge and wisdom, but now we have education, we have science, so we don't need religion, we don't need superstition. We have a a certain sense of the individual over the community, and we're always moving towards improvement in all these areas, right? So we will have more power, we will have more wealth, we will have more health, we will live longer, maybe we'll live forever. We'll be able to control everything, we'll be able to manage nature.
And this attitude, the progressive attitude in the bigger sense of that word, infiltrates everything. So if you look at the environmental movement that I was involved in for example, you see a movement of people which says: "Hang on a minute, we're destroying the natural world in our pursuit of progress". So what's the solution to that? And the mainstream answer is more progress, just a more sustainable version of it. So we'll solve this problem with different types of technology, we'll roll out the wind farms, we'll roll out - possibly - the nuclear power stations, we'll roll out the the solar panels, we'll roll out the electric cars. We will change the way that we progress, but we won't question the notion of whether we're actually progressing towards something good.
My feeling is that at the heart of the myth of progress is a fundamental desire for humans to be gods, effectively, to control nature, to control ourselves, to manipulate the earth at the genetic level, to effectively rebuild the entire world to suit the modern mentality, the mentality of enclosure and control. That's what we think we're moving towards. And what we can't face is the possibility that it might not be possible, because if we stop believing in progress, we feel like we're stuck in some terrible, endless prison that we can't escape from. We're trying to escape from something, that's what we're doing with progress, because we can't face the human condition in some way. And in a traditional society you have religion and community to help you with that, you have a sense of the transcendent. And we've dumped all of that, so all we have is the material realm. So, all we've got left is to control it to the down to the micro level, so that we can make ourselves content, which isn't going to work, but we keep doing it, because we don't have another story. It's fundamentally the story that we have. And I think a lot of the problems we have in society at the moment are coming from the fact that the story is breaking down. We can see that in some areas progress isn't possible, and is even going backwards, but we don't have another way of seeing to deal with that.