Since almost from the beginning of recorded time, humankind has wedded itself to the notion of progress in all things. We need look no further than the experience of our own growth in stature cutting across every facet of our lives: the larger and stronger brains and bodies of maturity paving the way for our ever greater competence, confidence, creativity and life satisfaction.
Until, that is, our inevitable decline.
But that’s when our successors come to the rescue, extending our influence, keeping us alive in some figurative sense, each new generation building on the last and becoming even larger, stronger, faster, smarter, the sum total of human knowledge and history keeping us on a constant trajectory of expansion and progress.
The same principle applies on the individual psychological-spiritual level as well, in the arc of personal histories that we like to think move us steadily toward more wholeness, wisdom and love.
Evolutionary theory bears this idea out at every turn. Survival of the fittest among all life forms, very much including our own, assures an ever more adaptable population, better suited to the challenges of its time.
This idea has enjoyed its own variation in religions, most of which see at least human life, whatever its current sufferings endured by any individual, swept up into a greater cosmic narrative primed for ultimate perfection in some version of heaven or unity with the godhead.
Or so the idea has always gone.
From Martin Luther King’s popularization of the phrase originally uttered by 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”) to the invocation by the 20th century Jesuit priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin of an “omega point” involving union with God toward which all of creation is heading, it seems an article of faith among at least the more optimistic among us that whatever our current travails, things are, by a kind of magic guiding hand, destined to work out for the better in the end.
Now more than a fifth of the way into the 21st century, in a new millennium that began with a splendid show of fireworks over Sydney Harbor and a preponderance of hope and confidence in the future steadily cascading through every succeeding time zone of the world, there seems plentiful reason to ask: “Is any of that true?”
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Harvard historian Timothy Snyder recently weighed in on some of these matters with Ezra Klein of the “New York Times” on Klein’s fine twice-weekly podcast. Snyder has authored six books on Ukraine, but is likely known to more people through his slim, one-sitting read, “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century,” which tore its way through the anti-Trumpist movement in 2017 as a kind of guide to understanding and thus, with effort, perhaps helping to derail, the worsening despotic signals of our time.
He followed that up the following year with “The Road to Unfreedom,” focused on Russia’s renewed expansionism.
Needless to say, little surprises him about Vladimir Putin’s recent Ukraine invasion.
Prominent in the 74-minute podcast is Snyder’s indictment of what he terms the “politics of inevitability” that much of the West seems to employ as a kind of self-comforting lovey when faced with the terrors that still manifest with depressing regularity across the globe.
Snyder is not the only thinker who sees this as naive at best and perhaps dangerously deluded at worst.
“The basic notion is that history is over. Markets bring capitalism. We are exceptional, but will no longer be because everyone will soon become like us. That’s the way the world is actually moving. And then that brings with it a predictable set of problems…For example, wealth inequality or addiction to social media, because all of these forms of things that you expect to be progressive don’t turn out to be….The politics of inevitability teaches you to narrate in such a way that the facts which seem to trouble the story of progress are disregarded. So…if there is huge wealth inequality as a result of unbridled capitalism, we teach ourselves to say it’s kind of a necessary cost of this overall progress. We learn this dialectical way of thinking by which what seems to be bad is actually good.”
On the political-historical level, this applies whether the facts entail Putin mauling Ukraine, Isis resurgent in the Middle East, the former leftist darling Daniel Ortega turning dictatorial in Nicaragua, or the ravages of homelessness, addiction and Trumpism in the world’s supposedly most advanced democracy.
But the same principle applies on the individual psychological-spiritual level as well, in the arc of personal histories that we like to think move us steadily toward more wholeness, wisdom and love.
Can and do we make strides in that direction?
Of course. Shoot me now and end my isolation if I haven’t seen into and been able to practice at least some of my time in that light.
But that very recognition, like all things, comes with a shadow side: It can also turn us toward an unbearable smugness, a personal “spirituality of inevitability,” in which we convince ourselves that if we just wear the correctly angled beatific smile of the Buddha on our faces, go on enough yoga retreats to Costa Rica and bleat on like Ben & Jerry about peace, love and Cherry Garcia, at least our own if not the world’s suffering can be overcome, and we will neutralize the roiling, crazy loons who still (and always will) occupy the nether regions of our psyche.
There’s a reason why we laugh so readily when comedians trot out the now time-honored thought bubbles above their characters, the incessant neurotic patter in the bubble overlaying the verbal niceties being exchanged at ground-level discourse.
“Yep, that’s it!,” we exclaim. Close to the bone, and all the funnier for it.
I’ll say this: it signals a modicum of mental health that we laugh about it rather than lapse into despondency.
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But the neuroses exposed in our thought bubbles are tame fare indeed when held up against the evils of Putin or the mass delusions clung to with such ferocity in MAGA Land.
Or even worse, the full recognition of those delusions but the cynical use of them for naked political power ala Cruz, Hawley, Haley, Graham, Cotton, Carlson, et al.
But everyone is self-blinded to some degree, the biblical beams in our own eyes obscuring the vision of things as they are.
Is there some truth to that arc of justice that MLK cited to such effect, and which in many ways his spiritual-political heir Barack Obama represented and repeated with his own talk of that arc and his sometimes smug claims and exhortations of being on “the right side of history.”?
Only to this degree, I have come to think: We have to work our asses off for it.
So in that sense, the claim of “inevitability” is to mistake in the extreme what we are up against.
There is zero guarantee that human freedom will win out in the end. Whether due to evil and oppression from without or our own willing slide into somnambulance as robots and their computer chips take over our brains and lives, no one—not God nor fate nor any historical arcs—can save us without our active, alert, and energetic participation and claiming of our own desire for sovereignty on both a personal and societal level.
There is simply too much evil and avarice and will to power lurking in the human heart for the forces of good ever to go on holiday.
(This is one reason that although I began this blog nearly a decade ago intending to focus it on the humanities without reference or even a category for politics, I have since realized that wholly ignoring the political is to be strumming a guitar on the beach in a hurricane, and without significant resistance to political evils, there will be no humanities worthy or capable of defense.)
As we have seen throughout history and in recent years with our own democracy under sustained and not inconsiderable assault, the human project is wobbly by nature, the strength of our outsized brains not wholly erasing, by any measure, the frequent flailing of our emotional armature.
“Man, the rational animal,” various philosophical tomes on our origins used to proclaim.
Sometimes.
Other times, our rationality falls prey to the biases and blindness we can only tame but never vanquish altogether, human as we are. Or worse, we place our rationality in the service of cunning and evil.
If that evil is cunning enough, it can become an overwhelming force, with an advantage over the good because the good’s nature is to desire harmony, practice forgiveness, and employ trust that the good can always be found, pulled from the shadows and liberated by love.
Evil just scoffs, plots, lies, misinforms, promises, betrays.
“The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin in a 1934 essay.
Elsewhere, he proffered his own brand of Darwinian Christianity, making plentiful room for science and a deliteralized creation story but clinging fiercely and eloquently to a faith-based understanding of God waiting in the wings for humanity to meet up with him once it has awoken to itself.
For all this, Teilhard got on wrong side of the Vatican over many years, a familiar dreary story of his books and classroom teaching being banned, lest impressionable Catholic minds be swayed from embracing “correct” doctrine.
Nevertheless, he persisted.
“The whole future of the Earth, as of religion, seems to me to depend on the awakening of our faith in the future,” he once wrote in a letter to a friend.
It’s an optimistic and heady vision, and likely a necessary one if we are to continue fueling the good in its attempt to prevail in the truly cosmic struggle with evil.
But another observation looms as well, often misattributed to 19th century classical conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, true source unknown: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
In a time when the enduring forces of evil and oppression lap with renewed purpose at the shores of the civilized world, may those words serve as a clarion call for good people unconvinced by the inevitability of anything but committed to doing one something after another in pursuit of the good.
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“But it’s written in the starlight/And every line in your palm/We’re fools to make war/On our brothers in arms.”
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M.C. Escher artwork, “Day and Night” (1937) from the public domain
Wonderful piece as a doorway into considering the big picture facing us in these trying times.
I take exception however to the idea that Buddha-like smiles and Costa Rican yoga retreats as inherently smug, false avenues to exploring our spiritual paths and responsibilities. First, sadly, every religion and spiritual practice is prone to the dark side of human nature, to falseness, chicanery and exploitation (hello Catholic Church, rigid fundamentalism etc etc). Secondly, it’s a risky business to judge another’s place on a spiritual path….the Buddha-like smile one assesses as fake may actually be genuine, a yoga practice (or other exercise discipline), even in an exotic location, can facilitate all sorts of positive change and hopefully a positive presence in the world.
Thirdly, I think I understand you to be saying that it’s not enough to only adapt the trappings and outward appearance of a spiritual practice: true enough. Healing ourselves can be the first step to being able to honestly take stock of our communal situation and take more steps toward bigger individual and social change. People have to start somewhere.
Valid points all, Mary. But I think you mischaracterize both my words and intent in suggesting that I dismiss Buddha-like smiles, yoga, etc. as “inherently” smug or anything else. Nothing inherent about it. I specifically used the word “can” to characterize the shadow side of spiritual progress and what “can” happen if we get too self-assured about it, such as it may be. Just as Mr. Snyder points out on the macro level with respect to the smugness and danger of thinking we are inevitably destined for a world made safe for justice and democracy.
I think I probably sounded too snarky in referring to yoga tourists and, I’m sorry to say it but I will, the inanity of Ben & Jerry urging President Biden to “de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war” after Putin’s troops had already started decimating Ukraine. So I should clarify I’m all in favor of beatific smiles and yoga and visits to the ice cream parlor and every other practice that can move us closer to becoming better, more aware human beings. To the degree we can avoid any smugness emanating from those activities, we will become better still.
Andrew, you’ve woven many important and thought-provoking threads into today’s blog tapestry. One question they beg is what leads good people to do nothing in the face of evil. Is it a sense of hopelessness or its opposite—the smug (and deluded) sense of inevitability, the belief that it will all work out okay? Is it fear of reprisal, sheer laziness, or being overwhelmed by the day-to-day struggles to keep heads above water? Is it confusion about what will have any real effect on the situation or the paralysis of indecision that can result from trying to figure out the “best” use of our limited time, energy, attention, money? Or, as we titrate our intake of ceaselessly depressing news in an effort to preserve and protect our mental health, do we also diminish any sense of responsibility for the events we are no longer tuning into? No doubt, different strokes for different folks or different strokes for the same folks at different times, but I think it befits us all to think some about what it is that keeps us from doing something or something more to bend that arc.
Fine questions, David, the answers to which I suspect vary tremendously depending on a person’s particular circumstance. I think I’d pick out two of your speculations as primary, at least in my estimation: fear, and the sense of “being overwhelmed by the day-to-day struggles to keep heads above water.” Fear is almost a given, and quite rational and understandable given the circumstances of war or an oppressive internal foe. Huge decisions loom about how much risk is acceptable, and that assessment comes with huge variables attached, such as whether one has dependents. Being responsible for children is a fear multiplier, and may well lead to very different decisions about how far and frequently one sticks one’s head above water to resist evil.
And then just the whole sense of overwhelm with day-to-day life, all its details and people to tend to. Activism is time and energy-intensive (who knew??) and we all have caps on how much of those we can successfully manage. I have empathy for anyone trying to navigate the crazy complex currents of modern life, even when that sometimes causes them to stick their head under pillows and tune everything out until their dizziness passes. What still gives me trouble, though, are those who ignore politics altogether, either because they consider it hopelessly soiled and proclaim “a pox on all their houses,” or just as bad, because it’s “depressing.”
“Oh Brother/Sister,” I want to tell them. “You don’t know depressing until you wind up living under a totalitarian regime because you didn’t like politics. You are going to like those politics a whole lot less…”
We all have our special retreats where we can gather our wits, renew our strength, laugh, eat ice cream but avoid Brussels sprouts and mustard greens at all costs. I enjoy relaxing at the pool, creating art, writing, and watching baseball, basketball and football to no end. I play Trivial Pursuit, not as game but a thirst to win. Then, after doing all these things that keep us sane, I’ll look around for my deputy voter registrar card and drive to local high schools and some colleges like Prairie View A&M to put to ink more names who I hope will go to the ballot box and participate in our democratic process. Ideally, my new voters will be of progressive leanings. Finally, may I add, “vigilantism” and “vigilant” possess the same root. So, be careful and do what you must to avoid the former. Our freedom is too precious and too vulnerable to fall into the hands of the few who wish to destroy all that is good.
Well-spoken, Robert, except for your rather shocking dismissal of Brussels sprouts. What the heck? Not even roasted on their long stalk, with lemon and some kind of creamy garlic sauce? Are you a Communist??
Timely post Andrew – I too listened intently to Klein’s excellent conversation w/Snyder and was left thinking how fragile our so called civilized world actually is. I appreciate the reader comments as well, while we can’t know the future, and any notion of “inevitability” is both arrogant and foolhardy (remember not that long ago it was the “End of History”, the Soviet evil empire had imploded and we’d all live happily ever after! It does seem to me it behooves us to focus on the day to day kindnesses in our local communities while actively supporting big picture activism re: climate change, support for Ukraine as well as refugees world wide (and a huge laundry list of worthwhile activities). In my experience it is finding some sort of balance across domains; personally, locally, nationally, and internationally. I’ll always cherish the opportunity we had to do volunteer work w/educators in Rwanda a few years back and it was so obvious that my wife Denise and I got so much more out of the experience than we put into it… while still loaded with problems, the healing and forward movement of the Rwandans since the horrific genocide of 1994 reminds me nothing is impossible nor inevitable!
I have been puzzled of years how and why obviously good people in my life could support the “wrong side” of political compassion and social conscience in their support of candidates that suppress voting rights, do not endorse support of the needy, etc. They are, I am now strongly suspecting, infected with the politics of inevitability and are just too busy managing family life, careers, and personal biases to see clearly the connection between what they do/don’t do and the future of our democracy.
After thinking about this issue overnight I am compelled to weigh in with a thought more far reaching than yesterday’s epiphany regarding loved ones and the politics of inevitability. The larger issue, it seems to me, is Andrew’s point that we must fight for our democratic values. Timothy Ryan points out that with the politics of inevitabilty we have lost a sense of our core values altogether. Recent SCOTUS hearings revealed that loss in the form of the behavior and thinking of US Senators. Now Trump is seeking “dirt” on our current president from a maniac war criminal. These situations are alarming and should serve as a national call to arms to fight for our democracy.