John Michael Greer: Facts, Values, and Dark Beer

Over the last eight and a half years, since I first began writing essays on The Archdruid Report, I’ve fielded a great many questions about what motivates this blog’s project. Some of those questions have been abusive, and some of them have been clueless; some of them have been thoughtful enough to deserve an answer, either in the comments or as a blog post in its own right. Last week brought one of that last category. It came from one of my European readers, Ervino Cus, and it read as follows:

 

“All considered (the amount of weapons—personal and of MD—around today; the population numbers; the environmental pollution; the level of lawlessness we are about to face; the difficulty to have a secure form of life in the coming years; etc.) plus the ‘low’ technical level of possible development of the future societies (I mean: no more space flight? no more scientific discovery about the ultimate structure of the Universe? no genetic engineering to modify the human genome?) the question I ask to myself is: why bother?

“Seriously: why one should wish to plan for his/her long term survival in the future that await us? Why, when all goes belly up, don’t join the first warlord band available and go off with a bang, pillaging and raping till one drops dead?

“If the possibilities for a new stable civilization are very low, and it’s very probable that such a civilization, even if created, will NEVER be able to reach even the technical level of today, not to mention to surpass it, why one should want to try to survive some more years in a situation that becomes every day less bright, without ANY possibilities to get better in his/her lifetime, and with, as the best objective, only some low-tech rural/feudal state waaay along the way?

“Dunno you, but for me the idea that this is the last stop for the technological civilization, that things as a syncrothron or a manned space flight are doomed and never to repeat, and that the max at which we, as a species and as individuals, can aspire from now on is to have a good harvest and to ‘enjoy’ the same level of knowledge of the structure of the Universe of our flock of sheeps, doesen’t makes for a good enough incentive to want to live more, or to give a darn if anybody other lives on.

“Apologies if my word could seem blunt (and for my far than good English: I’m Italian), but, as Dante said:

“Considerate la vostra semenza:

fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.”

(Inferno – Canto XXVI – vv. 112-120)

“If our future is not this (and unfortunately I too agree with you that at this point the things seems irreversibles) I, for one, don’t see any reason to be anymore compelled by any moral imperative… 🙁

“PS: Yes, I know, I pose some absolutes: that a high-tech/scientific civilization is the only kind of civilization that enpowers us to gain any form of ‘real’ knowledge of the Universe, that this knowledge is a ‘plus’ and that a life made only of ‘birth-reproduction-death’ is a life of no more ‘meaning’ than the one of an a plant.

“Cheers, Ervino.”

It’s a common enough question, though rarely expressed as clearly or as starkly as this. As it happens, there’s an answer to it, or rather an entire family of answers, but the best way there is to start by considering the presuppositions behind it. Those aren’t adequately summarized by Ervino’s list of ‘absolutes’—the latter are simply restatements of his basic argument.

What Ervino is suggesting, rather, presupposes that scientific and technological progress are the only reasons for human existence. Lacking those—lacking space travel, cyclotrons, ‘real’ knowledge about the universe, and the rest—our existence is a waste of time and we might as well just lay down and die or, as he suggests, run riot in anarchic excess until death makes the whole thing moot. What’s more, only the promise of a better future gives any justification for moral behavior—consider his comment about not feeling compelled by any moral imperative if no better future is in sight.

Those of my readers who recall the discussion of progress as a surrogate religion in last year’s posts here will find this sort of thinking very familiar, because the values being imputed to space travel, cyclotrons et al. are precisely those that used to be assigned to more blatantly theological concepts such as God and eternal life. Still, I want to pose a more basic question: is this claim—that the meaning and purpose of human existence and the justification of morality can only be found in scientific and technological progress—based on evidence? Are there, for example, double-blinded, controlled studies by qualified experts that confirm this claim?

Of course not. Ervino’s claim is a value judgment, not a statement of fact. The distinction between facts and values was mentioned in last week’s post, but probably needs to be sketched out here as well; to summarize a complex issue somewhat too simply, facts are the things that depend on the properties of perceived objects rather than perceiving subjects. Imagine, dear reader, that you and I were sitting in the same living room, and I got a bottle of beer out of the fridge and passed it around. Provided that everyone present had normally functioning senses and no reason to prevaricate, we’d be able to agree on certain facts about the bottle: its size, shape, color, weight, temperature, and so on. Those are facts.

Now let’s suppose I got two glasses, poured half the beer into each glass, handed one to you and took the other for myself. Let’s further suppose that the beer is an imperial stout, and you can’t stand dark beer. I take a sip and say, “Oh, man, that’s good.” You take a sip, make a face, and say, “Ick. That’s awful.” If I were to say, “No, that’s not true—it’s delicious,” I’d be talking nonsense of a very specific kind: the nonsense that pops up reliably whenever someone tries to treat a value as though it’s a fact.

“Delicious” is a value judgment, and like every value judgment, it depends on the properties of perceiving subjects rather than perceived objects. That’s true of all values without exception, including those considerably more important than those involved in assessing the taste of beer. To say “this is good” or “this is bad” is to invite the question “according to whose values?”—which is to say, every value implies a valuer, just as every judgment implies a judge.

Now of course it’s remarkably common these days for people to insist that their values are objective truths, and values that differ from theirs objective falsehoods. That’s a very appealing sort of nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. Consider the claim often made by such people that if values are subjective, that would make all values, no matter how repugnant, equal to one another. Equal in what sense? Why, equal in value—and of course there the entire claim falls to pieces, because “equal in value” invites the question already noted, “according to whose values?” If a given set of values is repugnant to you, then pointing out that someone else thinks differently about those values doesn’t make them less repugnant to you. All it means is that if you want to talk other people into sharing those values, you have to offer good reasons, and not simply insist at the top of your lungs that you’re right and they’re wrong.

To say that values depend on the properties of perceiving subjects rather than perceived objects does not mean that values are wholly arbitrary, after all. It’s possible to compare different values to one another, and to decide that one set of values is better than another. In point of fact, people do this all the time, just as they compare different claims of fact to one another and decide that one is more accurate than another. The scientific method itself is simply a relatively rigorous way to handle this latter task: if fact X is true, then fact Y would also be true; is it? In the same way, though contemporary industrial culture tends to pay far too little attention to this, there’s an ethical method that works along the same lines: if value X is good, then value Y would also be good; is it?

Again, we do this sort of thing all the time. Consider, for example, why it is that most people nowadays reject the racist claim that some arbitrarily defined assortment of ethnicities—say, “the white race”—is superior to all others, and ought to have rights and privileges that are denied to everyone else. One reason why such claims are rejected is that they conflict with other values, such as fairness and justice, that most people consider to be important; another is that the history of racial intolerance shows that people who hold the values associated with racism are much more likely than others to engage in activities, such as herding their neighbors into concentration camps, which most people find morally repugnant. That’s the ethical method in practice.

With all this in mind, let’s go back to Ervino’s claims. He proposes that in all the extraordinary richness of human life, out of all its potentials for love, learning, reflection, and delight, the only thing that can count as a source of meaning is the accumulation of “‘real’ knowledge of the Universe,” defined more precisely as the specific kind of quantitative knowledge about the behavior of matter and energy that the physical sciences of the world’s industrial societies currently pursue. That’s his value judgment on human life. Of course he has the right to make that judgment; he would be equally within his rights to insist that the point of life is to see how many orgasms he can rack up over the course of his existence; and it’s by no means obvious why one of these ambitions is any more absurd than the other.

Curiosity, after all, is a biological drive, one that human beings share in a high degree with most other primates. Sexual desire is another such drive, rather more widely shared among living things. Grant that the fulfillment of some such drive can be seen as the purpose of life, why not another? For that matter, why not more than one, or some combination of biological drives and the many other incentives that are capable of motivating human beings?

For quite a few centuries now, though, it’s been fashionable for thinkers in the Western world to finesse such issues, and insist that some biological drives are “noble” while others are “base,” “animal,” or what have you. Here again, we have value judgments masquerading as statements of fact, with a hearty dollop of class prejudice mixed in—for “base,” “animal,” etc., you could as well put “peasant,” which is of course the literal opposite of “noble.” That’s the sort of thinking that appears in the bit of Dante that Ervino included in his comment. His English is better than my Italian, and I’m not enough of a poet to translate anything but the raw meaning of Dante’s verse, but this is roughly what the verses say:

“Consider your lineage;

You were not born to live as animals,

But to seek virtue and knowledge.”

It’s a very conventional sentiment. The remarkable thing about this passage, though, is that Dante was not proposing the sentiment as a model for others to follow. Rather, this least conventional of poets put those words in the mouth of Ulysses, who appears in this passage of the Inferno as a damned soul frying in the eighth circle of Hell. Dante has it that after the events of Homer’s poem, Ulysses was so deeply in love with endless voyaging that he put to sea again, and these are the words with which he urged his second crew to sail beyond all known seas—a voyage which took them straight to a miserable death, and sent Ulysses himself tumbling down to eternal damnation.

This intensely equivocal frame story is typical of Dante, who delineated as well as any poet ever has the many ways that greatness turns into hubris, that useful Greek concept best translated as the overweening pride of the doomed. The project of scientific and technological progress is at least as vulnerable to that fate as any of the acts that earned the damned their places in Dante’s poem. That project might fail irrevocably if industrial society comes crashing down and no future society will ever be able to pursue the same narrowly defined objectives that ours has valued. In that case—at least in the parochial sense just sketched out—progress is over. Still, there’s at least one more way the same project would come to a screeching and permanent halt: if it succeeds.

Let’s imagine, for instance, that the fantasies of our scientific cornucopians are right and the march of progress continues on its way, unhindered by resource shortages or destabilized biospheres. Let’s also imagine that right now, some brilliant young physicist in Mumbai is working out the details of the long-awaited Unified Field Theory. It sees print next year; there are furious debates; the next decade goes into experimental tests of the theory, and proves that it’s correct. The relationship of all four basic forces of the cosmos—the strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, and gravity—is explained clearly once and for all. With that in place, the rest of physical science falls into place step by step over the next century or so, and humanity learns the answers to all the questions that science can pose.

It’s only in the imagination of true believers in the Singularity, please note, that everything becomes possible once that happens. Many of the greatest achievements of science can be summed up in the words “you can’t do that;” the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics closed the door once and for all on perpetual motion, just as the theory of relativity put a full stop to the hope of limitless velocity. (“186,282 miles per second: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”) Once the sciences finish their work, the technologists will have to scramble to catch up with them, and so for a while, at least, there will be no shortage of novel toys to amuse those who like such things; but sooner or later, all of what Ervino calls “‘real’ knowledge about the Universe” will have been learnt; at some point after that, every viable technology will have been refined to the highest degree of efficiency that physical law allows.

What then? The project of scientific and technological progress will be over. No one will ever again be able to discover a brand new, previously unimagined truth about the universe, in any but the most trivial sense—“this star’s mass is 1.000000000000000000006978 greater than this other star,” or the like—and variations in technology will be reduced to shifts in what’s fashionable at any given time. If the ongoing quest for replicable quantifiable knowledge about the physical properties of nature is the only thing that makes human life worth living, everyone alive at that point arguably ought to fly their hovercars at top speed into the nearest concrete abutment and end it all.

One way or another, that is, the project of scientific and technological progress is self-terminating. If this suggests to you, dear reader, that treating it as the be-all and end-all of human existence may not be the smartest choice, well, yes, that’s what it suggests to me as well. Does that make it worthless? Of course not. It should hardly be necessary to point out that “the only thing important in life” and “not important at all” aren’t the only two options available in discussions of this kind.

I’d like to suggest, along these lines, that human life sorts itself out most straightforwardly into an assortment of separate spheres, each of which deals with certain aspects of the extraordinary range of possibilities open to each of us. The sciences comprise one of those spheres, with each individual science a subsphere within it; the arts are a separate sphere, similarly subdivided; politics, religion, and sexuality are among the other spheres. None of these spheres contains more than a fraction of the whole rich landscape of human existence. Which of them is the most important? That’s a value judgment, and thus can only be made by an individual, from his or her own irreducibly individual point of view.

We’ve begun to realize—well, at least some of us have—that authority in one of these spheres isn’t transferable. When a religious leader, let’s say, makes pronouncements about science, those have no more authority than they would if they came from any other more or less clueless layperson, and a scientist who makes pronouncements about religion is subject to exactly the same rule. The same distinction applies with equal force between any two spheres, and as often as not between subspheres of a single sphere as well: plenty of scientists make fools of themselves, for example, when they try to lay down the law about sciences they haven’t studied.

Claiming that one such sphere is the only thing that makes human life worthwhile is an error of the same kind. If Ervino feels that scientific and technological progress is the only thing that makes his own personal life worth living, that’s his call, and presumably he has reasons for it. If he tries to say that that’s true for me, he’s wrong—there are plenty of things that make my life worth living—and if he’s trying to make the same claim for every human being who will ever live, that strikes me as a profoundly impoverished view of the richness of human possibility. Insisting that scientific and technological progress are the only acts of human beings that differentiate their existence from that of a plant isn’t much better. Dante’s Divina Commedia, to cite the obvious example, is neither a scientific paper nor a technological invention; does that mean that it belongs in the same category as the noise made by hogs grunting in the mud?

Dante Alighieri lived in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress were nearly absent and warfare, injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs about the world were matters of common experience. From that arguably unpromising raw material, he brewed one of the great achievements of human culture. It may well be that the next few centuries will be far from optimal for scientific and technological progress; it may well be that the most important thing that can be done by people who value science and technology is to figure out what can be preserved through the difficult times ahead, and do their best to see that these things reach the waiting hands of the future. If life hands you a dark age, one might say, it’s probably not a good time to brew lite beer, but there are plenty of other things you can still brew, bottle and drink.

As for me—well, all things considered, I find that being alive beats the stuffing out of the alternative, and that’s true even though I live in a troubled age in which scientific and technological progress show every sign of grinding to a halt in the near future, and in which warfare, injustice, famine, pestilence, and the collapse of widely held beliefs are matters of common experience. The notion that life has to justify itself to me seems, if I may be frank, faintly silly, and so does the comparable claim that I have to justify my existence to it, or to anyone else. Here I am; I did not make the world; quite the contrary, the world made me, and put me in the irreducibly personal situation in which I find myself. Given that I’m here, where and when I happen to be, there are any number of things that I can choose to do, or not do; and it so happens that one of the things I choose to do is to prepare, and help others prepare, for the long decline of industrial civilization and the coming of the dark age that will follow it.
And with that, dear reader, I return you to your regularly scheduled discussion of decline and fall on The Archdruid Report.

The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer