The Mystics of Progress

By the 1960s, progressivism had reached a new ascendancy. Fueled by the unparalleled wealth that came with a modern economy, millions were lifted into new, luxurious lifestyles. Now was the time to put aside the ignorance of religion and finally embrace the freedoms offered by a world liberated from Christianity. 

It isn’t hard to understand how so many fell for the deception. Things were getting better and better. Technology was improving, and more importantly, accelerating. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, yes. However, too many had already seen the miracle of science, and it seemed a better horse to back than spiritually weakened priests who were quickly conceding to the liberalism’s demands. 

But with any new religion, there has to be a story, and the story science told wasn’t so flattering. Men had gone from sons of God to sons of apes. Salvation was a lie and death was the end. There was no justice in the world, and mercy was just the delusion of fools. Man was a small being in a cold universe. The only thing modern men could be comforted by was his own increasing material comfort. 

That’s not a story anyone wants to hear. And it’s certainly not a story anyone wants to tell. While abject nihilism has always had its place in literature, it rightfully has a small audience. Nihilism has nothing that could sustain a city, much less a nation. 

Reason and science needed romance. It needed adventure and a destiny. Without these things, it was a boring, uninspiring philosophy. Writers (good ones anyway) instinctively shy away from boring. Better to be dead than boring. If there is a victory, it has to be a glorious triumph. If it is a defeat, it has to be a last stand. And if it is banal, then it has to be the most shuddering and teeth clenching banality of all. 

But the Sci-Fi writers of the 1960s and later could do a lot more than banality. They knew how to tell stories, and they (unconsciously or otherwise) slipped that dreaded irrationality and religious ignorance back into their fiction. In doing so, they created the archetypal myths which define the modern world. 

We’ll start with what I consider to be the quintessential story of progressivism. 2001: A Space Odyssey was written in 1968 by Arthur C. Clarke (one of the Big Three Sci-Fi authors). The original novel frames evolution not as random mutation guided by arbitrary natural selection, but rather as a series of stages, with each improving and progressing from the last. Guided by the hands of an intelligence, men are the products of a consciousness far beyond our comprehension. 

From a purely scientific standpoint, this is complete hogwash. But from a storyteller’s perspective, this is gold. Men are no longer an accident of cosmic forces. Suddenly we have a destiny again. There’s a conflict of tug and pull. We are going somewhere and we (at least to this incomprehensible intelligence) matter. We may be apes, but we have the potential to be something more. Can we realize this destiny? 

You’ll notice that God is back in the equation. Except this God is a surprisingly hollow one compared to the Christian God. This one makes no demands or moral rules upon humanity. This one does not care about the suffering of the life it created. This one wants little to do with humanity except when it achieves a sufficient stage of intelligence. 

Make no mistake, this is a despotic and cruel God. But, it is also a God fit for rationalism. Could we be the products of unimaginable forces? Maybe. Nobody wants to believe this was all an accident. And while this God is empty, it is sufficient food for the poets and artists. So long as nobody makes any moral demands beyond the current zeitgeist, it is a harmless idea for scholars to speculate and pine about. 

This idea of incorporating evolution into the narrative of progress and a distant, indistinct entity in God’s place is a common thread throughout all of Sci-Fi. And it doesn’t even have to be an indistinct entity. In the movie Contact, this role is occupied by a galactic community that judges humanity worthy to join them after a set time has passed. But do you know the kicker? Humanity is considered at all because we sent out some radio signals. That’s… depressing. 

But there is another problem. What of the individual’s place in all of this? We can talk about humanity’s grand destiny all day, but the future of humanity is not something particularly inspiring to the guy working 9-5. Yay, we’re in the transitionary period where everything is still kinda awful, but our descendants will get to enjoy space utopia. 

This question is not answered, but sidestepped paradoxically. Another of the Big Three, Isaac Asimov, showcases this bait and switch quite well in his magnum opus Foundation. This epic spans the collapse of a galactic empire. Hari Seldon has devised a new science called psychohistory, which charts the course of societies. He goes to set up a Foundation, which will be a light of science and knowledge in the coming Dark Ages and eventually bring back the empire. 

This is a story that spans centuries. Its whole premise is charting the course of history. And psychohistory is not a science kind to individuals. It says what determines the course of history are large-scale incentives and institutional rot. We are but numbers on a spreadsheet encompassing billions of worlds, and the greater part of humanity is accounted for in the margins. 

But how did Isaac Asimov write this story? Well, he didn’t, at least not in the way he thought. A third of the first book follows a shrewd politician named Salvor Hardin as he outmaneuvers factions within Foundation. He eventually consolidates their society and neighboring kingdoms into a religious theocracy. Particularly, he accomplishes this through a clever ruse by outfitting enemy fleets with a kill-switch and faking it as divine power. 

Fourteen-year-old me put down the book at the moment and asked, “okay, but what if there wasn’t Salvor Hardin?” There is some argument for the Second Foundation and Seldon predicting the rise of great men, but individuals are precisely the antithesis of psychohistory. You’ll find in each section of Isaac Asimov’s magnum opus, there are great men of history. There are people who rise above the paradigm and set the trends of the coming future. And it is not just captains of industry or conniving warlords. Even small people have a huge impact on galactic affairs. The Mule (a mutant with telepathic powers) lost because he fell in love with a normal woman. 

Sci-Fi is full of these characters. One moment they are but insignificant specks, the next they are upending everything. In this, you see a paradox which is played whenever the narrative is convenient for it. Humanity is vast, and the individual has no power, or the individual leads the revolution and remakes society. 

I’m not saying this is done deliberately (though it probably certainly happened at some stage). However, progress needed a place for the individual, if only because storytellers demanded it so. You cannot tell a good story without people whose actions matter. Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise you have no story at all. It may go completely against the rational point of view, which says people are utterly insignificant, but can’t we just pretend that we are? 

The final component of this narrative is a vision of what is trying to be achieved. The stage is set. We have our gods and demons, heroes and villains. For what shall be the contest? Well, the answer varies depending upon who you ask. 

Gene Roddenberry’s vision in Star Trek is of a space traveling humanity where all material wants were satisfied. Thankfully, the galaxy was filled with different peoples and aliens to meet. Otherwise, his stories would be fairly boring. Of course, that is the least of his world building troubles. Star Trek does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. 

However, I don’t think progress was promising material utopia. At least, that wasn’t what people wanted. Utopia is a nice political aim, but I suspect what really captivated the audience was the prospect of an endless adventure. 

What is mankind now fighting for? Ironically, the soldiers of progress want the world to go back as it once was, where the horizon was an unexplored frontier. In the 16^th century, men put themselves on little boats and crossed oceans for adventure. But space is too vast an ocean and our boats too tiny to cross. I have seen many futurists on the internet, and the dream of space travel is admittedly an intoxicating one. It tends to fill your thoughts as you work retail. I know it did for me. 

In the imagination of many, humanity was just at its short adolescent stage. Once it stepped into the stars, the fun would begin again. Again, this goes against all science. The galaxy so far has been silent, and I think it’s time we begin to accept that alien life, if it does exist, is so far away as to be inaccessible. 

Space is out. But what about computers? Neuromancer by William Gibson was released in 1984. A little later than the 1960s, but it’s still a foundational text. Perhaps the future we’re fighting for is a simulation? Of course, I wouldn’t want to live in the world of Neuromancer, but the dream of uploading your mind is an enticing one. What if your life could be a video game? 

Suppose you could do it. Suppose I could turn you into a program and put you in a simulation. Would your life be better than what you have now? For those advocating for this future, most seem to skip that step. Let’s take at the modern day. Are our lives really better with what digitization has already accomplished? Everyone agrees social media is a plague on humanity, yet why are so many pushing to trap themselves on what would be the ultimate social media platform? 

You’ll again notice we’ve ditched reason yet again for a digital version of heaven. And our future is so much more enlightened than religious notions of an afterlife. We’ve taken salvation and commercialized it. Your eternal soul will be bought with the US dollar. 

But putting all that aside, why do these stories matter? These stories are all fiction. They are nothing to be taken seriously. I can already hear the cry that this all has nothing to do with the actual expectations people had for the future. Had I brought 2001: A Space Odyssey into an academic debate on industrialization, I would’ve been laughed out. 

However, people do not tell stories just for mindless amusement. In them are the beliefs of a people. More than just hopes and dreams, stories are a reflection of the world as we see it. And in these stories I have listed, you see the beliefs of the people writing them. You see their Gods and Devils, their Heroes and Villains, and the reality they want to make happen. Stories are a look at where we are and where we are going. And most importantly, stories are a confession of faith. 

Did Arthur C. Clarke believe in monoliths that uplifted humanity? No. But he certainly believed in the God that made them.