Whatever will we do?

Maybe she'll get right with Jeebus.

Chris Hedges reviews “Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia,” by John Gray. His review is not altogether positive, but the book sounds fascinating.

...“Actually, humanity cannot advance or retreat,” Gray writes, “for humanity cannot act: there is no collective entity with intentions or purposes, only ephemeral struggling animals each with its own passions and illusions...”

“Human knowledge tends to increase,” he writes, “but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts...”

“Whether they stress piecemeal change or revolutionary transformation,” he writes, “theories of progress are not scientific hypotheses. They are myths, which answer the human need for meaning...”

The world that awaits us will be difficult. It will require, as Gray understands, “stoical determination and intellectual detachment.” It is not a world where we want “missionaries and crusaders” like George Bush and Tony Blair, who see every crisis “as a heaven-sent opportunity to save humanity.” The coming world will require a return to realism, to the belief that we cannot mold and shape the world according to human desires but must carry only out piecemeal and very limited acts of social engineering to ward off the worst effects of the disasters that will befall us. Politics, he knows, is not “a vehicle for universal projects but the art of responding to the flux of circumstances.” This means we must give up our grand visions for humanity to “cope with recurring evils.”

“Realists do not accept that international relations, any more than human life in general, consist of soluble problems,” Gray notes. “There are situations in which whatever is done contains wrong - for example, the situation that has been created by American intervention in Iraq. Certainly we can avoid multiplying these situations: we may have to deal out mass death to defeat Hitler but we need not wade in blood to democratize the world. Realism is an Occam’s Razor that works to minimize radical choices among evils. It cannot enable us to escape these choices, for they go with being human.”

Scientific progress produces a selection pressure. The higher the science, the greater the blowback if the species proves too immature to handle it. This is one theory why we hear no other species when we listen to the stars.

Perhaps one road to maturity is described here [thanks MJS].