The Ghost Dance of Progress

Since launching the Dendroica Project, I have sought to reserve this space for writings with an ecological spirituality theme while maintaining my old blog for more philosophical or scientific posts relevant to current events.

These themes intersect when it comes to the larger picture of exactly where we are at collectively and where we might be headed, of attempting to explore deeper causal understandings of our never-ending series of crises and controversies and political battles, and I feel like such explorations belong here.  So this will be a philosophical post – one that speaks more to the mind than to the heart.  For more of a heart experience, I encourage revisiting last year’s Solstice post: Hymns for an Ecological Spirituality.

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Over the past years, I have felt increasingly detached from the various culture wars, the coordinated outrage, the polarization, the roles of good and evil, the supposed base motivations of the opposing team.  I am neither “woke” nor “anti-woke”.  I do not believe that those who question the safety and effectiveness of vaccines are selfish or anti-science, nor do I believe that those who promote them are part of a coordinated global effort to impose an authoritarian digital feudalism.  Although I empathize with the people of Ukraine in the ongoing war, I do not believe that Vladimir Putin is an evil monster nor do I believe the US and NATO are heroic saviors.

On the deepest level, the most satisfying explanation to me for the current convulsions – from the rise of Trump to the woke/anti-woke divides to the whole covid saga to the end of the US-centered “rules-based” global order – is that we have reached the end of an age of Progress but we have not yet come to terms with it.

Among the most pervasive symbolism in our modern world is the “arrow of time” – the linear movement from simple to complex, from evil and barbaric to good and civilized, from primitive to advanced.  We see it in astrophysics: from the Big Bang to the early universe to the billions of stars and galaxies.  We see it in biology: from a primordial soup to single-celled organisms to fish to dinosaurs to apes to humans.  We see it in industry: from horse-drawn buggies to railroads to highways to jet planes to spaceships.  We see it in sociology: from cannibalism and human sacrifice to slavery to racism to equality to universal human dignity.  The inherent assumption is that this progress will continue until we achieve a sort of Star Trek harmonious galactic civilization, or else we will destroy ourselves and our planet in some sort of apocalyptic catastrophe.

A careful historical analysis will quickly reveal this worldview to be flawed.  The evolution of the universe and our planet over billions of years is entirely irrelevant on the timescale of human lifetimes, and on nearly all shorter timescales – from centuries to millennia to even millions of years – the predominant movement is not linear but cyclical.  Species evolve and disappear as ice sheets advance and retreat.  Civilizations arise and grow and decline and fall. 

It is worth pondering the various reasons why and how belief in Progress has effectively become a modern religion – I strongly recommend reading After Progress by John Michael Greer – but the simplest explanation may be the most satisfying: observer bias from a limited perspective.  Imagine that our seasons progressed a thousand times slower, so that a human lifetime might last from April into early May.  Would it then be surprising if the children born in July struggled to comprehend the reversal, the turn toward colder temperatures beginning around them?  Our ancestors lived through the Industrial Revolution.  Our great great grandparents experienced the advent of electricity.  Our grandparents saw the rise of air travel and television and the first humans in space.  All but the youngest of us have seen the rise of the Internet and smart phones and social media.  We have obviously been progressing, so why should there be any reason to expect the trend to stop?

I was once a believer in Progress myself.  I studied biology and genetics and alternative energy and set about working toward what seemed at the time like an inevitable breakthrough: re-engineering photosynthesis to produce clean and abundant hydrogen fuel.  I have chronicled my journey away from this perspective elsewhere and will not repeat it here, but suffice to say it become clear to me that there was a massive dissonance between the modest and limited advances in laboratories around the world and the press releases perpetually announcing a new age of abundant energy arriving any day now.  Moreover, many of the hurdles, the “opportunities for future research”, showed no signs of being surmountable.  The supposedly “limitless potential” of modern science failed to recognize the hard limits of physics, of resource availability, of economics. 

Once I stepped outside of the Progress mindset, I began to see that the broader religion of Progress – the belief in perpetual growth and technological advancement – was effectively on life support.  We had already extracted most of the easy oil, coal, and natural gas, and diminishing supplies were increasing costs across the board.  The renewables that were supposed to replace them were proving – despite decades of research and billions of dollars of research investment – to be more expensive, less scalable, and far less reliable, dependent as they are upon cloudless skies and regionwide winds.  Even as new medical treatments were being developed, life expectancy was declining, more people were living in poverty, and general standards of living were declining for all but the highest echelons of society.  Modern technology failed to prevent the next pandemic, and the whiz-bang vaccines developed in record time failed to be particularly safe or particularly effective.  We seemed to be deviating from the “arrow of time” and instead following the standard model of the Limits to Growth.

It appears to me that much of what has been happening in the past decade can best be understood in the context of the dissonance between a dominant Progress worldview and the reality on the ground, which is increasingly looking like a world running short of multiple critical resources and tipping into decline.  The social justice movement - what is pejoratively described as “woke” these days - represents a subtle shifting of Progress goalposts.  Reductions in discrimination and increased representation of marginalized groups in business and governance  - the current “progressive” goals - do not require an overall increase in resource availability or an improvement in overall standards of living. 

For the most part, I cannot find fault with the agenda of creating a more equitable society with less racism and other discrimination.  The trouble with the social justice paradigm, from my perspective, is not that it is wrong but rather that it is intentionally incomplete.  By privileging certain “axes of oppression” (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and ignoring others (level of education, social class, overall wealth disparities), modern social justice is able to make the case that progress is still happening despite multiple indicators moving in the wrong direction, and moreover it is able to identify scapegoats (typically those who lack officially marginalized identities but who have seen declining standards of living due to wage stagnation, offshoring, and skyrocketing housing/health care costs) who stand in a position of political opposition that is cast as creating obstacles to continuing progress.  A coalition of largely disenfranchised, working-class, less educated Americans elected Donald Trump.  On the left, this was viewed as an evil regressive force that needed to be defeated at all costs and that was impeding real progress.  On the right – where the underlying “arrow of time” mentality remains equally embedded – a new “Make America Great Again” vision of Progress emerged that instead scapegoated the left and claimed that we could return to prosperity and growth if only we got rid of bureaucracy and regulations and drilled more oil.  Physical limits being what they are, that wouldn’t have worked, though they never really had the chance to test their hypothesis.

With Trump and Trumpism fading into the background while true progress continues to move in reverse thanks to inflation and energy shortages, we have entered the next chapter, in which perhaps the most important player is Elon Musk.  Elon Musk is not the world’s richest man by virtue of his business acumen.  Compared to behemoths like Amazon and Microsoft and Walmart, Musk’s businesses are far less valuable and far less profitable by any real-world measure.  They have a common theme though.  Rockets (SpaceX), worldwide satellite internet (Starlink), snazzy electric cars and battery energy storage (Tesla), artificial intelligence (OpenAI), and brain-computer interfaces (Neuralink).  Elon Musk has effectively commercialized the ideology of Progress, offered a renewed vision of a Star Trek future through innovation.  Not surprisingly, his financial success – a measure of “investor confidence” – has far exceeded his real-world achievements, with his cars remaining largely toys of the upper classes as lithium for batteries begins to run short and overloaded electrical grids falter under added demand.

Elon Musk is launching a project to “save civilization” from the “mind virus” of “wokeness”, of which the current centerpiece is his $44 billion bid to buy and remake Twitter.  From within this perspective, the self-styled “progressives” have become the new scapegoats that are standing in the way of real progress and must therefore be defeated.  I have to say that I admire his courage to take on the increasingly censorious power structures that have been attempting to silence and criminalize dissent from the dominant “progressive” worldview.  At the same time, I cannot imagine that whatever political movement builds from this – whether or not it proves victorious in the near term – will survive for long.

In the late 1880s, as the genocide carried out in the name of “manifest destiny” was sweeping across the plains and western mountains, a new religion arose within Indigenous American communities.  It was called the Ghost Dance, and according to the teachings of its prophet Wovoka, proper practice would call the spirits of the dead into battle, end westward expansion of the USA, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to the tribes who practiced it.  It spread like wildfire across the western half of the continent and brought a renewed surge of hope, but failed utterly in its promises.

I would like to suggest that the movement currently coalescing around the person and business ventures of Elon Musk is analogous to the Ghost Dance of the 1890s, and that Musk’s batteries, cars, rockets, and neural links will be no more effective in preserving progress in the face of hard physical limits than the Ghost Dancers’ ceremonies were in defeating the guns, germs, and steel of the invading hordes.  Any victory achieved will be temporary, and the cool gadgets and rocket rides will be confined to an ever-shrinking circle of elites while global supply chains sputter and fail and communities refocus on local resilience and self-sufficiency to meet basic needs.

I will admit that I am looking forward to the inevitable collapse of the Progress worldview.  The alternative certainly need not be a linear Decline worldview in which everything is simply getting perpetually worse over time and our mission is to stoically accept it.

We exist on a cyclical planet.  The entire ecology and geology of Earth moves in cycles.  The rising and setting of the sun each day.  The movement of tides.  The phases of the moon.  The turning of the seasons and migrations of birds.  The birth and death of individual organisms.  Predator and prey cycles.  Eleven year cycles of solar activity.  The Pacific Decadal Oscillation of climate.  Hydrologic cycles.  Cycles of forest fire and regeneration.  Cycles of ice ages and interglacial periods.  Cycles of extinction and adaptive radiation.

An ecological spirituality is a cyclical spirituality – one that situates us not on an arrow of time pointing somewhere but within, among, part of the myriad cycles of our planet.  It is easy, from within the Progress worldview, to see the inevitable peaking and decline of a cycle of civilization as some sort of terrible failure.  We won’t actually travel to Mars or around the galaxy.  We won’t be able to defeat disease and death.  Our lives and our environment will be less in our control when we have less energy to freely burn to jet ourselves around the planet and bring mangoes and bananas to Minnesota winter.

But step outside of Progress, off of the arrow of time, and it becomes clear that we stand to gain at least as much as we stand to lose.  Why is it that despite our standard of living supposedly being at an all-time high, so are our rates of depression and dissatisfaction with life?  Why is it that we view death as a tragic loss, even at the end of a long life well lived?  Why is it exactly that so many people are excited by the concept of nine months in a cramped spaceship to inhabit an outpost on a lifeless planet that is far less interesting than a remote corner of Nevada, where there is not a drop of natural water and the atmosphere is not breathable?  Is not the wild living diversity of an urban backyard more interesting than an entire planet of parched red rocks?  Would it not be more meaningful if we were to collectively anticipate the sowing of seeds and the May arrival of Dendroica warblers more than the release of the iPhone 15? 

Even as we face more power outages and energy price spikes and supply chain disruptions, this may not yet be the last gasp of Progress.  Perhaps the next movement will make Musk the scapegoat and redefine progress yet again, setting up a new polarity and culture war.  Along the way, though, more people will be leaving the Progress worldview behind.  As civilization moves over the peak into a broad trajectory of decline, bets and investments based on the continued progress will increasingly fail.  Satellites will be destroyed by orbital debris.  New medicines and vaccines will more often than not prove to be unsafe and ineffective.  Cryptocurrencies and other growth-based financial investments will collapse.  Green energy startups will quietly go under when investment dries up and income fails to cover expenses.  Fusion power will always be at least ten years away, and if it ever comes to fruition will prove too complex and expensive for anything other than military applications.

Meanwhile, local food systems will grow and thrive, building connections among communities.  Work will become more meaningful, serving friends and neighbors rather than human resources boards and global corporate franchises.  We will, I hope, begin to become rooted in place, belonging to the land we inhabit rather than owning and controlling it.  Even as it seems like everything outside is falling to pieces, we can begin to plant the seeds of this new world: a world in which life is about being here rather than getting somewhere.  Such is my wish and my prayer this Solstice and Christmas season.

Have a blessed Solstice everyone!