Grand Illusion

The eclipse of societal progress

During the past century we've witnessed unprecedented growth and prosperity - albeit patchy and shared between a relatively small number of the world’s most highly developed nations.

Our deep and lasting love affair with technology, together with booming industrial economies, have provided their citizens with healthier lives, greater material wealth and less laborious work. There is less conflict and killing in the world today than at any time in human history. We live longer than ever before and have greater personal freedoms - or so we're told.

Our elderly, sick, disabled, unemployed and poor are catered for (albeit within the bounds of a fairly unyielding system), and discrimination, particularly that based on religion, sex and race, has declined markedly. Scientific discoveries hold out the promise of virtually unlimited alleviation of human pain and suffering. Yet there are deep levels of malaise within our society - a disenchantment with what the future may or may not hold.

At its core is the meaning of life. Any sense of spirituality has gone missing. Meanwhile, two of our most critical domains - the biosphere we have inherited and the technosphere we have contrived - are out of kilter. We appear to be trapped in a metacrisis of our own design.

The earliest signs of this imminent shift in our civilisation have been apparent for some time. It's not a secret that we live in a world corrupted by social and environmental breakdown, from which nearly all intelligible purpose has been erased; a world that has people 'living to work' instead of 'working to live' and an economy that exists for itself, and not for any higher human purpose. Our manic fixation on technology, economic growth for its own sake, the activities of the global marketplace, and our descent into triviality, all create an illusion of 'progress' where none really exists.

Industrial civilisation has become a global 'condition'. The imperative of economic development has affected most other societies, irrevocably changing them, often destroying them. The history of the twentieth century is that of the dominance, predatory nature and destructive idiocy of industrial growth. 

Uninterrupted prosperity seems to have become the norm after the War years. It was something we took for granted in the West. Furthermore, it ingrained itself deeply into the psyche of all Eurocentric nations. Relieved from economic uncertainty, people were free to pursue happiness. Even the spectre of a nuclear holocaust did little to diminish our enthusiasm for the consumption of luxury goods and services. Seduced by visions of a 'perfect' society, we imagined an era where all social problems would be swept away on a flood of rising prosperity. We anticipated a world in which workers and families would benefit from rising incomes and stable jobs; where poverty, racism and crime would abate and personal freedom and self-fulfilment would be almost limitless. We not only expected these things. After a while, we thought we were entitled to them.

This heady trust in a continuous 'boom' did more than just distort our view of reality. Governments began to operate on the assumption that resources, if not infinite, were almost so. Far too much was expected of prosperity and technology as a panacea for social ills. Meanwhile the idea of entitlement subtly nullified personal and institutional responsibilities, fostering a tendency for everyone to search elsewhere for solutions to their most perplexing problems. Governments looked to a surging post-war economy to pay for ambitious infrastructure programs; companies looked to governments to prevent recessions; and workers looked to corporate and government welfare benefits to assure their security and living standards.

The most destructive flaw in this post-war vision was that it rested on a vague concept of 'progress' - an assumption that all aspects of life would constantly improve. Yet, with hindsight at least, it's easy to see that some of these expectations of entitlement were inconsistent. It was always too Utopian to happen, and the belief in its practicality created the societal equivalent of a mythological chimera. It arrogantly presumed that we could engineer a constant economic boom, which we cannot, and that such vigorous wealth would automatically erase all social and personal problems, which it could not. Ultimately, it confused survival with advancement.

The fundamental wellspring of popular disillusion is the fact that this guaranteed societal system, with its comforting certainty and established order, failed to materialise. The vision of 'progress' that once provided social cohesion has been undermined by the cumulative weight of so many dashed hopes.

Today we're caught between the false promises and hedonistic desires of an empirical past and the insistent, hostile, uncertain social and economic conditions of the fragmenting present. Discovering new meaning in that forlorn void is tantamount to the punishment given Sisyphus - the struggle of pointless eternal toil.

To this day, politicians still promise things that they can never deliver. They insist on framing purpose on the discredited notion of loyalty to empire. Meanwhile, an ingenuous public, embittered by such superficial posturing and ritualistic ideological exchanges, become increasingly sceptical of traditional institutions - fearful of a future from which the reassuring assumptions and securities of the past have been stripped. Instead we resort to maligning those in authority, despairing at our own destiny.

The reductionist political and business processes we have devised respond best to clearly bounded problems and conflicts. Because any problem during the Second World War could be defeated with ample resources, appropriate technology and a suitable strategy, the dominant post-war ideology became that of 'problem-solving'. This engendered a confidence that any problem could be solved. But today’s issues are systemic in nature - unbounded, messy and ambiguous - and we've yet to learn how best to think about such dilemmas. Of one thing we can be sure: the thinking that gave rise to these issues in the first place cannot now be used to overcome them.

The complex and uncertain challenges facing global society today ultimately demand an entirely fresh approach to designing, organising and managing human affairs - not just more indiscriminate patching up of the present system. The diversity of issues we are currently required to address, together with their complex or chaotic nature, interconnectedness and sheer volatility, leads me to the conclusion that nothing short of a total reappraisal of the human condition - who we are, why we are here, what is meaningful to us and what goals, therefore, we need to pursue - is likely to suffice if we are to withstand the enormous pressures on our species to endure.