A Journal for Western Man

 

 

 

An Essay on the Necessities of Progress,

Technological and Moral

G. Stolyarov II

Issue I- August 31, 2002

 

 

 

  
To cover to the fullest extent a topic that has sparked controversy after controversy, dispute after dispute, defamation after defamation, thus being the most serious in our society and requiring many more analyses than can be furnished by all the writers, past and present, would be impossible in any form but that of a million-page manuscript that the author has neither the will to write nor the reader to spend his time on. But one may ask oneself whether to prove a statement one need rely upon the infinite instances, scattered throughout space-time, that would somewhat secure its validity. Or is there an essence, a general truth that would not perceivably change if the Holy Inquisition had burned one more Copernican or one less? What, one may ask, drives mankind? What has been able to furnish its ascent from the abyss of the animal onto the slope of the technological, ever closer to the sublime pinnacle of our yet unseen future that is, by all rational thinking, our goal? It is in the author's hopes that this following insight will dissolve at least in some minds the indecision or the even more dangerous retrogression that has so often been sparked by the insecurity of even our finest minds on this topic.

First of all, to the advocates of stability that seek to bring it about through stagnation, it is imperative to say that not all is well with the world as of yet. Even if one neglects all the petty material feuds that take place every day among all ranks, even if one disregards all the offenses of man that are not fatal, we still have a grand scattering of evil among us. World hunger claims one child every three seconds, thus, applying our knowledge of the ratios of the Earth's population to this fact, four adults as well. Disease, warfare, crime; all have taken their toll on our race. Yet even if we dismiss this, submerged in the false illusion that we are invulnerable to such peril, we must inevitably confront the fact that every living being, including ourselves, shall eventually be consumed by the endless evils of entropy. For those who have the desire to fade away so, this may not seem a problem, yet their suicidal tendencies are in all ways anomalous. Let us then begin with this concept of death and what mankind has done to it.

It is beyond doubt that people are living with the current means far beyond the term that nature had ordained for them when they first evolved from the apes. Skeletons found from periods throughout the Stone Age all speak of early deaths, late twenties, early thirties rarely. During a period of completely harmonious existence with their environment, man was only brought into this world to reproduce, rear his children, and pass away as soon as the latter had obtained self-sufficiency. Such is the fate of all other animals, and if one has heard anything of the life cycles of ladybugs, crickets, grasshoppers, butterflies, and the most conspicuous example, the black widow spider, one will understand that this is not an exception but the rule among those primitive thoughtless creatures unprotected by their own minds against self-destructive instinct and impulse. Such was our past, but then came Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome, the Dark Ages, during which we had lost our foothold on the metaphorical mountain and began to plunge into the abyss, the Renaissance, when we had regained our control and continued the ascent, the glorious Enlightenment, the Age of Reform, the ardent lights streaming forth toward our kind during the Century of Victoria, the recent slip of the Fanatical Sixties, to the present, where one foot, supported by the head, attempts with all its might to move up, while the other, the left, weighed down by the heart and impulse, has let go and needs to be dragged upward. Yet let us analyze this condition for a moment. No longer have we a single nation in the world where the life expectancy has plunged below forty. Even the nations of Africa, plagued by AIDS and warfare, enjoy a relative prosperity to the condition of even several centuries earlier. The more developed nations can boast numbers in the high seventies, and some (it is regretful to say that the United States is not among them) in the low to mid-eighties. The average human lives, therefore, triple the time of his primordial ancestors. It is common now that people survive to see their great-grandchildren come into this world.

Yet, as we have already made clear, such a situation would not be possible in an entirely natural state. Thus, we may conclude that the overwhelming responsibility for this vast improvement of mankind can be credited to human knowledge and their diverse applications of it. Genotypes have been much the same throughout history; the writings of great men of antiquity and the Medieval Era prove that to be so, since their patterns of behavior have never quite differed from ours. But why, then, are we on average so much taller, fitter, and healthier than even our close ancestors? Today, one who would have been a giant in Rome, is looked upon as a midget. That is, once again, a matter of lifestyle. We are well-nourished, treated with the utmost care and the best tools if we become infected with an ailment. We do not perform backbreaking manual labor during infancy and thus do not stunt our growth. Even in developing nations today, however, we see height far below that of the average Caucasian. Why? Because their conditions of life are not near the quality of ours. Why not? 'Tis because they have not the technological means to become improved so.

Therefore, those who wish to see "the world remain just the way it is" have not the understanding that the only way to improve man is, as we have seen, through the acts of man. Technology is the brainchild of Homo sapiens sapiens, and it allows us to obtain a greater mastery over a world rightfully ours, since we are the most sentient beings upon it, and, on a smaller scale, a mastery over our own lives, since it is nothing more than the rights we deserve to have to our own existences, those being our property. Seventy-six is better than twenty, we agree, a skyscraper more appealing than a cave, an airplane more efficient than one's own two feet. Everything that man reaps man must sow, and if man wishes to reap more, than he must sow more, else he shall starve or degrade himself back to that primeval stage that would neglect the labors of the great and the mundane throughout recorded history (Recorded history itself is, by the way, an achievement of man and would have been impossible without such technological marvels as the pen and paper).

As in mathematics and science, when we discover a certain pattern, a certain rationality in a world where incongruities are only falsifications of human perception, we assume that this pattern, having predominated to as great an extent as we have been able to grasp,  will hold always as long as the circumstances, mathematically speaking the "givens", remain the same. What are these circumstances? This very universe, upon which the only non-manmade progression, a slight variation of the endless cycle, occurs once every several million years through natural evolution of a critter's genome. Yet is a million-year wait suitable to ourselves when we have less than a century to spare? Such a delay, advocated by the proponents of "the way things are", would have forty thousand future generations lead a mediocre (we realize, of course, that our lives are far from the best and some of us have even begun to see specific points upon which we must improve) existence and die on average at seventy-six! Are seventy-six years truly enough to realize one's dreams to the fullest extent? They are if the dreams are shallow and unpretending, but is the reader not among those men who seek grandiose accomplishments? Or, at least, does he not wish to enjoy his existence and reap its fruits for as long as his far from perfect organism may permit? It is assumed that he has at least a high enough opinion of himself to set those two goals aforementioned as his own, thus proving a more extensive point: the only people who seek to stagnate the world are those who view themselves to be too worthless for their own lives to be improved.

But the reader may present the case of Blaise Pascal, whose calculating machine was banned from libraries simply because counting clerks feared that it would make their professions obsolete. And the explanation is as follows: indeed an obsolescence of past methods is a direct and inevitable result of new technologies, yet only people of a shockingly limited scope of mind think such a turn of events to have more negative consequences than positive ones. Those very clerks could have applied the calculator to accelerate their counting operations and lessen the amount of labor they would have had to perform or, in the worst possible case, obtain an education for a profession of higher prestige, i. e. one that requires not only monotonous labor suitable for a machine but the creative aspect of work only compatible with a living, thinking human being. Such can be applied to the factory workers of today who are being rapidly replaced with automatons. The manual laborers, having minimal wages and absurdly stark living conditions, can become learned men of the arts and sciences, or professional sportspersons, or, if they prove unwilling to ascend to such heights, workers for the maintenance crews at their factories to ensure the function of the robots. That is still a step above their previous reward-less tasks.

To connect with this, we can observe that another principle has held true as man's knowledge has increased over time: the more tools there were to lighten the burden of civilization's maintenance, the less workers were required to operate them, thus more people have been set aside for studies in the areas of knowledge and culture. In ancient Mesopotamia, the aristocracy was comprised of a miniature council of priests, later headed by a militaristic king. In the United States today, millionaires number in the millions (We shall consider them to be the aristocracy, since wealth is the key determinant of status in a capitalist society). The aristocracy has always consisted of the most well-to-do people, usually enlightened, and hopefully well-mannered. That their number has elevated from a handful to a horde simply shows that the world has progressed enough that at least some people have assumed the occupation of gentlemen and have not spent their days sweating in the fields or on the assembly lines.  Creative leisure is the herald of self-actualization, and all the greats of this world have existed in precisely such a state that has permitted them to forge their masterpieces. The more aristocrats or manual labor-free people in general we have, the more monumental contributions there will be. Since technological progress is the primary catalyst of ascent up the social ladder, it is indeed helpful to all the underprivileged of this world who are already begging to the deaf about but a slight relentment to their miseries.

Thus, we have concluded that, as action leads to action, a statement leads to a statement, progress also instigates further progress the pace of which accelerates at the rate of the increase in its instigators' quantity. Progress is in all ways like a snowball. The further one rolls it the more mass in accumulates. As it becomes heavier, advancement becomes more difficult and even at our current level of development, we rely upon functions too complicated to be efficiently controlled by the human organism alone. That is where the machines come into the picture. Thus, we are obtaining ever more advanced tools with the aid of which we can still push the snowball on through wit where brute force is rendered incapable. The snowball, however, is fragile. It is not impenetrable and can be cracked and even broken by malicious idlers. It can become withered away by the winds of entropy if it is not maintained and cherished. And still the snowball is not as great as it can be. It is still rough in some parts and unrefined, it is still unsuited for being shaped into a statue.  If contentment is the reader's aim in life, then he must know that none can be absolutely free unless all are free and none can be happy unless all are happy. One reads of world hunger, of AIDS, learns of the cancer that infests his relatives. One begins to suffer, cry if his spirit and determination seem hindered by such atrocious circumstances. Then, some time later, one dies and, if he is as ordinary as most of his comrades, fades away into the eternal gray of the past, to never have anything about him, not even his name, remembered. The author assures the reader that he shudders at the thought of such a fate and feels infinite sorrow for those who have passed away in such a manner even as he is writing this piece in condemnation of their negative self-image.

When if ever, then, is it proper to leave things the way they are? Not now, certainly. But how long must we wait? The author knows not. In his most ardent hopes and dependences on the acceleration of the pace of progress, he wishes for such a time to happen soon when we are all free of misery, suffering, injury, and death, when Homo sapiens sapiens holds the entire universe firmly under its benevolent, reforming rule. What is today unknown will in the future be learned and applied. We shall find out in greater detail about the world surrounding us and about our own life processes, which are the most mysterious of all. What shall lead us there? Reason and courage. We must not be afraid to risk the "stability" of the present establishment for a better one in the future. We are not yet a utopia, but we must strive to be. For what makes a man? The only rational answer is that a true man performs actions that animals are incapable of. Since we are such a superior species, we must manifest our superiority through our deeds, our thoughts, the fruits of the mind resulting from in-depth deliberation, relentless inquisition, and a passion for going where none have ventured before. Do we not, by virtue of our superiority and by simple virtue of our self-consciousness and self-esteem, possess the right to live a hundred, two hundred, a million, an infinite number of years? Is our science up to those standards? Not presently. We have not yet reached that stage of development. But if we continue along the mathematical pattern of technological progress, it is certain that someday we will have found the means. Already our most prophetic minds, the science fiction authors, have suggested means, such as microscopic cell maintenance robots, or controlling DNA replication that no information may be disrupted during that process, or the tweaking of certain genes possibly related to longevity. Science, as history has shown, can do just about anything given enough time.  Those minds too engaged in worlds of their age to look ahead had condemned to failure the ideas of mass transportation, air and space flight, electrical generators, computers, and other countless creations that, despite unsupported doubts from the idlers' mouths, were invented anyway and had changed the course of every single person's life for the better.

"For the better?" one may ask. "But what of all those countless accidents caused by the automobile and the airplane, countless drawbacks that had taken a horrendous toll? And what of that technology that was manufactured especially for the purpose of killing, inflicting death, which the author of this piece has spoken of so severely?" May the reader not become disoriented once more as a result of this. Such a question, like all, has a rational explanation that would fit into the reasonable framework of thought that has been erected by the author of this piece. For incongruities cannot exist in reality. If a paradox is encountered, it is because a certain present epistemological paradigm does not hold true to the actual state of things. And thus, it is imperative that we dissolve this paradigm and furnish the desired link between the siblings of technology and morality.

First of all, let the following question come forth: is the gun at fault for a death? A gun is but a tool, and the crime, the murder, was committed by the man who pulled the trigger. It is he who has misused this tool since his own petty human nature was still in its perverted original state, which advocates life-or-death competition for survival using any means no matter how despicable, underhanded, or inconsiderate. He is in a state where he still perceives that in order to avoid masochism one must subsist as a sadist ravenous for the flesh of his brethren. This criminal who is the subject of our present train of thought had applied a firearm with an intent that would have remained the same had he been holding a tablecloth and suffocating his victim by wrapping it around his throat. Must the tablecloth then be forbidden as a deadly weapon since there is a potential of it being used to do harm? If the reader assumes so, then such can be done with absolutely everything else, including his own body. A strike with a fist can maim and/or kill with far greater efficiency that most of the technological tools we have at our disposal (firearms, blades, and missiles being disregarded in that statement, it is nevertheless true, since a majority of our technology is not based on any of the three). Does that imply that we must abolish human hands and cut them off of every man that he may not commit one potentially harmful act and a thousand useful ones? Following such an absurd train, we can eradicate just about everything, for even a human head has the potential to become a battering ram. The reader, I assume, is not so fallible as to give in to such pseudo-reasoning and must be now laughing out loud at the theory of the antiprogressives, which had had its trial earlier. This question could only help establish the necessary connection within the reader's mind between progress and that without which it cannot be beneficial.

A truth in a case of a certain magnitude, as is obvious, will not all of a sudden become false if applied to a case that has been either increased or reduced in scale. Just like a tablecloth cannot be blamed for its abuse by a malevolent human, neither can a nuclear missile. Only primitive delusions, once again at its primeval state, can be held responsible for such a violation of Homo sapiens' rights. Just as technology is the source of all remedies, immorality is the root of all our species' problems. Murder, rape, torture, starvation, heedlessness during an epidemic can all be blamed on the opponents of progress, those who would attempt to disrupt this pattern of our accumulation of knowledge. It is therefore evident that those who oppose the general good of mankind do so not because such would destroy their opportunities but rather because it would intervene with illusory, certainly not logical nor virtuous nor truly selfish interests.

Let me place before the reader a rather mild but certainly applicable example. During the Cold War, thousands of petty activist groups had protested the United States' possession of a nuclear arsenal and desired not only the destruction of nuclear weapons, but even of beneficial sources of nuclear energy? Who were they? The hippies, of course, cannot be called upright in their views, and the only possible reasons for their outbursts of prejudice against technology could be the desire for attention or the desire to retain as primitive a state of development as could exist in order for those morally unclean people to live without the precepts of respect and human rights that have, just like technology, developed and progressed over time. Their minds were not particularly bright, nor their organisms industrious. And, of course, they did not understand that nuclear weapons and the threat of mutual annihilation that they posed were key in preventing an all-out World War III between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Thus, the fact that both sides had possessed such vast arsenals merely saved more people than could exist in ten Hiroshimas. There were, once again drawbacks to both nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, yet both Nagasaki and Chernobyl were a result of human fallibility. Truman, at least, would have explained that the bombardment was an effort to save millions of American and Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the island. As for Chernobyl, the explosion there would have been averted had all mandatory safety procedures been followed. However, the operators of the power station, due to indolence and irresponsibility, two more characteristics of an unrefined human nature, had neglected them. The consequences, of course, were catastrophic. In both cases, humans, of their own free will, are to blame, but we must forever keep in mind Mr. Locke's persevering aphorism. “All men are liable to error”; that is unquestionable. And, of course, some of the results of either intended or accidental mistakes can be catastrophic. And, to proceed further, it is in our interests that the least people suffer from such happenings and that they occur less than they would have had Nature been kept pristine and permitted to reveal the fullest extent of its evils. Thus, the concerned man aims to make all men less liable to error.

That is where the system of virtues comes in. What is virtue, one may ask? Is there such an absolute term? M. de Voltaire furnishes the undoubtedly correct explanation: there can be only one morality, just like there can be only one geometry that is of the real world. What is virtuous? That which is good for all or at least harmful for none. Precepts and laws of etiquette have existed ever since man's first settlements, and we see traces of those first attempts in such writings as the Holy Bible, which lays before us the Ten Commandments. Whether one is Christian or not, it is impossible not to find reason and benevolence in most of them. "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not commit adultery" are taken for inviolable laws of conduct by anyone even remotely upright. Yet there have been less successful attempts to establish precepts that people would follow. For example, in medieval England, a commoner had not the right to raise a hand against a lord, but the lord could kill him out of whim and not be penalized, despite the fact that the commoner might not have even been suspected of a crime. Who had created such an absurdly inequitable law? Why the lords, of course, in the interests of instilling fear and absolute obedience into their underlings. Why must, in another example, denizens of Hopi tribes engage in masqueraded kachina dancing every time the harvest season approaches? Such action is considered ultimate morality within their culture, yet it cannot be defended with abundant reason. Is it virtue, then? No. It is dogma. Where lies the boundary between the two? Following the truth stated by Voltaire, we can summarize the basic essence of virtue: do what you will, as long as all others can do what they will and harm none of the human species in the process. Any inexplicable custom outside this postulate becomes dogma when it is forced on people. Facing the Black Stone during prayer is not in itself an offense; it is an act, however, devoid of absolute moral value, becoming negative in those occasions when it is forced upon the man who commits it. Virtue and dogma are therefore opposite terms, since the former permits the freedom that is a necessary predecessor to reason, while the latter disrupts both and, in establishing its unjustified regulations, creates suitable grounds for the weeds of fanaticism to thrive. Whilst dogma, absorbed by people of the "monkey see, monkey do" attitude, is, again, a primordial characteristic, virtue, based on logical principle and a truly human compassion for one's species, is the ultimate manifestation of development and culture.

Thus, morality instructs us to behave in such a way that would harm none of the human species. Why, then, are setbacks inevitable to every new technological development? Because even the few principles that we have have not yet been absorbed fully by the slow and clumsy masses, who are today still stimulated to action by the same pseudo-esires that their ancestors have been. Why is that? Because dogma, superstition, and prejudice still hold firm places in those unfortunates' minds. Yet just as technology has begun reaching more and more human beings, such has been observed in the case of virtue as well. As one's quality of life increases, one observes an ever decreasing need to assail, defame, or destroy one's neighbor for one's own material or emotional security.  One no longer must choose between descending to the cowardly condition of a sadist or the self-degradation of a masochist, but rather can become an entity absolutely separate from the aforementioned two, a producer who serves his own gain through entirely benevolent actions. Thus, the level of one's well-being is oppositely proportional to the hostility and other natural weaknesses that one displays.

Therefore we have realized that not only is technological advancement necessary for man's comfort and longevity, but it is also vital in ensuring his security and causing new developments to have ever less unpleasant side effects than the old. With prosperity on the rise and antagonisms declining, with such movements accelerating every year, utopia will someday be reached, and perhaps sooner than we think, since there is as of now no way for us to predict future accelerations. Let the reader not be mistaken: science is not a way, it is the only way for us all to someday become persons of infinite compassion, unlimited productivity, sharpened minds, eternal life, and fulfilled wishes. If the reader still believes that things should decay by staying the way they are, than at least, he certainly realizes how pitiful such a condition is.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent filosofical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, The Autonomist, Le Quebecois Libre, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

Read Mr. Stolyarov's new comprehensive treatise, A Rational Cosmology, explicating such terms as the universe, matter, space, time, sound, light, life, consciousness, and volition, at http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/rc.html.

Order Mr. Stolyarov's newest science fiction novel, Eden against the Colossus, in eBook form, here. You only pay $10.00, with no shipping and handling fees. You may also find free previews, descriptions and reviews of Eden against the Colossus at http://www.geocities.com/rational_argumentator/eac.html.

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