I want to imagine here that we can succinctly and in a somewhat orderly fashion set out from the most general to the most personal some of the ways in which entropy, fallibility and failure plague and fool us from cosmic through evolutionary, religious, historical, civilizational, political, social, environmental, psychological and personal strata.
There is nothing we can do to reverse millions of years of our evolution. We have been Homo sapiens for a relatively brief time compared with the time span in which our origins lie. We share with animals the need to search for food and to reproduce, which entails predation upon others and avoidance of being predated upon. Aggression lies within our deep history, as does territoriality, competition and the tendency to relate positively to small groups of kin and to be somewhat suspicious of outsiders. Our physical evolution has bequeathed us many anatomical features and behaviours that do not always serve us well but that we cannot put aside, even if we can slowly modify some. Evolution occurs by using what is readily available and by gradual adaptation; it does not have the luxury of conscious design and redesign. Many features are carried forwards even when cumbersome or dysfunctional.
There are many dead or dying religions and the myths, sects and cults that go with them, as well as ongoing theological arguments for and against God. Secular atheism has grown but so too has fundamentalist and liberal religion. Lines of development can be traced from pantheism, polytheism and monotheism and the geography of religious belief and mission is fairly clear. I have no space here to attempt any detail. My own concise view is that humans once needed religion to explain what was frightening and unknown, and perhaps necessary for leadership and morality. But religious explanations and practices – a creator God, a son of God, walking on water, returning from death, orthodox and biblically preserved theologies, papal infallibility, to name a few – have become less and less credible with the growth of knowledge and science. While religion continues and even sometimes expands, it also becomes problematic and dangerous, and in some cases a taboo subject.
The strong case I want to put here, in the context of entropy, our species flaw and failure, is as follows. We can think of religion – belief in a supernatural God and his commands – as a kind of mimetic kluge. Religious ideas have been necessary, let’s say; they were once the best we could come up with; they replicate themselves and are still doing so. Millions, if not billions, appear unable to live without them. I regard them as false but as filling an emotional need. In some cases they may be harmless and are quite understandable as providing comfort. But the most primitive, pre-scientific tenets of religion are not only redundant but an obstacle to self-understanding, international cooperation and understanding. I am not proposing the substitution of science for religion but the acceptance that human realities have changed dramatically in the past thousand and a half or three thousand years since the major Abrahamic religions appeared.
Unfortunately little if any rapprochement or progress is possible between hardened religious believers and atheists. I dislike the epithet “atheist” and would honestly prefer “one who believes she or he has outgrown superstitious explanations for the cosmos, life and human behaviour”. (There’s no getting around the cake-and-eat-it conundrum here: I may wish I could present an inoffensive, liberal, nice-guy persona but authenticity compels me to be honest.) Religion now utterly fails to offer a credible explanation. In the unending and often unedifying textual war between theists and so-called atheists, Victor Stenger has produced a refutation of God as good as any, by means of hypothesis-testing, which amounts to a verdict of the complete failure of theism:
The large number of species results from the many, largely random attempts that evolution makes to produce a solution to the survival problem; many failures are to be expected as the bulk of these solutions fail. Many successes are marginal, leaving the species open to eventual extinction. We also know that mass extinctions have occurred several times as the result of natural catastrophes, such as meteorite strikes or geologic disruptions.
(2008: 70)
This refutation of the argument for God’s beneficent design will still not convince theists, of course. Nor will future meteor strikes or other global disasters (or cancer or AIDS) care who among us are theists or atheists. But the strong probability is that religious belief will gradually perish along with every other attempted but flawed solution.
As I have said, I think there is something resonant in the concept of original sin (or chronic human dysfunction, or species flaw); I am also sympathetic to belief in the reality of Buddha-like, individual, authentically embodied “mystical experience” or enlightenment (although caution is needed about this too). But religion itself, like all phenomena, decays over time. Religion may fade away completely within a few hundred years but in the meantime it remains a bug or virus, partially benign but ultimately a phenomenon of diminishing returns and a deadly fault in human affairs.
Impatient atheist readers may have skipped the above, but to what extent do we consider ourselves ahistorical? History might be considered in flux itself as a subject, with historians arguing about its proper contents and where it begins. The traditional conception of history as an objective record of significant events (usually of national and international significance but rarely, if ever, objective) has given way to an acknowledgement that most history has been written from the perspective of successful patriarchal societies. “Big history” now commences with the origins of the universe and tries to incorporate trends and phenomena that permeate all eras. Slightly less ambitiously, some accounts trace human expansion and development from hunter-gatherer times to the present, with an emphasis on tracking population growth and movement and civilizations’ growth and decline. There is argument, too, about whether any lessons can be inferred from history that might serve as the basis for predictions. Some philosophers of history claim to detect patterns.
The German philosopher of history Oswald Spengler analysed world history in his magisterial The Decline of the West ([1922] 2006). Echoing Nietszche’s “autumnal accent”, he regarded “Entropy theory as the beginning of the destruction of that masterpiece of Western intelligence” (ibid.: 217), explaining that:
Every thing-become is mortal. Every thought, faith and science dies as soon as the spirits in whose words their “eternal truths” were true and necessary are extinguished. Dead, even, are the star-worlds which “appeared” to the astronomers of the Nile and the Euphrates, for our eye is different from theirs; and our eye in its turn is mortal.
(Ibid.: 90)
Much influenced by Spengler was the English historian Arnold Toynbee, whose multi-volume A Study of History was published in the 1930s and 1940s. Toynbee traced the negative paths of world history and foresaw doom and decay. Unfortunately for him he got into the business of making forecasts that quite clearly failed to materialize. Nonetheless, from before and after Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we have histories in abundance of the rise and fall of civilizations. In spite of the assured tone of counter-doomsters such as Dan Gardner, who, in Future Babble (2011), dismisses Toynbee and many other prophets, we can see that empires do come into being and disappear. Twentieth-century history, with its two bloody world wars and many atrocities besides, surely does cast a large negative shadow over us, even if we conceded that overall violence is slowly declining.
Currently a large literature is available on the topic of the collapse of civilizations, Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005) being one of the most successful. The general tenor of these accounts is that human beings overreach themselves, fail to respect the environment, and gradually bring collapse on themselves through their own hubris. Combined with contemporary fears about climate change, resource depletion, population growth and international conflict, these analyses of past trends and current scenarios very commonly become grim prophecies about humanity’s future prospects. Some, like those of the Gaia scientist James Lovelock, give us mere deca
des until disaster is caused by irreversible climate change, for example. This is not the place to attempt to address these debates but it must form part of our picture of human folly, of our collective moral failure and unwillingness to confront the likely consequences of present damaging actions.
Societal collapses could, of course, be a matter of chaos and inevitability. Plato wrote in his time about the collapse of Atlantis thousands of years ago from our own time, wanting to attribute moral (or immoral) reasons for its demise. Having carefully considered different kinds of “imperfect societies” in the Republic, Plato could not have known what archaeologists now suspect: that the island of Thera and its Minoan civilization (actually quite affluent and less patriarchal and aggressive than Greek society) was probably decimated by massive volcanic action and tsunamis. Modern scholars also propose alternative theories for other collapsed civilizations, or suggest that few civilizations actually completely perish; rather, they are transformed.
Anyone of my geography and generation (I was born in London in 1950) will have been familiar with globes and maps showing the large pink areas of the British Commonwealth. Although this had already begun crumbling, as a child I assumed that my country ruled, or had recently ruled, the world. Now, older Britons are still slow to come to terms with the reality of Britain as a small island with diminishing power. Year on year we are even dismayed to discover that our footballers and tennis players fail to win international trophies. Britain no longer heads an empire consisting of many colonies; instead, it is a multicultural nation of gradually declining wealth and influence. It may not exactly be a “failed nation”, or even a poor one, but it seems well past its best. “Broken Britain” may be more of a political slogan than real but the notion of a failing society has some credence. This is probably true of most other European nations, many of which once had extensive empires. My point is, of course, that change, flux or entropy does appear to rule in these matters. The territorial or ideological expansionism of so many nations isn’t sustainable in the long run, and many now forecast the demise of the USA as China, India and South American economies and societies begin to flourish. Meanwhile, Britain may remain a locus of the fantasized good life for many immigrants at the same time as many Britons fantasize about a more successful life elsewhere.
There is obviously no perfect country, no country free from failure or failures. Indeed, all probably have their characteristic “failure style”. The British are sometimes said to hate or fear success, or consider it vulgar. Americans, on the other hand, appear to make it central and to pursue and celebrate it (while internally playing down their own inevitable poverty problems). Germany tends towards economic success even while it is still only too aware of its collective moral failure many decades ago. Italy is celebrated for its aesthetic flair and sexiness while all too aware of a continuing underbelly of Mafia-style corruption. Japan is interesting for its combined striving for economic success and heightened sense of shame at collective and individual failure, the latter often resulting in concealment of lost jobs and suicide. Anyone interested in an academic comparison of Japanese and American reactions to failure can consult a paper structured according to strict experimental design (Heine et al. 2001).
As Noam Chomsky demonstrates, “failed states” were so designated by the USA and allies to refer to countries perceived as a threat to their security. The definition of such failure includes the “inability or unwillingness to protect their own citizens from violence”; “their tendency to regard themselves as being beyond the reach of domestic or international law”; and “democratic deficit” (2007: 2). The USA has often so characterized Haiti and Iraq, with past foreign policy also invoking a terminology of rogue states and axis of evil variously to condemn North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Chomsky argues that both internal American political realities and aggressive American foreign policy suggest that the USA itself could be considered a failed state. In other words, this kind of failure is usually defined by those in power. But few even now refer to the USA as an evil state for its treatment (“extermination” as many would frankly call it) of its Native American inhabitants. Chomsky argues that the USA may be the paramount case of a nation representing a threat to world order.
If you want to ask if national and international politics really matter to the individual in terms of success and failure, it quite clearly does. Born at the “wrong time” and in the “wrong place”, your life chances will almost certainly be very poor compared with millions of others lucky enough to have been born into relatively affluent democracies. It matters too, of course, into which part of your society you are born. Promoters of free-market capitalism, of the American can-do attitude, want us all to believe we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps: anyone can do well, make their own fortune. It is true to say that a minuscule percentage can and does rise from dire poverty but the mathematics of significant economic success dictate that very few can get to or stay at the top.
In their much-lauded The Spirit Level (2009), Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett collated data from many countries, which they put forward as the foundation for an “evidence-based politics”. Their thesis is that more equal societies perform better and are experienced as more convivial on a variety of measures than unequal societies, the Scandinavian countries usually coming out best of all. Putting it quite simply, material success almost always accompanies what they call “social failure”. In stark terms:
We can fail to prevent catastrophic global warming, we can allow our societies to become increasingly anti-social and fail to understand the processes involved. We can fail to stand up to the tiny minority of the rich whose misplaced idea of self-interest makes them feel threatened by a more democratic and egalitarian world.
(Ibid.: 264)
The rich and other critics of their data and their interpretation are squeamish about restraining free-market capitalism and wealth distribution. What is lacking is political will, or collective conative failure, in which we are all implicated.
We like to think of Homo sapiens as a pretty clever and resourceful species and, of course, as wise. We marvel at the achievements of humanity, at our rationality, altruism and our potential for overcoming all obstacles. But these achievements are spotty and subject to wear and tear. The category of “civilization” is one of our largest achievements. However, the radical anarchist John Zerzan (sometimes dubbed an anarcho-primitivist philosopher), regarding civilization as pathological, speaks of “the failure of symbolic thought”, of our “fall into representation” and “fundamental falsification” (2002: 2). “More of what has failed us for so long can hardly be the answer” (ibid.: 16). For Zerzan, the remedy, to be brought about by worldwide anti-capitalist revolution, is an extreme anarchistic return to natural conditions, including sensually rich, prelinguistic consciousness. For many (not only capitalists but all who live and profit by more-of-the-same intellectual wrangling), such a scenario is anathema. Some nature mystics, radical environmentalists, eco-feminists and end-time survivalists share similar views, if with very different nuances. But even if we agree that the trance that language holds us in is a large part of our species’ or social problem, it seems reasonable to argue that the uber-kluge of civilization is not reversible, nor is symbolic thought at all likely to obligingly wither. Additionally, very few of us would cope with the kinds of massive changes proposed. I, for one, an ageing, thoroughly impractical urbanite dependent on spectacles and blood pressure and other tablets, wouldn’t last five minutes. This doesn’t automatically invalidate Zerzan’s argument but suggests that his remedy would have extremely high human costs.
Looking very briefly at some mainstream Western political philosophers across the centuries, we see a mixture of foci, aspirations and blind spots. The Platonic recipe of philosophers as rulers has some appeal (especially against today’s typically pragmatic, anti-intellectual political leaders) but Plato’s condoning of the “noble lie” in politics must be regarded as an extremely slippery slope; and
his indifference to the plight of slaves and women shows his geo-temporal limits. Niccollò Machiavelli, still admired in some quarters for his amoral pragmatism, left us complacent about the so-called need for “dirty hands” in politics. Recognizing nature as a “state of war”, Hobbes argued that only absolute sovereignty of rule could contain and protect citizens for whom life was otherwise “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short”. Arguments have raged unresolved for centuries over questions of equality, human rights, property, virtue, universal morality, the meaning of history, alienation, justice and emancipation.
Perhaps not until Mary Wollstonecraft was the equality of men and women taken seriously, along with real consideration of the plight of the poor. Marx stands out for his attempt to create a radical analysis of history, class struggle and contemporary working conditions, and his revolutionary recommendations. But communism is now widely dismissed as a failed philosophy and socioeconomic experiment, indeed by many Americans as pure evil. Yet simultaneously we have had instances of dire economic and moral failure of runaway free-market capitalism with no lessons learnt from it, as if we must accept the tacit assumption of capitalism that human beings must be free to compete, whatever the outcomes. This is exactly the theme of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail (2010), charting the events of 2008–9: the hubris of American bankers, the collapse of Lehman Brothers’ banking empire and dire economic effects for much of the world.
Scott Sandage, in Born Losers (2005), his history of failure in America, is quite frank about American capitalism and the distribution of blame for success and failure:
The self-made man who fulfilled his contracts embodied the free agent – individualism made flesh – but so did the broken man who could not fulfil them. Twins were born in antebellum America; success and failure grew up as the Romulus and Remus of capitalism. Failure was intrinsic, not antithetical, to the culture of individualism. “Not sinking” took both self-reliance and self-criticism, lest a dream become a nightmare.
Failure (The Art of Living) Page 7